Here's Why Diet is Critically Important!

Interviewer: Doctor Delgado, when we talk about overall health, is diet one of the most important but yet most overlooked aspects of our health?

Dr. Nick Delgado: I would say that diet is absolutely critical and one of the problems is that we make assumptions on what people need. We like to look at the cellular level.  Find out how people responding and it's quite revealing for them to look at their blood magnified 6,000 times in color, look at oxidative stress and then see the effects of separated oils or sugars or junk food and then compare that to how the body responds to whole super foods. The reality is that as we eat more back-to-nature, the way God intended, whole super foods, foods as grown, meaning very little or no processing, in wide degrees of combinations, a lot of different colors. The nutrient density needs to vary so we can get all our protein, all our vitamins and minerals and nutrients, and yet at times, because of deficient soils we have to supplement, but overall, yes, diet is critical to optimum health and performance.

Interviewer: How did you find that out? Just talk a little bit about your story and how you got down the path that you're on now.

Dr. Nick Delgado: I think being raised in America and feeling that a low-sugar, high-protein diet was good, I bulked up to play football and sports and I gained a lot of weight, and over time I noticed it was difficult to lose the weight. I had suffered problems with high blood pressure and then later a TIA, a transient ischemic attack, and I realized that something was very wrong and I read my first book, 'Live longer now' by Nathan Pritikin and it opened my eyes to some dramatic changes that I went about making and it changed my body and morphology and how I looked and how I felt. I met Nathan Pritikin at a conference, like, in 1978 and he shared with me his wisdom and knowledge and invited me to come work at the Pritikin Longevity Center, which I accepted and did it for several years under his guidance and direction. We had anti-aging conferences before they were even known about in this day, and we brought some of the great educators and researchers from all over the world. I got to train and educate and learn from those people. A lot of my training is very research oriented. I wanted to go back through the medical literature, the journals, find out how these studies came up with what is a good supplement. What is a good diet? How do we determine human needs? We look at fossils and we look at what primitive fossils, the feces, the analysis, and seeing that they were largely vegan in origin and not Paleolithic meat-eating type of people. So it's interesting but when you start putting the pictures together and then looking at current testing and biochemistry and lipid profiles, you just feel good. You look better. You have energy. You look years younger than you would when you apply these principles. 

Interviewer: Are those different for each person?

Dr. Nick Delgado: The differences may occur, for example, let's say the optimum situation is your breast-fed, but sometimes we're not, and we're transferred over to formula and then there's this introduction of foods that oftentimes the digestive gut is not prepared yet. The human body requires human breast milk for the first six months to two years, then a gradual introduction of fresh fruit, coconut water, various nutrients, vegetables, sweet potatoes, and then gradually later, maybe beans, and occasionally some brown rice and whole grains and things. We think it's so nice, "Let's feed little Johnny that extra meat. Let's give little Johnny some cheese. Let's give him some steak right from the table." You set up a possible autoimmune reaction, a response where the body perceives it as an invader in that little undeveloped gut and so for the rest of that person's life they may have sensitivity so that's where the individualities come up. Some people are more allergic or more sensitive to certain foods compared to others. We wanted to look at blood typing, but it didn't really hold up because people's blood types mix and they're so different, a lot of intra-marriages and so forth. When we looked at it, really there's individuality, so we need to do, what we talk about, delayed food allergy tests. We can do a simple test, 184 different foods. Expose the protein antigens from each food to your own white blood cells and see how they expand, break apart or alter, and then we know what you're reactive to and also, more importantly, what you're not reactive to, what you are compatible with, what you can consume that's best for you. That is really the most scientific way and then you go about as a detective and see how do you respond to those foods that showed up highly allergic to because it may not show up immediately like an IGE reaction. Strawberries, you eat and your mouth gets inflamed, you go, "Oh, I can't eat pineapple or strawberry." But it's something like with gluten or with corn, with dairy, where it's absorbed and then three, four days, five days later a skin condition, eczema, shows up, or wheezing, breathing, asthma or they probably have changes in biochemistry. It affects their neurology and they get angry or upset or moody. There's a lot of things that we're not starting to realize. Even arthritic type conditions and joint pain and inflammation often times stem from incompatibility or not knowing what's best for you as an individual.