This Weird Diet Is Actually The Healthiest Of Them All

Between keto, 5:2 and the 16-hour fast, there’s plenty of “healthy” food fads doing the rounds at the moment. So how do we sift through the masses and find out what’s really worth sticking the fork into?

Introducing: the pegan diet. Think: a cross between the plant-based philosophy of veganism and the paleo approach. Essentially its taking the healthiest parts from both eating plans and combining them into one, so it’s no wonder experts can’t recommend it enough.

“A pegan diet is low-glycemic, high in plant foods, low in sugar, and includes adequate protein for appetite control, and muscle synthesis,” Dr Mark Hyman, author of Food: What the Heck Should I Eat tells Well And Good.

And unlike the restrictive regimes that have come before it (looking at you, FODMAP), the pegan diet allows you to be pretty flexible with your eating habits. In fact, Dr Hyman recommends each person tweak it to fit their particular health conditions, preferences and needs.

“If you’re a vegan and don’t want to eat anything with a mother for moral or religious reasons, then that’s perfectly okay. But it’s critical to get omega-3 fats and not just ALA (or alpha-Linolenic acid) found in plants,” he says.

This is because you “need pre-formed DHA, which is what most of your brain is made from.”

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The good news? “You can get it from algae.”

“As a doctor, it’s my job to figure out the best way to keep my patients healthy,” he adds.

“We now know that food is medicine – perhaps the most powerful drug on the plant – with the power to cause or cure most disease. If food is more than just calories, if food is information that controls every aspect of our biology and health, then I better know what to advise people [to eat] to prevent, treat, and even reverse chronic disease.”

Where do we sign up?