non-essential to your diet. I mean, who’s living just to stay alive? If you want to thrive with a long
and healthy life, you need the thousands of phytochemicals that exist in plant foods.
Golden Rule #2: Limit or eliminate what your body does not need from food. That means
animal protein, cholesterol, saturated fat, refined and added oil, salt, and sugar, and of course,
unnatural chemicals like additives, preservatives and dyes.
Golden Rule #3: Eat your foods in as close to their whole natural states as possible in order to
protect nutrient integrity (i.e., raw or prepared with conservative cooking).
Even brief steaming of a natural food can destroy up to 30% of its nutrient content. Can you
imagine what baking, broiling and frying do? Even if a food was once 100% natural and came from
organic sources, it will no longer be health-promoting if you cook it in a way that destroys its
nutrient value. Cereal is one great example of this.
The Three Golden Rules cannot be understated or underestimated in terms of their fundamental
power to influence your health and all of the success results you will be learning more about in the
next section of Switch to Rich. They are the rules that make Nutrient Rich® healthy eating what it is.
These rules also distinguish Nutrient Rich® healthy eating from all of the other pseudo-nutrient-
rich or half-baked “healthier” eating styles that just don’t enlighten you far enough. You will
probably run across many such styles or “diets” in the future. You’ll notice that the definition of
nutrient-rich foods has been watered down and compromised to include any food that is rich in
some nutrients, or worse, one nutrient—even if that food contains substances your body does not
need or that are harmful to it.
In order apply The Three Golden Rules of Healthy Eating in a simple way, there must be an
approach to healthy eating that simplifies the whole idea into a few words—one phrase that aligns
with the Golden Rules, without requiring perfection, to be perfect, yet guiding the healthy eater
down a path far enough to get the results.
Those criteria that prompted me to craft the following phrase:
90% or More Plant-Based Nutrient Rich®
You have been hearing about this 90% or More Plant-Based Nutrient Rich® approach on almost
every page of the book so far. Now’s the time to learn how to do it!
There is a reason why this phrase is worded as it is. Take away any one component and you will be
left with a very different message.