True Left

"I can't quite figure how to do it without using Western nutritional terminology/concepts to determine what makes a "balanced" diet."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3686083/

Please use:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/re-psychological-decolonization/

to discuss the concepts further. I tried to bring it up in the past:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/re-psychological-decolonization/msg2282/#msg2282

The first concept (common to many independently derived non-Western medical systems) that I suggest you try to grasp is hot and cold, which refers not to temperature but to the character of the food:



Which end of the scale do you prefer, tastewise? This will tell you something about what kind of nutrition is good for you. (Part of your answer is likely to vary depending on when you ask yourself the question. But there are also likely to be some constants independent of occasion, which should reflect your personality.)

"I'm a bit pedantic about knowing EXACTLY what's going into my body and if it's keeping me healthy."

The problem is that what keeps you healthy will not necessarily be the same as what keeps the next person healthy. You are an individual.

The real problem is that Western medicine does not treat people as individuals, instead callously treating us as particular cases of a generalization (hence RDAs). If you believe that knowing what's going into your body provides you with sufficient information to know if it's keeping you healthy, then even you yourself have failed to treat yourself as an individual!

What should be going into your body is not a set of rigid RDAs, but whatever is required by your unique body on each unique day as it interacts in real time with unique (and constantly changing) environmental conditions (habitat, weather, activity, stress, etc.).

"Being observational (what the people of the ancient times would have been, I suppose) just seems too... risky?"

What is more risky: trusting your own sensitivity, or assuming your body just happens to be the most average body in every parameter (which is what RDAs assume everyone is)?

And yes, if you have been Westernized, then the former really may be more risky at first. But we have a duty to recover as much as possible of the innate sensitivity that Western civilization has beaten out of us.