Interesting point, especially when asking ourselves why a certain food is good for us. I'd love to see a discussion on that. For example: http://www.getoffyouracid.com/alkaline-diet-recipe-hearty-oats-power-breakfast-smoothie/ - agrees with you regarding oatmeal. This website argues that kombucha (while considered healthy everywhere you look) actually is acidifying and they say that the pH value is the decisive criteria for labeling food as healthy or not. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
We can talk about some of those things when it comes to diet, health, eating. We can talk about those words, those things, including the discussion, the debate on sugar, acid, salt, carbs, and some of the other keywords people use.
However, I strongly believe that what matters more than that in a holistic way for the whole body is in eating a balanced rainbow pyramid diet focused on real, natural, organic, garden grown, foods. People get lost in the numbers of calories or the other keywords. But they eat food that is processed, mutated, chemically changed through the DNA, the GMO, the genes, at a genetic level, and these things are worse than we know. That is why the Amish do better. We got to eat different colors of food. We got to eat more nuts and whole grains, whole wheat. We should eat less meat like vegans. We can talk about Kombucha and other things. We can talk about acid. But we should first talk about the art of cleaning out the gut. The art of focusing on the immune system.
I agree, balance is key. I feel that many people get easily overwhelmed by the amount of diets out there and by focusing only on losing weight or achieving a certain type of body shape. That's just part of the whole effect. Movies like 'Samsara', 'Okja' or 'Supersize Me' are pointing in the right direction. But in fact, we can simply learn by doing without drowning in all the information. When we start cooking on our own, we need to make food choices and ask questions about what we actually put in our body. And we will feel the effect - how we feel after healthily balanced food, and how we feel after processed food. Even for those who don't like cooking, there are easy-to-make foods. For those who want to understand more in depth, 'Cooking for Geeks' is an amazing path to go, as there we can learn why something tastes the way it does and how we can experiment with all the factors. In the end of the day, our health/lifestyle/every day is better, when we eat healthily, when we create our own and especially when we have the essential knowledge of our body and which food does what to our mental and physical health. Books can be the way, but experimenting does the trick and just being more aware of our own body. Awareness is something everyone can apply. And from that point, anything is possible, even growing our own food, preserving and ferment as well as recycling waste products. From countries like Japan we can learn from the focus on food culture and how it goes beyond food alone: food is connection, health, art, tradition and social life at the same time. Looking at food from a different perspective can suddenly make it easy to know everything we need to know about food, even from a young age: http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-amazing-school-lunch-program-2017-3. If now someone also comes up with a smart way to recycle and wrap food (I'm waiting for the fermentation technology to catch up for the packaging material like here: https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_lee_grow_your_own_clothes) we will have come a far way which makes discussions about diet unnecessary because everyone will know the essentials from living it every day.
Yes, Martin, agreed, there is so much we learn from the health habits of the Japanese and balanced diets and good discussions for sure.