Eat Like Your Ancestors

An experiment featured in "The Truth About Food," a miniseries hosted by Mehmet Oz, MD, the Evo Diet tested just how powerfully a diet can influence your health. Researchers asked a group of junk-food-loving volunteers to try out the diet of their distant ancestors to see whether it would improve their vital signs. Here, the drastic results and how they did it.

We fed nine people a diet of fruits, vegetables and nuts, with some fish. After just ten days, our volunteers' blood cholesterol had reduced by nearly a quarter, and their blood pressure had gone down by about 10 percent.

If you want to try the diet the volunteers ate, think about making the following changes to your diet:

1. Aim to eat a rainbow of fruits and vegetables. Having a variety of different colored fruits and vegetables will help you get the range of nutrients you need. Eat at least five portions a day, fresh, frozen or canned — and dried fruits count too.

2. Reduce your intake of saturated fat: cut down on fatty meat, meat products such as sausages, hard cheese and full-fat dairy products. Replace with oily fish, lean meats and unsalted nuts and moderate amounts of low-fat dairy products.

3. Choose oils rich in monounsaturated fats, such as olive oil and rapeseed oil.

4. Choose unrefined carbohydrates such as whole wheat breads and pasta, brown rice and whole grain breakfast cereals.

5. Watch your salt intake; avoid adding salt to cooking and at the table, choose herbs, lemon juice and garlic for flavoring and avoid heavily salted foods such as bacon, cheese, chips, and smoked fish.

Read our interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz for more great nutrition tips!

Excerpted from "The Truth About Food" by Jill Fullteron-Smith. Copyright Bloomsbury USA © 2007. These tips were adopted from advice given by Lynne Garton, the dietician we worked with on the program.