Is there any such thing as a perfect diet?

[Grimbeorn]

I googled but couldn't find one. Basically at least a week long meal plan for all food consumed, for a healthy omnivore (ie not a diet specifically for a postmenopausal woman, or someone trying to lose weight, or gluten free or whatever).

Assume calories around 1800 (increase portion sizes if taller or exercising a lot).
30+ plants a week
5+ fruit and veg a day
Meets ALL the RDAs for vitamins and minerals
Not excessively expensive
Not hugely time consuming to cook (soup and stew from scratch is fine; hunting your own wild mushrooms is not)
No UPFs

Has anyone ever made this meal plan? Is it actually possible?

For example zinc.

100g of oysters OR
20 eggs OR
300g of Edam

EVERY flipping day? How on earth do people get enough zinc without eating too much and still have enough space for vegetables?

What you basing your zinc figures on? A bowl of cereal has 2.8mg, a serving of roast beef has 3.8mg, a glass of milk has 1mg and you only need 8mg a day.

Fling it through chatGP and see what it fires out.

You simply don't need to eat like that.

The body can store many vitamins & minerals and doesn't need a constant prescription of RDAs.

The body is able to adapt to the diet available & is actually designed to cope with periods of famine/starvation.

So actually a diet that gives the exact RDA of every vitamin, mineral etc would not be the best diet at all.

Cereal is a UPF, so you couldn't include that. Beef is good, I agree, but you couldn't eat beef everyday for reasons of both variety and cost.
Even if you could eat cereal, beef, and milk every day, they'd take up a good chunk of your 1800 cals and you also need to consider selenium, potassium, beta-carotene...

I agree. RDAs (even if taken as weekly/monthly totals rather than daily) seem too high - is it actually impossible to hit all of them? If it is, then clearly humans do fine on lower levels so why are they set at that level?

I don't think you can think about daily RDA amounts, since we can store a lot of the less common nutrients in our bodies for periods of time.

Generally if you eat a wide variety of fruit/veg/proteins/complex carbs, mostly in their whole forms, across a week or a month I think it usually balances things out. More attention paid to fibre, water intake and protein than RDAs generally pays dividends in terms of forcing your diet to expand.

I do think that you have to be comfortable cooking though. Most people I know who have poor diets seldom or never cook for themselves, and even people who do sometimes cook often seem to forget vegetables or include them in small quantities eg. in a soffrito for a tomato based pasta sauce which is then the only thing eaten for the meal, with just the pasta - no side vegetables or salad.

I think the Zoe way of eating stresses variety and eating both seasonably and instinctively, so perhaps that’s why this meal diary doesn’t exist?

I need to lose weight. I have food issues. I'd love a sheet that says eat this as it will give you all the nutrients you need to live, I'm always tired, and also help me lose weight along side walking every day and running several times a week.

Isn't the ideal something like the Mediterranean diet plus berries, nuts and seeds?

Exactly this. Vitamin C is one of the only vitamins we need to take in every day as our bodies can't store it. This is fairly easy to do though if you eat fruit and vegetables/salad each day.

If you go to your GP and ask to see a dietician, they can make a diet sheet for you. Or even your GP or a practice nurse could probably do this.

Failing that, pay for a session with a personal trainer in a gym. They frequently give clients diet sheets.

Weston A Price diet. You’ll have to eat things like liver though.

So the RDA for zinc is 8mg for women. I appreciate you don't need to hit it every day. But presumably the ideal is that you do eat 2920mg per year? So at some point you do need to eat an absolute shitload of oysters/eggs/beef. If you don't need to do that, what's the point of the RDA?

I do eat healthily and with good variety. It's not that I want to change my diet as such. It's just that there are so many 'ideals' to hit (and the lost in my OP is just the ones most people agree on) that it seems impossible to actually hit them all within a maintenance calorie limit. If it is impossible, why have they set them?

This seems to be a list of ideals, much like my OP, rather than an actual specified diet. I'm meaning something like
Day 1 breakfast - 2 eggs with spinach and mushrooms
Day 1 lunch - 80g chicken with salad (tomato, pepper, aubergine, olives, walnuts). 100g greek yoghurt.

Sounds a bit obvious sorry, but why can’t you take a multivitamin instead of eating half a cow?

Oh I see. I’m sure you can find people that offer that kind of thing on social media.

I was reading with interest a book on nutrition recently that discussed the Planetary Health Diet. It was designed to best balance environmental concerns with human health but interestingly research has shown positive health outcomes for those following the diet. I do think at its core though it is essentially a Mediterranean style diet with more fruit, vegetables, beans and pulses and modest amounts of meat, fish, eggs and dairy. An example menu is here:

eatforum.org/a-weekly-planetary-health-menu/

I was referred to a clinic as wasn't eating. They said they'd do this then didn't.

Well I'm sorry about that....Most dieticians, pretty much all I'd imagine, do this for clients.

You could pay for a session with a private dietician. A one off session as they can be pricey.

Theres no such thing because some people will have problems digesting this and that, which will effect the amount of absorption of vitamins and minerals anyway.

So some people have to follow a FODMAP diet, some are diabetic, some like me get terrible bloating with many carbs but not others and so on and so on.

This is true but some things are essential for all of us - adequate protein, adequate vitamins and minerals, some form of carbohydrate (but some of us need to be careful which ones, I do).

Well thats the point, what is adequate protein?

You'll get people talking about 120g of protein a day, yet Ive been told by medical staff suppporting me with nutrition and diet that 60g is more than enough.

So you would never find out what is the 'true' state of anything because everyone has a different opinion and theres no 'facts' to go by.

Because we are told that we need Xmg of selenium, and Xmg of zinc and so on, and the NHS goes on to say you should be able to get these amounts if you eat a healthy diet. But it seems impossible! I realise you could take a multivitamin, but if it's impossible to achieve without taking a compressed and artificial form of vitamins then surely they shouldn't claim you can do it through diet.

I have no skin in the game here! I am happy with my diet. But it just really annoys me when the gov/NHS issues guidelines that aren't actually achievable.

It’s not possible to get RDAs daily, I agree. Interesting the poster saying you don’t need to- logically that makes sense but why are they RDAs if so?

the other issue is nutrition is a function of type of food and quantity of food. Eating very little/ fasting/ calorie counting doesn’t align with premium nutrition because you would need be to eating quantity to get the nutrients recommended

so yeah it’s not possible. Obvious you can supplement but UPf