Those who suffer from allergies or digestive ailments are familiar with exclusion diets, a technique used to isolate intake to identify the cause of the problem. Tedious, torturous, and just plain boring, nobody enjoys the prescriptive exclusion diet.

Yet many healthy people willingly choose exclusion diets entirely on their own! Meat, vegetables, carbs, dairy, each cornerstone item of the human diet has found it’s way to the chopping block for health, environmental or political reasons. This choice, besides being a luxury of a first world culture, will never satisfy the desired objective, yet sentient beings still choose to torture themselves this way.

While masochistic, exclusion diets also have the ease of simplicity to them. The exclusion dieter can look at a menu and instantly identify what they will not eat, which limits the choices into a non-decision. Those who choose exclusion diets for political purposes, also have the pleasure of explaining their perspective to anyone who has the misfortune of dining out with them. It gives them the gratification of saving the world with their sacrifice.

But sadly, this perception is about as realistic as the idea that everyone in the world would also adopt those same eating habits to forward this cause. Or as realistic as the idea that everyone in the world would have the option to follow the same eating habits.

From a health standpoint, the exclusion diet is just as misdirected. Most people find nutrition science confusing due to the profundity of studies that contradict one another. One study will show that a certain food helps prevent cancer while another study will show evidence that the same food may contribute to heart disease. Exclusionists seek a perfectly ordered list of good, and a perfectly ordered list of bad to direct their choices, when in reality, most real food balances both elements. This is why nutritionists preach the dreaded moderation technique. Exclusionists find moderation more difficult than abstinence, but it need not be. Let me introduce the only healthy diet, which has its own environmental and political advantages as well, the inclusion diet.

The inclusion diet embraces everything edible and available. Adzuki beans to zucchini. The health, environmental, and political harm caused by dietary decisions stems from exclusion diets that focus on only certain sources. If everyone ate mostly red meat, then we run into an unsustainable situation where we lack enough farmland to feed enough livestock to feed all the people. If everyone ate only rice, they would lack the nutrients needed to build healthy muscles. If weather, a virus, or a parasite decimated this exclusive food source, the population would become politically beholden to others for imports. These are all examples of exclusion errors.

Now imagine a cupboard that, in addition to rice and wheat flour, you also found amaranth, kamut, quinoa and a rainbow of other grain choices. What if, in addition to red meat, protein sources included sea animals, insects, bean and wheat protein. Vegetables provide the most variety, almost impossible to catalog here. If every meal incorporated one element from each of these catalogs in moderation, we would have a sustainable environment and more balanced health because we are not satiating ourselves with one nutrient and ignoring others.

You don’t need to be a vegan to eat tofu, nor do you need to have celiac to use chickpea flower, and you don’t need to follow a low carb diet to substitute cauliflower for rice. These substitutions carry stigmas in their association to exclusionists. Gourmands eschew them, but almond milk can be tasty to those who have no issues with lactose. Why not try nutritional yeast as a pizza topping, or, for that matter, a smattering of alligator sausage? Each trip to a market, choose something new, milk one day, soy the next, hemp the next, why discriminate? Choosing from a wider a variety of food sources balances the impact on the environment and gives your system a round of different nutrients to benefit from.

We live in a culture of availability and abundance, so why not embrace it with the inclusion diet? Many exclusion diets advocate living the way our ancestors did just because that is the last time we were sustainable. However, sustainability requires participation from all parties. Emerging markets are eager to embrace the first world pleasures enjoyed by others. If the first world pleasures are one of abundance incorporating a wider variety of ingredients and cuisines, there is no need to abandon traditional foods, or stop growing the traditional crops. They can be supplemented instead, and everyone will have more to enjoy.

Exclusion diets stem from the human desire to control our environment, but that control is exactly what is killing both it and us. By embracing the variety and the abundance of nature, not heavily in favor of this food choice or that food choice, the inclusion diet is more natural and healthy.