Food is unfathomably powerful in dictating how you feel and what symptoms you’re experiencing, and you will never discern how foods are effecting you if you don’t eliminate them and re-add individually to gauge. This is why the carnivore diet in the short term can be so powerful, because it provides you with a clean baseline that you can experiment on.
You will never know if your joint pain is because of the spinach salads you are eating. your chronic fatigue is from an egg allergy, or if your gut problems are from almonds, unless you eliminate for a period and re-add individually.
I hate that word “balanced” in regards to diet. It’s not about balance, it’s about preparation in regards to plant foods. If you go eat 1lb of raw almonds, you are going to be in a world of hurt and have severe kidney damage. If you ate the same amount of almonds that were soaked, fermented, sun cured, and then roasted, you wouldn’t have the same problem. Preparation reduces the plant toxin defense systems.
With that said, I think there is an objective hard scientific reality in regards to human gut physiology that tells us definitively that we are first and foremost a carnivorous species, but also cyclically and opportunistically omnivorous, and an obligate lipovore species, lipo meaning animal fats.
Yes some people are lucky enough to have a rare strain of oxalate digestive bacteria in their gut, but it doesn’t digest all of it. Ive had a dozen gut microbiome tests, and I have 0 of that bacteria. I coincidentally got 2 kidney stones from drinking a veggie shake every day for a year that contained spinach, kale, almond milk, and blueberries.
You wouldn’t tell a cat or a dog to “eat a balanced diet”, when they are physiologically a carnivorous species. It’s no different for human beings. We are significantly closer to wolves in digestive physiology than we are any herbivore.