I have genetic metabolic disease and I have thought about this many times. My conclusion is simple enough: Eat real food, ignore the macros, listen to your body and adapt your food intake accordingly. Paul Jaminet's diet [1] is the closest I have found to fit this idea.
I disagree strongly. Eating shouldn't make you tired. I could eat 2 1/3 pound greasy cheeseburgers with toppings but if I skip the buns, I feel like I ate nothing.
There is something legitimate to intermittent fasting, ketogenic diets, avoiding refined carbs, avoiding bread etc.
I have a serious disease that is thought to prevented by ketogenic diets. And I think there's an equal chance I got the disease from refined carbs as anything else.
I also know many so-called experts in this field (MDs) and they know nothing; and worse they do not want to know anything.
My conclusion is simple: just don't eat bread or drink any sugary drinks.
There is strong evidence that a ketogenic diet helps prevent/diminish seizures in epileptic patients. And there's some initial but promising research it can help reduce symptoms of Alzheimer's disease – and possibly Parkinson's and ALS. There's also some very early research that a ketogenic diet might slow the growth of certain cancerous tumors. But specifically for cancer, there's also evidence that a ketogenic diet has no long-term improvement of survivorship – though might have short-term improvement. My conclusion is that the science is still very much out, and it's way too early, from my layman's reading, to make any claim about those diseases being caused by refined carbs.
There are many possible causes; in my case, it is a single large scale deletion in my mitochondrial DNA.
Symptoms are varied. In my case: extremely weak eye muscles (I have both ptosis and diplopia), intermittent fatigue, mild aerobic exercise intolerance and hot intolerance.
From a scale of 1 to 10, being 10 the worst, I rate myself at 3. So, I am doing fine. Watching what I eat, doing some exercise and controlling stress made a big difference in my quality of life (going from 7 to 3)
mild aerobic exercise intolerance
Do not see why. In fact, I agree with you 100%.
>>> I have a serious disease that is thought to prevented by ketogenic diets
Are you epileptic ? Know a couple of kids with secondary epilepsia that are doing great with a keto diet
Collecting data is never a bad thing and is always worth doing.
The middle two pieces of advice seem somewhat contradictory. I usually get a pretty strong sense for which macro I'm primarily hungry for. "listening to my body" is intimately tied to picking the macros that make up my meal[1]. Or did you mean something more like "avoid planning macros contrary to your appetite signals"?
[1] obviously I don't have meals that consist entirely of protein powder or fruit juice, but it just gives me a sense of what type of food to emphasize in meal to avoid the irritating " full but still hungry" feeling.
This. Same for planning ahead gym workouts.
The audience for "pop nutritionists" is the normal, healthy human. Whatever that is. I'd LOVE for their to be a model, baseline, reference healthy human. To study and emulate. Then I could compare and contrast myself to that model, adjust accordingly.
On the flip side, note that some of the nutrition plans are meant for certain conditions. Like the Univ of Wash doctor who "cured" his diabetes patients with all meat diets.
In this context, "real food" means anything that you would find in nature in the same form - excluding changes due to cooking - as you would eat it. Some examples:
- Potato, orange, nuts, milk, eggs, meat: Real food
- Bread, Pasta, Chocolate (no cocoa): Nope
I know that this leaves lots of grey zones (butter, coffee, ...), but you get the idea.
I cannot help but recognize that my approach is very simple; some would say simplistic, and I would partially agree, but it has been working great for me. Bear in mind that my metabolism is completely broken, so you mileage may vary.
you're simplifying to the point where you aren't any help at all.
Please see my post above.
>>> you're simplifying to the point where you aren't any help at all.
Completely possible. It has helped me tremendously though.