Why almost everything you've been told about unhealthy foods is wrong
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Unfortunately the research and measurements of these values is thin. We need to fix that. We already know things like whole milk better provides satiation and sateity than skim milk, and children that drink whole milk actually have less obesity than skim milk drinkers.
If we just measured and labeled foods with a sateity/satiation index (what we really care about), then people would actually have a chance to pick better foods. Right now it is damn near impossible to determine if eating eggs and bacon for breakfast is more likely to drive over eating vs cereal. It can be measured, but we just don't do it.
doesn't matter what i eat.
i'm never hungry.
and i'm an athlete who eats a caloric deficit.
It's all based on where the food sits in terms of its Glycemic Index. High GI foods trigger an insulin release and insulin effectively tells your cells to lower your blood sure levels. Lower blood sugar reduces the feeling of satiety, aka makes you hungry.
By avoiding insulin releases in the first place (sweet/grainy/starchy shit) you'll come out a far healthier person.
Any source you can refer to ?
So, pretty much get a balanced diet and do not overeat.
Should saturated fat make up 1% or 30% of your calories? Should processed carbs and/or high-starch vegetables make up 5% or 50% of your calories? Should meat make up 0%, 10%, 40%, or 80% of your calories?
(Because remember, vegetables like broccoli, kale, tomatoes, carrots, and so on, while they provide essential nutrients, don't contribute meaningfully to your calorie intake.)
You might want to say, well, just put everything between 20-40%, isn't that balanced? But we used to think that trans fats were part of a balanced diet, a healthy replacement for saturated fats. Now we realize they're basically poison. Some people are coming to the same realization about processed carbs, high-starch vegetables like modern varieties of potato, and sugar.
I know that saying "well, just eat a balanced diet" is the most common response to new nutritional research. But it's actually a harmful attitude, because it trivializes what is arguably the most important public health issue today in America.
I feel like it means to simply eat food in moderation. People who are severely obese aren't obese because they eat slightly too much saturated fat or eat a few extra potato chips beyond the recommended serving. Who otherwise have great diets except for a mixup here and there with their ratios.
We're talking about many people who have seriously unhealthy eating habits that are extremely high in things like saturated fat, sugar and sodium. We're not talking about people who are eating 30% of their calories from fat when it should be 20%, we're talking about people who are absolutely blowing the recommended daily limits for fat and sugar out of the water by crushing soft drinks and making junk food a huge portion of their diet.
Some things aren't within our control. There are people who will surely get their ratios "perfect" (whatever perfect is) and still die an early death of heart disease because of their genetics.
Eat a wide range of minimally processed foods avoiding anything your allergic to. Eat animals not just fat and meat. Things like brains, bone marrow, intestines, cartilage, and liver are all part of a nutritious diet. Again, eat most of the plant not just the most high energy parts. But also a wide range of plants and plant types potato's, rice, soy, and grains are just the tip of the iceberg.
Remember if your not starving you don't need to focus on maximizing energy consumption.
It's not. It's minimalistic, it's insufficient, but it is in no way misleading: following this advice is invariably better than not following it. Your criticism doesn't disagree in any way.
Are you sure you replied to the right comment? Ninja edit, maybe?
What you eat depends on what you can get from the land you live in. You can't grow much above 4,000 meters or near the arctic, obviously. Indians are mostly vegetarian because you can grow alot in India, the much of the rest of the world isn't so lucky (I always crave veggies whenever I tour in high country because they are so unavailable).
yes... and so different groups of people were under different pressures. So when oneeyedpigeon said "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.", and you responded mentioning the Inuits, I decided to remind you that that's not relevant. You haven't made a counterargument to the claim that you should be eating mostly plants. A given person's ancestors were probably not under the same sort of pressure to consume meats.
"mostly"? I would love to know where this statistic was pulled from? Personal experience living in India for 5 years suggests that only Brahmin Hindus and a few other castes are purely vegetarian. Every one else eats meat albeit not as frequently as Americans. Wikipedia stats suggests 20-40% (a huge variance).
When I was working in Delhi, the office canteen offer only veg food 4 days a week, with an optional meat item for a small surcharge on Fridays only. Down south, 100% veg food in restaurants is pretty much the rule, not the exception, although it's not hard to find fish/meat if you look.
Also, a good Indian friend of mine is nearly 100% vegetarian, except that every now and then he gets a craving for a cheeseburger. That's "mostly vegetarian" in my book.
...and getting back to the health thing, it's kind of striking how many obese Indians are Brahmins, who may keep veg but like to slather everything in ghee (clarified butter).
Vegetarianism != Healthy. A diet high in protein/fat doesn't necessarily have a causal link with weight increase. The problem is eating beyond what your BMR/TDEE is. A large portion of Indian food is calorifically rich, e.g. bowls of rice and flat breads.
The semantics police are out in full force today :) BTW, The Microsoft cafeteria in Bangalore is pure veg.
Does not look like it. Humanity and Meat production have scaled pretty well in the 20th century. And we have way less food shortages that we have ever had before.
Switching to a vegetarian diet, or even to a meat that consumes less resources to produce[3], drastically reduces one's environmental impact.[2]
Meat consumption also has direct fiscal impacts by way of the increased cost of treatment for those that consume meat.
If the price of grain increases because of an increased demand for meat then the world's poor will be the ones most negatively impacted.[4]
Disclaimer: I currently consume all forms of meat, including beef.
[1] https://woods.stanford.edu/environmental-venture-projects/co...
[2] http://css.snre.umich.edu/css_doc/CSS09-05.pdf
[3] http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-80...
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.htm...
Also health and lifespan are not the same thing.
I believe that I it made clear that this is not the case. Your view is myopic and selfish, as it ignores the very real effects that a meat-eater diet has on other humans and the environment.
I did not imply that health and lifespan are the same, and I even addressed them separately.
My beliefs are based in well-documented evidence. Eating meat has a strong positive correlation with increased healthcare costs.[1] Whether or not meat has a negative impact on health only has a bearing on the costs of healthcare for meat-eaters, which is a minor point that I mentioned as an aside. It does not have a bearing on the environmental impacts of a meat-eater diet.
You are nitpicking minor details of my post. Perhaps instead of vaguely implying that I'm mistaken you should produce evidence that contradicts me.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryhusten/2012/03/12/bad-news-...
Is it above or below overpopulation?
From the intro on Wikipedia: According to Edmund Searles in his article "Food and the Making of Modern Inuit Identities," they consume this type of diet because a mostly meat diet is "effective in keeping the body warm, making the body strong, keeping the body fit, and even making that body healthy".
Question begging.
> Not too much.
Question begging.
> Mostly plants.
Actual recommendation, although vague and unsupported.
• Eat food: real, minimally processed produce, grains, or meats. As opposed to highly-processed, vaguely food-like substances.
• Not too much: addresses the point that, at least as concerns obesity, quantity is crucial. So get that quantity right.
• Mostly plants: here arguments vary, but Pollan's big on vegetables (less so grains and such), and the complex compounds, many apparently helpful, they provide.
His books are quite a delight to read. I recommend them strongly.
The meta analysis made no control for dietary alternatives, and it is hard to argue that, given the sociological factors involved (ie - middle americans), that the participants in the studies didn't simply replace their saturated fats with carbs. In other words, they just replaced an excess of one bad thing with an excess of another.
There was an in depth article about this, that I can't seem to find now. If you know what I'm talking about, please post it.
This was a primarily carbohydrate focused diet. I ate pasta several times a week, cereal or its equivalent for breakfast. The only thing I kept my eye on was my fat intake, especially saturated fat. For that whole year, I went from about 80kg to a whopping 80kg, fluctuating up and down a only few kg throughout the year. The only time I noticed that I was putting on weight was after a trip overseas where I was eating significant amounts every two to three hours. Even then I only put on 3kg.
Correct portion size is pretty much what I swear by for my unchanging weight.
I start each day with coffee mixed with butter and MCT oil. I eat meat for lunch. I eat meat for dinner.
I feel better than I have for years.
http://reddit.com/r/keto is a reasonable place to get started.
I'm on keto, but I use DIY Soylent and vegan protein sources for it. Not because I don't like meat (I LOVE bacon), but because I'm lazy.
Keto is wonderful because it keeps your blood sugar level low, which helps burn fat and prevents your body from storing excess energy as fat. Don't overdue the red meat though; there is a body of evidence that shows that red meat can cause cancer through the digestive track.
Also, much love for /r/keto. It's a wonderful community. Keto on!
-You start with caffeine, a known hunger suppressant
-Meat is high protein, which is (I think) fairly confidently known to be what stops your brain thinking that it is hungry.
These two factors, along with internal knowledge that you're attempting to lose weight and may therefore conciously attempt to eat less, should result in you eating less than you otherwise would.
Yet you purposely eat high fat and low nutrition foods such as butter - if you replaced those with other options - vegetables and starchy carbs - and attempted to eat protein-dense but low fat meats such as chicken breast - would you be still losing as much weight and also overall having a healthier body (which is less likely to lead to problems later in life?).
Obviously this article throws some of those assumptions into question, but I think few people would argue that replacing some fat in a (relatively) high fat diet with vegetables would be a negative for your weight loss or future health.
> You start with caffeine, a known hunger suppressant
And yet, most of the western world, including most obese people, drinks coffee. So apparently, the "hunger suppression effects" are not relevant, or they would be relevant to everyone.
> internal knowledge that you're attempting to lose weight and may therefore conciously attempt to eat less, should result in you eating less than you otherwise would.
That would also be true for ... just about every person who is trying to lose weight. And the vast majority of them fail spectacularly. So this can't be a reason either.
> Yet you purposely eat high fat and low nutrition foods such as butter
What does "low nutrition" mean, and why would you think butter is not nutritious? "Butter" is not one thing, much like "Meat" is not one thing. European style and US style butters have different nutrient contents. Butter from well treated, grass fed cows contains a lot more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butyric_acid than grain fed cows that are not treated well (The taste is also different - after I got used to the former, which I can eat by the stick, the latter is disgusting in any form or amount). Butyric acid is seriously good for you (see e.g. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/12/butyric-acid-a... )
> would you be still losing as much weight and also overall having a healthier body (which is less likely to lead to problems later in life?)
Why would you believe that? That it causes problem, or that you would lose as much weight? Calorie in - calorie out is a theory that was never scientifically proved, and was scientifically disproved numerous times.
You make it sound like a bad choice, but that's exactly the keto food that gives them results, and the one that makes the difference. High fat food like butter.
Most people subscribed to /r/keto already tried all you advocate, and failed.
Keto works for them, don't try to disregard that.
For every fad diet, there are people who lost significant weight using that diet. It's how they get to be fads (and how you can know that the biological rationales are bunk).
This [ http://imgur.com/NJlqag1 ], was thru increased self-awareness which I jump-started by counting calories for the first couple months. (194 is the top of what the BMI chart calls "normal")
If you're mindful of what you're doing, then you'll only eat when hungry (and enough to not be hungry) rather than mindlessly snacking all day or mindlessly continuing to eat at meals until the food and/or conversation runs out. If you learn to pay attention (just enough to keep your senses calibrated), your body is fairly good at telling you what you need.
So anything that helps you stay mindful will help you lose weight.
I don't know if keto is solid science, but the theory cannot be represented as merely calorie reduction.
The only way to verify this is to do large scale controlled experiments. So until that time, we are going back and forth on anecdotes.
Note: In the interests of disclosure, I would like to point that I have tried all three diets and successfully (kept that weight off for more than 3 years) lost weight.
But I have reduced my triglycerides count from 390 to 140, I can program for 6 hours straight instead of just 2, I feel less tired through the day, and I am much healthier than ever.
Keto is not a fad diet to me, it is a lifestyle.
Weight is obviously important (obesity is not healthy) but there's far too much focus on weight in my opinion. There are lots of people who are not overweight who are incredibly unhealthy. Many of them don't think they're unhealthy because they're not "fat."
> I feel better than I have for years.
This, and how you look, is far more important.
Are you chronically tired? Do you get winded with modest exertion? Can you lift a modestly heavy object? Do you have bags under your eyes? Do you see definition in certain muscle groups?
The science of diet is unsettled. Medical science is always changing. There are few one-size-fits-all answers. But you can start to get a pretty good sense of your overall health and well-being by paying attention to how you feel and looking at your body in a mirror on a regular basis.
200 to 150 would be much more impressive than 300 to 250.
Is it because the field is rife with pseudoscience anyway, and that by the time this has been filtered through a layer of ignorant* journalists, the advice we get left with is mostly nonsense?
*I don't mean that in an insulting way, I'm ignorant about a lot of stuff outside my field
I don't really understand why in the year 2014 there is still so much conflicting thought around diet. You'd think we'd have a better handle on it by now.
I don't find statement like this very compelling: "there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease". Does that leave open the door for "there is evidence that saturated fats contribute to heart disease"?
As an example it's been noted that countries with a high saturated fat consumption have higher cholesterol levels and high death rates from heart disease. Is this evidence that saturated fats contribute to heart disease? The 2005 Malmo study of 28,000 men and women showed no relationship with cardiovascular disease in men and a statistically insignificant <downward> trend for women.
If you use WHO public data and compare the seven countries with the lowest consumption of saturated fat with the seven countries with the highest consumption you get an interesting result. Every country with the lowest saturated fat consumption has higher rates of heart disease than every country in the group with the highest saturated fat consumption.
Wherever you go from there it's not leading to the conclusion that saturated fat is a major culprit (any biochemical can be linked to a dysfunction if you try hard enough) in heart disease.
"A 2004 review of the evidence said that while CLA seemed to benefit animals, there was a lack of good evidence of human health benefits, despite the many claims made for it."
That's essentially the default conclusion of a review study, lack of good evidence means any claim at all is bogus. CLA could be a stone cold killer, or it could be Lazarus juice, but there's no way to tell from the current state of affairs.
As such, the article is incorrect when it says CLA does X, where X is anything.
This article's advice that we should disregard official recommendations and eat as low-tech as possible without any kind of scientific inquiry is complete horseshit. Classic Luddite homeopathy conspiracy theory horseshit.
On the other hand, there's absolutely no excuse for the amount of sugar and salt in products that absolutely don't need them. Why can't we have healthy frozen and microwave ready food? Because the marketing execs say there's no overlap between the demographics that want healthy and the ones that want fast food. Well, at least we'll soon have Soylent.
Calling nutrition research "scientific" is kind of generous. But not as generous as calling the onerous government guidelines that reshaped the food production industry and drove obesity to epidemic proportions in the USA "recommendations".
So I think the trick is to eat out less, because portion control is much harder, restaurant food is much more caloric. And when you eat dinner at home, eat early, and light.
Look into Nitric Oxide.
Your veins / arteries produce it as a signaling molecule. When it is produced, your veins (I will use vein to reference both veins and arteries) expand. If you've ever exercised and seen your veins become larger, that is nitric oxide at work.
It also clears out the plaque "pockets" or "cysts" that form in your veins.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2050816/
If those pockets break open (the very thin inner lining of the vein breaks) and the plaque content gets into your bloodstream, it causes a heart attack because that plaque liquid causes your blood to clot, essentially make a big scab ball in your vein that blood can't get through, effectively depleting all the cells that rely on the blood from getting any oxygen or nutrients, killing the effected cells in minutes / hours if blood flow is not restored.
The problem with fat is that is really slows down nitric oxide production.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21903940
Because to produce nitric oxide, your veins need a couple ingredients. Lets call them A, B, and C.
A + B + C = Nitric Oxide
A B and C fit together like a puzzle. Well, fat has a molecule, lets call it D. That can ALSO combine with A and B to produce something else.
So picture this:
AAAAAA BBBBBBB CCCCCCCCCC DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
If those can randomly form to their produce ABC, or ABD, looking at the quantities above, which are you more likely to have, ABC or ABD?
ABD... Which is not nitric oxide... Which is not what we want!
This is why eating too much fat is not good. It really harms your arteries because you can't produce the stuff that's needed to clean them out and help them expand properly.
Unfortunately, "too much" is a relative term. Considering in this age that 1 table spoon of olive oil is all the oil found in 50 olives... The fat quantities we evolved for are waaaaay too low for what is so readily available now. This is why the MAJORITY of people have atherosclerosis. That is the condition of plaque built up in your veins, which leads to heart attacks, strokes, and your dick not working.
P.S. vegetables increase nitric oxide production (because they contain the "C" molecule)
P.P.S. you should buy L-Arginine (the "C" molecule) from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013OVX3U/ref=as_li_ss_tl?... (affiliate link, I am thinking of selling it and this post is my MVP sales pitch).
"Nucleotide excision repair gene polymorphisms, meat intake and colon cancer risk." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24607854
~6600 results; I checked the first three pages of papers. All came to the conclusion that red meat causes a higher incidence of cancer.
Well, that's good science. I'm sure there were some more worthwhile ideas in there, but that one made me wonder.