The State of Affairs

The Diet Problem

If you live in the 21st century, you've undoubtedly heard about this diet or that diet. You've got Vegetarian, Low Carb, Vegan, Low Fat, Atkins, Ornish, South Beach, Macrobiotic, Mediterranean, Paleo, Alkaline, Fruitarian, and so on. Subscribing to a branded set of rules like those mentioned above rarely results in long term improved health or satisfaction with the food you are eating. Various cultures across the globe have enjoyed wonderful health and quality of life without having to subscribe to an ‘optimal diet’ set by self-proclaimed nutrition authorities.   

The Diet Industry is worth well over $40 billion per year. It is extremely profitable to tout extraordinary claims by book, video, or 'program' by playing on peoples' insecurities. Whether to blame the entrepreneur or the consumer is up for debate. Although it is possible to sell anything as a diet; eating the majority of meals as reconstituted ingredients out of boxes doesn’t exactly scream common sense, either.

Education

Education on the subject of nutrition is extremely poor in the United States. Most consumers are only familiar with the 1992 USDA Food Pyramid. This an example of an extreme grain bias based on the billions of dollars in farm subsidies that are still in place for the growing of wheat, corn, and soy. The surplus of these products must be packaged, refined, and thrown into just about everything that goes on a supermarket shelf. The end result is that we are told these foods are vital to a ‘healthy diet’ and should make up the bulk of our calories.     

Special interests have a lot invested in various food industries; this influences what research is done and the way it is presented to the public. Therefore it can be extremely difficult to navigate the many personalities and interpretations of the scientific literature.

Nearly all nutrition studies are epidemiological in nature, and this in and of itself is an issue because the data is extremely unreliable. The most popular types of surveys are 24-hour recall, a multi-day food diary, and the food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). (1) (2) Compounded with the fact that people are prone to lie about their food intake and have a poor memory of what was eaten, the lack of a real control with this type of study often results in the fallacy known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc; Latin for "with this, therefore because of this.” This is how most conclusions are made in regards to nutrition data. It is important to remember that in good science, correlation does not equal causation.  

Common Sense

There is however, a healthy population thriving on just about every variant of macronutrient intake, even with large differences in lifestyle patterns and environmental stressors. Whether it be the Kitavans or Japanese (3) and their native high starch diets, Inuit with an entirely meat based diet (4) or the French enjoying saturated fat and alcohol (5)… it is possible to find very healthy populations under all of these circumstances.

To say that any of these populations enjoys their health simply because they eat “this diet” is obviously incorrect. In many cases it would also be in direct opposition with the philosophy of another supposed dietary guideline (e.g., the premise of a low fat diet is that fat is bad for you, therefor it would be impossible for someone on a high fat diet to be healthy). To definitively say that one macronutrient is unhealthy, or to propose that we must eat 50% of our calories from a certain food source, displays a profound lack of understanding. There are countless examples of very healthy people on diets that if compared next to each other, would be as different as black and white.

Trust Real Food

One thing though is very clear in all of this. Populations who eat real foods prepared in traditional ways enjoy much better health and lower rates of disease than those who consume highly processed modern fare (6). Human nutrition has largely been a process of trial and error by our ancestors for the last 150,000 years. The conclusions that ancestral peoples have come to by default should be taken very seriously and used as a starting point for the generation of new hypotheses and research ideas. We should study how traditional foods like pastured meat, eggs, butter, fruit, tubers, wild fish, wild fowl, and fermented meat and vegetables influence our health. To have only named a few – these foods appear in all of the healthiest traditional societies to date.

Don’t fall into the trap of “the latest research” or some quack diet endorsed by an M.D. looking to make a buck. Trust foods that have stood the test of time –  if it can be definitely proven that something is bad for you or does not nourish your body… don’t eat it. The purpose of nutrition is to repair and improve function. If an item does not do this, it is not food.   

Note: The next series of posts will address the specifics of:

·         Traditional food choices and how to apply them.

·         Roles of specific macro nutrients and how they relate to lifestyle.

·         Food politics and education in the US.

References:

1.         1   Willett WC. Nutritional Epidemiology. 2nd Edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

 2  Michels KB. A renaissance for measurement error. Int J Epidemiol2001;30:421–22.

 3  Age relations of cardiovascular risk factors in a traditional Melanesian society: the Kitava Study. Lindeberg S, Berntorp E, Nilsson-Ehle P, Terént A, Vessby B. Am J Clin Nutr. 1997 Oct;66(4):845-52.

1.         4   H. H. Draper. The Aboriginal Eskimo Diet in Modern Perspective. American Anthropologist. New Series, Vol. 79, No. 2, Jun., 1977

1.         5   Hamed S, Alshiek J, Aharon A, Brenner B, Roguin A.Red wine consumption improves in vitro migration of endothelial progenitor cells in young, healthy individuals. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Jul;92(1):1-2.

1.         6   Price, WA. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: Eighth Edition. La Mesa, CA: Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation (2008). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.