dear friends!
A slight shudder always rings through my conscious whenever I have to grok and reason about anything to do with nutrition or diet. At the same time — it’s one of the most important areas of study for obvious reasons AND it’s one of the fields most improperly studied and conflated with various external ideologies and profit-seeking interests. Not to mention the sheer difficulty of producing sound research and drawing lines of causation (e.g. interventional studies instead of epidemiological studies).
For the lay person, it’s gotten to the point in which saying “the research says so-and-so” has lost a ton of its sway since there always seems to be existing research for and against any point of contention. Similarly, references to standout individuals are also diminishing in value due to the ability to always find someone that suggests to the contrary of an example. For instance, Kyle Vogt (vegan) ran 7 marathons on 7 continents in less than 4 days. On the other hand, Zach Bitter (low carb, high fat, animal-based) beat the world record for the 100 mile ultra marathon. Both these examples happened within a span of the same six months. Currently for a lot of people, choosing between all these various espoused diets is just a matter of availability bias. Additionally, these examples may not be that useful since performance is often orthogonal to healthspan. Still fun to track tho :)
Though dietary needs surely differ between people, I believe that for ninety eight percent of people, we aren’t nearly close enough to the optimal fringes for that to relieve ourselves of this responsibility to find results that improve healthspan across the board. There’s still much low hanging fruit.
The task to find a great dietary routine is a tough one. A sort-of-but-not-really cop-out answer is to just go with the “balanced” approach. The word “balance” is almost tautological in this context. In the same way “too ____” implies something bad, “balance” is implicitly tied with good. Can a balanced state be a bad state with that connotation? There’s strong evidence that some of the most restrictive/unbalanced diets could be the best for certain populations. Semantics aside, if balance means to eat moderate carbs, moderate fat, moderate protein, some greens, some animal products, some processed foods, some unprocessed foods, some desserts, some cold-pressed juices, etc — I think 55% of people would do quite well, 40% would end up with some degree of metabolic syndrome as they age on the usual timescale and deal with traditional diseases such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, etc. 5% would deal with autoimmune issues, bad gut issues, and other more severe ailments.
If one is willing to put in work, one can achieve an “informed balanced” approach. This consists of learning about all these diets (including very unbalanced diets) and identifying common themes. Here are some that I’ve found:
- Low-moderate amount of carbs. Low glycemic index. Bias towards non-grains such as sweet potatoes & cauliflower. Especially reduce intake of whole grains.
- eating fish often. Some should be fatty.
- avocados
- sprouted/soaked nuts
- Not eating too much of one vegetable or fruit.
- Olives & olive oil!
- Moderate amount of eggs
- Some degree of intermittent fasting (12+ hours)
- Less dairy. Some of the dairy would benefit from coming from non-cow (e.g. goat/sheep). Casein free would be preferential.
- Don’t eat too much protein unless it’s specific to some strategy.
- Every few days, have some grass-fed red meat.
- Occasionally, bone marrow, organ meat (especially liver), bone broth.
I think with this approach that continues to consider evolving information, we can change the 55, 40, 5 ratio of results to 85, 10, 5. Many in the 85 will do even better than great. For the 5 that deals with various autoimmune issues or other rarer issues, an elimination diet is generally helpful. If you can manage it, try to be very conscious of how meals are making you feel and pick a set of reliable metrics for judging whether that meal was good for you or not. The metrics question is very hard and I’ll probably write a separate piece focusing on just that.
Here are some non-traditional pointers to help you evaluate dietary choices.
- Don’t just look at what nutritional value a certain unit of food can offer. Consider the tradeoffs. We have a bad habit of just trying to maximize the “nutrients” we consume blindly. Yes, whole grains do have more nutritional content than something like white rice, but it also contains potentially detrimental compounds such as lectins. Do the pros outweigh the cons? Possibly. Could you get those nutrients elsewhere?
- Get to know what your body feels like when there’s inflammation happening. Then use those signals to zone in on foods that are inflammatory for you. For me, sometimes my ears get warm and more red, sometimes I get more sleepy or lethargic (can also feel kinda good), sometimes I get short-tempered, sometimes my body temperature increases but I want to keep my jacket on, sometimes I feel a small discomfort in my wrist joint or around my tailbone, sometimes my nose gets more congested and my eyes become more dry.
- Feeling relaxed and free of anxiety is not necessarily a good signal that what you ate was good for you. Some research has started to evaluate different foods and bacterias’ ability to make one feel “less anxious” as a recommending point, but we should be careful with that. In a mice study involving microbiomes, some bacteria caused the mice to be less anxious from the serotonin released by the bacteria but the bacteria was covering a nutritional deficiency.
- Be careful of confusing the effects of electrolyte imbalances with the effects of eating a certain food. They’re certainly related since foods contain electrolytes, but be weary of saying the foods of a meal weren’t right for you because you felt bad afterwards when it was because you didn’t have enough salt, had too much salt, or didn’t eat enough potassium-rich items, etc. This is a common issue when people change diets suddenly. Always remember, electrolytes are king.
Here are some big topics that need to be reexamined in science & mainstream knowledge:
- Health assessments — For instance, bloodwork is only a snapshot in time. E.g. inflammatory markers will be higher after just working out. Reliability of cholesterol assessment dependent on how long you’ve fasted for before test and what diet you’re on.
- Cholesterol’s link to heart diseases and other health issues.
- RDA for electrolytes and water. It may be counterproductive to set one since one’s needs for these vary so much depending on a variety of factors.
- Fiber
- Saturated fats
TLDR: deadlift and sunbathe nude.
