What is a "Healthy Diet"?
The Dietary Guidelines describe a healthy diet as one that
- Emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products;
- Includes lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, and nuts; and
- Is low in saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, salt (sodium), and added sugars.
That, in both my own experience and in light of the actual science that exists, is a crock. The best that can be said for it its that it recommends low added sugars; it gets most of the rest wrong.
Taking it point by point:
Fruits are almost all high in sugars, some much more than others. Sugars are one of the top two problems in the Western diet (not just ours, but everyone's at this point), fructose in particular. The less of these that you can consume in a day, right down to zero, the better off you'll be.
Vegetables are a mixed bag. High-starch things like potatoes are best avoided altogether; low-starch and low-sugar vegetables are not going to cause harm for the most part, but they don't supply you with everything you need, either. Eat what you want of them, but don't rely on them to give you basic nutritional needs.
Whole grains - ones that have NOT been ground up into flour, and still have the bran on the grain, are less damaging than those that have been processed, but not much. Grind whole grains into flour, and they're essentially just as bad as the highly-processed types; whole wheat bread isn't significantly better for you than white bread, and both are highly problematic. Grains - ALL of them - convert in digestion into glucose in large quantities, causing your body's systems to go into fat storage mode (can you say "resulting in obesity?"), as well as stressing the pancreas (eventually resulting in diabetes in many people). The more they've been processed before you eat them (particularly by conversion to flour), the faster they convert to glucose. The more glucose that reaches your bloodstream, the higher the insulin level will rise, and the longer it will take to drop back to normal (that is, non-problematic) levels. Among other things, the elevated insulin levels caused by high glucose loads can accelerate the growth of cancers. Records of indigenous populations across the globe whose diets included very little or no sugar or starch show that they had no cancer problems - until they began consuming sugars and starches with the arrival of Western influences. Grains of ALL types should be avoided, though many people can safely consume small amounts of things like brown rice. Anything made from flour is just Right Out, period; this includes breading on deep-fried foods.
Fat-free or low-fat milk still has all the lactose and other sugars of whole milk, without the nutritional value of the butterfat. (Yes, I said NUTRITIONAL VALUE OF THE BUTTERFAT. Fats are not the problem in obesity and heart disease; that's a myth that has been persistently promoted for a century by people with nothing but loud assertions that had no science behind them.) Small amounts of milk can be tolerable, but it's best to go easy on this if you're over the age of about 14. Milk products, on the other hand, can be a very mixed bag. Most real cheese is actually low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein; read the labels, and if the carb count is less than 10% of the calories, it's probably OK. (Diabetics may need to be even more restrictive and particular about this, of course.) Whole milk is safer than low-fat; only about 30% of the calories in whole milk are derived from carbohydrates, while nonfat milk's calories are 55% from carbs. Of course, both contain exactly the same total amount of carbs, so neither is good in large quantities.
Lean meats, poultry and fish aren't bad for you, but meats with fat are better, as long as you minimize carbohydrate intake. Why? Meats have lots of protein, which you need. Fats, in the absence of carbohydrates, provide fuel for the body perfectly. The few parts of the body that don't use fat will quite happily employ protein-derived fuels instead, and those are readily produced from multiple sources. If you load up on carbs, however, both a lot of those carbs and any fats in your diet will get stored (as fat) instead of used... and then you'll find yourself hungry long before you've burned off what you stored up, because the switch-over to using fats instead of carbs isn't instantaneous when the carbs run out. The switch to using carbs instead of fats, on the other hand, can actually be so fast that the carbs haven't even reached your tissues yet, making you hungrier than when you started eating. Can you say "Vicious cycle"? And that's just one of several that carbs cause.
Beans are another mixed bag. Fresh beans - ones that were harvested green and not dried - tend to be fairly low in starches and sugars; they're OK. Dried beans tend to have lots of starches; not OK. Dried soybeans have another set of issues in the form of harmful substances that aren't found in the raw, green soybeans. Some of those persist in the products made from soybeans, though not in soy sauce and tamari (which are fermented). Overall, dishes made from dried beans and dried bean products are best avoided due to their carbohydrate content, while anything made from dried soybeans is best avoided altogether. (Sadly, this includes tofu and soy milk. Try almond milk instead.)
Eggs are OK, period. If omelets are your thing, knock yourself out.
Nuts, again, are a mixed bag. Some are high in carbohydrates, some are low; read the labels and avoid the ones that get substantial portions of their calories from carbs. (You can subtract the fiber, however; it doesn't count.) Pecans are much better than cashews, as an example; you can look up the data easily.
Fats are the most persistently vilified part of the diet for no good reason. No study has ever demonstrated a real cause-and-effect relationship between dietary fat (or cholesterol) and fats in the blood or tissues except in the rare cases of people with a basic metabolic defect of some kind. Saturated fat, in fact, is affirmatively needed in the diet, particularly if there's a substantial amount of the much-praised Omega-3 component already present. Trans fats are not a part of the natural diet, however, and there's reason to believe that they can pose problems - avoiding them on the basis of their being artificial is justified by itself.
Salt is another thing that people avoid because of misinformation. The problems that have been blamed on salt can be laid at the feet of carbs more accurately; a high-carbohydrate diet causes water retention, which in turn causes sodium retention. Drop out the carbs, and both the excess water and the excess sodium are quickly eliminated by the body as a matter of course. If you maintain a low carb intake , you can pretty well ignore salt in most cases.
Sugar is best eliminated entirely from the diet, both "added" and "natural". If you want to read an extensive indictment of that substance, try "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes. I have often mused that if the writer of the Biblical book of Genesis had been fully in possession of the facts, the stricture would have been "Do not eat the sweet fruits of any tree or plant, for they will make you ill in your old age." Sugar's problems are many; the two most important in my opinion are that it raises insulin levels (with all of the many ill effects this has over the long term), and it contains fructose which is strongly implicated as one of the causes of the development of the plaques that seem to play a large part in the onset of Alzheimer's.
So how much carbohydrate can you eat and still avoid the problems that come with the level that's commonly in our diet today? If you want all of the benefits of reduced carbohydrates, the answer is "Not much". Under 50 grams per day is a good place to aim for - and that's barely more than you get in one large slice of bread. One can of a typical soft drink has 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrates, nearly all sugar; are you starting to see the challenge here? Be forewarned; once you start reading the labels on prepared foods, you'll discover that entire huge regions of the typical grocery store are pretty much useless to you; the bakery aisle, the soft drinks, most of the frozen prepared foods, all of the breakfast cereals, large parts of the canned goods, and all of the pasta, rice, and dried-bean-based items fall off the menu right away. There really is not a lot that's useful in the center of the store; you end up shopping primarily from the fresh produce, a limited amount of the frozen vegetables, parts of the dairy case, and all of the meats. If this sounds boring, don't worry. After a remarkably short time of carbohydrate avoidance, you'll discover that you just don't get as hungry as fast when you aren't eating carbs. As a result, you'll start concentrating on quality instead of quantity. And you need not give up fast food; a double-meat McDonalds Angus Deluxe minus the bun (with water or unsweetened tea to drink) is very low in carbs, and will provide the kind of meal that will keep you going but won't make you fat. (Okay, you might not be able to finish one with double meat, but that particular item has become my standard order at Mickey D's of late, and it keeps my 160-pound mass in motion for hours without running down or getting hungry.) And as long as you aren't already diabetic, you can probably get away with the occasional bit of backsliding; a couple of slices of pizza, or one hamburger with a bun in a given week is unlikely to move your goals out of reach.
Not convinced? Not my problem. There's plenty of straight information out there, and you're welcome to believe whatever you want to. But if you really do the investigating, you'll find out that the official guidelines are a recipe for misery in the long term, not health and long life. Or you can find out the hard way, when it's too late to do anything about it. It's your choice to make.
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