Food used to be food, and I’m not sure people spent much time worrying whether it was “healthy” or not, but in a world full of diseases specifically caused by diet, people have attempted to ease their existential understanding of food by subscribing to various diet religions, accompanied by their own prophets, rituals, and dogma.
And to be fair, many, if not most of us can loosely be classified into one or another of these religions, even if we don’t consider ourselves among the faithful. At one extreme is veganism, which often takes a strange political stance on the “evils” of meat products, next is maybe vegetarianism, which permits a few animal products and is generally less preachy, then perhaps the Mediterranean diet which is plant-heavy with some meat and healthy fats, followed maybe by much of the modern diet as it happens in the real world (although most people understand that excessive sweets are probably bad for you), and then transitioning to the low-carb groups of Keto, which is wildly popular right now, and then the new (and strange) carnivore diet, which insists that meat is all you need, with some radicals suggesting plants are even bad for you. Other diets, which don’t always fit well into the sliding scale, pick strange fights with very specific foods like nightshade vegetables. [Adkins is still out there, too, but I don’t hear much about it these days. I think it was also low-carb?]
My own indoctrination into this world – on a more serious note than in years or decades prior – came from a book called The Acid Watcher Diet last summer, because almost everything I ate gave me heartburn (spoiler: grade 4 esophagitis will do that to you. Get thee to a doctor!). Otherwise healthy food like beans gave me raging heartburn, so it was less a philosophy of “this is the way” and more of a “eat foods that don’t destroy you”. But it was somewhat plant-heavy, at least in suggestion, and it got me eating far more fruits and vegetables than I ever ate before. It was also my first introduction to aggressively eliminating strange chemical additives and highly processed foods, which is a huge part of my current diet philosophy.
I suspect that the Truth is out there, at least generally speaking, and it’s one reason I’m highly suspicious of elimination diets, like veganism (which eliminates animal products), keto (which eliminates “carbs” – a term that is far too broad to be meaningful; hell, broccoli is a ‘carb’), and carnivore (which eliminates plants). Generally speaking, humans eat what they can get, and they’re damn good at it, finding ways to process an enormous variety of sources into edible foods, even if we exclude modern factories. I find it highly unlikely that half of what we’ve accomplished as a species should be thrown out the door because “carbs bad” or whatever, although this is purely opinion. Or maybe someday we’ll discover that sucking on lichen all day is the key to pure health, but I doubt it.
My own bias is probably in the vegan direction, simply because the books I read after The Acid Watcher Diet have had a generally vegan bias. Alas! – the first Light one finds often comes to constitute one’s views for life! Granted, I don’t plan to ever be vegan, but there seems to be a lot going for it, although I find it incredibly frustrating that the environment is always dragged into the picture. It’s not that the environment doesn’t matter, it’s just that I don’t care about the environment when I’m trying to learn about my own personal health, and these preachers just can’t shut their mouths about the planet. Nonetheless, there are YouTube channels like Nutrition Made Simple!, which presents the results of various health studies in extremely objective detail (it’s clear the author only eats plants, but he’s not religious about it), and Plant Chompers, an old guy who is super capable for his age and who has an amazing knack for researching old papers that diet authors like to take out of context.
Oddly enough, on a recent trip to Natural Grocers, I found that the book section was unusually dominated by Keto books. Politically, I would have thought they would align more in the vegan direction, but I suppose not; or perhaps that is the natural bias of working in the grocery industry, as you’d hate to lose any business from meat-eaters.
What I don’t like about Keto is it’s strange hatred of gluten, which has somehow earned a disproportionate amount of ire, quite a lot for one molecule! Nonetheless, I wouldn’t tell anybody they should eat bread, since the vast majority of bread is not real bread but highly processed garbage. I have a bread machine (actually two) and so make my own, but unless you find these at a thrift store, they are very expensive, and for feeding a family, the small loaves they make won’t last long (they are also loud and incredibly annoying during the various knead cycles). There’s a lot of evidence that people can lose weight on a low-carb diet in the short run, and in so far as Keto encourages people to avoid highly processed food, I have a hard time seeing it as a bad thing. But, what little I know of it seems to indicate it also sees very high fat foods as good, and I’m more than a little skeptical of this. What I can’t get over is that even ancient people like Otzi the ice man had heart disease. It’s unclear exactly what caused that, but red meat consumption seems to be linked to this (which is not to say it isn’t otherwise healthy food, but it’s the sort of thing that might not be great if you’re planning to live 70+ years, etc.). It’s also not clear to me that modern beef adequately resembles the game people hunted thousands of years ago, and aurochs are no longer with us, so….
The strangest diet to me is the carnivore diet, which several friends have brought up over time. This is only a gut feeling, but it strikes me as a reaction to veganism. It somehow unintentionally become widespread among conservatives because of Jordan Peterson and his daughter’s adoption of it, and while I otherwise like Jordan Peterson, I’m not convinced it’s a great long-term diet. The problem with vegans is that they tend to be so damn preachy, and they are almost always left-leaning, so the carnivore diet just feels like this reaction of, “Oh, yeah?! Well…well…you should only be eating meat! Yeah! Take that!” And, you know, I love steak too. In so far as it eliminates highly processed foods, I can see where it would be useful as a sort of elimination diet to reset things, and sometimes specific plants don’t agree with people’s bodies but they never have the opportunity to truly learn this, so I’d hate to completely dismiss the value of a short-term carnivore diet. But from what little I’ve seen, the people who follow the carnivore diet permanently, end up with astronomical blood cholesterol levels. You’d better be absolutely certain that all of the past 100 years of nutrition science are completely wrong about heart disease before you just dismiss them with an ideological wave of the hand. It’s also important to realize that Inuit genes have specific adaptations that allowed them to live predominantly off of meat sources, so it’s quite rash to assume you can extrapolate data from those populations for all humans. That being said, it is interesting, and as one friend mentioned, it should at least be studied. In my opinion, though, it sounds like a health nightmare, especially when you consider the mounds of research that show how healthy plant foods are. According to Plant Chompers, this diet is just a renewed version of previous diets that have come and gone, and the ‘influencers’ who espouse it do not tend to live very long, at least not compared to their plant-based counterparts, who sometimes live well over 100 (something veganism has going for it, at least when it isn’t being used as a cover for orthorexia, an interesting sociological observation which I only recently heard about)(also, see his “How Long Do Health Influencers Live?” series).
More anecdotally, I think I once started to develop gout in my big toe in my mid 20s – blood work showed high uric acid levels, which could have been from A) high beef intake combined with B) high consumption of antacids, which can inhibit the absorption of things that decrease uric acid [as I remember it. I don’t remember everything I read on the subject, but fortunately it never came back. If that’s what I was starting to experience, it damn near crippled me on a hike one day. Never again.]
I’m just going to wrap this all up by saying…I don’t have all the answers. And quite honestly, the more adamant you are about one food diet being the Truth, the more likely you are to ignore future evidence and discoveries, and the more likely you are to be wrong. It’s kind of like people who insist that the way they learned the Bible as a child [for those who grew up Christian] is the one true way everything happened, happy farm animals boarding the ark and all. I don’t know, man, I’m still a Christian, of course, but I like to think I have a more sophisticated understanding of the Bible these days, even if I don’t believe this understanding is necessary for salvation, so I try not to foist it upon other people, or act as if I know everything, because I don’t, even if I have an otherwise pretty solid conviction. You’ve just got to be careful what you choose to believe, while staying open to new evidence, and not get too caught up in dogma. I’m still trying to learn about diet and how to eat healthier, but it’s not an easy subject and there are few obvious and self-evident answers.