I’m being a little cheeky with this one, but I wanted to make the point that health advice and “studying” nutrition can actually make you worse off in the end.
When I was making major dietary changes in my life 3 or so years ago, I read a lot about the positive benefits of fiber. When I started eating foods that were higher in fiber, this did several very good things for me, so I was more or less sold on its benefits (and still am today).
However, at one point I started making small burritos for some of my meals, and because I was on-board with fiber, I started using slightly larger “whole wheat” tortillas. These, I suspect, packed far more calories than I expected, and over several months I regained the weight I originally lost, which freaked me out, because wasn’t I eating so much healthier?
I was, but that doesn’t mean I was eating smart. First of all, whole wheat tortillas are a joke because A) they kind of suck, and B) their actual fiber content is negligible. Moreover, because they were larger and I decided to still eat two of them, that can’t have done anything good for me. There are far better ways to get your fiber in.
See, in more than a few ways, I started eating more to get my “nutrition” in, and for some reason this nutrition dominated my brain more than common sense. If you want health problems, be overweight, that’s probably the leading cause of a slight majority of modern health issues. It’s not all of them, but it’s an awful lot of them. Over time, I’ve had more than a few days when I really didn’t need to eat anything more, but I did anyway to get that fiber in, especially if it was a rare day where both breakfast and lunch were low-fiber.
But you could substitute “fiber” from my story with just about anything for yours. On more than a few occasions I’ve looked at daily recommended quantities and thought, “How in the fucking hell are you supposed to consume this much xyz in one day?” I don’t want to ignore these recommendations entirely, but in a world of overeating, it does beg the question of whether focusing on this stuff is really worth your time. I’m not saying “never supplement” or anything like that – and things have to be pretty extreme to have a bona fide deficiency – but these labels are all generic anyway, and absolutely do not adequately address all shapes and sizes. Unless you have a very specific need, eating a generally healthy diet is probably going to keep you covered. Eating more just to squeeze something in is…kinda dumb.
I think this is a great example of how people can miss the forest for the trees.
The other challenge is, social media thinking dominates health advice, and this is really dangerous. People love sound-bites and simplistic “rules”, which are all deeply divided from actual food science, which is gritty, difficult, occupies tomes of good and bad research, and can only effectively test small things at one time. Which is not to say it isn’t valuable, but unless you are a research scientist, there’s almost certainly no way you can A) fully understand those studies, B) maintain a vast repertoire of studies in your brain, and C) know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the research is gold standard. So, cherry picking becomes the name of the game, and since humans are otherwise so drawn toward stories, many “health” books use stories to build up evidence for their convictions. And that would otherwise be fine, except that so many people are clearly influenced by fad diets, even when these diets are completely lacking in a coherent, overarching theory. Keto, for example, is ostensibly anti-carb, but a tremendous number of “keto” foods are high-carb, they just use refined flour from non-wheat plants, since keto somewhat arbitrarily blames gluten for half of the world’s problems (so which is it? the “carbs”, or the gluten? fuck off, Keto! even the Carnivore bozos are going pro-honey to own the vegans, you can’t take these people seriously)
My vegetable of choice lately has been green beans, but you can’t necessarily green-bean yourself to a healthy weight, you have to actually eat at a caloric deficit.
This is kind of the story with eating a variety of plants, too. Fiber Fueled introduced me to the concept of trying to eat 30 plant sources every week. I believe there’s a lot of value in doing that, but again, if you’re eating a surplus of calories just to “get your plants in”, I think something has been lost in translation. For awhile I thought of multi-grain pancakes as a fun way to get a variety of grains in, but the problem with pancakes is that a bunny dies every time you eat them without a slather of syrup, and while a slather of syrup is probably better for you than a can of soda, it’s still probably not a great idea to do on a regular basis. Are the extra plant sources really worth it?
You see this with protein, too, which is all the rage these days. The more reasonable scientists on YouTube will tell you that very few people in the US are actually protein deficient (and those who are, are typically elderly), but since politics has turned red and Keto reached ascendancy some time well before that, ‘protein’ is hyped up everywhere, sometimes injected into foods in very strange forms. I don’t believe any of it. What I do know that is that I am, 100%, overweight by 20 or 30 pounds, and it’s in my best interest to lose this weight.
Anyway, I fear this will rapidly turn into another Diet Religions post (ah! I miss venting, though).
Be very careful what you believe on social media!