Everybody knows how to be healthy! So why isn't everyone healthy?. Maybe because "fake news" isn't new.
These graphs illustrate the problem with what everyone knows about nutrition and health.
Maintaining a healthy weight is about control, calories in (what you eat) = Calories out (exercise). The secret is to count calories, eating 500 kcal a day less, and to exercise about 30 minutes most days, to lose weight.
CICO is mathematically correct, if the body is an mechanical engine. But the body responds to the types of food eaten in different ways. Like you, the body doesn't know what a calorie is. Driven by hormones and other signalling metabolite's, the body can either conserve or waste the energy from the food you eat.
The human body is not a machine, CICO is physics, it applies to machines. Your body is controlled by hormones, enzymes and signalling metabolite. What you eat and when you eat changes that signalling. If you eat foods that are quickly absorbed by the body, you end up eating "all the time" and yet always feeling hungry. That's one problem with the "balanced diet" commonly recommended.
Open Future Health recommends a Banting Diet. Begin the planning of each meal by choosing a quality protein, add salt, add green or coloured (above ground) vegetables, and quite a lot of fat (preferably animal fats). If you are not hungry, skip that meal.
Most people find that the largest meal of the day is in the evening with the family. There is no supper. There is no breakfast either, but coffee, tea or water is common. At lunch time, sometimes later, a small meal, mostly protein and fat will be eaten. Snacking stops.
We have been told to eat a low cholesterol diet, limiting eggs for instance. Even if that advice was right, it doesn't work because cholesterol is essential to the body, and the body readily makes it's own.
When people eat a high carbohydrate diet, doctors recommend people with high LDL-cholesterol take statins. When people switch to a low carbohydrate diet LDL-cholesterol commonly rises. Should statins be offered?
Open Future Health, suggests you look again at the biomarkers chart on this page. All those improvements are surely valuable. Then look at the overlap in the chart immediately above. We doubt if LDL-cholesterol is a useful marker for CVD risk. High insulin and high triglyceride's in the other hand might be. Talk to your doctor.
We know that blood glucose should be fairly constant, and that glucose spikes are harmful. Insulin is the "magic hormone" that protects you against high blood sugars.
Dr Joseph Kraft, tested thousands of people with a glucose tolerance test. Insulin hides the glucose spike, and that is why, you discover the damage that's being done 20 or 30 years later.
You need a high carbohydrate for energy, because glucose if the preferred fuel of the body. The brain alone requires you to eat 260gm of carbohydrate a day. Those who exercise need even more.
The notion about the amount of carbohydrate the brain needs is based on a mistake. Ketones are the preferred fuel for the brain,the heart and the mitochondria. There are no essential carbohydrates, so we don't need to eat any at all, but most people enjoy the sweetness of them.
The Kraft Test shows the hidden illness in the community. A test for fasting glucose doesn't reveal diabetes if insulin is still able to return blood sugars to normal during an overnight fast. The Glucose Tolerance Test, tests the insulin response for several hours after taking a 75ml drink of glucose. People who are pre-diabetic are exposed by this test.
We need to drink lots of water, at least eight glasses a day. We need to drink fluids fortified with electrolytes if we are exercising at the gym, or going for a walk or a run.
It's rubbish. Drink if you are thirsty. Don't drink just because you need an excuse for a rest. Take a rest, you don't need the excuse.
Marathon runners used to drink just water ONCE, during a marathon, a tiny amount. Nobody died. Today there are often drink stations every 5km. People drink excessively. Women, in particular take the literal words often spoken about hydration very seriously. They over-drink, and during a race pass out, not from dehydration, or heat exhaustion, but because of low salt levels. Prof. Timothy Noakes tells us that 13 women have died, because of this. Some of them because when they collapsed, they were given even more fluid, by confused first aid volunteers.
Drink when you need to. You don't need to be excessive about it. You can easily exercise for an hour without needing to drink at all.
A low salt diet is protective for people who have high blood pressure.
People on a Banting Diet tend to excrete salt, and are likely to be short of both sodium and potassium.
It's recommended that on a Banting Diet people eat more salt than usual.
Dietitians often complain the people are not doing what the US Dietary Guidelines recommend.
This chart shows that the public understood the message about the low-fat diet, and that saturated fats were to be avoided. As expected if fat consumption goes down carbohydrate consumption must go up. So based on this simple metric, people did attempt to follow the guidelines.
Dietitians argue the opposite, that people eat far too much sugar, and much less fruit and vegetables than they would prefer. People have increased the amount of grain they are eating, but dietitians say that they don't eat whole-grains. Of course, following what we think is a bias in nutritional advice, most dietitians think we eat too much meat.
We need to eat a diet with much less red meat and fewer eggs. Plant based diets are suitable for people of all ages, and should be encouraged. People should eat less saturated fats and more vegetable and seed oils.
In fact red meat is particularly nutrient dense, the natural fat of animal foods contains fat soluble vitamins and minerals that are often lacking in human diets.
In particular, animal fats are higher in omega 3 fats, while vegetable based oils tend to be high in omega 6 oils. Both are essential. But before the production of seed oils was possible the balance of omega 3 and omega 6 oils was roughly, 50/50. Today the low cost of omega 6 oils has resulted in them being excessive in our diet, with adverse health consequences.
There is a simple test for fats and oils. All natural fats and oils are a mixture, they don't exist like laboratory examples. If the substance is solid at room temperature, the chemical bonds in it are mostly connected, bound together, like a brick wall. Those fats are mostly saturated, and mostly omega 3. On the other hand if the fat is liquid at room temperature, there are more mono-unsaturated fats, and poly-unsaturated fats, mostly omega 6.
We were told that the mono-unsaturated fats, and poly-unsaturated fats would reduce our LDL-cholesterol and protect us from heart disease. That is a mixed message, true enough, but probably irrelevant.
A low fat protects your heart from artery clogging plaques. If you eat the healthy balanced diet recommended by the Ministry of health you will live longer and enjoy life more.
More importantly, the rise in the consumption of vegetable oils has changed the availability of essential fatty acids in the body. These are the raw materials that build cell walls and the myelin sheath that protects your nerve cells. Omega 6 fatty acids are perhaps 15 times more available than they used to be. When cell walls are built, or repaired, (any cell membrane in the body) the mix of available fats is sub-standard, the cell walls are sub-standard. The system is not build are our DNA intended.
The problem is that it's apparently sugar and more generally carbohydrates that in fact drive obesity, and high triglyceride's, and make for a higher risk for CVD.
So why is it that homeostasis, that is supposed to keep us healthy, seems to break down, so that unless we are particularly health focused, we all tend to age more rapidly that we need to.
Understanding Professional Dissonance
What you can do to improve your health
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