Simple Rules for Healthy Eating (2015)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It seems everything that makes food more profitable also makes it less healthy. Perhaps the science is thin on things like caloric sources (quality vs quantity), preservatives, complexity of sugars, the effects of high processing of food, etc., but my anecdotal evidence and growing intuition aligns with the author's opinions.
For me personally, removing added sugars and processed foods and moving to a more "real foods" meal plan (meat, veggies, fruit) has been transformative.
There are two sides to this: it's cheaper to supply unhealthy food, but only when people buy it. Other brands (Whole Foods, Amy's frozen foods, arguably the entire "cooking show" industry) are built around fetishization of the healthy eating. This is why the recent ruling on displaying "added sugars" is so important, even if many more similar steps are necessary for people to make educated, healthy decisions when hungry. If we can convince corporations it is in their profit margins' interest to provide healthier food—ideally because consumers assign value to the nutritional content instead of just calories—we'll see widespread health benefits.
That said, you're completely correct, which is why there are systemic problems with the diets of the lower class. Why buy real food when you can feed yourself (or your kids, or your relatives) with cheaper food that is easy to eat? There's simply no reason for those brands to invest in cheaper, healthier food when it would be harder to sell and couldn't piggyback off shared food processing (e.g. processed sugars, grains, meats, proteins).
Essential foods (eat more of these than the other types of foods):
1. vegetables
2. fruits
Recommended foods:
3. nuts, seeds, and healthy oils
4. high-quality meats and seafood (by this he means "wild-caught fish and shellfish, only the highest-quality farm-raised seafood, the leanest meat cuts, and meats from wild game and free-ranging animals fed natural diets". Also eggs.)
5. whole grains
6. dairy
Acceptable foods (eat less of these than the other types):
7. refined grains
8. low-quality meat and seafood ("all processed meats and all but the leanest cuts of unprocessed meats" as well as "seafood that does not meet the quality standards of watchdog organizations such as the Aquaculture Stewardship Council" are in this category)
9. sweets
10. fried foods
No particular category is required if you don't want to eat them, as long as you eat more of each grouping than the one below it.
Some of the differences between the two are that the linked article would allow "low-quality" meat as long as it isn't processed, but doesn't include as much "healthy oil" or dairy. Another difference is the article would consider a whole grain cereal to be "highly processed" whereas it would be "whole grains" in the book (the appendices have more details on which foods go in which categories). Same for 100% whole grain bread. So the only qualm I might have is it could be healthier to include more healthy oil and less meat.
The article adds behavioral guidelines to cook at home and eat with people to get you to cook more. These guidelines seem both slightly more strict yet also makes the whole list easier to follow. I lost weight on the list I wrote above (agnostic healthy eating), but stopped following it after a while. Your success on the article's guidelines makes me want to try it.
If I'm sort of lazy, I'll eat something made with palm oil, even though there is a lot of Omega 6.
I dunno- the longer you live, the longer I can sell shit to you.
That is, food corporations that practice methods that increase consumption to unhealthy levels - high sodium, high sugar, low satiating and cheap to produce foods (high-carb, high-yield meat products due to growth hacks like bovine growth hormone).
The food companies that choose not to play along are either niche health food companies, or they will go bust by not being able to compete in a commodity market.
Sarah Palin (1) would have you believe we should have the "freedom" to eat what we want. However, for the vast majority of Americans that's a straight up pipedream. We are "free" to eat whatever is available, and baring government intervention what is available is subject to the forces described in my previous paragraph (ie garbage optimized to make us over-consume).
The obesity epidemic WILL NOT be resolved until heavy government regulation comes into play in the food industry. Pretending otherwise is no different than those who pretend abstinence education prevents pre-marital sex.
1. Obviously I'm just using her here as poster child for a certain political ideology.
I don't know, in every town there is a grocery store that sells produce, raw meat, and other unprocessed foods. If your argument is that the shopper is so overwhelmed by advertising that he just can't help but choose poorly --- well, that's the dividing line between conservatism and liberalism.
Actually I believe that there is truth to both sides, but either side taken to the extreme leads to absurdity. Full faith in the individual, and full faith in government, are each flawed.
> no different than those who pretend abstinence education prevents pre-marital sex
May I suggest you look into that more?
You're free to believe that most humans are capable of making healthy eating choices by their own free will if you want (not trying to be catty, and I'm not sure that was the point you were communicating, just how I interpreted your comment), but the data overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/US...
At a certain point I believe it is important to protect people from themselves. Being too proud to admit that "humans can be taken advantage of using certain hacks/tricks" makes society as a whole weaker.
>Actually I believe that there is truth to both sides, but either side taken to the extreme leads to absurdity. Full faith in the individual, and full faith in government, are each flawed.
You and I agree on this point 100%. Currently I believe the FDA has allowed too much leeway with the food industry. I'm not foolish enough to think that it couldn't easily swing too far in the other direction as well.
The problem is, as hard as it is to predict the future, it is harder to predict farther into the future; and, once you set up a pot of "long term" honey, people have a chance to reorganize their affairs to siphon off said honey and if your idea is to not pay attention to their short term results, you set yourself up for a big long term surprise. Publicly traded companies are mostly companies that have products, markets, customers, service, etc. Generally, when they are losing money compared to other companies, it does not scream "we're pouring money into R&D, great things are around the corner!"
This boils down to, statistically speaking, short term results are actually the best indicator of long term results. You'd be foolish (statistically) to overemphasize long term hypotheticals in the face of short term losses.
TL;DR that financial markets are too tilted in favor of "short term" results is largely a myth. if it were not a myth, wealth would shift from the majority people who supposedly pay attention to short term results and toward people who ignore short term results leading to the end of the myth.
edit (couple above and): I'm not saying that long term projects and ideas and thinking don't ever pay off; I'm saying that saying that they are undervalued and therefore represent an opportunity is a stretch and requires proof that you most likely will not find if you look because others have looked.
Theory aside, here's a thing that doesn't fit into any short-term models I know: Bell Labs. Take a monopoly business with a ton of spare cash, and throw that cash into a well. Build a city full of comfortable middle-class researchers and their families with no need to produce anything of immediate value, and keep it going for decades. Watch them invent a million amazing things that change the world, and then, once they get splintered into a bunch of smaller, short-term focused groups, watch them fade into insignificance.
If you are suggesting that rational behavior is emerging every time, or even much of the time, somebody says "Wall Street is too focused on the short term", I shake my head in sadness at the money you are planning to lose.
For example, if you have control over a golden goose asset and managing it to maximize wealth is best achieved by sitting in a room with other oligopolists and carving up markets, that (1) may be best accomplished "in private" and (2) why share unfairly high profits if don't need to? This type of thing has occurred for example in the growth of cable TV companies, go public (yet maintain control) to get access to the capital necessary to grow your networks, then go private again (you already have control) to not have to dilute profit over and in the face of inefficient public regulation.
In any case, the idea that the market is too focused on the short term has been around for decades, and if the shift had occurred as you propose, then we wouldn't still be hearing it.
My own experiences, especially related to corporations, seem to corroborate this.
To convey the intuition I'm trying to describe as quickly as possible, I think you're thinking of market data being useful to help you find the Old Faithful geyser, and once you find it you just need to hang around and scoop up the reliable expulsions. Coupled with the even worse idea that you can see it where nobody else can :) To continue the analogy, I think it's not Old Faithful you found, but a solar flare on the surface of the sun, and while waiting for the next one you are more likely to get scorched.
We aren't going to debate technical analysis here (or resolve it), the point I'm making overall is that people persistently believe that financial markets are leaving money lying around, that these people can see where nobody else can see it, and that is easy to bend over and pick up. I'm trying to use some fairly simple logic and explanation to say, "it's not that easy; if it was, how can you think an entire financial industry somehow can't see what you can see? Wall street hires people just like you."
If convexity isn't assumed, you're right back to my original point.
I don't think using terms such as convexity explains anything to anybody, but if it indicates to you that the market is too short term focused, you should just print money with a derivative security that prefers companies that lose money in the short term because that will with no effort uncover all the long term strategies...
Amazon is an apt antithesis ... though obviously an outlier.
Amazon is pursuing a long term strategy, and it's a public company, and it's getting funded, it's not getting starved for capital. i.e. the market is working, its strategy is being valued, there is no evidence of a market failure. (that is why I covered myself in my previous comment by saying "overemphasize" rather than simply saying emphasize.)
what would be your "antithesis" example would be other similar ideas that were floated and funding dried up because investors "stupidly" didn't get what a great long term idea it was. Of course, nobody can know what woulda coulda, and I'm not saying anybody can; what I'm saying is, if somebody thinks that markets don't properly weigh the long term over the short term, they are essentially saying that they want to sink more of their money into these (hypothetical) "losers" and I'm saying, please don't, it's a bad idea to assume that you know more than people actually in that industry.
I'm also not saying "don't think you have better ideas" and I'm not saying "don't pursue your good ideas" etc. I'm saying, don't think that financial markets are stupider than you. Don't think that the world is this hugely unfair place where all the people with money don't know a good idea when they hear about it, and that all these people with no money have all these great ideas that money seems to make people blind to (which is what "markets just don't get long term like I do" is saying)
This is touched on a bit in the Omnivore's Dilemma, people without heavy encouragement otherwise, have a rough limit on how many calories they will consume in a day. As a food company that has sufficient market penetration, you're stuck growing your profits at the same rate as the population. To get around this, you'll either need to increase your profits per calorie (sell less for more, cheaper ingredients, etc) or increase the amount of calories people are eating, through marketing and/or formulating your foods in such a way to encourage more consumption.
I think most companies opt for both, there's a lot of limits/diminishing returns on the making food cheaper side of things, but on the human consumption side, there's a lot of room for growth until everybody is morbidly obese. The bigger you are, the more calories you need to consume to keep that weight. More calories consumed is more money for food producers.
Personally I'm very happy to pay a premium for food I know has been prepared with good ingredients.
When I started reading labels and stopped buying anything with sugar, corn syrup, evaporated cane juice etc., I automatically eliminated processed food.
As for food companies, their responsibility is to maximize profit which usually involves selling as much as possible at the highest profit margin possible.
Given that high profit margin excludes the possibility of expensive quality ingredients, the variables that remain are taste and perception. Thus, food commercials, stories, "healthy food fetishism" (and pushing same crap as such) and taste laboratories where scientists focus on making said crap palatable, tasty and if possible addictive.
Sugar is an addictive substance so it is almost always a part of this formula.
Ideal breakfast for me is eggs & meat & perhaps fruit, though I currently have only black coffee for breakfast on weekdays (mild intermittent fasting).
I might add that feeling "full" at meals has been a huge motivator for me. Skipping breakfast and not placing limits on what I eat otherwise so long as it's real food has worked extremely well psychologically; I don't feel deprived, and I can see myself continuing this for life.
Salads for lunch
ps: said that earlier, my body made me change diet, you discover a lot of sensations you don't sense with the average industrial diet (everything is fuzzed by sugar and fat). It's not easy though because you lack all the hoops all these sweet meals gave you before, and your brain crave them a lot. Without a change in culture/lifestyle and real constraints (disease) it seems impossible to achieve on long term.
[1] there's a research department in some English univ. dealing with consumer buying reflex optimization, they investigate the package-sound-crispiness / buying ratio
They are the one that pushed the food pyramid and all the anti-fat craze.
The single biggest thing I've noticed: there are virtually no overweight people. And yet, no one is on some kind of obscure no-meat/no-carbs/no-fruit diet. People just live, eat the local food (which often has a ton of butter, salt, fat, etc.) and somehow still look 100% better than Americans.
My conclusion: obesity is caused by some combination of excessive portion sizes + over-processed food. It's not that complicated.
Don't forget lack of exercise from a car-centric transportation culture.
I live in San Jose and I honestly miss walking. I mean sure, I can walk, but I can't use it to go anywhere other than the 7/11 near my apartment without taking an hour or more out of my day. That's not to say I don't like living here (I do) but I guess that's just something you deal with when you trade a comparatively small college town (Santa Cruz) for a huge, spread-out city.
So we go in the store and afterwards make an effort to walk a couple of blocks down to the crossing so we don't get arrested or run down. When we get back to the car there's a tow truck trying to take it away because we were shopping across the street and no longer customers of this strip.
It was pretty amazing to us. We spent the rest of the trip driving everywhere, no matter how small the journey.
Does this not happen in other countries? It's not exactly common in the US, but you will see it dense areas sometimes where a) parking is limited and costs money and b) businesses provide parking free of charge to their own customers.
Obviously it's annoying when it's enforced as overzealously as the above example.
My working theory is that walking all the time ramps up the metabolism. Regardless, the notion of a 1:1 relationship between calories consumed and calories "retained" seems suspicious.
[edit] regarding the "you can't outrun the fork" theory of weightloss (e.g. exercising at the gym won't offset a poor diet), I absolutely agree with you, but I think there's a difference between an hour or two of intense exercise every other day (a gym membership) vs a lifestyle of walking everywhere all the time.
If not, what's the difference in that and gym-exercise?
As to why I think it’s different, here's a possibly dumb analogy: my building has this rooftop garden, and for the past few years, someone would walk up to the rooftop and water it a couple times a day with a hose. So far, so good.
Last year I decided it would be funny to install a drop irrigation system. Half a dozen times a day it trickles out water. Just drips, possibly less total water than the hose sprays.
Our yield last year was simply bananas. Plants growing taller than me in little pots and 16"-deep crates. The local plant expert explained to me that when plants get sporadic water, they grow roots deep to find more; when they get constant water, even if not as much, they "assume" water will be around whenever they need it and grow up instead.
I speculate that the human metabolism works in a similar way, and that ongoing, low levels of exercise is more beneficial to the metabolism than daily spurts of high intensity exercise.
just a theory IANA scientist obviously
Research has shown that properly structured, high intensity exercise (10 minutes) is just as beneficial as low levels over a longer duration.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
I disagree on portion sizes, based on my experiences in Japan.
In Japan - there is far less sugary products and they are less popular than in the states. (eg: soda). Even many of their "desserts" aren't that sugary (or tasty IMO...)
I stayed with a family during my time there. During home cooked meals it wasn't uncommon to have several servings - often times totaling more food than I'd ever eat in the States! While I would politely decline past the second serving [0] on the grounds of being full, the family I was staying with would often have several servings each. It was so much food! It felt like instead of one "double-size" serving they would have six "half sized" servings (slightly exaggerating # of servings).
I ate less than everyone in the family - they even commented on the fact many times! They were surprised I would always be full before they were and had expected an American to always be hungry (because of the "smaller portions" of Japan). I also ate with other families/visited other foreigners my family knew and it was always the same! Smaller portions but way more servings!
Restaurant serving sizes were more or less equal to the States except the drinks which felt like the largest sizes were equivalent to a kid's cup or a water cup you'd get at a fast food joint in the states. I was perpetually thirsty in Japan.
Also Japanese people walk/bike nearly everywhere as the public transport via trains is very practical and very convenient. The exercise certainly adds up.
[0] Always have seconds if the cook offers!
It's pretty easy to Google 2500+ calorie monstrosities that are served as a dinner in American restaurants. We have pastas with rich sauces (lots of butter, oils, or sugar), dishes with excessive cheese, and large amounts of deep fried ingredients... and many places serve a heck of a lot of this when you go out to eat.
Other countries have rich foods too, but my experience is that many cultures with very rich food often go light on the portion size (France comes to mind). Another set of countries have cuisine that normally is not very rich or excessively sweet (like you mention with Japan and the lack of sugary products). In many cases the food is flavored with spice instead of fats and sugars. For these type of foods, I bet you could easily match the portion size of one of those big American restaurant meals, and come nowhere near the calories.
Another factor that probably doesn't help here is that America seems more soda oriented than many cultures, and that excessive use of sugar even applies to other drinks all down the chain (my impression is that other cultures use way less sugar on coffee, tea, alcoholic cocktails...). It all adds up.
While the absolute numbers are lower in Europe versus the U.S., they're still very high. The numbers vary from 30% (UK) to 20+% in most other countries (vs ~35% in the US).
The reason you don't see overweight people on the streets is because they're not going out as much and are traveling by cars or .. just sitting at home.
Seriously, though, to address why people find it hard to follow such rules one has to look beyond nutrition and medicine. People don't just eat to fuel their bodies, they eat to fuel their minds i.e. for comfort and pleasure.
This is why (I think) that small amounts of caffeine and alcohol are good: for a given level of mental stimulation they reduce the amount of food needed. Reducing side effects from any one source reduces overall damage to the body.
How does one reduce one's overall level of self-stimulation? For want of a better word this is a spiritual problem. Having an objectively valuable purpose or problem to occupy the mind with is crucial, but perhaps there will remain 'ups' and 'downs'. Look to traditional religious teachings or the AA for advice. Which advice, again, is going to be mingled with falsehoods and irrationalities. Intermittent fasting is becoming fashionable and may be part of the solution; it certainly bring personal issues into vivid focus.
[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11981884/Cooking...
This is because poly- and mono-unsaturated fats had double bonds that oxidize rapidly. A free radical colliding with one of those double bonds will set off a chain reaction, resulting in rancidity.
In comparison, saturated fats have single bonds that do not oxidize as rapidly after a free radical challenge.
The processing step that the fake oils use will degrade the antioxidant capacity that you'd get from real, cold-pressed oil.
So, in summary:
PUFA's go rancid easily in absence of antioxidants.
Pure EVOO, though PUFA, has antioxidants that protect it.
If you buy "EVOO" in the US, it has possibly undergone processing (despite the label!), which means that it will have lower antioxidative capacity
Wiki article:
On another note, I've recently given up sugar as an experiment after reading all the bad things about it (surprised it didn't even come up in the article!), and have had quite dramatic results. The first 3 weeks were a shock to the system and I had major withdrawal symptoms; cravings, sweating, migraines, insomnia even shaking. Then in the 4th week I was back to normal again and seeing lots of benefits. The biggest surprise for me was sleep; I used to need ~10 hours a night, but now wake up refreshed after 7! My skin on my face is also less red, acne on my back has cleared up 50%, excma on my arms nearly fully gone, and of course my waistline has reduced.
This was just from eliminating all the obvious processed sugars, ie. chocolate, cakes, desserts, honey, biscuits etc. Also only drinking water and eating oatmeal for breakfast. These days I don't have any cravings for them; the knowledge of all the long term problems they caused completely kills it for me.
Data point of one, but after a month I really started to feel a difference. I felt a lot better almost immediately, but some of that was likely placebo. I crash a lot less in the afternoons, and have higher energy in general. Physically the difference was more dramatic – lost a spare tire I was starting to cary around my mid section. Partially this was due to exercise – more energy led to commuting by bike a lot more than I was.
One thing I'd add to the article was the importance of changing your environment. When I first started it was difficult because most of the snacks at home were carbohydrate based – by changing the environment and stocking a lot more protein-based foods at home that were easy to prepare, it was a lot easier to make the transition.
If I were rich, I would have a cook and eat macrobiotic or vegan, but to make tasty macrobiotic and vegan food yourself is a lot of effort.
IMNSHO, it might seem that way from the outside, but it's really very little effort to prepare and eat vegan meals.
The only actual problems are all social :(
EDIT: for example, people downvoting me for being vegan.
Why is protein a challenge even if you were fully vegetarian? What about all the nuts and legumes?
I personally have said fuck it. I takes drugs for pain with a liberal moderation and drink protein shakes to balance out my vice of eating pure sugar snacks. Glycemically I know its terrible but on the calorie scale and macro nutrients I am well nourished. Eh..I have some sense of guilt about potential glycemic shock from the spikes but I think my body can handle it. Trick is to know before its too late...
On it, he talks about commonly asked health questions (is coffee good for you?), and backs up everything he says with data and research (he tries to use meta-analyses when he can).
~180K members of that subreddit. I guarantee you, if you cut your carbs to below 20g/day, you will lose at least 3lbs a week (no exercise required).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15615615
Edit: Since I got curious and followed a bunch of other studies, here's a cool calculator based on some of that research and the (admittedly flawed) NHANES data
i.e. an apple and hard candy both have sugar, but the apple is a good idea. A cupcake and a loaf of whole-wheat bread both have carbs, but the bread (especially if it contains only yeast, flour, water, salt) will be way better for you.
Vegetables are good. Processed foods (including sugar) are bad. Mix in some fish and chicken from time to time. Don't pour salt all over it. There you have it. A healthy diet.
The bottom line is that eating healthy is not hard, nor is it prohibitively expensive. It's all about priority. If you would rather have the flat screen TV than a budget for Whole Foods, then that's your prerogative.
Pretty sure it's still as simple as "eat enough calories. Eat enough vitamins and minerals to not get sick from a deficiency. Have enough fiber to keep the digestive system humming. Drink enough water."