The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (6 page)

The three irrefutable facts about health and foods are these:

1. Vegetables, beans, seeds, fruits, and nuts are good for you.
   
2. Excessive amounts of meat or animal products cause disease.
   
3. Eliminating refined carbohydrates will aid in sustainable weight loss and overall health.
   

A diet style composed of the healthiest foods is the healthiest. As ridiculously obvious as this sounds, a mystifying majority of us still
struggle to accept this simple fact: For a diet style to be truly healthful, it absolutely must contain large amounts of vegetables. The scientific literature backing this up is unimpeachable.

And yet, we all continue to get distracted by the latest fad diets—largely because the standard American diet is so markedly dangerous that even the most scientifically suspect diet looks better in comparison. For instance, when you read or hear about how the Mediterranean diet reduces your chances of heart disease and cardiac arrest by 25 percent, it looks good in relation to the SAD, which is responsible for 1.5 million heart attacks each year in the United States. I don’t know about you, but a 25 percent reduction in the risk of heart disease doesn’t excite me. I want it reduced by 100 percent.
³
This is especially relevant since any diet that still allows so many cardiovascular deaths, as today’s Mediterranean diet, should not be held in high esteem, but instead considered dangerous.

Judging the merits of a mediocre diet plan against a terrible one doesn’t improve your health. Comparing the Mediterranean diet to the SAD and demonstrating benefits is like buying a car by comparing it to a junkyard wreck. There are hundreds of popular diets out there. The famous DASH diet. The Weight Watchers diet. The Biggest Loser diet. The TLC diet. The Flat Belly diet. The Jenny Craig diet. Not to mention the crash diets and fasting protocols that are doomed to fail. I could go on and on and evaluate each one, but I won’t waste my time or yours. Instead, I’ll break down five specific diets—the standard American diet, the Paleo diet, the Mediterranean diet, the Wheat Belly diet, and low-fat veganism. These five approaches, which the majority of Americans consider to be healthy, are in truth potentially harmful and keep you trapped in the vicious cycle of toxic hunger and overeating. I’ll then measure each one against a nutritarian approach to eating to demonstrate how and why we can break free from this cycle once and for all.

The Standard American Diet: It’s to Die For

Some people like to think that there’s nothing wrong with the SAD, for them it’s perfect. The only thing perfect about the SAD is that it’s perfectly designed to kill us off.

The SAD is centered on chicken, red meat, cheese, and other animal products, sweets, and processed grains, particularly wheat. Even worse, the typical person eating this way consumes a tremendous amount of extracted vegetable oil. Not only does oil supply lots of empty calories, it also contains a suspected carcinogen—called 3-MCPD, or monochloropropane—that forms when we heat extracted oil. Many of us cook all vegetables with oil and add oil-based dressings or sauces to almost everything we eat—even the foods that are good for us. All oil contains 120 calories per tablespoon. Oil gets absorbed efficiently and quickly and converted almost instantly into body fat. Even olive oil, coconut oil, and soybean oil. When fat calories are absorbed so rapidly in such a large bolus, they cannot all be utilized for energy, so they are rapidly stored as body fat, something Americans have in large supply. Excess body fat increases the likelihood of cancer. Vegetable oils are calorically dense, low-nutrient foods that contribute to obesity and chronic disease and mess with our immune systems. Similarly, refined grain products like pasta and white bread are poor sources of minerals and vitamins, especially antioxidants. They are also rapidly absorbed and rapidly converted into body fat.

This modern way of eating makes our bodies function at a low efficiency, which stresses our internal organs and in turn leads to chronic disease and premature aging. Though all chronic diseases may have genetic factors contributing to their expression, without the stresses of modern living and modern dietary practices, these weak links in our genetic codes never need to end up as chronic disease.

Chronic diseases have been dramatically on the rise not merely because we’re eating an animal-product-based diet, but also because
the grains and other plant-derived products we regularly consume are refined and processed, making them nearly devoid of fiber and their essential, but fragile micronutrients. Additionally, we consume an obscene amount of added sweeteners, simple sugars, and, as mentioned, refined vegetable fats or oils. These foods, because they have no significant load of micronutrients and phytochemicals, rob our bodies of our stored micronutrient reserves and add further toxic stress to the body. Consuming empty calories enhances the body’s production of free radicals and waste products, which means they cause chronic disease and promote our premature demise.

Most of us consume large quantities of processed foods that are high in fat, salt, sugar, and additives. Instead of a regular diet of fresh fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds, which supply the proper nutrients for maximum health, we consume empty calorie after empty calorie. In fact, the top three sources of calories in the SAD today are—shockingly—milk, soda, and margarine, with the combination of fat and refined sugar consisting of 65 percent of our caloric intake.

The USDA’s suggested guidelines for almost twenty years—the infamous food pyramid—encouraged a diet that was way too low in plant-based nutrients and fiber. Though USDA recommendations have become significantly better in recent years, they still fail to emphasize fresh fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, and raw and cooked vegetables as the major source of calories. Unrefined plant foods must supply the vast majority of calories for any diet to be safe.

SAD = FAT

Excess body weight has reached epidemic proportions globally, and being overweight is the primary cause of type 2 diabetes; it accelerates atherosclerosis and death from heart disease and has been identified as a strong promoter of cancer. In fact, excess body weight is projected to overtake smoking as the primary cause of cancer in developed countries, as cases of cancer linked to smoking dwindle. Today, two in five
Americans are obese, and the three of five Americans who are not obese are significantly overweight. We are in worse shape today, with heavier bodies and thicker waistlines, than at any time in human history. Refined foods are addicting, and the SAD is making our population too fat.

And yet so-called scientists and nutritionists continue to rally behind erroneous studies, such as a 2013 study—published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
—that claimed in bold type: “Overweight People Live Longer.” But the study was actually a meta-analysis of different studies looking at death in relation to various BMI categories. A person with a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9, for instance, is considered normal, while a person with a BMI between 25 and 29.9 is overweight. A BMI of 30 or more places a person in the obese category. The researchers found a small reduction (6 percent) in the risk of all-cause mortality for overweight people compared with normal people and an 18 percent increase in mortality for obese compared with normal individuals. If a 6-foot male goes from 150 to 220 pounds, his BMI will still be less than 30. This study therefore concluded that a man can gain 70 pounds of fat, and all this weight gain will have no negative effect on his risk of death.

If you believe that, you might as well believe that smoking cigarettes is harmless and eating junk food is fine as long as you take a multivitamin.

This study was essentially worthless because it didn’t exclude people with chronic disease recorded at baseline and former smokers. It is well known that illnesses and smoking cause a lower body weight. Sick people always become thinner, while any relatively healthy person who follows the SAD will inevitably become overweight and eventually get sick. If you’re eating the SAD and you remain at a normal or near-normal weight, chances are you’re either chronically ill or you have an illness yet to be diagnosed.

Current and former smokers, though typically at a lower weight, inevitably die earlier. Any study about body weight and health that doesn’t
exclude them should automatically be dismissed. Similarly, a number of other medical conditions may also cause unintentional weight loss. These include depression, anxiety, alcoholism, asthma, auto-immune diseases, celiac disease, early pre-diagnosable cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression, drug addiction, and minor to severe digestive disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome.

In this 2013
JAMA
study, what percentage of the “normal” weight group suffered from one or more of these conditions? The study did not say, but it’s likely that many of the study participants were affected by at least one of these conditions. Depression, anxiety, and alcoholism alone could account for the findings in this study, as they affect about 20 percent of the population. But this study was nonetheless triumphantly publicized as “it’s okay to be overweight”—exactly what overweight people want to hear.

When people eating the SAD remain at a normal weight, it is often because of disease, not good health. A healthy person eating the SAD should expect to be overweight. Overweight or not, anyone and everyone eating the contemporary SAD is unhealthy, because it is such an unhealthy diet, eventually creating premature, life-threatening disease in all. If you are eating like other Americans and are a normal weight, however, you are most likely battling alcoholism, depression, emotional disorders, undiagnosed cancer, digestive disorders, or auto-immune illness, and your life expectancy may be even more negatively affected.

If this study were correct, then almost every study on fitness, and the benefits of dietary excellence, in the past forty years is wrong! This study is essentially telling us that we should all pack on some extra pounds, exercise less, eat some cheese doodles, and lounge on the couch watching more TV so we can live longer. This is bad science, and because of fatal flaws in the design of the project, it should never have been reported nor published in a major peer-reviewed journal. Especially because other more carefully designed studies, looking at
the same issue, show the opposite. The notion that people can be overweight or obese and still be healthy is a myth. Even the overweight, without high blood pressure, diabetes, or other metabolic abnormalities, still have higher rates of heart attack, stroke, and even cancer if followed long term.

This was confirmed in a recent thorough investigation that pooled together long-term studies compiling the data of more than sixty thousand people that had at least a ten-year follow-up. They found a 24 percent increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and premature death when comparing the “healthy” obese with normal-weight individuals. Even the non-obese overweight had a 21 percent increased chance of premature death compared to normal-weight individuals. The more years the so-called healthy overweight are followed, the more evident it becomes that excess fat on the body is a significant risk for all-cause mortality.
⁴

Our waistlines and our weight are the most critical factors governing our health and lifespan. The science behind this fact is indisputable. Despite the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence showing that we could prevent it, people continue to die prematurely after a poor-quality life plagued by sickness and disability. Hardly anyone can escape the lifespan-destructive effects of the SAD, which dramatically increases the risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. For instance, the lifetime risk for developing hypertension, or high blood pressure, is more than 90 percent—a 30 percent rise over the past decade. And cardiovascular disease is responsible for approximately 40 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.

There’s nothing programmed in our DNA that says we have to get old or fat or develop high blood pressure. We develop high blood pressure because we eat foods high in calories and low in nutrients. And when these calories enter our system without a sufficient amount of protective micronutrients, our cells become congested with free radicals and advanced glycation end products, which can lead to inflammation,
cell damage, and premature cell death. High blood pressure, obesity, and heart disease are not natural consequences of aging. They are the result of slow, insidious damage related to years and years of poor dietary choices.

Dietary ignorance, coupled with the addictive nature of refined foods, is now the leading cause of premature death in the modern world. The bottom line is that the majority of Americans ultimately die from their unhealthy nutritional choices. Type 2 diabetes, for instance, a disease born primarily from excess body fat, has exploded, costing our nation a record-high $245 billion in 2012, a 41 percent increase from five years earlier.
⁵

Heart disease, diabetes, and most cancers are preventable, but prevention requires change. It sounds simple, and it can be simple once you let knowledge, rather than habits and emotions, guide you. Natural plants, such as vegetables and beans, contain thousands of protective micronutrients, including antioxidants and phytochemicals. When we gain weight, we not only produce more damaging toxic waste in our cells, but we also dilute our body stores of nutrients into a larger pool, lowering the micronutrient concentration in our cells. The simple key to a long, disease-free life is to be relatively thin and well nourished with micronutrients.

The Paleo Diet: Dead Like a Caveman

One of the most popular diets today is also one of the most harmful.

The Paleo crowd believes that if we eat like our Paleolithic ancestors, then we will be much healthier—practically free of disease. All by eating plates and plates of meat.