Diet and Nutrition

Diet and Nutrition: Finding the Balanced Approach

Over the past

several years I have been on something of a quest to find the source of my stomach problems, and sort out from amongst the many wildly differing viewpoints on nutrition, which one helps me the most and seems like the best long-term approach.

My family has had a history of stomach problems, and it seems I was lucky enough to get a double dose. After seeing multiple doctors and specialists with no improvement, I even resorted to a gluten-free diet for three years, finding it helped me more than anything else I had tried. This was no easy thing to embark on, and it took months for the bread cravings to go away.

Along the way I have read a lot of books about health and nutrition, and it is amazing how much the major viewpoints differ from one another, all coming from expert authors with loads of research to back up their ideas.

How does someone with little nutritional background wade through this mass of conflicting diet ideas and come up with the one that makes the most sense? That is the question I am going to attempt to answer with this post. I feel, just within the last few months, that I have finally emerged from searching through the trees for many years to see the forest. I certainly do not have the kind of credentials to be able to intelligently debate the intricacies of each approach, but I have taken a close look at the literature that is out there, and I have come up with a basic approach that I feel serves as the most balanced (albeit not very mainstream) way to approach a healthy long-term diet.

First, a ridiculously over-simplified diagram of some of the major diet/health books from the last decade or so!

This obviously isn’t entirely accurate; the Paleo diet is not completely carnivorous, but I would say the proportion of meat generally increases as the graph goes down.

To give some background on why I picked these books in particular, it is based partly on the number of reviews each book got on amazon.com. I know this is not the most academic approach to selecting sources, but it does give an idea of the degree of popularity these books have, which I think does have some amount of importance. I’ll admit I have not actually read all of these books either (although I have read a lot about all of them); rather they make up the books that I think best represent some of the major modern long-term nutritious dietary approaches. I’m not looking for quick fixes or even to lose weight. I just want to be healthy and avoid stomach problems.

I’ll give a brief overview of what I consider to be the major take-away points for each of these books (links are to amazon.com, where you can find loads of other more lengthy reviews to consider):

The China Study

This seems to be the strongest evidence provided by vegans and vegetarians for supporting their diet. It is an interpretation of an enormous study done in China that produced a huge amount of epidemiological data used in this book to link certain dietary choices with heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. The book concludes that vegetarianism, and preferably veganism, is the healthiest way to prevent these nasty sorts of problems.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Book by popular food writer Michael Pollan, who coined the phrase “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan dissects the real sources and origins of our food, and shows just how processed nearly everything has become.

The Mediterrasian Way

This is really a cookbook, but it provides a nice, fairly detailed explanation about why traditional Mediterranean and Asian dishes are healthy compared with modern food preparation techniques.

You: The Owner’s Manual

I put this and The Mediterrasian Way on the same level because Dr. Oz, one of the authors of this book, generally believes that the traditional Mediterranean diet is best, and that belief seems fairly clear in reading this book. I also labeled this book “mainstream”, meaning that it seems to avoid controversial ideas about diet and healthy living habits, and maintains a fairly mainstream approach throughout.

Nourishing Traditions

Another cookbook published back in 1999, but this is one heavily researched book, with pages of references following the initial section about different kinds of nutrients. This book traces its origins back to the work of Dr. Weston Price, a dentist who traveled the world and published a book about how the health of indigenous tribes fared with traditional diets vs. modern diets that had been introduced later (Nutrition and Physical Degeneration).

The Maker’s Diet

This book takes a lot of its ideas from Nourishing Traditions, so I put it on the same level. Religion is the primary difference here; author Jordan Rubin is a very religious guy and he founded a major supplement company (Garden of Life), which he tends to promote a little too heavily in his other books. While I can’t totally agree that a literal interpretation of the Bible is the best way to come up with a diet, this book sent me in the right direction, so I wanted to include it.

The Paleo Solution

The basic idea here is to eat the way our ancestors did, before the agricultural revolution. People report feeling better and having more energy, which I don’t doubt after my years of going gluten-free, which is somewhat of a similar path. Nutritionists find this one a little questionable, though.

So, how to choose among these many credible approaches to nutrition?!

If there is one dietary approach that seems most accepted by the mainstream media these days, it is probably the traditional Mediterranean diet. As I pointed out, Dr. Oz believes in and follows this approach himself, and it provides a balance of healthy natural foods without forcing anyone to give up red meat and dairy products completely. I can say from experience that completely excluding whole categories of foods is extremely difficult and best avoided if at all possible, so I liked that component of this diet approach.

I really wanted the Mediterranean diet to work for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite measure up. Surely many people would do much better on this diet than the standard American diet, and most people probably do not have as sensitive a stomach as I do. However, I could not completely switch to this diet from my safe gluten-free diet without many of the same problems returning. This was not a success for me, so I had to keep looking.

Vegetarian and vegan diets are hugely popular, and seem to be backed up by a considerable amount of scientific research. From respected books like The China Study to the popular nutrition books by Michael Pollan, these diets are impossible to ignore.

I have some big problems with these diets too, however. For one thing, they just aren’t that appetizing. Eating veggies, fruit, nuts and lettuce all day just is not going to keep my interest day in and day out, and it certainly isn’t going to keep me full for any significant length of time.

A further problem I have with veganism and vegetarianism is that we as humans don’t seem to be well-adapted to only eating plants. We have carnivorous teeth and a stomach capable of breaking down animal proteins for a reason. It is no small issue that it is very difficult to get all of the necessary nutrients from plant sources alone. You would have to be incredibly disciplined to follow this diet all the time and get everything your body needs on a regular basis.

Why mess with millions of years of evolution? Veganism and vegetarianism were out.

The Paleo diet certainly sounded interesting, and it wouldn’t have been a huge stretch for me since I had already given up gluten. But diets of exclusion aren’t much fun, and I had a sneaking suspicion that this diet was popular among athlete-types for the energy that comes from removing grains and eating lots of protein all the time. Some of what I read about it indicated it could be more of a fad-type of a diet, and that nutritionists found it a little questionable. I’m not going for fad diets. I want a diet I can live with the rest of my life.

That leaves Nourishing Traditions (and The Maker’s Diet basically, which teaches many of the same ideas). Reading this book was like a breath of fresh air after reading so many other books that seemed to have some sort of slant that I couldn’t completely agree with. This book both has no fear of bucking commonly-held beliefs about nutrition, while at the same time providing very thoroughly-researched opinions on the foods we should and should not be eating. It is a throwback to old times, when we made things from scratch and did not have the dizzying array of processed foods we have now.

The section on fat is particularly interesting. The co-author of the book (Mary Enig) is a world-renowned expert on fat with a Ph.D. in lipid biochemistry. After reading this book I have switched to drinking whole milk and buying better quality dairy products, because the authors provide a convincing case that high-quality unprocessed dairy is an extremely important component to the American diet in particular. The one major sticking point, at least in Wisconsin, is that I can’t legally buy raw milk here, which contains all of the enzymes destroyed in the pasteurization process.

While the amount of time it takes to prepare the meals in Nourishing Traditions is no welcome change (I have 3 kids under the age of 4), I cannot deny the difference in how I am feeling, and just how much better the food really tastes. This book was so convincing in fact, that I finally managed to give up drinking soda and eating desserts on a regular basis.

But another surprise in reading this book, was that I found out good homemade meals cooked the old fashioned way do not necessarily require a huge amount of time, so much as they require a lot of advanced planning. Once I accepted that I would need to start things the night before or even days before, I realized that cooking things this way really wasn’t so bad.

I realize this comes across as very favorable to Nourishing Traditions compared with the other books, but it is based on years of suffering through other less effective diets, and finally finding something that works for me. I have no affiliation with the book, its authors, or the Weston A Price Foundation (which was created by the authors of Nourishing Traditions).

If nothing else, none of these diets include much if any processed foods. Avoid them as best you can and you’ll be feeling much better regardless of the rest of your approach to nutrition.

If anybody has any comments or corrections I would love to hear them. I am sure there are many more qualified experts out there on this subject, I am merely trying to explain for the layperson what the major viewpoints are so that it might save them the years of searching I went through!

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Diet and Nutrition