The Diet Wars

Being a portly individual of stout proportions for much of my life, I have studied all kinds of diets.  Most of those either did not work at all, or only worked for a while, then stopped working for various reasons.  The typical diet is a calorie in equals calorie out diet.  According to this theory, the only way to lose weight is to reduce your calorie intake, or exercise more, or both.  A pound of fat, in this theory, is equivalent to 3500 calories.  So, if you can achieve a net negative of 500 calories per day, you will lose 1 pound per week.  But, as we shall see, its is not that simple.  The body has ways of coping that defy this simple mathematical equation. 

Problems with this diet include that it is hard to maintain.  You are hungry all the time on the diet.  Additionally, long term calorie restriction causes your metabolism to slow down, defeating the diet.  It is as if your body is working at cross purposes to maintain your weight.  Since you graze all day, because you are always hungry, it is easy to over eat and blow your diet.

The Atkins diet was a step in the right direction, in that it reduced carbohydrates, especially sugars and refined carbohydrates.  Atkins billed the diet as a high protein diet, which is the message a lot of dieters got.  In addition, the Atkins business came up with the "glycemic index" and produced so called "diet foods" that contained sugar alcohols...not good.  Atkins, though was a supposed to be ketogenic diet, and it worked up to a point.  but many people plateaued, and didn't get down to their goal weight.

Next up was the Protein Power diet.  The Protein Power Diet was written by Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades. Protein Power, though, as was made clear by a careful reading of the book, was really a fat diet.  Most of your calories on this diet, if done right, actually come from fats.  Why is it called the Protein Power diet and not the Fat diet?  Because the public had been convinced that eating fat caused a person to become fat.  Why this is so is a story for another time.  The point is that the Protein Power diet was a big step closer.  But it was not the whole story.  Heavy cream, for example, is a fat.  But it is a not the kind of high quality fat that you should be eating.  Additionally, protein consumption raises insulin levels, which shuts off the fat burning mechanism that is indicated by ketosis. Thus meats should be limited, as should whole eggs.  When I eat eggs, I usually have 1 whole egg, and 3 or 5 egg yolks. 

I will get back to Dr. Michael Eades in a moment, but the next evolution in my dietary journey was when I came across Dr. Steven Gundry and his book Plant Paradox.   Gundry further refined the ketogenic diet by noting that many plants produce toxic lectins as a way to protect their offspring from pedators, like us. In his diet he put grains, beans, plants in the nightshade family, and some other off limits. On the other hand, he encouraged the eating of lettuce, cabbages and cruciform vegetables (includes broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts) as well as other vegetables such as sweet potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, fennel, onions, radishes, carrots, garlic, and spices such as pepper corns, curry, and other spices. One can also eat tree nuts such as Macadamias and walnuts all in limited quantities, as well as a nightly dark chocolate. He extols the value of polyphenols for improving your gut health, and recommends copious quantities of olive oil in your daily diet.

Dr. Gundry makes a point that much of our meat supply comes from grain fed animals. Grains are the seeds of grasses, and thus contain a heavy lectin load. Since ruminant animals such as beef are not designed to eat grains, their meat contains the lectins the ruminants ate, and pass those toxins on to those who eat them. The lectins interfere with your gut, causing leaky gut. Leaky gut in turn allows the lectins to get into your bloodstream and cause inflammation throughout your body. And inflammation is the cause of most of the diseases of aging such as arthritic joints, belly fat, as well as many skin conditions.

Dr. Steven Gundry recommends that what meat you do eat be grass fed or in the case of fish, be wild caught.  Gundry also encourages intermittent fasting, or IF. Which brings us back to Dr. Michael Eades and his blog post here.. Dr. Eades has also gotten on the IF bandwagon, pointing out that there is considerable medical evidence of the benefits of IF. Eades has now also recommends against grain fatten beef, preferring grass fed as well.

Interestingly, Eades and Gundry have divergent theories regarding the evolution of man that support their diets. Gundry believes that man evolved to eat a diet rich in certain specific plants, with limited amounts of meat. Eades believes that man evolved to eat animals including hunting, insects, fish and shell fish. Eades points out that until we developed agriculture, the supply of edible plants was pretty thin on the ground. He also notes that plants are not nutritionally dense, which means that we would have had to eat a lot of plants pretty much all day.  Of the two, Eades's theory makes the most sense, especially of you look at the practices of hunter/gatherers today.  On the other hand, I have lost 60 plus pounds so far using Gundry's advice. 

I am not an expert on this topic, though I am a well read dilettante.  I suspect that both Gundry and Eades have found a piece of the puzzle, and in fact while both write about diet from different perspectives, in practice both diets are pretty similar.  So I was sorry to see that Eades lumped Gundry in with obvious calories in/calories out nutritionists.  Both have done incredible work, for which I am grateful.