Dietary Madness

The Atkins Diet, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, the 21-day fix, Paleo diet, Gluten-free, South Beach, Mediterranean, Volumetrics... one of these has got to work, right? You may have even tried one or more of these. They all work somewhat for weight loss, but what about just eating healthy?

When your only concern is weight loss or gain, the calories in vs calories out equation tends to work pretty well. However, food does more for us than just determine how much fat we store and how much muscle we have. I have seen this quote a few times and support it 100%... "Every time you eat, you are either fighting disease or feeding disease."

How do we know which foods are healthy? Is it best to eat carbs in the morning? Is saturated fat the enemy that will lead to a certain early death? There are many questions you probably have and I will answer most of them with this simple statement. Eat Real Food. That's right, eating real food is the best approach to health that you can take. Think about this, go back just 200 years ago, a well documented time in history and examine what people ate. They ate food. Animals, plants, seeds, fruits, etc. There were no chemicals in their food, no additives, no preservatives. No matter what you believe in regards to the origin of our species, you can agree that however long humans have lived before that time, this is how they ate. That is somewhere between 6,000 and 5-7 million years that humans have been eating real food. This should be enough for us to know what we should be eating. You may be thinking that people did not live very long in the past, which is true, but the things that were killing them were largely infectious diseases that have been eliminated through public health advancements and medical breakthroughs, not because they had uncontrolled diabetes.

Only recently have we started eating "food products." Food was not a business back then, not like it is now, where the fast food industry is approaching 200 billion dollars in revenue in a year. Agrium, one of the largest agricultural companies made over 16 billion dollars last year, as did Monsanto, producer of agricultural pesticides and genetically engineered crops. Of course not all of these products that we eat are toxic for us, but with such a little time frame to reference from, how can we know? With 5 million years of time to reference, I think it is safe to say that eating animal meat or vegetables is safe. The rising prevalence of chronic diseases like Type 2 Diabetes, autoimmune disease, and cardiovascular disease is alarming and have an undeniable link to what you eat.

Saturated fat is not bad for you. This idea needs to stop now. In fact, it is essential and you would die without eating it. The large saturated fat study by Keys from the 1950s, which laid the foundation for the anti-fat movement has been disregarded, and now the mainstream needs to catch up. Many saturated fat studies since then deal with hydrogenated vegetables oils as the source of saturated fat, which, tying in with this blog, IS NOT A REAL FOOD. Hydrogenation is a chemical altering of the oil, which produces a "product" that would never be found in nature. Animal fat, coconut oil, even butter from grass-fed cows are perfectly natural and "healthy" sources of fat.

Do not be mislead by the government's recommendation of what you should be eating. You all know of the food pyramid, which has been replaced by MyPlate, which encourages hearty doses of grains and dairy products everyday. Keep in mind that the US Dept. of Agriculture is the agency that publishes these charts. That's right, the agricultural industry is telling you what to eat, not the Dept. of Health and Human Services. If you think they tell you to eat grains and dairy products because those are their highest revenue products, you are correct.

Look at the labels of your food. Think about what the labels on foods would have read in 1800. A package of potatoes would have read something like this: potatoes.

I highly recommend watching the movie Food, Inc if you want more exposure to the massive industry that is food.

Eat real foods, and remember, every time you eat, you are either fighting disease or fueling it.

Yours in health,

Dr. Joel Ardner