Who Are You Going to Believe?
A dear friend started following some Vegan Influencers on YouTube. She learned that becoming “vegan” would speed up weight loss and aide in cleansing the body and slow aging. She was also told that she could lose a pound a day by becoming vegan. The Vegan Influencer told his followers that to become vegan, they had to renounce all meat.
Heading into summer, my friend decided she was going vegan. After three days on a vegan diet, she was ready to change it and add in some meat, but I encouraged her to stick with her vegan diet for another two days.
Our time together came to an end but I urged her to keep in touch and let me know how the vegan diet turned out for her. A week later, the phone rings and it’s my vegan friend. She is going out to try the new Impossible Vegan Burger. And she is craving anything that tastes like meat. I encouraged her to be careful with processed food. Later that day she calls to say that she saw her YouTube guru eating the real hamburger and her vegan guru confessed that he is a YouTube Vegan!
I Can’t Believe He Would Betray Us like That!
My friend shared she craved the taste of meat to the point of eating anything — she didn’t know what — as long as it looked like meat! And that was the end of my friend’s foray into the vegan world. But it brings up a larger problem for businesses like mine who are in the “healthy nutrition” market. Bad food advice is everywhere and it changes by the second. An example of this “bad advice” is beautiful people with gorgeous bodies on social media encouraging their followers to follow a diet program that is unproven, risky, and in some cases, dangerous.
“All calories are the same!”
Dieting misinformation is dangerous. Any diets that encourage risky eating to lose weight is setting you up for long-term health problems. Another problem with some dieting advice is that nutritionists, medical doctors and diet experts can’t seem to agree with a core standard for healthy nutrition. What’s eating healthy? Is eating eggs healthy? When it comes to dieting, what is good or bad? Will coffee make us live longer? Can I have fat in my diet and when is fat bad for us? Should we believe the pundits who say a low-carb, high-fat diet is okay, or those extolling the virtues of a diet that is high fat, high carbs? Is it better to join Team Ketogenic, Team South Beach or Team Mediterranean? Everyone has a differing opinion and every diet plan affects people differently. It’s so confusing!
Another trap is showing pictures of people who lost weight and are now sporting new, sexy bodies is the gold standard for dieting success.
“I lost a hundred pounds on this diet and you can too!”
The parade of people who lost weight never ends on the media circuit. Is that the true measurement of a successful diet? The true measurement of dieting success is losing the weight and keeping it off! The reality for some people may be that they gain the weight back and then some.
Nutritional Health Is New
In all fairness to the nutrition industry, nutritional health is new. The problem is that there have been 50 years of bad dieting advice that went unchallenged. The longer the poor advice circulated, the longer considered the fact. Most of our scientific nutritional advice comes from celebrities who are looking for Instagram “likes” and a following. After we got the message out that excess sugar is causing catastrophic health problems, along came the influencers promoting poor advice.
A bigger problem is the lack of research into the role food plays in the formation of cells in the body. While researchers look at the effect food has on the body, most popular science looks at fat and little on how food influences cellular growth. One research group tracked the general eating and health habits of people over the years, to see who lives and who dies.
Another research group randomly tracked the role of one food by comparing small groups of people eating it against those who don’t. As a result of the well-thought-out studies, the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) called on the food industry to produce thousands of new “processed food products” that would be low in fat. The thinking at that time was that fat is the enemy that is causing the explosion in weight gain in America.
The food industry was eager to comply, flooding supermarket shelves with “healthy snacks” and offering “low fat” too-good-to-be-true, processed foods that replaced fat with loads of sugar. People started gaining more weight! Soon the grocery store became a death trap with hundreds of boxes of sugary everything on the shelves. The public relying on the recommendation of the American Heart Association’s seal of approval. Even buckets of greasy fast-food chicken carry the Susan G. Komen(R) breast cancer foundation seal.
Wait, I thought DHHS said fat was the enemy of good health?
Why is the American Cancer Society giving seals of approval to food loaded with bad fat for decades linked to causing cancer? It would be great if there were long-term randomized trials isolating and testing every possible food combination to see what the optimal diet is but again, such study would take too long and the void would be filled with influencers selling hype and hope to the desperate. The American public doesn’t have the patience to wait for long-term medical studies or definitive findings. Even with definitive findings, it’s difficult to change behavior. Until a more convincing study surfaces, we’re doomed to more self-serving and contradictory advice. Where can you go to find the truth about diet and nutrition without getting tons of bad advice?!
You Ate Your Way Into This Problem
You must eat your way out! Foodology is the reliable advice you need when diet and health are confusing. On one level, our war on fat was successful. In the 1970s, the proportion of fat in the average American diet was 42 percent of total calories. Today, 34 percent. In a larger sense, it has been a total failure. While fat consumption has gone down, the percentage of calories from sugar has seen an increase. Over the same period, probably not coincidentally, the rates of obesity and diabetes have exploded. As science points out, that spike has contributed to the first nationwide decrease in life expectancy since the flu pandemic 100 years ago. There’s a lot of harm associated with poor dieting advice!
Dr Walter Willett, a nutrition professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the world’s most cited nutritionist, has overseen the Nurses’ Health Studies since 1980. Tracking the eating and health habits of a quarter-million nurses (the granddaddy of observational studies). Willett was furious during the 1980s and ’90s when people demonized good fat — the kind found in avocados, nuts, and olive oil — and glorified the bad fat in Big Macs and pepperoni pizza. He became an evangelist for the moderate Mediterranean diet: low in saturated fats (but high in healthy fats) and high in whole grain carbs, vegetables, and fruits, with a good amount of protein.
“Take one pill a day and the weight melts away!”
In a recent blog, I wrote about a study called multi-vitamins useless, Dr Safi Khan was the lead author of a meta-analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this year. It reviewed nearly 300 randomized controlled trials to decide the affect certain diets, vitamins, and supplements had on the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death. What did it find? “Don’t bother with multivitamins,” Khan wrote. “You’re wasting your money.” As for a low-fat vs. Mediterranean diet, the meta-analysis suggested that neither has much of an impact and his finding on diet supplements were equally bad!
Christopher Gardner, Stanford nutritionist; the same one who told us in 2013 that he was suffering a professional midlife crisis because of all the dieting misinformation— worked with colleagues on a study tracking the eating habits of more than 600 people for a full year. Half of the participants were assigned to a low-fat diet, the other half to a low-carb diet. Regardless of their assigned group, all participants were prodded to eat good; lots of fresh veggies and as little added sugar and refined grains as possible. Gardner and his colleagues wanted to see which diet had better results and to decide if they could predict which would be a better fit based on certain genetic or biological markers.
What the study found was little difference in the low-carb group and in the low-fat group. The results of that study were so close it determined that neither diet was better and researchers had no success in predicting who would do better with one versus the other. This is why you get the latest fad diet or social influencer saying this diet is better than that diet. This much we know for certain; no diet will work for everyone.
For those who are now skeptical about all the dieting and weight loss advice out there; we have a reliable way to get up-to-date dieting and nutritional advice without taking the chance of getting poor dieting advice. Foodology is honest advice that can boost metabolism by eating whole, natural food. For everyone who takes our courses, we don’t focus on losing unwanted pounds, we focus on the CHANGE that must happen for you to achieve dieting success! To be successful with dieting, you must change how you eat and what you eat. Your attitude with food must also change.
Change is hard. If you’re trying to lose stubborn, unwanted pounds, you must eat to succeed. The failure to keep weight off is to forget how you gained the unwanted pounds in the first place! You gained the weight by eating an unbalanced diet! You will learn that in Lesson I on Diet Wars! In lesson II, Foodology will tell you what foods to eat to lose unwanted pounds and the foods to eat that will help you keep off unwanted pounds! We also tell you what foods will sustain a healthy weight for the rest of your life!
Wellness Begins With Food!
There will always be bad dieting advice but the rules of dieting have never changed! If you hear of diet plans promising quick weight loss or losing “pounds a day,” hold fast to your wallet because that is not true when it comes to weight loss. Let Foodology be your source for up-to-date weight-loss information without unnecessary hype. View our video on Diet Wars and lose all the unwanted pounds you want without starving or doing strenuous exercises! Invite us to come and speak at your next wellness fair. Let us help your company cut medical cost!
