Well, here we go again. It wasn’t long ago when we were told to eat a balanced diet with 6 to 11 servings of bread, rice or pasta, 2 to 4 servings of fruits, 3 to 5 servings of vegetables, 2 to 3 servings of milk, yogut, or cheese and it must be low fat, 2 to 3 servings of meat, beans, eggs, nuts, for protein and of course a small amount of fats if any and absolutely no saturated fats. Do you remember, it’s the “food pyramid”. An unscientific approach by our government to tell us how to properly eat.
It wasn’t our governments fault they followed an unethical scientist named Ansel Keyes. A scientist that would deliberately remove data from others research to make his outcomes what he wanted. Our congress believed him and thought they were protecting the American people from metabolic diseases, at least I think they believed him and there wasn’t any conspiracy.
Let’s move on. Now we have the “MyPlate”. A project released my Michelle Obama in 2011. It has equal parts fruit and protein, a little bit more grains and then a large helping of vegetables, with a smidgen of dairy. Fats by themselves are not even near the table.
What did I mean by here we go again? Well for beginners the MyPlate isn’t much different than the Food Pyramid, well one is round and the other a triangle, I see that. I feel what we need is a paradigm shift in how we think about food. With both government recommendations we as Americans have continued to watch the scale numbers rise and rise until we now are the most overweight country in the world. What is a person to do?
First let’s look at all the research we have, not just the ones that have been mainstream for 60 years, but all research. A large amount of new data coming in today states, we have made a very big mistake by cutting out fats from our diets. It’s not as simple as “you are what you eat”. Eating fat does not make you fat, just like eating vegetables and fruit only makes you healthy. Research that I have read says the more fat you eat while reducing complex carbohydrates reduces your chance for heart disease and other metabolic type diseases. Well, that statement definitely is against everything we have been taught.
Following a diet like Adkins, or South Beach, or Paleo may put us in a much better position to live longer and healthier than we first thought. These diets promote more fat consumption with controlled carbohydrate consumption. The metabolic processes of blood pressure, cholesterol, heart disease seem to improve with added fats and carbohydrate control. We are now finding sports dieticians pushing their athletes into a low carb training regimens and the athletes are doing much better without the bloating and discomfort that carb loading does to the human body.
I feel we still may be trying to figure this thing out and what is the best way to provide the necessary nutrients to the body without giving it too much of what it doesn’t need. A couple of quotes come to mind, “Nutrition, it can be the safest and most powerful form of medicine, or, the slowest form of poison”. The second is “everything in moderation” which may serve to do us all well until we figure it out.