What to eat – Part 1

What should I eat to be healthy? What should I eat to lose weight? What is the best diet? These questions are answered in newspapers and websites and blog posts almost everyday. A problem arises because there are so many different answers and many people become confused. Is there such a thing as the perfect diet? The answer to that is both yes and no. People vary sufficiently to make it impossible to state that one particular diet will be perfect for everybody. However, a particluar diet may turn out to be perfect for you, while it is less than perfect for someone else. Having said that, a really bad diet is likely to be bad for everyone. The interesting thing is that a diet which improves your health will almost always help you to lose weight (if you need to). In moving towards a more healty diet, the first step is to eliminate the least healthy elements first:

1. Stop drinking sugar.

A can of Coca-Cola has the equivalent of nine spoons of sugar. An 'energy drink' typically has 20 spoons of sugar. Because these are liquid they will be absorbed very quickly and your blood sugar levels will sky-rocket. This will produce a surge in insulin to bring the sugar level down. When the falling blood sugar overshoots, you will feel hungry and eat or drink something else. All the insulin in your blood stream prompts your body to store fat and prevents you from using fat for energy and preventing you from losing weight. If you drink sugar often enough, and that includes putting sugar in your tea or coffee, you may become resistant to the effects of insulin and start to develop type 2 diabetes.

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2. Stop eating sugar.

Sweets, biscuits, cakes and desserts contain a lot of sugar and little nutrition. It is best to avoid them as much as possible. The important thing to remember is that all carbohydrate foods become molecules of glucose ( or fructose) when they are digested by enzymes. The equivaleent number of 'teaspoons of sugar' within typical carbohydrates is displayed here. Rice, spaghetti and potatoes are potent blood-sugar raising foods.

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3. Stop eating vegetable oils.

VegOil

You can’t get oil out of a vegetable.
People always used to cook with natural fats found in lard, beef dripping, butter, ghee and, more recently, coconut oil. The incorrect demonisation of saturated fat has persuaded many to swap these traditional foods for liquids referred to as vegetable oils. Everybody thinks vegetables are healthy, so it follows that vegetable oils will be healthy too. The trouble is vegetable oils don’t come from vegetables: the name is a marketing con trick. They are created by extracting oil from plant seeds using an intensive industrial process by means of extreme heat, pressure or chemical solvents. We are told they are better for our health than traditional fats because they are high in polyunsaturated fats and low in saturated fat. No human being ever ate these substances until 1911, when the process of extraction was invented. Millions of years of evolution made us into exactly what we are. How can it possibly be true that a food entirely absent from our evolution is better for us than the foods we ate to become what we are today? The answer, of course, is they are not and their overconsumption has dire consequences for our health.

4. Avoid ultra-processed food.

In Britain, 51% of all food bought is highly processed. Highly processed food provides something we have not evolved to deal with: an abnormal mix of fat and sugar. Naturally occurring foods rarely contain high levels of fat and carbohydrate together. We get fat and protein together in animal foods, and carbohydrate with some protein in plant foods but only in modern, processed foods do we get large amounts of fat and sugar. We evolved with a brain-based craving for sugary foods, which produce a dopamine response. This encouraged us to eat plenty of carbohydrate when it was available and store it as fat for times when food was scarce. We also have a liking for foods containing fat because that was the main source of energy throughout our evolution. A study, published in 2018 by Yale University, in Cell Metabolism, examined this process. Among their conclusions they said: “We theorize that the simultaneous activation of fat and carbohydrate signalling pathways launches an effect that human physiology has not evolved to handle. Consistent with this suggestion, rodents given access to fat alone or carbohydrate alone regulate their total daily calorie intake and body weight. But given unrestricted access to fat and carbohydrates, they quickly gain weight”.
The conclusion is simple: modern ultra-processed foods like cakes, biscuits, doughnuts, chocolate bars and ‘potato-based snacks’ hijack our appetite control centre causing us to overeat. These fake foods are designed to make us eat too much and when we do so, we become fat and ill. If we want to be healthy, we have to stop eating ready-made, ultra-processed food.

Ditching all this fake food will improve our health for many reasons. Processed food contains a long list of chemicals including emulsifiers, stabilisers, colourings and flavourings. None of these things provide useful nutrition; they are there to increase the shelf-life of the product - not your life. Processing also tends to remove essential minerals and mineral deficiencies are common in Western societies.

Crap