What is the healthiest diet you could possibly eat? (as a general consensus)

Fats are an essential component of a healthy diet.

Sir Lance-alot wrote:

"general consensus" does not mean agreement by every individual in the world.

(And no, JR is not joking. 1/2 the time the guy makes a lot of sense, the 1/2 the time...he off his rocker.)

I know what "general consensus" means, and it does not exist when it comes to diet...

J.R. wrote:

The healthiest diet is low fat, less than 10% of calories from fat, no transfat, no caffeine (no tea), no sugar, no processed flour or grains, no gmo soybeans, corn, no wheat, NO SALT, no processed dairy.

quote]

[quote]cliff clavin wrote:

See, this is what I mean about NO consensus. I'm a moron and believe humans need to add lots of salt. Am I some kind of joke or something?

Yes, J.R., it is obvious you were responding under a different name, and no, I know that humans don't need to add lots of salt to their food, but as one who is vastly intellectually superior to you, I am cognizant of the need for humans to consume some salt. You were so stupid as to not recognize this.

I just finished two re-fried bean, egg, white rice, garlic, onion, Parmesan cheese, and Shiracha soft tacos on whole wheat tortillas.

Health = Nutrients / Calories

Cordain wrote:

4)Endurance athletes don't needs as many carbs as high-carb prophets say (your body can only store about 2200 calories of carbs and your main fuel source is fat). You only need to eat enough carbs to keep your glycogen topped off. Glycogen can't be moved from muscle to muscle and it isn't your primary fuel source for normal running

carbs are more efficiently used by the body. any physiology textbook will demonstrate this.

Randy Oldman wrote:

Fats are an essential component of a healthy diet.

I definitely agree. However, when it comes to satiety, effects on beta cells, likelihood to be stored or oxidized/used for energy (i.e., make you fat), effects on cholesterol and blood pressure, and other factors, research strongly supports the notion unsaturated fatty acids are better for us than saturated fats. But that doesn't meant that one needs to eliminate all sat fat from their diet. And that doesn't mean that lean meat does not contain a mix of fats (often, very small amounts of sat fat if the meat is lean), and furthermore it doesn't mean that many healthy foods like nuts, seeds, fish, and olive oil only contain unsaturated fats: no, they contain some sat fat too.

So yes, I am certainly defending eating lean meats as part of a healthy diet (not necessary, but can certainly be part of a healthy diet). And defending the concept that sat fat is not, in moderation, going to cause health problems. And lastly, stating that if one tries to avoid all sat fat, this would mean avoiding many foods that contain lots of healthy mono and poly unsat fats. However, I am simply making the point that when it comes to fat consumption, the evidence, overall, clearly points to trying to get most of one's fat from Unsat fat, and smaller amounts from sat fat. (and yes, within sat fats, there are different effects of each, this is true),

Gradually lower your food intake, and as you lose weight, you'll require less and less food. Eventually you will train your body to not need food at all. Problem solved!

If you don't believe dairy is a "food group" owing to industry lobbying or that industry lobbying doesn't play a role in government food recommendations, you need your head examined.

There are plenty of scientists who question the "high carb" orthodoxy. Do you know how to search PubMed? Is it a coincidence that the food groups are dominated by subsidy receiving agribusiness? The paleo-diet isn't all that radical. What is so radical about fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish, grass-fed meat, and tubers? This is all "real food". Kraft dinners and cows that eat corn are not.

Truth isn't decided by nose count. If it was, you would have to believe in any given religion, depending on what country you lived in.

How about this - don't eat any food that is cheaper owing to government subsidy. How is that for a 1 rule diet. That means no corn-fed meat, no corn, no wheat, no dairy and no HFCS.

This is quite consistent with paleo principles. Corn feed greatly alters the fat profile of meat - feeding salmon corn even ruins their good fat profile. Saturated fat is not to be consumed in high quantities.

Another thing I think people should realize about diet is that we make the mistake of seeing what skinny ectomorphs eat and thinking that works for everyone. How many mesomorphic people have you know who are active and still fleshy even though you know that don't eat that much, religiously avoid fat and even sugar, but eat a ton of carby stuff like rice, pasta and bagels and are always fighting hunger and showing good discipline?

It is a very live debate as to the role of a person's insulin response in how well the process carbs (and how this changes over the lifespan) as well as the exact role fats alone play in blood lipids.

My personal opinion is that most runners eat too many carbs, shunning things with mono- and poly-unsaturated fat, but eat far too many bagels, packaged high-carb foods, and pasta. Your body simply doesn't burn thousands of glycogen calories a day.

When I have friends and relatives visit and I am eating yams, cashews, avacadoes grass fed meat, straberries, kiwis, oranges, apples, and bananas and they ask "Don't you have any real food?" and what they have in mind is pasta with a packaged sauce or kraft dinners, we have a definition problem.

Grass Fed Beef?

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/23/corn_domesticated_8700_years_ago/

Robert Lustig, of course, says that saturated fat has a neutral effect on bad blood lipids and that the byproducts of fructose metabolism have the most negative effect. But he isn't a scientist, I don't suppose.

Now, I know he overstates his case a bit (fructose in moderate servings is perfectly manageable by the body) but his larger point is sound - we get far more calories than we need from sugar and it is the fructose part that is the culprit, both in how it is metabolized in the liver and its neutral effect on satiety.

I have still heard no sound defense of why even a 80 mpw runner needs to get 1500+ calories from carbs a day. Why mess with your insulin response when most of those carbs will not become glycogen anyway? Your body can only store 2000 or so calories as glycogen, most in the muscles and some in the liver, and you can't take bicep glycogen storage and move it to the quads for running fuel. For all your running, the large majority of the fuel is fat. Especially good are medium-chain fatty acids, but runners avoid this because they think "fat makes you fat" and scarf bagels instead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-chain_triglycerides

If you control for sugar intake (that is, people with low sugar intake by high fat intake) there seems to be much less relationship between even saturated fat and heart disease. Spurious correlations plague alot of epidemiological study. High fat diets also tend to be high sugar.

redux - Just Wondering wrote:

Grass Fed Beef?

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/23/corn_domesticated_8700_years_ago/

No matter how long ago corn was domesticated, animals weren't using it for feed until we started subsidizing it. All that corn growing in Iowa and Nebraska is cow feed, not human feed.

Cows can only exist on corn for a short period of time - it is too acidic and eats a hole in their guts. Cows are finished on corn for about 4-6 months is all. They can't take it much longer, but they pack on a ton of weight on it.

Humans in some cultures have had some time to adapt to agriculture - it generates a ton of calories so can support large populations (but are they healthy ones?) and we were probably increasingly selecting for people with healthier insulin responses and tolerance to gluten and casein. But note what happens to otherwise fit hunter-gatherers who get on a western diet without a slow evolutionary transition period? Their systems are unprepared for the carb onslaught. No way could you feed billions of people on a paleo diet.

Fast evolution and cultural selection has made some populations do relatively well on agriculture, but others not so much.

Are you saying the western diet was concocted to support and enslave people? To consolidate wealth and power into the hands of the few on the back of the many?

Apart from questions of health, I think agriculture probably led to a lot of the cultural facts we see about the world - the ability to amass wealth, economic stratification, gender stratification, etc. But we got things in return too - the ability to support larger populations for one. Agriculture, of course, facilitates division of labor, so we probably wouldn't have much technology without it. But are humans happier now than they were in hunter-gatherer times? That question is not as easy as it seems. Hunter-gatherers work less and experience more of the positive mood effects of social capital and social cohesion.

I suspect agriculture, as a cultural development, is like nuclear weapons - if you're culture is the only one who has it it is a huge advantage, but once everyone has it, you have just imposed costs on everyone that you can't get rid of. A Robert Frankian "arms race" good:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Darwin-Economy-Liberty-Competition/dp/0691153191/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333554159&sr=8-1

bangalangadanga wrote:

carbs are more efficiently used by the body. any physiology textbook will demonstrate this.

Please explain. Carbs are not "more efficiently used by the body". They are differently used by the body. Say you are a 100 mpw runner burning through 3500 calories a day. How much of that do you think is carbs and how much, metabolically, could it possibly be. This is just a nonsensical statement. Used for what? Fat is more efficiently used in aerobic exercise as energy. How did we get by so long as hunger-gatherers with relatively low and seasonal carb intakes?

Most of the carbs you eat on a high-carb diet are not burned as glycogen, they are converted to fat first. Where do you think you store it?

The Okinowa diet is best

Cordain wrote:

bangalangadanga wrote:

carbs are more efficiently used by the body. any physiology textbook will demonstrate this.

Please explain. Carbs are not "more efficiently used by the body". They are differently used by the body. Say you are a 100 mpw runner burning through 3500 calories a day. How much of that do you think is carbs and how much, metabolically, could it possibly be. This is just a nonsensical statement. Used for what? Fat is more efficiently used in aerobic exercise as energy. How did we get by so long as hunger-gatherers with relatively low and seasonal carb intakes?

Most of the carbs you eat on a high-carb diet are not burned as glycogen, they are converted to fat first. Where do you think you store it?

i'll respond tonight.