Think about this for a moment: Until recently, there has been nothing resembling a remote scientific consensus on something as fundamental as what people should eat to maintain ideal health. Maddeningly contradictory studies and diets asserting what's healthy and what isn't have been around ever since the media realized people cannot help but lend an ear to the promise of losing a few easy pounds — much less to the promise of an objective nutritional truth. Remember on TV, when it seemed like every possible food and drink was attributed with either some lingering disease or obscure nutritional piece of the immortality puzzle, often both?
The subject of nutrition has been a constant debate for as long as we've had options about what to eat, a miraculous reality that is itself a climax of technological and medical advancement as well as unprecedented bloodshed and destruction since the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 years ago. Might I also humbly remind you that, as Americans, we find ourselves in the middle of this climax, the eye of the most delicious storm in human history. Perhaps we rage more than anyone about diet because our options, and therefore our margin of error, are the highest.
Our rates of obesity, bad mental health and chronic disease seem to correlate. The latter two are now indisputably linked to the predominant American diet of (in order of harmfulness) sugar, salt, cereal grains and saturated fat — all of which are staples of "processed" food, which really means tampered with to save money, full of cheap filler that appeals to our foolish senses and helps shelf life when supply lines are as long as they are. But these staples are equally as prevalent in high quality food considered whole, natural and healthy. Food being fresh and untampered with is important, but how our bodies genetically adapted over the course of our existence happens to be the most dependable dietary reference available.
The two most popular and dramatically effective diets that fall under the new dietary paradigm of what we genetically adapted to eat since we were mobile on two feet are The Fat Flush Diet, written by Ann Gittleman, Ph.D., and The Paleo Diet, by Loren Cordain, Ph.D. They've both enjoyed huge media endorsements. Achieving sales patterns unheard of in the diet book publishing industry, as Cordain himself put it, they started off slow and picked up instead of the inevitable flair and fade of fad diets, which are hard to stick with for long either because the research is too extreme and arbitrary or the food itself is branded and proprietary, a la L.A. Weight Loss.
The premise for both plans is largely the same: a huge focus on lean, animal-based protein, un-starchy vegetables (starchy vegetables including potatoes, bananas and peas) and fruits; the elimination or near elimination of cereal grains in all forms (bread, cereal, pasta, rice), refined and whole grain alike, because at the end of the day all grains metabolize as sugar and are stored away in places that only intense exercise — an unexaggerated luxury in our time — or diet can burn away; and a general avoidance of dairy, salt and salt containing food, legumes and fatty meats.
The universal theme tying these diets together is an avoidance of foods introduced during the Neolithic, when agriculture and animal domestication disseminated globally. The human body is simply not optimized to digest grains, which require tools to digest from their raw forms. Milk from any mammal is not really meant to be consumed passed infancy. Both of these assertions are supported by the fact that there remain many groups of peoples in the world, usually those culturally unexposed to the kind of agriculture we have, that have not developed the physiological tolerances (genetic band-aids) to these new arrivals. Peoples without access to salt in their diet lack heart disease across the board.
Two out of every three people are overweight in America, weight being only one obvious indicator of the ravages being done by the foods we aren't adapted to consume. Commercialism, our loudest and most monied authority on nutrition, maintains itself, as it must, with deception; yet the government, noble mandator of the nutrition fact, has backed the wrong science for decades, ever advocating its most subsidized crops, corn and grain. MyPlate.com replacing the Food Pyramid of Subsidization is a step in the right direction, though it still emphasizes grains and clings to bad science — like linking cholesterol to heart disease. In reality, veins are inflamed by acidic diets high in salt that the body clogs with cholesterol in an exaggerated attempt at repair.
Our very culture makes eating right like swimming against a tide, but these diets make it doable. Earlier this summer I lost 25 pounds and melted the beer and pasta "freshman 15" off my waist, a tire a few years in the making, in less than two weeks.
— Wiley Robinson is an undecided junior. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.