Dietary theories

[unixronin]

I've had a personal theory for some time now that the most significant medically overlooked aspect of the influence of diet upon health and life expectancy is how much you worry about how your diet is affecting your health.  Stressing over every last calorie and every microgram of sodium can't be good for you.

In that context, Michael Shermer's column in the February 2007 Scientific American is interesting.  He cites Barry Glasner of USC, who has a new book about to hit bookshelves, "The Gospel Of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong".

What's interesting is that Glasner cites a number of dietary studies, including one that compared nutritional uptake from two groups of Swedish and Thai women fed three different diets: a spicy Thai-style diet, a blander and more European-style meal of hamburgers, potatoes and beans, and a highly nutritious but essentially flavorless paste.  The Thai women absorbed more nutrition from the spicy meal that matched their tastes, while the Swedish women absorbed more nutrition from the dull meat-and-potatoes fare, and neither group absorbed much nutrition from the paste.  Other studies looked at meat consumption by Italians, Greeks and Japanese, and at groups of smokers who exercised daily on a diet high in fish and fiber.

The general consensus of all the cited studies:  Avoiding food ingredients that may be bad for you is possibly be less important to your health than making sure you eat plenty of what's good for you.  Stated like that, it sounds like pretty much of a no-brainer, doesn't it?  Yet most of the conventional wisdom on dietary health takes the opposite viewpoint -- that above all, it's crucial to avoid food that might contain substances that have been implicated in laboratory rats developing cancer, or becoming obese, or experiencing a 6% decrease in their lifespans.  (Remember, after all, the apocryphal first law of laboratory biology:  "Laboratory rats, when experimented upon, will develop cancer."  It's not unreasonable, considering we've already figured out that stress is a major factor in immune-system functioning.)

So anyway, this general finding returns us to my original point:  You may be better off in the long run just eating what you enjoy, in reasonable quantities, and not worrying about exactly what you're eating, than in trying to slavishly follow every new advisory from the Surgeon General and driving your blood pressure up ten points worrying whether that ham-and-swiss sandwich you had last week might have contained a microgram of excess sodium.

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I too have a personal dietary theory; until you burn fewer calories than you consume, it doesn't matter what you eat. Only excess food causes problems.

Obviously you need critical vitamins and components for amino acids, but those are found in far more places than we think. My theory means I can eat what I want, when I want, provided I don't overeat.

I can't figure how some many societies can be healthy with such diverse diets without something like this being true.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, I think that's pretty much correct too. Barring, say, the all-McDonalds diet, or someone I know who ate nothing but ramen for a month and found that everything tasted like salt for weeks afterwards.