Banting

This paradigm involves using the fatty acid fuel system, by modifying the diet to create an artificial shortage of glucose. If you restrict dietary carbohydrate, your body will create a stable blood sugar state which conserves glucose. That means your dietary fat becomes your main fuel source. If you get deeply involved in this, there may be surprising health benefits.

This is a dynamically different paradigm to the American Standard Diet, and current dietary practise. In particular you need to eat a lot more fat, because fat becomes your energy source. Some people have lipophobia and find that very difficult.

There is a good deal of scientific support for this diet, especially for endurance athletes, for people with diabetes and for anyone with metabolic syndrome.

Can easily incorporate season eating and intermittent fasting.

Seasonal Eating

There's a principle here, that we should eat what's plentiful and cheap when it's most available. Also that it's good for us not to eat the same food all year around. Our bodies are adapted to changes in our food supply.

Spring

Lots of salads using thinning's for the vegetable garden. New growth greens. Rhubarb, oranges and onions. Beans, lettuce and spinach. Roast chicken and fresh fish.

Summer

Berries and salads using more mature vegetables. Seafood. Radishes, shallots, tomatoes and beans. Cherries, strawberries and watermelon. Roast lamb and fresh fish.

Autumn

Berries and fresh fruit. Tomatoes. Broccoli, cabbage, mushrooms, squash, turnips. Pineapple, pears, apples and kiwifruit. Roast beef and fresh fish.

Winter

Apples and pears. Roasted red meats. Lots of fish. Kale, leeks, squash and pumpkin, turnips, potatoes and onions.

What Are Your Dietary Options?

Vegetarian

Considered by many to be the gold standard for human dietary practice, the key reason for this diet is usually ethical, religious or environmental; not primarily health based. It's very difficult but not impossible to be both vegetarian and healthy. That's why in practise most vegetarians are not very healthy, despite what they might personally claim.

Physiologists and biochemists never recommend a vegetarian diet. It's a rod for your own back, and not supported by modern research. Vegan diets are distincly unhealthy and should be avoided. We need animal proteins and fats for our best health.

General Mixed Diet

The low-fat diet recommended in the Dietary Guidelines, has no health benefits: we're not going to do that. Perhaps by eating a little more fat, and by eating far less carbohydrates, people might be able to avoid the long term damage that becomes metabolic syndrome. This would only be a slight variation on what many people are doing anyway. The diet does not tell us to eliminate any food from our diet. It's a small change.

But, if over a lifetime you've damaged your metabolic system, perhaps you need to choose a more dramatic dietary option.

Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet is a modern nutritional recommendation originally inspired by the dietary patterns of Greece, Southern Italy, and Spain in the 1940s and 1950s. The principal aspects of this diet include proportionally high consumption of olive oil, legumes, unrefined cereals, fruits, and vegetables, moderate to high consumption of fish, moderate consumption of dairy products (mostly as cheese and yogurt), moderate wine consumption, and low consumption of non-fish meat products.

There is tentative evidence that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart disease and early death. In trials of the Mediterranean diet against the standard American diet, the Mediterranean diet always performs better. There's a clue.

Olive oil may be the main health-promoting component of the diet. There is preliminary evidence that regular consumption of olive oil may lower all-cause mortality and the risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, and several chronic diseases.