Open Future Health Blog

Your habits when you are in your 40's and 50's are the foundation for your good health and fitness at 85. Improved diet is the low cost alternative to extensive medical intervention later in life. The body has the ability to heal itself, if we treat it with respect. ANYBODY who adopts a healthy diet, at ANY AGE, will benefit, and as the months go by, those benefits will multiply.

A World Stacked Against You -

In a local up-market magazine, "Avenues" for May 2016, the well known and respected nutritionist Bronwen King, proposes that the best human diet would have less meat and more vegetables.  We should drink low fat milk, eat nuts, more legumes and fermented foods.  This is exactly the type of diet the Women's Health Initiative, demonstrated in their 2006 report, as having "no health benefits."

In the same magazine the Green Prescription promoted by the Ministry of Health, and run locally by Sport Canterbury is recommended. They show a badly overweight woman trying to exercise to reduce her weight. I commend the woman for enthusiasm and effort, and condemn the people who are giving her advice.  The Swedish Experts Committee confirm what most of us know, that exercise has minimal if any effect on your body weight.

This is exactly why people have so much trouble reducing their weight.  People who are supposed to be experts in the field, are saying things that have no scientific basis.  We keep on doing the wrong things, thinking that we are doing good things.  Following "expert" advice, gets us into trouble.

I watched a video this week where Nina Teicholtz spoke to a medical specialist audience.  She explained in an hour the key findings of her book, The Big Fat Surprise.  She made it clear that meat was important in the diet.  At the end, two or three persistent voices claimed that we should be eating a vegan diet.

Repeated scientific studies have shown that meat is a valuable resource in the human diet, and that red meat, far from being vilified, has until recent times been eaten at almost every meal, by people who lived long, were strong and healthy, and who didn't get fat.  While vegetarian diets are possible, they are not recommended.

Unfortunately, because almost all dietary research in the last 50 years  has been spent trying to prove that a low-fat high-carbohydrate diet and often vegetarian diet, was a healthy diet. There has been very little progress in nutritional science. We cannot tell you what the best diet for human beings should be. We do know what it isn't. For older women, the recommended "low-fat high-carbohydrate diet" has no health benefits. Presumably that also applies to older men. For children, teenagers and middle-aged people, we cannot say.

There is some evidence that both the low-carbohydrate high-fat diet and the Mediterranean diet, produce good short term results and there's no evidence yet of long term harm. However, there are many varieties of both those diets, that are not valid representatives of the category.

People can eat a more healthy diet, but the entire environment in which we live tries to make sure you don't do that. Misinformation is everywhere. You have to be quite single minded in your research to find for yourself an improved diet. I can point the way. Recently published science strongly supports moving towards the diet our grandparents ate. They didn't have any science to validate what they were eating, but they got a lot of things right. Like having a full breakfast, with meat and eggs and vegetables. Like having a roast red meat meal two or three times a week. Like eating less chicken rather than more. Like eating brains and livers and kidneys, or black puddings.

We need to re-educate ourselves. Understand what went wrong 60 years ago, when "nutritional science," such as it was, took a wrong turn and became unscientific. We've moved away from meat and fat, towards more grains and low-fat, and made ourselves obese in the process. We need to move our diet in the opposite direction to lose weight and be more healthy. How far should we take that? That's what we all need to learn more about.

I've made the choice to learn about ketosis, and to live in ketosis most of the time. There are many health advantages, but it's a very different way of thinking about food. Recently, I've been out of ketosis because I'm eating too much fruit, pears and peaches, which have been free and abundant for over a month. In the transition from glucose burning to ketone burning there is a slight nose sniffle. Not much of a problem and easily avoided, don't be in the, in-between zone. Eat more than 130gm of carbohydrate a day and burn glucose. Or eat less than 50gm of carbohydrate a day and burn ketones. It's a choice.

Even a little thing like having the evening meal at 5pm rather than 7pm helps people to reduce their weight. My father strongly urged me to eat the fat on my plate.  He did, and he was always slim. I changed my diet, based on the recommended diet. I ate cereal for breakfast, with low fat milk, and low fat yoghurt. I ate very little meat, chicken about once a week, fish once a week, we tried to eat lots of vegetables and whole grains, and I got fat.  Now I know why. Dad was right and I was wrong. Thousands of people need to learn that lesson.

John Stephen Veitch