What is a Healthy Diet?
The Healthy Diet is NOT Healthy
This is difficult to understand, but the "healthy diet" we've been told to eat for more than 50 years is the cause of the obesity in the community. The low-fat and high-carbohydrate diet, low in meat and saturated fats, is causing the problem. It's not you that's wrong.
There is access to all the evidence in this site, but you only need to know two things. First, The Women's Health Initiative, a major study designed to prove that the low-fat and high-carbohydrate diet, was a healthy diet. The study was closed early because the recommended diet was apparently causing early deaths. This unexpected result is still causing all sorts of problems.
Confused by their results, researchers said: "Everybody knows what a healthy diet is," but their own research shows that a diet high in carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, with low fat, does NOT improve health. In 2006 the results were reported.
By 2015, least two-dozen long term studies had demonstrated that the low-fat high-carbohydrate diet was not a healthy diet.
Secondly, that normal aging does not need to include, becoming fatter, having knee and hip replacements, getting heart disease and cancer and diabetes. Those things should be exceptional, but they have become normal. Why? Read about people in earlier times who were fit and healthy into their 90's and for whom heart disease was unknown. Can we learn from that?
That message has been offered to us many times, but we keep rejecting it, perhaps for language reasons, perhaps for cultural reasons, perhaps because it's about "them" and it doesn't seem to be about "us."
Real meal diets like he Banting Diet and the New Atkins diet, first appear in European literature in 1862. William Banting got the idea from an English doctor who had been to France. Banting wrote about his dietary success, and his work was widely accepted, even in the USA.
The first real science on obesity was done by Dr Wilhelm Ebstein, who established a clinical laboratory in Germany. Ebstein was critical of Banting's diet saying that it contained too little fat to give Banting the energy he needed. It was Ebstein who first identified the low-carbohydrate high-fat diet, as a healthy diet.
Several people with strange foreign names, tried to inform Americans that there was a better more healthy diet. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, and Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson for example. Stefansson wrote three books and subjected himself to a year confined to Bellevue Hospital, New York, to prove that his high fat diet was safe, and that he would remain perfectly healthy. Confounded, the doctors at Bellevue, chose to ignore what Stefansson had just demonstrated to be true.
People who were less "foreign" were also ignored. Dr. Weston A Price, and Dr George V Mann. What they were saying wasn't what the American community wanted to hear.
Better nutrition is the lowest cost way to avoid extensive medical intervention in your life when you get old. Your body has the ability to heal itself, if you give it a chance. That chance begins with the right diet for YOU.
As we say in the aside to the right, you need to estimate how much damage you've already done to yourself. How free of metabolic syndrome symptoms are you? Then you get to choose a course of action. Stop doing the things that cause future ill health.
ANYBODY, at any age, who adopts a healthy diet, will benefit, almost immediately. If you sustain that diet, the benefit will multiply as your homeostatic system resets itself, and you become fully adapted to being more healthy.
Obesity in New Zealand
66% of New Zealand adults are overweight or even fatter.
The Annual Update of Key Results 2014/15: New Zealand Health Survey found that:
almost one in three adults (aged 15 years and over) were obese (31%)
a further 35% of adults were overweight but not obese
47% of Maori adults were obese
66% of Pacific adults were obese.
The BEST Diet? It depends on YOU.
How much damage have you already done to your metabolic system?
If you are genetically lucky, or if you've eaten sugar and carbohydrates in a moderate way all your life, your system may not be very carbohydrate intolerant. If that's the case, your dietary choices are not at all restricted. Eat a mixed diet, and your body metabolism will help you correct for occasional indulgences.
If you have a growing carbohydrate intolerance, you will find the symptoms of metabolic syndrome developing. Time to act early, cutting out sugar, and cutting back on carbohydrates. Do that in your 30's, 40's, or 50's and protect your health status for when you are 85.
Half the adult population have metabolic syndrome. For you, to rebuild your health the options are few. Firstly use a Banting real meal diet, to get your weight back to normal. If you've done that well, you'll have learned quite a lot about ketosis. You need to decide to what extent you want to be in ketosis and to remain in ketosis, to maintain your health.
The Best Diet is a Vegetarian Diet?
Advocates for a Vegetarian Diet are very passionate.
A vegetarian diet is very difficult to maintain and remain healthy. There is no scientific validation for a vegetarian lifestyle. The largest nutritional forum on the Internet, run by professionals, in 2013, banned any further posts by anyone trying to promote a vegetarian diet. The reason: it's scientifically unsound as a nutritional programme.
Committed vegetarians often have very strong personal reasons for their dietary choice. It's a choice that means taking personal responsibility for your own care, and accepting that there are likely to be long term health disadvantages for you as the result of your choice.