Let's Talk "Fad" Dieting!

By Kim Marquardt, RN MSN

This blog post is from the Nurse Kim archives of myth busting. I want to share some "alternative" or maybe just lesser known health and wellness viewpoints for you to chew on.

*These posts are not intended as official medical advice.

They ARE meant to be fun, informative, and thought provoking, hopefully sparking an interest for you to do your own research (you can start with the links I provide!) and discover the marvels of the human body, and how it can function at its optimal performance level if we understand how it works and interacts with our environment and our diet.

I have a passion for health and wellness through lifestyle and nutrition and have done thousands of hours of research in addition to being a registered nurse for 23 years. I have done A LOT of self-experimentation in and around diet, lifestyle, body care, and supplementation and have spent a lot of time looking into the science behind it all (or lack thereof!). Check back weekly for the latest post!

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By now I am absolutely sure you have heard of the low carb diet, maybe you have even heard of the ketogenic or “keto” diet. 

I’m sure you have also seen the bad press and the “fad” diet accusations. You may have also known someone who swears by the diet and talks about it nonstop like the diet is paying them. You yourself may have experienced success or failure on such a diet.

So, what’s the deal? Should we eat like this? Why do people love it? Why do people hate it?

I am going to surprise you at this point in the blog and tell you that we are actually NOT going to talk specifics about these types of diets, and no, I am not going to recommend or not recommend one. It's a moot point. What I am going to share is what I think you should be focused on with food instead.

The very first thing I want to abolish is the word “diet.” This is a word that has a short-term connotation in our culture and suggests that we should change our habits for a short period of time, achieve some set of results, then resume business as usual and expect the results to be permanent.

Great marketing for weight loss companies who want returning customers. Bad advice for humans.

STOP DIETING!!! Change your way of eating… permanently. That is the first take away today.

In my blog intro, I allude to the fact that I have done it all with “diet,” and I have; from a processed food standard American diet, to a raw vegan diet, to a zero-carb meat only diet, to a low carb plant-based diet, to a paleo-ish whole foods omnivore diet, and everything in between.

And I have learned a couple of things. One of them is… I love Taco Bell.

Another is, I don’t necessarily think (as I once did) that the absolute focus needs to be the macronutrient ratio of a diet. Let me explain. Keto and low carb heavily emphasize tracking your macronutrients, and specifically, limiting (or severely limiting = keto) your carbohydrate intake.

Macronutrients

Macronutrients are the three elements that make up the diet of every human on earth no matter what you are eating. They are 1) Carbohydrates, 2) Fat, and 3) Protein. Carbohydrates and fat are fuel (your body can use either one, or both) and are both stored as fat if not used. Protein is used as the building block for tissues and cells.

Carbohydrates are not essential, that simply means, if you never ate another carb, you would continue to live. Many a dietician and/or nutritionist would disagree with the “sentiment” of that statement because some carbohydrate rich foods have nutritional value. That’s neither here nor there, I will say it again… if you never ate another carb, you would continue to live and that is simply because of a little something called gluconeogenesis. Big word alert!

Gluconeogenesis 

Gluconeogenesis is the process by which your liver makes glucose out of protein, an amazing thing! And it is the reason that you can cut carbohydrates down to zero (not recommending this, just saying) and still maintain a perfectly normal blood sugar. This is why all low carb dieters and even extreme zero carb dieters don’t immediately die. Because they maintain perfectly normal blood sugars on low carb diets by way of gluconeogenesis.

Fat and protein

Fat and protein are different. They are essential. If you stopped eating either of them, you would die. Protein I think is fairly obvious because of the building block thing, but fat probably requires a little more explanation. And let’s dispel another myth while we are at it: Low fat diets are healthy.

Wasn’t the USDA recommending a low-fat diet for like, millennia? Yup, sure was… until scientific studies (like the gigantic multiyear Women’s Health Initiative) showed startling results about the HARM that low fat diets cause. One of the world’s leading peer reviewed medical journals, the BMJ (British Medical Journal) actually published an article describing how they tried to suppress these findings. Huh. That seems problematic. Why would they do that?

Interestingly, if you now search ‘low fat diet’ on the USDA website, it is nowhere to be found. Curious. Just a quiet retraction of info. No media statement, “Hey ya’ll, we discovered that low fat diets are actually harmful, sorry about that, our bad.” Yeah, no, the government doesn’t do that in case you haven’t noticed.

So now for the reason low fat diets are so harmful… because fat in our diet is responsible for little things like:

• The brain: it’s made of fat
• Cell membranes: they’re made of fat
• Reproductive hormones: they’re made of fat
• Myelin sheaths: the insulating layer of nerves and the spinal cord allowing electrical impulse conduction, you know… the basis for life itself, you guessed, it... made of fat
• Vitamins A, D, and E absorption can’t happen in the absence of fat

And about a million other things, but other than that, it’s horrible stuff that can kill you (I hope by now you are used to my sarcasm).

So… what in the world should we be eating!!??

Hope you are sitting down…

REAL FOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know… seems obvious, but it’s not. The stuff lining our grocery store shelves is NOT REAL FOOD. It is "food like substance" that can stay in a box or package for a hundred years and never go bad. Does that sound like food? Listen… the agricultural revolution was an amazing thing and has fed the whole planet, but as always, we humans went too far.

We’re like, I know! Let’s:

• Mono crop 3 things: corn, soy, and grain
• Destroy the soil in the process (which is where the nutrients come from) because soil was not meant to grow that much food, that many times over
• Separate the crops and animals (who replenish the soil) and mass produce everything
• Spray it with 3,000 chemicals to keep the bugs away
• Pulverize the corn, soy, and grain and make “food like product” that never goes bad and is devoid of nutrients (don’t worry it’s “fortified”)
• Put a bunch of sugar in it to make it not taste like cardboard
• Make it super cheap
• Tell everyone to eat 6-11 servings a day because it’s “healthy” (and low fat!)

Wow. There’s SO MANY MORE REASONS ultra-processed food is bad but alas, this is again, becoming the longest blog post ever (I do that a lot!).

Here is my final answer, and a personal bet from me to you. 

If you never ate anything out of a box again, and only ate one ingredient whole foods, and everyone else in the US did the same… yes Kellogg’s would go out of business, but more importantly, chronic disease in the US would disappear.

IT. WOULD. DISSAPEAR.

The other absolutely criminal piece of the pie here that I want to acknowledge is, the government subsidizes processed food, so yeah, real food generally costs more and is less available in certain contexts. What I will say to that… those who can, should be advocating to change these policies!!! What I will also say… a whole foods diet can be done on any budget.

First tip: The 99-cent store sells meat, produce, frozen veges, canned goods, etc. A whole foods way of eating does not necessarily mean grass fed, cage free, organic, panda massaged, picked directly from the ground, or hunted in your own backyard. Buy whole foods that you can afford! And no, it’s not the end of the world if you have to incorporate some processed food as well. Baby steps.

Oh, and I should probably mention, I know I keep saying “packaged” and “boxed” food but at the end of the day, most things we buy at the store are packaged in some way. So how can we tell which things are ultra-processed “food like product” (or NON-food as I like to call it)? Easy – it has an ingredient list a mile long, most of the words ones you can’t pronounce.

Coming back full circle to “fad” or whatever "diets"… 

This is why I could care less if you eat mostly potatoes, or mostly broccoli, or mostly chicken, or mostly beef, or mostly apples, or mostly beans, or mostly WHATEVER! Forget the macronutrients.

EAT REAL FOOD and our chronic illnesses – seasonal allergies, PMS, IBS, horrendous menopause, PCOS, heart disease, fatty liver, diabetes, cancer, etc., all the things we now think are normal –  

Would disappear.

Prove me wrong.