Health Hacking: Diet and Nutrition (Premium)

This past week, I marked the one-year anniversary of my low-carb (sometimes ketogenic) diet. Here’s how it went, and why I will keep going.

First, and most important, I’m not a doctor, scientist, or nutritionist. I’m not even a dietitian. This means that I am not qualified to give you advice about health, nutrition, or dieting. That said, I am relaying facts that are supported by science.

And facts are in short supply when it comes to health and nutrition. Thanks to various powerful food industry lobbyists over a period of several decades, America and the western world have been sold a load of crap—literally—when it comes to what’s healthy to eat. And the primary culprit is sugar, which takes two forms: Actual sugars and carbohydrates, which turn into sugar in our bodies and cause them to store fat rather than use stored fat for energy.

Yes. It’s that simple.

A bit of background. I first came across this information in Gary Taubes’ seminal long-form article What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?, which appeared in The New York Times in mid-2002. At that time, I was about 15 years into what has been an entire adult life of being overweight, and had been steadily gaining weight each year. I had tried everything—every diet, every workout plan imaginable—and fell into a now traditional pattern of short-term gains followed by setbacks that always led to me quitting whatever plan I was on at the time.

Taubes, an award-winning science journalist, followed up his article with a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease in 2007. I don’t believe I read that at the time. But I did read the follow-up, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. And in reading that, I knew that I finally had the answer.

So in early 2011, I believe, I set out on on a low-carb diet. I lost 26 pounds rather quickly, which didn’t surprise me because the science was clear. But then the same thing happened that always happens: My weight—and weight loss—plateaued, meaning that I stopped losing weight. And after a few months of disappointment, I drifted away from the low-carb diet. Over time, I just resumed what we’d call a normal diet here in America. So I gained weight again, as before.

The issue, to me, was that Taubes had settled on the truth of the matter, the science, but he was decidedly lacking in the “how to” bit. That last book’s title suggests that it will be full of advice about how to maintain the “correct” diet, but it’s not. If you take a look at it, about 90 percent of the book is the scientific evidence and only at the very end is there any advice or how-to, and it’s pretty vague on specifics.

Over the intervening years, I hoped that Taubes would turn his attention to this topic. But he hasn’t. In 2012, he busted the bad science around salt in Salt, We Misjudged You in The New York Times. (Short version: Salt is not bad for you, unless it’s in processed foods.) And this past year, he published The Case Against Sugar, which I see as beating a dead horse. We get it: Sugar and carbohydrates are bad.

Fortunately, there are others doing the hard work of figuring out this mess. And, incredibly, one of them is a friend of mine: Computer scientist, tech writer, musician, and podcaster Carl Franklin. Tired of his escalating weight, Carl turned his attention to this topic and investigated the science. And he quite naturally arrived at the same and correct conclusion as Gary Taubes. It’s all about the carbs.

Most important, Franklin did something about it: He created the 2 Keto Dudes podcast with Richard Morris. I cannot recommend this podcast enough: With great humor and wit, these two geniuses make the case for the science of nutrition in an approachable way. And they are providing the how-to thing that I think is so crucial. Please, subscribe to the podcast.

Carl and Richard are proponents of what’s called a ketogenic lifestyle. It’s what most Americans would think of as an “extreme” version of a low-carb diet. But the only thing extreme about it is how much healthier and better it is for you than whatever most of you are eating each day. This isn’t a “diet” in the “let’s lose x number of pounds in x number of days” sense; it’s a sustainable diet for life.

Put simply, when you eat a ketogenic diet—primarily fats, with some protein and, optionally, some green/leafy vegetables—your body will burn your stored fat for energy. If you add sugars or carbohydrates to your diet, your body will store that as fat.

There are other components to this diet, including fasting. We all fast every day when we sleep—fasting is just the absence of eating—and ketogenic diet followers will often fast in other ways, by skipping a meal, usually breakfast, or by not eating for one day or more.

That may sound difficult, but it’s not. The ketogenic lifestyle turns the “just eat less and you’ll lose weight” stupidity on its head: If you eat right, you will need to eat less because you’ll feel full, or sated, more often. It will just happen.

This is the diet I have adopted for myself. Sort of. For about the first half of 2017, I’d say that I was firmly in the keto camp, meaning that I consumed under 20 grams of carbs per day. I skipped breakfast more often than not. Aside from some alcohol—I drink wine, not beer, which is liquid bread and very high in carbs; wine is fairly low in carbs, comparably—I pretty much ate zero carbs for much of 2017. (Hard alcohol like bourbon, whiskey, and even rum has no carbs at all. I know. It’s confusing because you’ve been lied to.)

For the second half of this year, I’ve drifted a bit. Meaning, I’ve still been low-carb the whole time—I pretty much never eat bread, never drink beer, never eat potatoes or pasta—but I probably came in closer to 30 grams of carbs per day, which is still very low. I started eating breakfast again, thanks to travel. I ate corn in the summer, and tomatoes. And the wine. Some rice, with sushi. And popcorn sometimes. Trail mix. Those were my cheats in 2017.

But enough about me. Let’s talk facts. (The 2 Keto Dudes podcast recently aired an episode called Keto for Absolute Beginners that is even better than this short list.)

The ketogenic diet can—and has—reversed Type-2 diabetes. This is interesting on a number of levels. But if you see a proof-point that a particular diet can reverse diabetes, that is something you should look into.

Eating fat does not make you fat and it will not clog your arteries. Fat is the healthiest thing you can eat. Animal and other saturated fats. Fat from avocados or nuts. All perfectly healthy.

But this assumes that you do not eat that fat with carbohydrates or starches. Consider Fettuccine Alfredo, which is often described as a “heart attack on a plate”: The part you think is unhealthy, the sauce, is a perfectly healthy combination of wonderful fats: butter, cream, and cheese. The unhealthy part is the pasta, which is a starch, which is a carbohydrate, which is a sugar. Eating that makes the sauce unhealthy too. Just like the bread is what makes butter unhealthy when you eat toast. Potatoes in any form are evil and should always be avoided.

Seed oils—corn, soybean, etc.—are really bad for you. But coconut oil and olive oil are very healthy.

LDL cholesterol is not a marker of heart disease or of anything else. It’s a meaningless number.

Sugar is a toxin. It should be avoided in all of its forms.

Carbohydrates quickly turn into sugar in our bodies and are used for fuel, with the excess stored as fat. You should avoid carbohydrates. Potatoes. Breads. Beer. Rice. Pasta. All of it.

Adding salt to food? Perfectly healthy. You pretty much couldn’t add too much salt; the food would be inedible if you did. However, salt is a huge issue in our western diet because its in all of the processed food we eat.

In fact, the things that are most bad for you—sugar in any form, carbohydrates and starches, and seed oils—are all key components of the processed food that is destroying us all. You should always avoid processed food. If you could simply skip any processed food, and any sugary beverages (all sodas, orange juice, sports drinks, and so on), you’d be well on your way to a healthy future. Any real, whole food is better than anything processed.

Speaking of which, all fruit is bad for you. And fruit juices are even worse: Both are just sugars. Vegetables, excluding starchy and root vegetables, are absolutely fine. Not essential. But not unhealthy.

This is all very straightforward, though I understand it’s not what you were led to believe.

But there is a deeper problem with nutrition with regards to weight loss. And this is a fact that I have stumbled upon myself: Nutrition is personal. That is, two seemingly similar people could eat the same food, consume the same number of calories, and it would impact them both very differently. Either of the two might lose weight. Or gain weight. Or experience no change at all. Chances are they will both have a different experience.

Put another way, the issue is hormonal. It’s what makes dieting difficult. One person may go on a grapefruit-only diet, or whatever, and lose 80 pounds, and then go off happily spouting that they found the answer. When, in fact, all they’ve done is found something that—for some reason—worked only for them and their unique body. Their solution is not scalable. It does not apply to other people.

The beauty of the ketogenic diet is that its universal. What I mean by that is that it’s a fact. It’s not something that is healthy for only some people. It is our natural diet. Now, that doesn’t mean that you will simply lose weight and keep losing weight. You will still plateau, as I have done again. But your body is now healthier and more efficient. And by staying on this diet, you will continue losing weight again sometime the future. Keto is the answer. (For some, low-carb is an even more sustainable answer, given the availability of foods in our modern world.)

You’ve heard the phrase, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Well, Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day either, and the ruins of that once powerful empire still stand in modern-day Rome. In a similar vein, you didn’t gain weight over a weekend. And your body is designed for a feast or famine mentality. It will resist your weight loss to protect you for a famine that will never come; its programmed to do this. Short-circuiting this behavior is hard. It will take time. Perhaps even a lifetime.

I’d like to tackle two common misconceptions before moving on.

First, you’ve heard of the calorie-in, calorie-out theory, that if you simply eat less, you will lose weight. This is untrue: A starvation diet, or a deprivation diet of any kind, is not sustainable. By adhering to a low-carb or keto diet, you will naturally eat less and will lose weight. But more to the point, the quality of the calories matters. Sugar isn’t empty calories, it’s a net negative that has a dramatic impact on your body. Fats are satisfying, and they will make you feel full.

Second, you’ve probably heard about Michael Pollan and his theories about health and nutrition. He boiled it down to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Pollan is possibly more concerned about environmental sustainability, but he’s wrong about nutrition. I’d go with something like “Eat mostly fats. Some salty proteins. Green, leafy plants are optional.” Because that’s the science.

With a year of healthy eating under my belt, literally, I’m going to push into the second year by recommitting to a true keto diet, meaning under 20 grams of carbs per day. As I said, I’ve strayed a bit, and my weight loss has plateaued. But I know I’m on the right track. And it’s nice to have that kind of certainty about something that’s so important.

If there is any interest, I would consider discussing this a bit further. What I eat, for example, and what I do not eat, and why. My experiences with fasting. My thoughts on exercise, and my plans for stepping that up in 2018.

But I know this topic is controversial and that many will disagree with at least some parts of what I’ve written here. Some are going to really freak out.

I’m not super-interested in debating this because the science is so clear. We’ve been lied to our entire lives. And it’s hard to overcome a fear, especially when you believe that the thing you fear—fats, salt, whatever—will kill you. So I recommend learning the science. This is too important a topic to be ignorant of the truth.