Results. Do They Matter?

Um... Like, hello? Not to sound like a teenager, but is anyone paying attention? It is surprising how the medical communities have reacted to our declining health. To be clear, in terms of managing the deluge of chronic diseases that have descended upon us over the last 30-40 year, they have been very responsive - the care for diabetics and heart disease patients keeps getting better. But in terms of noodling on the questions, "How did this happen to us?" and, better yet, "How do we stop this from happening to us?", the medical community's response feels like the equivalent of a collective shrug. A "Gee... I don't know... nothing is working. How strange that, en masse, people suddenly started eating too much and exercising too little." 

But how do we, the eaters in a results-oriented culture, completely ignore the dismal results of the low-fat diet? It would seem that the ill health that has ensued after the food pyramid's introduction can be explained either one of two ways: 1) The low-fat diet works for a few but not for most. For most, it causes one or more of the collection of chronic diseases that plague us: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, fatty liver, cancer, and dementia; or 2) The low-fat diet is a great diet, but it is incredibly hard to follow, so most people, although trying, end up failing and get fatter and sicker. Either way, the result is unacceptable and it is obviously time to move on. Yet we don't.

The medical community remains stuck in a failed paradigm, in part, because it sees no other way. Margaret Heffernan calls this 'willful blindness' in her excellent TED talk entitled 'Dare to Disagree.' Hence the bottom line, the results -- to which we normally pay so much attention -- get largely ignored. The data is out there, but few doctors want to know.

As mothers, we can no longer pretend that the low-fat diet is working. Results do matter. We don't want to be chronically ill. And, there is another way - obviously. Let's just return to a vintage diet. Real food. More fat. It worked before. It will work again. Together, we can lead our families back to health.

Fed Up With Processed Food?

What role do food giants like Kraft or Nabisco play in our current health crisis? They make a lot of the food that is bad for us, sure, but ultimately, we are the ones putting the products in our cart. Why, oh why, do we buy?

Well, food manufacturers are good at marketing, and we are often governed by our 'reptile brain'  - the part of our brain that likes the hot model in the commercial and that wants quick and easy food...  more, more, more. Our food corporations engineer attractively packaged, convenient, and even tasty or addictive food that lasts in our pantries. And they put it in front of us -- both in the grocery aisles and in the media -- with remarkable creativity. Yes indeed, they intentionally tempt us, and they are skilled temptresses.

Movies like Fed Up do a nice job of pointing this out. But what they fail to point out is that expecting much more from the food giants is a little naive. Given that their corporate charge is to maximize shareholder value, not improve our collective health, can we really expect change? After all, poisoning people really, really slowly with an addictive product is actually a reasonable business model. 

If Big Food is doing its free-market thing and isn't going to change anytime soon, is there any hope of improvement?  Why, yes. We can change the advice we give eaters and, in turn, eaters can change their behavior. Nothing will change the food industry faster than educated consumers walking away from aisles and aisles of processed crap. 

So why, oh why, do we buy? We buy the current, crappy offerings, in part, because of both the advice we have been given and the advice we have not received. "Avoid fat" comes to mind as an example of bad advice.  "Avoid refined carbohydrates" comes to mind as an example of advice that we have not received with enough consistency. So again, why do we buy that yogurt with 24 grams of sugar? Perhaps because we have been assured that yogurt is 'healthy.' And, perhaps because it is labeled 'low-fat', which, in the mixed-up construct that is the USDA's dietary advice, would make it even healthier, right? So, although we wouldn't dream of feeding our kids 'dessert' for breakfast, we hand them the brightly packaged nutritional equivalent without giving it much thought. The double whammy of the misinformation we have received about dietary fat and the missing 'avoid refined carbohydrates - yes, even in yogurt' advice leave us adrift in the sea of bad breakfast options, unable to find the shores of real food that await us a few aisles over.

Imagine a world where, in 1980, the USDA had just told everyone to eat more real food and less processed food, particularly sugar and starch.  Would you guess that the yogurt offerings would look different?  Absolutely.  Because the food corporations actually do at least try to please both the USDA and consumers by meeting the demand for 'healthy' products, whatever the current definition of 'healthy' dictates.

Let's redefine healthy.  Let's vote with our grocery carts. Remember, "If you are dumb enough to buy it, they will be smart enough to sell it." The best way to get the crap off the shelves is to, collectively, stop buying it.

Jamming with JAMA

Vintage Blog RSS

The ever prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has just published an article entitled, "The 2015 US Dietary Guidelines - Lifting the Ban on Total Dietary Fat." In this article, authors Mozaffarian and Ludwig, from Tufts and Boston Children's Hospital, respectively, call on the USDA to remove the upper limit on dietary fat consumption when crafting the new, 2015 version of our nation's Dietary Guidelines. All this in response to the recommendations of the recent Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report, an evidenced based review of what the science actually says. OMG. We have certainly come a long way from the how-low-can-fat-go recommendations of yesteryear.

But what is a mother to do? How do we, as mothers, process this sort of scientific paper into our daily meal plans for our families? After growing up on skim milk and fat-free yogurt, how do we move towards making friends with fat again? And, can we trust the USDA's guidelines, when we know they have already taken our collective waistlines in the wrong direction?

Let's help each other go back to vintage eating. Real food. More fat. After all, do we really need a government agency involved in our grocery shopping? Eat what your great-great grandmother would have eaten in times of abundance. It can be fun to completely ignore the processed food industry -- all of their products, their packaging, their marketing, their nonsense. It will make you feel powerful!

For those who want more, here is the concluding paragraph from Mozaffarian and Ludwig:

"The limit on total fat presents an obstacle to sensible change, promoting harmful low-fat foods, undermining attempts to limit intakes of refined starch and added sugar, and discouraging the restaurant and food industry from providing products higher in healthful fats. It is time for the US Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services to develop the proper signage, public health messages, and other educational efforts to help people understand that limiting total fat does not produce any meaningful health benefits and that increasing healthful fats, including more than 35% of calories, has documented health benefits. Based on the strengths of accumulated new scientific evidence and consistent with the new DGAC report, a restructuring of national nutritional policy is warranted to move away from total fat reduction and toward healthy food choices, including those higher in healthful fats."

Dilute Your Carbs

When you reach for a snack for yourself or your child, make it a balanced one. So many snacks today, even 'healthier' options, are carb-heavy (almost exclusively carbohydrates). Crackers. Cheerios. Goldfish. An apple or banana. A glass of juice. And that piece of banana bread.

With meals, it is usually easier to balance it out - to get some fat and protein into your body. But with snacks, it is harder. Let's face it: carbs are convenient, crunchy, and shelf stable.  

At Eat the Butter, we love the idea of diluting carbs with fat and protein, even at snack time. It is not a new idea - bread and butter - crackers and cheese - peaches and cream. And it still works. So, when your daughter reaches for those apple slices, offer her a slice or two of cheddar to go with them. When you are munching on whole grain crackers, grab a hard boiled egg to accompany them. Or, let nature do the balancing:  skip the carb-heavy snack altogether and grab a handful of nuts. It may seem like more calories, but your snack will keep you full longer, reducing future grazing or perhaps reducing what you eat at your next meal. This will also help keep you off the blood sugar roller coaster, as the protein and fat in your snack will slow the rise in blood sugar that follows any snack or meal with carbohydrates

A Diet That Works As We Age

Most mothers teach their kids to eat a diet that is relatively high in carbohydrates... We emphasize whole grains when we can.  Is this the right message?

One of the cruel tricks nature plays on most of us is that our systems tolerate a high-carb diet quite well for a while... Most (though sadly, not all) 18-year-olds can get away with eating lots of sugar and starch. But, just as we cannot expect our eyesight to get better and better as we age, our ability to tolerate the USDA's recommended diet does not get better and better. In fact, it declines. By the time our kids turn 30 or 40, most will be struggling to remain lean and healthy with the very diet that seemed to work when they were in our homes eating corn flakes at our breakfast tables. This is a rude awakening... just as our children take on the responsibilities and pressures of careers and families of their own, the diet we taught them was 'healthy' begins to cause their health to deteriorate.

Why teach your kids to eat 'wrong' -- to eat in a way that will not stand the test of time? The USDA's diet clearly does not work for most adults. If you do not believe this statement, drive to any mall and look around at your fellow shoppers.  So why bet on the diet that has been in place for over three decades and has proved to be an epic failure? Why bank on the notion that your kids will be among the lucky few who can eat a carb-rich diet into middle age without health issues? The odds are stacked against your kids.

Skip the USDA's recommendations, and instead serve vintage food that has stood the test of time. Build habits now that will actually work for your kids when they are your age. Eat vintage. Real food. More fat.

A Universal Law

Most of us would rather buy a used car from the little old lady down the street than the 24-year-old drag racing dude from around the corner. Why? Because we know that the drag racer has been slamming his foot on the accelerator every chance he gets... and the little old lady? She has been using her car with great care. So her car will last longer.

When you wake each morning and consume a carb-heavy breakfast, low in protein and fat, YOU are that dude slamming your foot on the accelerator. Your blood is quickly flooded with the glucose from the sugar and starch in your fruit, breakfast cereal, and skim milk (or your oversized bagel, low-fat cream cheese, and orange juice), so your pancreas scrambles to pump out insulin to keep you from slipping into a hyperglycemic haze. Your blood sugar spikes, your insulin levels spike, and you begin a roller coaster of a day, slamming on the accelerator and the brake from a blood sugar perspective. This is not easy on your body - your pancreas, your tissues, your teeth - high blood sugar and high insulin levels are just not good for any part of you.

Look here for a graph of blood sugar levels after two very different breakfasts...  eggs vs. cereal.

Take it easy on your body. It is your home. Use it gently.  Eat real food.  Eat more fat.

Rethinking the American Diet

It is time to step back and reevaluate our national diet. Chronic diseases, which are closely linked to diet, are at an all-time high. Perhaps we should reconsider the dietary guidelines that influence our choices in the grocery store and restaurants.  

As New York Times bestselling author, Nina Teicholz, puts it, "What if the very foods we've been denying ourselves -- the creamy cheeses, the sizzling steaks -- are themselves the key to reversing the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease?" What if, indeed?  

We are a results oriented culture. The low-fat dietary paradigm has been an epic failure. There are other ways of eating... As mothers, it is time that we say, 'Enough.' It's time to take back our grocery carts and our dinner plates, and go back to ways of eating that have stood the test of time. Vintage eating. Here are some options.