Diet & Health
Everything in Moderation is Too Much Bull…
Diet professionals who use the phrase show they don’t know what they are talking about
I’ll start off by clarifying a couple of things. First, I’m using the term “diet professionals” to include doctors, nutritionists, fitness gurus, personal trainers and anyone else who provides others with recommendations on one’s long-term diet.
Second, when I say using the phrase “everything in moderation” shows they don’t know what they are talking about, I don’t mean, in any way, that they are trying to deceive any of their clients/patients. I believe those who give that advice really think it’s the best advice to give — and it’s what they have been told is the best advice to give. Further, I’m referring to using the phrase in terms of advice for weight management.
The problem is that what many diet professionals learn in their training is simply wrong. The basis for “everything in moderation” as advice for weight management is the notion that one needs an imbalance between calories taken in (what we eat), and calories expended (what we do). This foundational notion simply isn’t true. The knowledge that this foundational notion isn’t true dates back over 100 years. That begs the question of why the misinformation continues to be taught — and bad advice continues to be given — when we know better.
The simple answer is that food companies’ primary objective is to make money for investors. They are bound by ethical standards of business behavior and accounting practices. They are NOT required to care for the health of the consumers that buy their products. The closest they come to caring about their customers’ health is to push the “everything in moderation” mantra in the university programs and textbooks they exert influence over. But really, the moderation just slows the journey many will take to obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and early death.
Practicing “evidence-based medicine” is an attempt by doctors to bring patients the best available care. The idea is to base treatments on the evidence reported in peer-reviewed journal articles. It’s a great concept. The problem is that the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry contribute, financially, to scientists doing research, the editors of major journals and even individual reviewers. This financial conflict of interest influences what gets published — which contaminates the evidence doctors have on which to base their treatments.
This article dives into the specifics of the problem:
To give just one example from the article, researchers looked at 59 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) — one of the strongest forms of research one can do — on the impact of sugary beverages on weight gain. Overall, 49% of those studies found a link between the drinks and weight gain — the more sugary drinks people had, the more weight they gained. In 51% of the studies, no link was found between drinking sugary beverages and weight gain. From “the evidence” one might conclude that there are other factors at play when it comes to weight gain — that overall, you can’t predict weight gain from knowing how many sugary drinks a person has. As a doctor, this “evidence” might keep you from suggesting to overweight patients that they cut back or stop drinking sugary beverages.
But when you look at the results sorted by whether there were financial conflicts of interest present, or not, the story is quite different. In studies with conflicts of interest, only 14% found a link between sugary beverages and weight gain; when no financial interests were present, 83% of the studies found a link. It’s clear that one of the factors impacting whether a study finds a link or not is the influence of financial conflicts of interest.
I know, I know — it sounds grim. Maybe even too grim to believe! But the facts — and science — back me up.
Let’s look at the “calories in vs. calories out” hypothesis. It works great for short-term weight loss. But your body doesn’t really care about your weight. It cares about energy. When your body senses you are consistently taking in fewer calories than it needs for getting through your day, it slows you down, so you use fewer calories (to match the reduction you’ve imposed) — so you feel tired more often. It also tries to get you to eat more — so you feel hungry more often. That’s why most calorie restriction diets fail — because those on them feel tired and hungry all the time! They can’t take it for more than a few months — then they blame themselves for failing to overcome basic human physiology. But diet professionals don’t understand human physiology, so they blame you for being weak, lazy or just a glutton without any willpower. And I get that if you down know the real reason why calorie-restriction diets fail 95% of the time, it can seem like the patient/client is weak, lazy or just a glutton without any willpower.
If it is a willpower/laziness issue, this article raises an interesting question…
Everything in moderation has another flaw — we don’t need everything. By everything, I’m referring to the three macronutrients: Carbohydrate, fat and protein. In a nutshell, there are nutrients we must eat to live a long and healthy life — the field of Nutrition calls these “essential nutrients.” So, essential nutrients — be they macro or micro — are nutrients we need to eat to survive. When it comes to the macronutrients there are essential fatty acids (essential fats) and essential amino acids (proteins). But guess what? There are no essential carbohydrates. That’s not a typo — there are no essential carbs. We can live a natural, long, healthy life without eating a single gram of carbohydrate (and that includes fiber).
Here’s more detail on carb in general:
And the detail on fiber:
Now here’s a statement that, at first, might seem to go against what I’ve said so far — but read past the statement for the explanation: Long-term weight loss can be achieved with a caloric deficit.
The catch is it can’t be an “eat-less/move-more” type of deficit. If you do that, your physiology fights you and you end up gaining weight after several weeks — as I’ve described above. What you need to do us “uncouple” the metabolism the mitochondria in your fat cells are performing. This article covers the details:
In a nutshell, in a high glucose environment (when you eat according to the Food Pyramid), your fat cells are very efficient — they only use the amount of ATP (the fuel cells use that is derived from nutrients such as glucose, amino acids, fatty acids or ketone bodies) they need to do their work. This is referred to as “coupled” metabolism. When using ketones to produce ATP, however, fat cells get very wasteful, using far more molecules of ATP (and, therefore, more nutrients) than they really need to get their work done. This is an “uncoupled” metabolism. Under the situation of uncoupled metabolism, the body is creating the caloric deficit at the mitochondrial level. Uncoupled metabolism is how your body works in a ketone-based environment (nutritional ketosis).
So, rather than fighting against your body by trying to create the deficit at the macro-behavioural level (eating less food and/or moving your muscles more), you can work with your body by creating a metabolic environment where it naturally wastes your stored energy (i.e., your body fat). “Everything in moderation” gets it wrong because even eating carbs in moderation can keep you from entering nutritional ketosis and achieving uncoupled metabolism.
This is why I cringe when I hear a diet professional talk about “everything in moderation.” It really shows there is a vast body of knowledge they just don’t know about.
Thank you for reading this article — hopefully it contained something you found useful.
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