American Food Needs Warning Labels
Snacking is the new smoking.
The statistics on childhood obesity in America are straight out of a horror movie.
Obese toddlers are the victims of a food system gone awry. They grow up on TV shows advertising delicious snacks in brightly lit packages, while the school system loads them up on carbs and sugars, and their parents, too weary to cook, feed them pizza.
The rest of us aren’t much better off.
Eighty percent of people with Alzheimer’s are diabetic or pre-diabetic. The shorthand term for Alzheimer’s disease is “Type 3 diabetes.” Most Americans are currently pre-diabetic or diabetic–both conditions often accompany obesity.
But let’s get to the kids, who most definitely are not all right.
Toddlers — yes two and three-year-olds — are now obese at rates never before seen in human history.
As convenient as it feels to blame the victim, we are fooling ourselves when we do so. Are we going to blame a two-year-old for failure to stick to her diet?
Maybe the tired advice to eat “in moderation” is a good place to unpack our collective predicament. It could be that such advice is like telling people who complain about high gas prices to walk to work. It’s not practical.
Poison–that is, snack foods–aren’t okay in moderation.
The evil geniuses of Big Food aren’t going to stop trying to get your kids — or you — to eat an entire can of Pringles.
Fat Isn’t the Enemy
It is tempting to conclude that many diets work and you just need to find the right one for you, but experience has taught me otherwise.
Low-calorie diets don’t work because you aren’t a robot and you’ll get hungry.
Two diets work for virtually everyone: (1) a low-carb or ketogenic diet and (2) a very low-fat diet, which leads to weight loss but is nutritionally dubious.* Choice #2 is commonly called a low-fat or starch-based diet, is usually vegan, and has been effectively promoted by doctors such as McDougall and Ornish.
Low-fat means never giving up cookies and pasta or limiting the 6–11 servings of grains a day (the recommendation from the still invoked, massively outdated USDA Food Pyramid/MyPlate.gov), so it remains popular.
Plus, vegan is trendier than hell and all over social media.
Unfortunately, as apex predators and lovers of fat, the low-fat solution will lead to nutritional deficiencies, health problems, and, more immediately, hunger. It is beyond the scope of this post to review the reasons veganism isn’t the answer to planetary ecological disaster, but if you have an open mind, consider the benefits of regenerative farming and the pitfalls of mono-crop farming.
The ketogenic diet, however, supplies all necessary nutrients, reverses diabetes and obesity, and is proving a better way to lose weight.
Going Keto
The ketogenic diet is a high-fat diet with plentiful calories from all fat sources, including red meat.
This translates into high-fat, moderate protein, and very low carb (about 5% of calories or less from carbs). Meat, non-starchy vegetables, a little full-fat dairy, and a few nuts now and again, and you are good to go.
The American Diabetes Association has finally put its support behind such a diet, albeit with caveats. Keto is much more effective at controlling blood sugar.
If you dive into the keto deep end, there’s the Carnivore diet, an excellent choice to mitigate or reverse diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and autoimmune conditions. Meat digests easily, is highly nutritious — especially if organ meats like beef liver are consumed regularly — and supplies plenty of fat and protein.
If you don’t buy into the USDA misinformation campaign that red meat and saturated fat are bad for you (because there is no good scientific evidence they are), you can happily consume all the bacon, lard, tallow, and ribeye steak you want.
Whether keto, ketovore, or carnivore, If you shift from carbs to fat, you will lose weight.
Fortunately, we live in an age where there are multiple credible and experienced sources who educate people about how it’s okay to eat meat again, including Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Ken Berry, and Dr. Paul Mason, to name only a few.
The Randle Cycle: A Brief Scientific Detour
In 1963, Philip John Randle (1926–2006) described the biochemistry of consuming a “balanced diet” of carbs, protein, and fat. Randle was a well-regarded British diabetes researcher who discovered that human metabolism efficiently converts both fatty acids and sugars to energy, but not at the same time.
Glucose and fatty acids compete for their oxidation and uptake in muscle and adipose (fat) tissue. The Randle Cycle explains the biochemistry of this competition in detail.
Since our requirements for protein are fairly constant, Randle’s discovery about our two fuel sources — glucose (carbs) and fat — gets to the heart of metabolism and obesity.
The Randle Cycle isn’t debated, nor has it ever been debunked. (If you want to know more about the biochemical reactions and rate-limiting steps, see the postscript.) The crux is this: fatty acid digestion inhibits glucose oxidation, making fatty acids the preferred fuel for powering muscles.
Your intuition is correct: the way to gain weight is to eat fat/sugar bombs. Fat and sugar together — for example, in the form of pizza, ice cream, or doughnuts — are bad bets.
Modern researchers believe there may be much more to understand about how fatty acid and glucose metabolism are related to metabolic diseases like obesity and diabetes.
The Context of a Balanced Diet
The Randle Cycle teaches that we are better off eating an unbalanced diet, in which fat predominates, i.e. keto, low carb, or zero carb or carbs dominate. Pick a fuel source for better energy.
A typical American balanced diet is neither low-carb nor low-fat. Instead, we consume plenty of fat and carbs together. Even a heavy fat and protein meal like a ribeye steak or ribs is usually accompanied by a baked potato or fries.
If you still want to eat a variety of foods in moderation, there is another route to consider: the Mediterranean diet, which has proven health benefits.
The Mediterranean diet is moderate-high fat, moderate protein, and moderate-low carb. It includes meat, especially fish, and generous quantities of non-starchy veggies. Not much fruit, but grains are okay on a daily basis.
Greeks typically consume about a 1/4 cup per day of olive oil, which means 500 calories of pure fat a day, with another 200–400 daily calories of fat from foods! Researchers estimate, for example, that most Greeks eat 35–40% of their calories from fat.
It turns out the olive oil may be what provides most of the dietary benefits of the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle.
How are Greeks and Italians able to stay healthy while eating both carbs and fats? First, they eat natural, minimally processed fat in the form of olive oil. Second, they eat unprocessed foods. Third, they rarely eat concentrated sugars. And, finally, their diets are part of a lifestyle that includes daily movement, high levels of social engagement, and enjoying slow, home-cooked meals around a table with friends and family.
Redefining Extreme Diets
The types of grains Americans consume, as Newsweek recently reported, are often “ultra-processed” — they absorb ultra quickly into our bloodstream. These include high manufactured snack foods, which most Americans eat several times a day.
Ultra-processed foods absorb ultra quickly by design. Food scientists want you addicted, so you’ll come back and purchase another case of Mountain Dew or family-sized bag of tortilla chips.
In modern America, our standard diet is the epitome of extreme.
To counteract obesity and beat diabetes, some Americans are taking what looks like extreme countermeasures: a ketogenic or vegan solution.
Keto and vegan diets are strict but in contrast to what the USDA Dietary Guidelines advise, consider them instead as antidotes to Standard American Diet (SAD). Although a vegan diet isn’t healthy long-term — it’s an improvement over a daily diet of ultra-processed junk, seed oils, and sugar.*
Low-carb and Mediterranean diets make plenty of intuitive sense as well: they are much closer to traditional eating patterns of the last tens of thousands of years.
We successfully survived the ice age eating almost entirely meat and fat, as the healthy Inuits ate prior to their contact with westerners. We ate animals — every part. Since farming and ranching began to predominate about 12,000 years ago, food cultivation, storage, and preparation have shifted away from meat and towards carbs.
In the last 50 years, this fat/protein/carb balance has radically altered. In the US, our government told us to eat less meat and dairy, and eat more carbs! Per the 1980 USDA Dietary Guidelines. Go for 8–11 servings of grains per day!
As the 80s progressed, a low-fat snack food craze hit us like a tsunami. The dismaying results are obvious.
The devastation caused by adding high-fructose corn syrup (HCFS) and industrial seed oils to our diets cannot be overstated. Food manufacturers shifted from using lard and butter to industrial oils and hydrogenated butter alternatives like margarine and Crisco in 1911.
Food giants began adding HFCS in the early 1970s, and now it’s in everything from spaghetti sauce to peanut butter.
Defund Big Food
The Frankenstein diet Big Food is feeding our children has created a monster who wreaks havoc on our healthcare system, military preparedness, and mental health.
Big Food may be a monstrosity that lurks in every grocery store in this nation, but they don’t differ much from Big Tobacco. In fact, as Newsweek reported, many of the Big Tobacco companies, such as RJ Reynolds, shifted their profits from tobacco to food manufacturing once they were outed as villainous profiteers who preyed on children.
They brought with them finely honed skills on how to foster addiction in a population. Banned from selling cigarettes in machines or marketing to kids, tobacco companies pivoted to become purveyors of fruit roll-ups and cheesy snacks.
We can defeat Big Food using the same weapons that brought Big Tobacco to its knees: information, laws, and taxes. Make no mistake, Big Tobacco still destroys millions of lives worldwide, but in the US we’ve reduced smoking rates considerably.
The first step is to treat snacks just like cigarettes and stop giving them to kids.
Postscript
Luc Bertrand briefly describes the Randle Cycle in his article, “Pre-Diabetes in Health and Disease: Prevention and Treatment”:
Under physiological conditions, myocardial ATP is mainly generated by mitochondrial oxidation of fatty acids (for 60–80%) and carbohydrates (glucose, glycogen stores) (for 20–40%) Fatty acids are preferred to glucose because fatty acid oxidation inhibits glucose uptake, glycolysis, and glucose oxidation via several molecular mechanisms known under the name of “Randle cycle.”
*While the low-fat, vegan approach will technically produce weight loss, our history as a species doesn’t support such a way of eating. There are no vegan civilizations, as the diet is lacking in essential nutrients such as B12. Veganism tops SAD, however, because it promotes eating Whole Foods, especially whole grains and vegetables.
