A Better Way to Think About Eating Healthy

Before I jump into a blog about diet and nutrition, I want to note that I am in no way a health expert, nutritionist, dietician, or anything that would make my opinion credible.  That being said, I'm not really giving any diet advice as much as I am proposing a better way to mentally organize each person's current  knowledge about nutrition.  

I see a lot of healthy eating experts since pretty much forever talk about the do's and dont's of dieting.  "Eat these foods to achieve perfect health" or "NEVER eat this food because it contains blah blah blah". This style of diet advice is pretty widespread, but it's an ultimately toxic way of talking about a nuanced subject.  What ultimately triggered me to write this blog was seeing  CarnivoreMD's instagram page, where he gives his 2 cents on whether or not a food is bullshit.  His black and white opinions on pretty much every food made me realize that nearly everyone in the diet industry does this to a degree.  

So why is this so popular?  Abstractly, I'm sure there is some evolutionary reason why humans take to this advice so willingly.  My guess is that in a primitive context, this advice was probably very useful for getting the tribe to avoid eating plants that were known to be poisonous.  Practically, the do's and dont's method's inherent strength is that it is simple to understand and anyone can adopt a new diet without needing an in depth understanding of how foods affect your body and health.  By merely having discipline and planning skills, nearly any diet can be closely followed.  

If do's and dont's is so simple and straightforward, what's the problem?  One all too common issue is that our primitive brains are not well equipped to deal with the endless content and people on the internet talking about diet and nutrition.  One day you might see online that eggs are bad for you because they contain cholesterol, so they should be avoided at all costs.  The next day you hear that fish has too much mercury, so that too should be avoided.  Then you hear that eggs are great for you, and to eat as many as you want!  Pretty quickly, your head is filled with conflicting information, and you can't fully trust anything you eat because there is probably someone out there that would tell you it is bad for you. (apparently broccoli is BS)

So instead of latching on to the latest diet trend or influencer that makes a compelling case to only eat these foods and avoid those foods, I'm arguing that a better method is what I call the common sense tradeoff method.  The idea is that everyone has a comparative understanding of which foods are healthiest.  For example, if I ask you if an apple or a donut is healthier, you will intuitively know that an apple is healthier.  So you immediately have a framework to make an optimally healthy choice given your food options at any point in time.  

The common sense tradeoff method also facilitates an iterative process for improving one's typical diet.  If you can make a common sense improvement in just one part of your diet, you gain momentum and confidence without doing a cold-turkey style diet change.  An example of this is going from from white bread to whole wheat bread.  It's not that I'm saying eating bread is healthy, but if those are the only two options then whole wheat is the intuitively better choice (this is barring any food sensitivities or anything like that).  Doing this intentionally allows people to recreate their diet at their own pace and takes into account their current situation (limited time, resources, etc.).  The end result is that there is less feeling of guilt when don't have the means to eat a perfectly healthy meal (your vegetables aren't organic, you run out of raw liver, and you ate >1 carb)

Now I fully acknowledge that dieting is certainly more nuanced and sometimes a lot more confusing than comparing an apple versus a donut.  More heavily debated food categories (meat, grain, dairy) may require a more educated reasoning for the justification of a certain tradeoff (cow's milk vs. almond milk vs. oat milk).  The answer then is to become more educated on the pros and cons of the different foods that you could potentially eat, so you have a greater confidence in your ability to compare foods.  With some sustained effort at this, your diet will improve subtly in short term but drastically improve over the course of a few months to a year.