1. Which Diet Is Best? Understanding the Basics of Food

TL;DR: Rather than try to follow the hype of each new diet you hear of from vegetarian, Mediterranean, paleo, keto, and even carnivore, go with common sense and evaluate diets based on 5 timeless factors: “Naturalness”, Nutrient Density, Anti-nutrients, Variety, and Real Life Application.

Introduction

Let’s pretend it’s the 1960s, a time where chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer are just starting to really rise and you decide you want to start being healthy. You figure the place to start is diet, like everyone talks about, so you do some reading, and listen to what your doctor says. It should be pretty straight-forward!

Uh oh, people are getting lots of heart disease and dying – why?? What’s changed recently in our lifestyles? Processed foods you say? Sugar maybe? Don’t worry, sugar is most definitely not the cause, it’s saturated fat and cholesterol – according to your doctor and authorities like the World Health Organization. You know what doesn’t have much saturated fats? Plant foods! Vegetarian diets are just the best, plus the China study says you’ll die if you eat meat! Well, authorities know best!

Fast forward

Wait! Hoold up, breaking news, saturated fat and cholesterol might not be bad for you at all! The authorities are changing their minds, better listen to them. They say it might actually be sugar that’s the problem. And those cigarettes, they’re obviously causing cancer! What’s that, you say doctors used to recommend cigarettes and ignore sugar as a cause of chronic disease? Shh, forget about that! There’s new science now – we made an oopsie before sorry to all those who died following our old recommendations.

The new science says: Meditteranean diets, now that’s the best diet, and vegetarian is a close second! Low saturated fats, but lots of healthy fats like those in plant sources like olive oil and you can still eat a little bit of meat, just be careful about that red meat that causes cancer! What’s that?? Red meat has been in our diet for millions of years and we should be evolutionarily adapted to eat it? No, no stop thinking so much, listen to the authorities, they know waay more than you.

Fast forward

Hmm, some people are saying that animal foods are actually good for you. Something about B12 and other stuff you can’t get from plants? Wait, there’s this new diet called the paleo diet, where you eat like your ancestors! Wiat, there’s more, there’s something even better, it’s called the keto diet and you can burn fat by the pound while aging backwards! You know what, you should ditch plant food altogether and be a full on carnivore! It’s all the rage now!

Hold on, the authorities are disagreeing with this, they still say animal foods are bad and saturated fats are bad.

Fast forward

Hoold on, the paleo people won’t back off, and the authorities are actually starting to agree?? You need B12 and other nutrients from animal foods – they’re actually important or something, who would have thought of that! Also, apparently there’s nothing wrong with red meat – that’s what the latest science says. What’s that, we keep changing our minds? Don’t think about that, everything else you knew toss that out the window folks. New science, new science, new science!

Wait, what’s that, you’re confused because health authorities change their minds every 10 years? Hahaha, perfect, because we don’t want you to know that the secret is and always has been to just eat and cook a balanced variety of real foods in their natural form and to stop listening to the “authorities” who say whatever is popular and will make the processed food industry money. Forget about that, look at this next diet!

Fast forward to the future

Hold up, the news is that eating is actually no good anymore! You need to switch to the pure electricity diet to really be a part of the future.

Now

Vegetarian, meditteranean, paleo, keto, carnivore… Is your head spinning yet? Are you annoyed that when you ask a simple question like “what diets are healthy?”, you get a dozen different answers? Are you annoyed that the Government recommendations change over time? Are you tired of wondering if the food pyramid is accurate? Do you just want some answers that make sense and to get on with your life?

Rather than telling you exactly which foods are healthy and which are not, let’s bring it back to the basics, and stick to what matters over hype. As they say, “Give a man a fish and he eats healthy for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats healthy for a lifetime”.

In this article, we’ll go beyond the hype to teach you the principles of food that will be true forever, not just “true” for a few years or decades. This way, when the next fad comes out, you can check for yourself if it’s hype or if perhaps there’s something to it.

These principles are:

Whole Foods / “Naturalness”: the less processed the better
Nutrient Density: the more nutrients the better, and the more bioavailable the better
Anti-nutrients: minimize compounds like phytic acid in grains that trap nutrients so you can’t absorb them
Variety: eat enough variety in color of foods that you cover all the essential nutrients
Real Life Application: at the end of the day, do what makes you happy and works for your lifestyle and social life because

1. Whole Foods / “Naturalness”

Naturalness is how close a food is to its natural state when you eat it, i.e: the less processed a food is, the more natural, or whole it is.

The reason naturalness matters is because of our evolutionary history. Our bodies are very good at using compounds that you can find in food in nature, but very bad at dealing with most artificial compounds. This is because our bodies evolved in tandem with the natural foods we have eaten over the past few million years, and only in the last seventy years or so have artificial foods been heavily introduced, which coincides with our rising rates of chronic illness. This indicates that our bodies are designed to run on whole foods, not processed, and artificial foods. See the figure below for one example supporting the correlation between sugar (low in “Naturalness” because it is removed from the food it was part of), and obesity (a chronic illness).

Note sugar and flour consumption (mostly processed flour) vs obesity. Those in the overweight category likely were pushed into the obese category, which is why obesity rises but the overweight category remains the same [1]

An important note is that it’s not just about the chemical structure of the nutrients in food, it’s also about how nutrients interact with each other – food synergy. One example is how fruit is healthy, but fruit juice is not. The fiber and other nutrients in the fruit slow the digestion of sugar, but when you drink a lot of juice, this sugar quickly hits your bloodstream and stresses your metabolism. Even further processing the sugar and removing it and then eating it will be even worse for your body, even though it is the same molecule you are eating. Taking nutrients out and eating them does not have the same effect as when we eat them in a real food with other nutrients working together.

Since cooking has been around for millions of years, it is still considered natural, and actually improves the digestion of food in most cases. Furthermore, combining certain foods together actually has benefits. Cooking wouldn’t be considered bad even though it reduces the “naturalness” of the food.

Things to look out for:

Refined Sugar
- Includes added: sucrose, fructose, glucose, maltose, galactose, dextrose, and most things that end in -ose
Refined Flour
- Enriched wheat flour, white flour
Industrial Oils
- Includes: sunflower oil, soybean oil, canola oil / rapeseed oil, corn oil, safflower oil, cottonseed, and modified palm oil
Oils that are ok: coconut oil, palm oil, butter, olive oil, avocado oil, lard
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)
- Soybean, cotton, and corn are highly modified in the states, about 90% of production is GMO
- It is still unclear how GMOs affect our health, so be cautious as these foods are very low in “naturalness”
Multivitamins still haven’t shown a definite positive effect on health outcomes in studies – some show benefits, and others show no benefits – even though they add “all the right nutrients”. This is related to the synergy of nutrients discussed earlier [2]

2. Nutrition Density

Micronutrients of beef vs beef liver. Left: An ounce of beef – 28 grams – 45 calories, 0 grams of carbs, 1.3 grams of fat, 8.5 grams of protein. Right: An ounce of beef liver – 28 grams – 54 calories, 1.5 grams of carb, 1.5 grams of fat, 8.3 grams of protein. Note that the same amount of beef liver has much more micronutrients. Nutrition facts generated by www.cronometer.com

Nutrient density is the amount of nutrients you get from a food divided by its mass.

Nutrition facts show how much of each nutrient is in a food. You can take a look at our list of all nutrients to learn more, but to summarize, you should eat protein, fat, carbs, 12 vitamins, 16 minerals, and choline. Try to get to 100% of your daily value (%DV) of each nutrient each day.

Practice looking at nutrition facts, especially facts that show every nutrient, not just what is on the printed label. You can find these by using a tracker like MyFitnessPal or Cronometer. Compare hyped foods or diets to foods you know and see if they really hold up when it comes to the numbers. For example, if someone tells you a salad is healthier than a steak overall and that it’s usually healthier to eat a salad, ask them why? The most important part of a food is what nutrients it gives you, so does salad have more nutrients than steak? Compare the numbers with your friend.

At the end of the day we eat food to get nutrients. So, naturally, the best foods have the most nutrients. There is, however, one caveat which is that not every nutrient you eat gets absorbed into your body – aka bioavailability is a factor.

Bioavailability

Bioavailability is the amount of a nutrient you absorb and use divided by the amount you ate.

Typically, about 90% of macronutrients (fats, carbs, and proteins) are absorbed, but micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) are much more nuanced [3].

Micronutrients can come in different forms depending on what organism makes it. For example, the vitamin A in plants is actually called beta-carotene, which is different from the vitamin A in animals, which is called retinol. Beta-carotine gets converted into retinol in a 12:1 ratio, meaning 100% of your daily value from carrots really only gives you at most 8.33% of your vitamin A. Iron is another example. The form found in animals is called heme iron, whereas the form found in plants is called non-heme iron, which has much lower bioavailability [4].

Fortified foods also seem to have relatively low bioavailability, for example, the iron added in fortified wheat in one study only had a bioavailability of 4.6% [4].

Generally, animal foods have much higher bioavailability than plant foods when it comes to micronutrients.

There are also nutrients that increase the bioavailability of other nutrients. For example, taking Vitamin C with iron at the same time increases iron absorption by up to four times [5]. This may be why orange juice is recommended as part of breakfast with fortified cereals that often contain added iron. In general, natural foods have many synergistic effects like this that are hard to know about, which is why naturalness is the first category. On the other hand, compounds in grains, legumes, and nuts called phytates and tannins can reduce iron absorption by up to 50%.

Things to look out for:

Animal foods, which have higher bioavailability than plant foods
Food combinations that increase or decrease bioavailability of nutrients. E.g. oranges and breakfast cereal
The most common deficiencies: Iron, Iodine, Vitamin D, B12, Calcium, Vitamin A, and Magnesium
Eggs, which have different bioavailability than meats

As an interesting related note, take a look at our article on why we need braces to see the link between nutrient density and facial and dental formation.

3. Anti-nutrients

Antinutrients are compounds in food that reduce nutrient bioavailability directly or indirectly, and many also cause damage or irritability to the gut. In addition, since these compounds disrupt your digestive process, they may cause intestinal discomfort as bacteria digest these instead of you and cause gas and other symptoms

An animal runs away when you try to eat it, but a plant cannot. A plant defends itself by making compounds like antinutrients that harm its predators. They occur mostly in grains, beans, legumes, and nuts.

Here is a list of the most common ones [6]:

Phytic acid:
- Found in grains and legumes, it binds large percentages of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron, phosphorous, and zinc so that you can’t absorb them
- In some studies, up to 80% of phosphorous is bound and unusable in high phosphorous foods like pumpkin seeds, up to 80% in high zinc foods like chickpeas, and up to 40% in high-magnesium foods
- Inhibits key digestive enzymes like amylase needed to break down carbs, and pepsin, and trypsin both needed to break down protein
Gluten
- Found in wheat, barley, rye, spelt, semolina and other grains, but not in rice, corn, oats, millet and other grains
- Inhibits certain enzymes
- Causes gastrointestinal discomfort in some people
- Causes intestinal permeability (leaky gut) according to many studies, which means compounds go into your bloodstream that shouldn’t and is a primary factor in inflammation and autoimmune disease [7]
Tannins
- Found in coffee, tea, wine, grapes, cranberries, strawberries, blueberries, apples, apricots, barley, peaches, dry fruits, mint, basil, rosemary [8]
- Causes skin and tissue in the body to contract, binds to protein and other macromolecules making them less absorbable (lower bioavailability)
- Enzyme inhibitor
Oxalates
- Found in sesame seeds, soy beans, and black and brown millet
- Reduces the protein bioavailability of plant foods by a large amount, especially legumes
Lectins
- Found in high amounts in beans and wheat
- Not broken down by digestion, so they make it through to your intestines where they damage the gut lining as well as kill the gut lining cells, reduce digestion and absorption, change the gut microbiome, and contribute to autoimmune disease
- Can cause symptoms similar to food poisoning and cause immune responses like joint pain and rashes
Saponins
- Contribute to leaky gut, which predisposes the body to autoimmune disease
- Hard to digest in humans, and can enter bloodstream and cause immune reaction
Other: trypsin inhibitors, isoflavaones, solanine, chaconine

To reduce antinutrient content, cook grains, beans and legumes, and sprout and soak grains for extra reduction in antinutrients.

Not everyone experiences negative reactions from antinutrients, but they do lower nutrient absorption. In some cases, and in small amounts they can be beneficial, like the amounts found in leafy greens, fruits, and other vegetables [9].

For a deep dive on all things anti-nutrient, see our article on the carnivore diet.

4. Variety

So now you’re eating whole foods that are nutrient dense and don’t have many antinutrients in them, but now you’re only eating five different foods! A good diet also has a variety of foods to cover a variety of nutrients.

Two reasons why variety is good in diet is to cover all essential nutrients you need to live, and to promote a healthy microbiome – a relatively new field of study. Studies show that more diversity in the diet leads to more diversity in the microbiome, which is correlated with better health. Lack of microbiome diversity is linked to the development of disease. The microbiome serves many functions in the body including creating neurotransmitters and certain nutrients.

[9]

To check the variety of a diet, take the most common or touted foods of that diet, and add them into a nutrition tracker to see what a whole day of that diet would give you in nutrients. You can also short-cut this process by looking at the colors of the foods, which correlates with what nutrients are in the foods. Is the rainbow of colors found in this diet?

5. Real Life Application

Real life application of a diet is where rubber hits the road and you actually practice what you preach. How practical is this diet? How do you feel eating it? Do you have enough spirit food that makes you happy?

Part of the reason nutrition is so complex is that the ideal diet is different for everyone. Some may thrive on a vegetarian diet, and others may thrive on a carnivore diet. Each person is unique socially, psychologically, physiologically, and has unique lifestyles that demand different amounts of each nutrient.

Many people eat unconsciously, as in they don’t pay attention to the taste of their food or how it makes them feel during, after and even days after. Paying very close attention to how your food makes you feel before, during, and after you eat is very valuable for you to determine if the diet works for you specifically.

Often, those who are focused on high performance can obsess about the foods they eat to an unhealthy degree, and this impacts an even more important part of our lives: our work and social life. If you’re finding that you miss out on too many social experiences because of your healthy diet, then take a step back and ask if it’s worth it. Of course, don’t abandon your healthy lifestyle just to conform, but allow a certain amount of leeway for you to be flexible and enjoy time with your friends.

Some questions that define Real Life Application are:

Intuitive eating: how do you feel when eating and for hours after? Which specific foods do you notice sit well with you? Which ones bother you?
Social life: will this bring you closer to people who are good for you or further away? Does this diet restrict your social life too much? Do you worry about food too much, or are you at a happy balance between healthy eating and healthy socializing?
Cost: Is this diet within your budget? If not, what changes can you make to make it work? Could you make more food at home, or have certain staple foods that are inexpensive and still healthy?
Morals: how do you feel about the impact of your food choices on the world?

Conclusion

Our question was, “What Do I Eat?”, and our answer was to use 5 main factors to evaluate a diet plan based on 1. “Naturalness”, 2. Nutrition Density, 3. Antinutrients, 4. Variety, and 5. Real Life Application. Take a step back when you see the next new diet come along, and when the government or media makes recommendations, rise above the hype and take a look for yourself.