Bring our diets back to basics

Some friends of mine showed up over the Labor Day holiday weekend and got a chance to meet some new people. Since I was introduced as the president of the Ocular Nutrition Society, I obviously got a few questions about what to eat and how to lose weight. Interestingly, we had interactions mostly over huge meals, which I thought was pretty ironic – but that’s what you do on holidays.

However, I did try to address concerns for the 65-year-old male who weighed in at about 265 pounds and wanted to get down to 200 pounds. After a few general questions about his health history, diet, medications and supplements, I made a few broad suggestions that I’ve found to help lose weight but still maintain a satisfied diet. (I never tell people to just stop eating).

It wasn’t until a few hours later (after they had left) that his sister mentioned to me that he had heart issues and had a stent. He never mentioned it, and she relayed that his distrust of “regular doctors” was deep seated and he was trying to “do it himself,” without medications and just with nutrition.

While I obviously support a nutritional approach to optimum health as well as good vision, I also think that a more integrative approach should be considered. I won’t tell people to stop taking statins (even though I think they are grossly over-prescribed), but I tell them to consider asking their doctor to reduce their dosage. Or, as in this case, I don’t tell people to stop drinking coffee if they have borderline high blood pressure; I just tell them to reduce it to one cup a day.

One of the problems that I see in the diet industry is the promotion of the “all-or-none” approach. We categorize diets as meat/high protein or vegetarian or lactovegetarian or ovolactovegetarian or pescatarian or whatever other combination fits our liking. The fact is that there are a multitude of variations in dietary intake and no one rule fits all conditions or populations.

Think about the different diets out there, with the most popular now being the paleo diet or the Atkins diet or the vegan diet or the raw food diet. Truth be told, all of these diets do work. So, if they are all different, why do they all work? What do they all have in common? For the most part, they all reduce the intake of sugars (especially simple sugars) and rely on less processed foods (a.k.a., “real” food).

I’ve blogged before about how our diets are so different from our grandparents and that the food they ate is not the same as the food we eat. They didn’t have genetically modified organism foods on the table and weren’t as concerned about high fat content. Their food was less processed and typically grown locally. However, those days are over, given the massive “big agra” influence over our foods.

It won’t be until we get back to basics on our food supply (starting with farmer’s markets and organic food) that we’ll start to turn the corner on using food as medicine. Until then, we’ll still rely on “big pharma” to give us the drugs to control diseases created by the foods we eat.

I just saw a saying the other day that rings true: “People are fed by a food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food” (Wendell Berry).