I don’t think I was explicit enough in my earlier post about dietary goals, so I’m going to take a moment here to be more explicit and clear about this.
Why am I even defining goals?
I think a diet that includes a lot of delighting in meat can be a really healthy diet, but I think I should scrutinize this idea and not just assume it is true because I like it.
(I have been delighting in meat a lot since my departure from my vegan diet. When I was vegan, I had a pretty extreme, simple, and, I believe, healthy diet. I also became very confident that my diet was healthy, and my confidence that my diet is healthy has persisted even though I am eating a lot of meat now. What gives? One possibility is that I’m deluded and I have just found a way to be comfortable with my regression to a standard western unhealthy meat-centric diet. Another possibility is that you can really fit quite a bit of meat into a healthy diet. I think it is the latter, but I want to scrutinize this some by seeing if my diet can meet some healthy-diet standards.)
Why not define goals in terms of nutrient composition?
I used to pay a lot of attention to nutrient composition, and I don’t like the way it encourages a strict accounting approach to diet, and I don’t like the way it encourages avoiding various foods.
Nutrient composition goals can be met without eating any whole foods. The importance of eating whole foods was clearly explained to me by my mother in the early ‘80s and by Michael Pollan in his In Defense of Food (2009). The experts who provide nutrient composition goals might not know everything. They might not know of every nutrient that you need to live. They certainly have identified some things (certain vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients) that exist in whole foods that we need to live, but that does not mean they have identified everything that exists in whole foods that we need to live. Humans have survived for millions of years eating a variety of whole foods. No expert’s nutrient composition goals has a track record that is this impressive.
However, I agree with the general idea that you can learn more about something by looking at it from different angles. I should consider scrutinizing the exciting meat-inclusive diet from the perspective of nutrient composition.
If I meet my dietary goals, will I know that my diet is healthy?
Well, no. Of course, not. Answering this question accurately is easy. “Know” is a high bar.
But I wanted to clarify what I’m trying to do here. Whether my strategy for doing this will work or even seems promising is a separate question, which I'll get to.
Why define goals in terms of amounts of various foods?
At first glance, this approach seems stupid. To meet my goals, I need to eat slightly more than 1400 pounds of arguably healthy foods. But if I do this and then add in 1400 pounds of chocolate cake, I will still have met my goals. I am going to solve this problem by not eating 1400 pounds of chocolate cake.
As I noted in my earlier post, one advantage of defining goals in terms of amounts of foods that must be included is that I can completely avoid don’t-eat-this or don’t-eat-more-than-this-amount-of-that rules.
Also, this approach might really work. If you eat enough good food and don’t eat too much over all, you might not even need to think about avoiding or not eating too much of bad foods. Even a super reasonable writer like Michael Pollan is pretty negative about refined carbohydrates. I think we should chill on refined carbs and freak out on low levels of whole foods. The problem with big mac and fries is that it’s not a big mac and fries and a winter squash and a head of cabbage. (yeah, it should be an organic, grass fed big mac and fries, but adding the squash and cabbage is a more important change.) The high refined carb diets associated with obesity and adult-onset diabetes I think are diets that are typically low in whole foods, but the problem with the diet is usually described as the presence of a lot of refined carbs and not as the absence of beans, whole grains, vegetables and fruits.
My set of goals do not seem like a fool-proof plan to achieve a healthy diet, but do we have any evidence that anyone has ever followed a diet that met these goals that we would also identify as an unhealthy diet overall? I don’t think so. Evidence abounds that millions of people eat an unhealthy diet. But I don’t think we have evidence that any one of these people has also met my dietary goals. So I think it would be pre-mature to conclude that my set of goals is not a good guide to a healthy diet simply because they do not logically guarantee a healthy diet.
Love the food quantitatively.
This is just another reason for defining goals in terms of amounts of various foods, but I want to call attention to it.
I’m super positive about the love-the-food approach to food, especially to vegetables and to other foods from plants. In the love-the-food approach to food, you take some food … like cavolo nero
and you look at how beautiful it is, and you think about all the wonderful nutrients that are in it. So rich in beta carotene, vitamin C, vitamin K, and manganese. You ponder its long rich history in the cuisine of Tuscany. You go to the store and you find the wonderful leaves. You bring them home cook them and eat with much enthusiasm. And then you blog about them and read other people’s blogs about them and you see if Alton Brown has an episode about cavolo nero.
This is great, but way more than my set of dietary goals are not a fool-proof plan to a healthy diet, the love-the-food approach to food is REALLY not a fool-proof plan to a healthy diet. You can follow your cavolo nero with a milk shake, and tomorrow … well, I just had cavolo nero yesterday, so today I’ll just have the milkshake.
So what I want to do is embrace the love-the-food approach to food and healthy eating, but actually build it up to an effective strategy for healthy eating. To do this, just make it quantitative. E.g., 20 pounds of cavolo nero this year. Do this with a large number of healthy nutritious foods you want to eat, and you have a healthy eating strategy -- one that might be really effective.
Points to clarify in future posts
I think some things about this set of goals could still seem confusing, so there are some things I plan to address in future posts.
Basically, I need to address whether trying to follow this strategy will even work. There are a couple of reasons why just trying to follow this strategy might not work.
1. Accounting would seem like a pretty big challenge and it turns out it is horrendous. I’ve been simplifying the set of goals to get to something that allows for simpler accounting. More on this later.
2. Are these goals achievable? Those large numbers could make it look like a lot of food.
I don’t know whether I’ll achieve these goals (or the simplified goals I mentioned above). I will provide a progress report soon. But a few comments here.
The numbers are not crazy. We don’t usually think about an amount of food in terms of pounds per year. But if you eat 5 ounces of some food every day, you will have eaten more than 100 pounds in a year.
It’s orange season here. I have been getting large California navels. One orange can weight a full pound, and most I have checked weigh more than three-quarters of a pound.
Also, I really should have seen this coming more clearly. Trying to measure what I am eating is affecting what I am eating. I was interested in showing quantitatively that eating a significant amount of refined carbs is totally compatible with a healthy diet, but I find myself making the whole grain choice a lot more often than I was recently. Although I think refined carbs are ok, I definitely agree that whole grains are better, and I’m getting a little too excited about eating healthy. However, I don’t think that the effect that thinking about a food choice has on the food choice makes the food choice false. I still ate it.
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