What Should I Eat?

So what should I eat? Oh, boy. Isn't that a question that we're all kind of wandering about wondering how to answer? Every author has their own solution. Every nutrition expert has their own bias. Every new bit of data tends to point to a different direction. So what is the story? Well, it's interesting because if we just look at a month's worth of nutritional literature, we can start to understand where maybe the forest exists with the trees. And I was reminded when I saw this issue of Time magazine that just appeared recently, maybe many of you saw it with the Rx cross there, the danger cross of the bacon, under the title the War on Delicious, in which they go and talk about this trend that we're getting towards increasing amount of animal products in our diet, that this has been hailed as the way of reducing insulin resistance and improving insulin sensitivity and reducing obesity and turning back the rising tide of diabetes. But yet they point out that when you start cooking these meats, particularly processed meat, that you end up producing all sorts of secondary chemicals, heterocyclic amines, they're called, and other things, nitrosamines, that are potentially harmful, cancer producing, dangerous and are not healthy. And in fact, the rendering of fat at high temperature can oxidize fats into secondary metabolites or oxidant products that are also not healthy. So they're starting to raise the question, is there something about the increasing consumption of animal derived products, particularly cooked animal derived products and processed products that are dangerous? Well, that takes us then into once again, this question of what do I eat? And I was very intrigued to find that when you start studying the urinary metabolic profile of meat eaters, so omni nutrition individuals to vegetarians, to ovolacto vegetarians, you start to see within their urine patterns of different metabolic breakdown products that are indicative of different metabolic consequences. And in fact, this was recently described in a paper that was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition under the title Metabolic Profiles for Meat Eaters, Fish Eaters, Vegetarians and Vegans. And what they basically showed is that you can actually start to define what diet a person's on, basically on the foundations of their urinary metabolites. And if you start looking at urinary metabolites from meat eaters, you find a lot of interesting rearranged nitrogenous compounds, some of which might be considered not so healthy. Now, where do these come from? Well, they not only come from the native metabolism of the protein, which is rich in nitrogen, because amino acids have nitrogen in them as carbohydrate and fats do not, but also from the bacterial metabolites, from the microbiome of the digestion of these meat protein, amino acids as well. So we start to say maybe there are other characteristics in an overly burdened animal based diet that would be associated with altered metabolism. So it's just kind of raising the question again, what kind of diet should I eat? Then we go into more recent paper that's just again, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Consumption of meat and its association with insulin and postprandial glucose levels. Now, we've been told that eating carbohydrate starchy foods increases your blood sugar, decreases your insulin sensitivity, meaning increasing the amount of insulin has to be secreted by the beta cells of your pancreas and therefore is not healthy. But yet in this particular study, looking at 50,345 Caucasians, they found that increased meat consumption was associated with increased insulin and increased dysglycemia, increased postprandial glucose. So in this case, meat is a culprit. Now it's interesting to note if you look at this paper more closely, they show that there are specific genotypes, specific SNPs that are more associated with elevation of blood sugar after eating meat than others. Now what does this say? The diet of one may not be the diet of another based upon genetic uniqueness, genetic history, there may be different in the way that we metabolize and process these diets. There's not going to be what shall I eat? One answer to all particular individuals. That's what appears to be coming from this type of data. Then lastly, what about the difference between whole foods versus partitioned foods in terms of their metabolic effects? Can we just say that starch is starch and fat is fat and protein is protein? Or must we look at, at the composition of the food in which that is derived, being it highly processed or unprocessed? And this paper was really again, a little illuminating. This comes from work of Tim Garvey at the University of Alabama School of Medicine. And he's discussing as an endocrinologist the difference in the consumption of whole foods versus macronutrient, defined kind of processed foods in their effect on insulin sensitivity, again showing that whole foods with the same carbohydrate and the same fat and protein ratio as other foods that are highly processed have a much lower glycemic effect, a much lower influence on release of insulin and release of glucose in this case. So what we're really talking about is the composition of the diet, not just the compartments of protein, carbohydrate, and fat. We're talking about genetic uniqueness. So we come back to what shall I eat? And the answer to this question is it depends on who you are. The one rule we can say, however, is staying away from highly processed foods are really going to be a good watchword for general selection habits. Staying away from cured, processed meats appears to be absolutely a good decision. And then balancing your minimally processed carbohydrate, rich whole starch, grain and legume and vegetable products with modest amounts of lean animal products appears to be a good prudent story to take away from this emerging literature. So there is no one perfect diet. It really has to be individualized. But there are general principles that I think are emerging that relate to the construction of what would be considered a healthy diet.