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What are some simple nutritional changes that most people can make to be healthier? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Gary Taubes, co-founder of NuSi, author The Case Against Sugar, on Quora:
From my perspective, changing your nutrition in favor of your health is pretty simple. The fundamental problem with modern diets is not the fat or calories we consume — the concept of “excess” is tautological — but the carbohydrates, particularly refined and easily digestible carbohydrates and added sugars. As such, I think the first and obvious nutritional change to make is to get rid of most to all of the added sugars we consume — i.e. cane and beet sugar (sucrose) and high fructose corn syrup. Now some form of these sugars are found in virtually every processed food on the market, often for reasons other than sweetness, but if we get rid of the obvious sources of sugars, we’ll be getting rid of the huge proportion of them. So these include sugary beverages — soft drinks, sports drinks, and fruit juices (sugar water with vitamins, in my world) — the sugary cereals, the sweets, pastries, and ice creams, and, my pet peeve, the foods or foodlike substances (thanks Michael Pollan for that term) that are advertised as healthy because they’re low in fat but add sucrose or high fructose corn syrup to make them edible, the iconic example being low- or no-fat fruity yogurt and “healthy” snack bars.
I realize the grinch-like nature of this advice, but I’m confident that most of us who simply stop eating these foods will eventually stop craving and missing them. We won’t need them to bring joy to our lives, as we do now, in the same way that former cigarette smokers, of which I am one, eventually get to the point that they not only don’t need cigarettes to make them happy or give their lives meaning, but can’t even imagine why they ever smoked.
After the sugars, I’d suggest getting rid of the refined grains next, the high-glycemic index breads and pastas, whether from white flour or whole wheat, that raise blood sugar in the short term and so do our bodies no favors, regardless of the vitamins contained.
If we’re predisposed to get fat and/or diabetic — i.e., if we have metabolic syndrome — and we tend to know who we are because we put on fat easily, then I’d also restrict starchy vegetables — potatoes, and yes, sweet potatoes, yams etc. If we’re metabolically healthy than these foods would be fine and probably would allow us to stay that way, but many to most of us aren’t.
Last note, for now, my research has led me to believe that high fat diets are better than low, so long as the carbohydrates discussed above are restricted. I think many people err when they try low-carb diets by trying to hedge their bets and go low fat and low -carb. So they avoid grains and sugars but then eat skinless chicken breasts and low-fat turkey meat. My reading of the evidence, suggests the naturally occurring animal fats — saturated or not — are beneficial here and so butter and fatty meats and fish are preferred. I could be wrong (and if so, I apologize) but you asked. After that I could speculate but even I would admit my judgment was approaching a coin toss in its likelihood to be right.
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