What I set out to do when I was looking at the nutrition research over time was to understand why so many physicians believe low carbohydrate or Paleo type diets to be harmful. I expected I would find significant research explaining the ideas that we docs have been prescribing for years. And I did gain some understanding of where they are coming from… You will have to wait for another post to get those details.
The short answer is, we were doing the best we could with the information we had and yes our information has been skewed by multiple factors which include but are not only political and economic reasoning. Just so you don’t get too biased, many nutrition studies looked at what people were eating and did not simply recommend a typical American diet. The logic used to create hypotheses was often sound and some of the research bears out the ideas that complex carb diet can be beneficial. The biggest problem with say the mediterranean diet – one most doctors recommend is not the diet itself, it’s how it is applied by people. And I have a lot of compassion for why people translate mediterranean into high carb eating that is not grounded in complex carbs and doesn’t have enough fat or fish. More on that in another post too. Another thing to consider is that not everyone, in fact not most of the population, can afford to eat a truly paleo diet, shopping at whole foods for wild caught salmon 100% grasss fed beef, organic soy free corn free pastured eggs at 8$ a dozen. And the real issue, across the board with all these diets is we aren’t eating enough veggies. That’s not about money, or time, or access. That’s about palatability and our stress levels dictating what we eat. That’s my diatribe for now… let’s get to these articles. (more posts coming soon)
