To think there is a poor understanding of a healthy diet?

I think you’re right. What would be a healthy diet for a vegetarian that means I get enough protein?

I feel like I’m struggling for protein at the moment.

@BrillantBriony wow, I thought my diet was good. In fact better than 80% of people. But yours is next level.

I'd love to be in a position to spend the time to do what you do. Because presumably your family support you with that.

I do abs everything in my house and cook something different for everyone. The only thing I can control is my own diet. My definition of success is not getting fat, eating 30g+ of fibre each day and maybe hitting 70g of protein.

Your food sounds incredible.

Interesting topic. And I completely agree with you there’s a wide spectrum in understanding of what a healthy diet is. And health and diet really trigger people.

Understandably, a healthy diet is expensive and time consuming. I’m currently on a juice fast 16 days and counting, a whole body cleanse to remove all the fillers the body has consumed over winter, once over I will transition to a raw diet, my dehydrator and spiraliser are sitting ready. As the summer progresses I will add eggs, then fish to my diet ready for winter.

Normally my diet would be:

11.00 Açai bowl - I add berries, a nut and chai seed mix I make, sprouted organic flaxseed.

17.00 spaghetti squash served with homemade vegan balls and tomato sauce, and salad (salad usually consists of roasted broccoli, fennel, and asparagus, lettuce etc).

other options are:

mackeral with quinoa, vegetables mixed into quinoa (finely chopped spinach, peppers, onions, carrots and green beans)

trout with sweet potato and salad (salad as above)

mussels and seafood mix cooked with spinach, tomato, chilli, onion and saffron served with buckwheat pasta.

large courgettes thinly sliced and grilled then filled and rolled with tofu blended mixture of basil, Spinach, nutritional yeast, and pine nut cooked in a tomato sauce.

weekends we will have poached eggs with a really delicious bread I get from a local farm shop made by a local woman.

snacks: nut mix I make with goji berries
chocolate (raw halo)
Carob bars (Caroboo)
‘Proper’ crisps
homemade hummus and crudités
homemade crisps using dehydrator
I will make my own chocolate bars which I do when I’m raw, my favourite is a healthier version of a snickers bar which includes making my own chocolate (not as hard as people think cocoa butter, cocoa powder, coconut oil sweetened with either maple syrup or Lucuma powder).

If I use sugar in food I tend to use piloncillo (the raw pure form of cane sugar)

Rice is a treat - quinoa is my go to rice substitute

And I’m about 90% organic

I do have days when I want to eat carbs and I have my treat recipes which I can whip up in 15 minutes. Our most recent favourite was a rice dish served with king prawns, bell peppers and spring onions. The sauce was something like fish sauce, soy sauce and oyster sauce. So simple, cooks in 10 minutes (including prep) and homemade. And green thai curry so easy to make once you can source down the galangal!

Of course we eat out our go to place in the countryside is a lovely farm restaurant where they use local produce, cote for their mussels, and a local Mexican restaurant. In London I love Vardo and Colberts. We never do takeaways if I crave a takeaway it’s a sign that I don’t want to cook and we just go to a restaurant. If we can’t afford it I suck it up and cook and do the restaurant as soon as we have that extra cash.

I will cook meat for my partner, sometimes I might eat it, but currently my body just wants to cleanse and feel clean. Having completed many 30 day juice fasts I do think we have been sold a complete lie and misconception about what our body needs to feel healthy and sustained. All in the name of consumerism for capitalism.

I eat this way not because I’m trying to be super slim but because I love it. I’m in my 40s and have been choosing organic since I could afford to buy my own food (18), I’m not riding the wave of a consumer trend, I’m doing something that I gravitated to when I was very young. I love food, I love experimenting with food, and most importantly I love my body (I’m not talking about how it looks) and I’m proud of my body.

If you can say you love your body then you’re doing something right so if it feels right and it works for you then keep doing it.

Times of war, conflict and famine show that it is ultimately calories in v calories out.

Calories in vs out still applies to people with insulin resistance, it's just the type of food and timing needs to be considered too; so whilst not as simply as just counting calories, people aren't putting on weight and/or not losing even when they're heavily restricting as long as they are mindful about what they are eating which lots of people struggle to do for various reasons.

Weight control is about calories in an calories out. I get that the diet you having been following for a few months has worked well for you (assuming your lipid profile and Hba1c is good) but that doesn't mean everyone who eats carbs will be overweight. I eat similarly to OP and also fish because that is my preference and always has been. I am nearly 60 and I don't think my BMI has ever been over 21 my entire life.

… where is the rigorously researched published evidence then?

Rather than referring to people who largely appear to do the rounds of Joe Rogan/Diary of a CEO/Mel Robbins type podcasts as part of their sales pitch?

But it is calories in, calories out. There is absolutely no evidence otherwise.
Low carb means you might adhere to a low calorie diet better because you are eating more satiating food. That’s the trick behind low carb, behind the Blood Sugar Diet and any other magical way of eating that Big Diet/Healthcare/Pharma/NHS won’t adopt and prescribe to everyone besides they’re just SO UNINFORMED!

This is exactly the level of misunderstanding I’m talking about.

It absolutely is proven that many, many things affect how our bodies use calories, yet you and many others still believe we work like a car engine. It’s honestly baffling.

I’m with @picturethispatsy - I’m out. The level of understanding on this thread is woeful.

😂

But it is calories in, calories out. There is absolutely no evidence otherwise.

Low carb means you might adhere to a low calorie diet better because you are eating more satiating food. That’s the trick behind low carb, behind the Blood Sugar Diet and any other magical way of eating that Big Diet/Healthcare/Pharma/NHS won’t adopt and prescribe to everyone besides they’re just SO UNINFORMED!

It doesn’t mean it’s incorrect or wrong to eat that way, because if it helps you stick to a diet without significant deprivation and lose weight then that’s a good diet for you.

I would be really careful in combining the word “science backed” and the Glucose Goddess in the same sentence. She’s a charlatan of the highest order.

What a strange thing to assume about how I spend my time. I take an interest in health as I am a parent and want to give my children the best I can. I spend a normal amount of time reading about health and listening to podcasts thanks. I am a busy person who home educates their children. This information about fat is common knowledge. You don’t need to spend hours and hours researching and digging.

I’m surprised that you haven’t come across this as a person deeply invested in the research.

Anyway I’m done with this conversation now, it’s clear you don’t want to believe anything other than the outdated, debunked theory and are wedded to what you perceive to be ‘the truth’ so I’m out of this thread. I wish you all the best wombat.

Oh, and the NHS and Department of Health refuses to respond to any of it and prefers its outdated recommendations.

And yet there’s still so much misinformation out there!

If you take MN as a gauge, people still believe weight control is simply about calories in calories out, they don’t understand (or believe in) the role of blood glucose stability and insulin, they DEFINITELY don’t understand the role of hormones, they don’t understand that we need protein and fat (and that fat doesn’t make you fat).

There have been some excellent high profile proponents of this stuff (Michael Moseley, Tim Spector, Jessie Inchauspe) — all science-backed - and yet still people think toast, low-fat yogurt, eating like a bird and heading off to Slimming World every January will make them healthy.

Gosh, you're a bit out of date! People have come out and said this, and written their best-selling diet books about it, and people have pontificated about it online for decades now.

What do you mean when you say your lipid profiles are perfect? Why do you spend so much time researching if you are a perfect weight, and have a perfect lipid profile and presumably hba1c levels?

Clearly. Clear as mud.

Ok thanks for the advice 😆 (but I already have and my lipid profiles are perfect thanks. I will continue to eat all the butter, full fat dairy, grass fed meat and coconuts and enjoy them too 😂).

Why are you reading a lot of research to see whether you are eating a good diet with regard to your risk of heart disease and diabetes?. Presumably you have never been overweight and if your lipid profiles and Hba1c are good, carry on.

The people who have looked at the evidence and produced the guidance have clearly decided that overall it demonstrates saturated fat increases ldl cholesterol (which means it will increase the risk of heart disease).

Rather than spending hours searching through evidence why not get your lipid profiles checked?

Look at it this way.

We have whole diet industries based upon high carb/low fat diets.

The food industry in general is based upon the previous message that fat = bad and carbs = good. Which only came about in the first place because gram for gram fat has more calories than carbs. But people who eat healthily but have higher fat diets tend to consume few calories overall because of the increased satiety and reduced snacking.

There is a lot of money and business tied up in it.

How easy do you think it would be to change an entire culture around eating?

I generally only venture into the fruit (because I do eat some), veg, dairy and meat aisles at the supermarket because the rest of them are pure carbs. Packet foods, jarred foods, pre-prepared foods all filled with carbs. It's really hard to find anything premade that isn't loaded with unnecessary carbs. Going out for dinner is difficult because eg sauces aren't made with real ingredients, they're bought in junk filled with crap. Because it's cheaper.

People have been eating low fat/high carb diets from so long, many wouldn't know where to start. These food stuffs are promoted as part of healthy living - 'healthy' ready meals for example. There was a comparison done once between the nutritional value of 'healthy'ready meals and bog standard or even value ones. There was barely any difference. The 'healthy' ones were no better for anyone than the cheap crap ones. But people believed they were. I've looked myself. Very little difference.

And, if you read a lot of research then you should also know that research is shelved if the findings do not support the desired hypothesis.

And findings can be manipulated.

If someone came out and publicly announced that a moderate amount of saturated fat wasn't an issue if the rest of your diet is (actually) healthy but people really should be cutting down on carbs on a huge scale because sugar is the real culprit, where wpuld the governemnt, food industeies, hospitality and average households even start?

i agree sugar is the culprit
they may eat carbs in korea and japan but i bet they dont consume sugar

Yes processed. Not ultra processed.

The ingredients today in white bread are not the same as in the 70s. Same with most other food. Even vegetables have been developed to be sweeter.

For every study saying saturated fat causes heart disease you’ll get another saying there is no correlation between heart disease and saturated fats. Especially the kind that are natural like butter, dairy in it’s original form, coconut products & meat.

I truly think that scientists don’t know. I also think that it’s not as black and white as eat this food = disease. There have to be SO many other factors involved such as stress levels including loneliness and lack of community and support, exercise or lack of, genetics, environment (artificial light exposure/lack of sunlight, sedentary lifestyle, toxins, air pollution, microplastics etc etc) and sleep quality.

The longitudinal studies don’t really bear out that saturated fats are just fine at a population level. They need more research. I’m personally of the view they are okay IF the rest of your diet is broadly Mediterranean in style.

The 2 long data sets in the States (Nurses Health and Health Professionals Follow-up) still comes up as recently as this year that healthy ageing revolves around a diet of vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, whole grains, unsaturated fats and low fat dairy. Unhealthy ageing is associated with a diet of trans fats, sodium, sugary beverages and red or processed meats (or both). Healthy ageing is defined as reaching 70 with no chronic health problems.

Funnily enough the researchers found fruit was the most strongly associated dietary factor for healthy ageing 😆

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03570-5

That is fascinating!

And if you certainly look at the top 25 there is a whole range of differing national diets and cuisines - including diets not typically thought of as super healthy.

List of countries by life expectancy - Wikipedia