I will NEVER diet or follow nutritional advice again

[holmessweetholmes]

I thought I was pretty clued up on healthy eating and on why certain foods were good or bad. Then I read 'In Defence of Food' by Michael Pollan. It is astonishing to read about how utterly clueless, completely untrue, or often deliberately misleading, official nutritional advice is. And incredible how simple it is to eat healthily. Anyone who has ever dieted/low carbed/low anythinged should read this book.

I must admit I struggle to see sugar free muesli as a baddie! Important not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

For me muesli is a baddie as after I eat it I feel knackered. I can tell her quickly what foods don't work for me from how I feel 10 minutes afterwards. Portion size is the same. If I eat too much I feel sleepy and I hate that. So a perfect lunch for me is small amount of protein/carb, healthy size portion of veggie/salad. Then I feel bright and energetic still.

BravePotato - I am not in favour of vitamin pills, and agree that a balanced diet will supply everything one needs. I also don't do 5 a day. I eat a balanced diet which includes fruit and veg in every meal, and don't feel the need to count them.

People above are guilty of the things which the Pollen book is against, and are talking about good foods and bad foods, being naughty, and demonising foods. I certainly am not evangelical about the way I eat (which is a pretty old fashioned view) as food has been medicalised into components and psychology is so involved in people's reaction and attitudes to food now. It is amazing what our brains can trick our bodies into thinking and doing (placebo effect anyone?), and so much of people's perception of nutrition is bound into this. Too complicated for me, and hey - whatever floats your boat. However, we are raising a generation of people who are seriously screwed in terms of attitudes towards food and their bodies.

Eat whole foods simply prepared, eat with people who are all sharing the same food, and make it pleasurable.

Thanks for this thread, OP, and everyone who has shared links - very informative.

Couple of questions: do we still have to worry about cholesterol?

Does everyone eat brown rice and pasta - did your insides cope with transition from white?

What is the verdict on soya products?

Brown rice and brown pasta? In general no. Why? Japanese people are the longest lived and thinnest people on this planet, despite all the white rice and white noodles they eat.

Brown pasta? Yuck.

Soy is fine in the form it was meant to be eaten, in dishes created for it. Soy as a substitute. Yuck.

Cholesterol? Some people which certain metabolic disorders need to worry about cholesterol in relation to CHD. Have you read the book Outliers? Very interesting story about a small town in Pennsylvania which extremely low incidence of CHD. Do they eat differently? Nope, the same junk most other Americans eat. HOWEVER, they had an extremely socially integrated life and the families who lived in that small town all had ancestors who came from the same village in Italy.

I suppose in this weather I eat loads of salad. But souped up ones with loads of ingredients and protein.

I was out for lunch today with dh and had an incredible one where they put what you want in it, I went for the seared tuna and added the rest Plus a glass of prosecco. All very nice.

Mominateix, I also have a hatred of brown pasta.

I thought that was irrational. Maybe it still is, but at least I am not alone.

Durum wheat pasta is delicious, brown pasta tastes like boiled bread, all wrong.

I love brown rice and whole wheat pasta but we tend to eat a lot of white rice and pasta. Asian cultures have also survived and lived long lives (til more recently maybe) on white rice.

I think we need to be more concerned about wheat to be honest, whether it's white or wholewheat. I do buy bread from shops but I think it's basically rubbish. I really do need to bake bread at home.

What Mominatrix said. On all counts! When you have spent possibly decades worrying about what you put in your mouth, it is very hard to let that go. I am firmly of the opinion that we should be thinking about all the good stuff we SHOULD be eating and not demonising foods.

This is a very similar message to John Briffa with Escape the Diet Trap. That was a lightbulb moment for me

Eating just pure, fresh and healthy foods is a great way to eat but some of us need to do more than that for weight loss. I am very overweight and have lost the first 3 stone of it by low-carbing which, to me, seems like a reasonable compromise

That's good going Scousadelic.

I do just eat what I like these days, but that has really changed since my 20s. I wasn't overweight then however, just fairly uninspiring food. I'd do the usual pret sandwich at lunch, crisps every night, lack lustre chocolate. Still slim but the food wasn't the tastiest.

This all sounds good. I am being slow here though. Please can someone explain why a full fat yogurt is going to be more beneficial to me than, say, a muller light, if I'm trying to loose weight? I know I should know the answer to this

Because natural full fat yoghurt is made of actual food, which will nourish you and fill you up. Muller light is made of absolute crap here . Artificial sweeteners, thickeners, flavourings.

^ Yes! Also, the natural full-fat yoghurt has a lovely mouthfeel - creamy, rich, and, speaking in more chemically/scientific terms, will fill you up faster due to the chemical signals triggered by the presence of fat.

Marsha, your talk of summer foods makes me miss home (which I will be going back to in a few weeks!). Summer foods in the house I grew up in were traditional Korean summer foods. Loads of ssam - various lettuces, grown in my Mum's garden, used to wrap rice, kimchee, vegetable banchan, and small amount of grilled meat or fish. We also eat loads of noodles dishes. Cold soba noodles topped with julienned cucumber and seaweed, dipped in a soy based dipping sauce. Also nnaeng myun - yam noodles in a cold clear beef consommé with pickled cabbage and thinly sliced boiled beef. Bibim nnaeng myun: the yam noodles in a spicy chili and red bean sauce with julienned cucumber and carrot. Hwae dup gap: assorted sashimi served on rice with a spicy chill and bean sauce. Can't wait!

Sounds delicious Mominatrix! What amazing food, I can imagine it.

I go back for the rare roast beef and crayfish with homemade mayonnaise sometimes. It's worth the flight.

Have a lovely holiday!

Mmm! Mominatrix that all sounds gorgeous!

Scousadelic - I know what you mean. I had a lot of weight to lose a few years back. I lost quite a bit by just cutting calorw and exercising. But I found it hard to keep going because of feeling deprived and falling off the waggon. That's why I turned to low carb, paleo etc. But ultimately no diet is going to work unless you can do it forever. And I don't want to spend forever fighting with myself and not enjoying my food.

Re the full fat yoghurt, the thing is even for weight loss, you don't want to be aiming for no calories. You want calories, enough to make your body feel you are not starving, but not too much. The best way to do this is to eat real and satisfying food that makes your body think (in a chemical sense) "I'm being well fed, I can release energy". It also makes you feel full, so you are not hungry again 30 mins later.

If you eat fat free, sugar free stuff you have the experience of eating but your body thinks "shit no nutrients, not enough calories, things must be bad". The chemical response is to tell you to crave and seek out calorific food and pack it on as fat instead of releasing energy. This is one reason crash dieting makes people fat - you are telling your body that you are starving, it responds by making you eat and store fat to guard against starvation.

Also to make "diet" food, normal food is processed quite a bit then chemicals like sweetener are added to it. I saw on a programme that skimmed milk has a white colour added to it as it would actually be blue.
Regular milk (yoghurt) are only about 4% fat anyway. That's not really high.

Mominatrix that food you've described sounds amazing. I'd love to able to cook that kind of stuff. Maybe I should get a Korean cookbook :)

I've just read this full thread.

I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself. As an educated, professional 40 something, I still don't know what natural food is.

For example, home made bread and full fat butter - this is ok for you? Full fat milk is better? Mash, made with butter and milk is ok and not 'bad food'' ?

These are just the examples I can think of!

Home made bread and butter is great stuff - as part of a balanced diet with plenty of other similarly old-fashioned dishes, like vegetables and fruit and fish and meat and cheese and nuts. After all, all that goes into home made bread is wheat, yeast or sour-dough, water, salt and perhaps a bit of honey or sugar. So is mash made with butter and milk. It's potatoes, some milk, some butter and some salt and pepper.

I think the problem is when people start labelling these perfectly healthy, ordinary, nutritious foods as 'bad' or 'good'. It's just bread and potatoes and butter and milk - they don't have any moral judgements.

When I say good food I mean good ingredients and it tastes nice. It's shorthand and easy. I think it's fine to use, it's just a more efficient way to say the latter.

Sissy - that is exactly the problem! We have lost sight of what real food is! If you are struggling to work out whether a food is real, natural food, think about whether it would have been available (in that form) to your great, great grandmother.

And no, mash with butter is not a bad food. Sure, if you ate huge piles of it every day it would not be ideal, but that is the point. A proper balanced diet should include fatty things, some starchy things, meat etc balanced by plenty of veg. There was not an obesity crisis in our great great grandparents' time. And less cancer, diabetes and heart disease. And yet they were eating butter, lard, loads of stuff that we have been told is bad.

People then would have died of other stuff of course, but we are lucky enough to have modern medical treatment. It's a shame we are wasting our potential for better health and healthier long life by stuffing ourselves with such rubbish.

Goodness - apologies for sounding so evangelical! This is all very new to me too really (although my recent phase of low carb and paleo had already made me cut out most of the crap), and it's been quite a while since I believed in the low fat diet.

For me, the difference this particular book has made is the feeling of letting go of all that diet-baggage and choosing real foods because I like and enjoy them. The pleasure of thinking 'Mmm - what shall we eat today?' Instead of working out how to make a meal containing nothing too 'bad'.

So by good ingredients do we mean fruit/veg/natural things.

Is Asda fruit and veg/etc ok?

Does any home cooked food fit the bill? FRom creamy pasta and garlic bread to fish and veg?

I wouldn't write off cucumber as a snack because it doesn't have many calories and nutrients. Sometimes that not what you desire. Sometimes it's lovely to munch and crunch through it because it's tasty and crunchy and refreshing. Also the perfect vehicle for hummus.