Context is everything, and the context within which we buy into nutrition fads that both help and hurt us at the same time can make things worse instead of better. Short-sighted “solutions” (in quotes) can therefore worsen our global metabolic disaster of obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic diseases. Processed food inadvertently funded by the government since the 1973 Farm Bill created an obesity epidemic that turned into a pandemic with global free trade. Processed food creates an addictive eating pattern: If you take a perfectly normal person not addicted to anything and feed them a donut, their blood-sugar drops from the insulin response, triggering cortisol to break down muscle and driving up hunger for the next 24 hours (not only for food in general, but for more of the same thing that caused the problem to begin with). This effect is known, and yet we generally keep treating metabolic disease (and nutrition in general) as a problem of eating either too many Calories or carbs when our body needs both in the form of healthy food.  Healthy food enables physiological and psychological function as opposed to processed foods that do the opposite in a vicious cycle with an addictive pattern. THIS NARRATIVE IS IN AUDIO FORM (BELOW) & CONTINUES BELOW THE SHORT VIDEOS…

NOW BACK TO THE TEXT OF THE ABOVE AUDIO FILE…

WHY FASTING IS TODDLER NUTRITION:

Food is a foreign substance until proven otherwise by our gut bacteria, so even healthy food at first creates some inflammation until that food gets our microbiome’s approval. Food can also enable cell function beyond what is immediately needed, accelerating protein and energy production to the point that damaged proteins are not cleared out as fast and cells turn over faster. Caloric restriction therefore creates a cellular cleanse and slows aging. However, cells need protein and other nutrients besides fats every moment they are alive. Skipping eating entirely therefore requires your lean tissue to be broken down: When you don’t eat, your body is forced to eat itself, not only its fat but also its muscle. Low blood sugar lowers cognitive function by the same percentage as the blood sugar itself because the brain is unable to maintain consciousness at its high rate of nerve signaling without glucose. Fasting abandons our cells with what feels like an easy out of eating nothing since you don’t notice much hunger at the time. This implies we don’t benefit from healthy food when we have not eaten in 12 hours since dinner the night before. But then we feel a need to overeat in the evening shortly before bed. This increases body fat at night and loses muscle the next morning. We would not treat our children, pets, or our car this way. We feed them when they need food and cut them off when their cravings hurt them. I know a clinical dietitian who forces their kids to eat breakfast and feeds their cat in the morning but they themselves do not eat breakfast because (quote) “they need to eat but I am not hungry in the morning, so I don’t.” Somehow, our logic reverses into absurdity when it comes to ourselves if we neither want to eat breakfast nor want to restrict our eating in the evening. This is a clear failure to parent ourselves even when we are properly parenting others: Fasting is toddler nutrition, not a scientific breakthrough.

WHY KETO IS A 1/2 TRUTH THAT HURTS THE PEOPLE NEEDING HELP THE MOST:

Like intermittent fasting, keto diets outside their proper context are “so bad they are not even wrong,” meaning so illogical it is a wonder they need to be argued against. Ketosis is mainly a brain adaptation to use ketones generated from fats by the liver. At least one-third of the brain’s fuel must come from glucose (even in the deepest ketosis) because of the faster fueling requirements of inhibitory neurons. This third of the brain’s fuel that must be glucose is made from glycerol from triglycerides by the liver. But an active lifestyle can easily use up that glucose, triggering the brain to break down muscle so the liver can convert amino acids into glucose. In other words, whether you are in ketosis or not, an excessively low blood sugar forces the brain to eat your muscle as a fuel source by recruiting your hormones and liver to support its function, which includes consciousness and mental health: Rapid weight loss, chronically low blood sugar, and athletic overtraining (84% of which stems from under-nutrition, in particular low carbohydrate intake) are all associated with depression at a clinical magnitude because of the failed function of inhibitory neurons even when no underlying depression exists. Fasting and ketosis or the combination of both are therefore not inherently wrong but rather taken out of context for those needing their benefits the most, which is society at large and the individuals within society falling victim to the pandemic of metabolic disease. Any solution to reduce the accumulation of lipids and inflammation that simultaneously lowers brain function and muscle metabolic rate lowers our psychological quality of life immediately and physiological health in the long term. It is a noble effort to burn up lipids accumulated within central organs (ectopically) or around them (viscerally as belly fat) in the short term. But these well-intentioned efforts can shift the problem from lipid accumulation to a loss of muscle metabolic rate that (ironically) reduces the ability to burn lipids. Burning up fuel by burning up the engine at the same time is a continual loss of what is burning up the fuel to begin with. When our car runs out of gas it stops working, but our body does not have that option, so it burns up both its fat and lean tissue to keep going.

WHY THE PROTEIN MINDSET IS NARROW TO A FAULT:

Perhaps the most out-of-context and therefore most absurd nutrition concept is the high-protein diet. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which in turn are the building blocks of our cells and therefore us. Our DNA encodes the amino acid sequences making up our proteins, which therefore encodes who we physically are and how we function, including the function of our mind. It therefore makes sense that we would need to eat protein, and that fully meeting our body’s protein needs would avoid a loss in protein production that would undercut our cellular vitality and our exercise recovery. But amino acids are building blocks, like bricks on a construction site for a building. Without other nutrients and workers (meaning energy) to put those bricks together, they will just sit in a pile instead of creating structure. Gorging on protein by itself assumes the bricks will somehow put themselves together on their own. Overtrained athletes average 4 as opposed to the 8 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram body weight per day eaten by healthy athletes: It is carbohydrate that accelerates the protein production process. Protein smoothies and bars consumed without a fuel source will piss the protein into the wind since our body does not store any extra protein it cannot assemble immediately. Most people produce new protein in the range of 3 to 6 grams per kilogram body weight per day depending on their exercise recovery needs and life stage (such as age, pregnancy, or during lactation). But this production cannot be realized without A) quality sleep to accelerate DNA gene expression to encode the protein, B) balanced nutrition to support the production and use of protein, and C) stress management to avoid the breakdown of protein as a resource. Simply focusing on protein while ignoring the context within which it is useful is no better than throwing new engine parts on a car’s engine in the hopes that when you come back the next day the engine will somehow have fixed itself on its own. This concept is so bad that it is not even wrong.

MEDICAL WEIGHT LOSS WITHOUT HEALTHY LIFESTYLE ABANDONS THE BODY:

The top 4 absurdities of nutrition are rounded out by how we are approaching the use of Ozempic-type weight-loss medications. These meds can be critically important for diabetics because they slow stomach emptying, potentiate insulin release, reduce hunger, and provide other benefits. But using them for weight loss without the simultaneous consideration of nutrition to maintain skeletal muscle metabolic rate can easily create a potentially unsustainable circumstance for someone whose lipid accumulation is already in part due to the loss of muscle from years of poor nutrition, low activity levels, high stress, poor sleep quality, natural aging, or a combination of these. Medications are an emergency response to morbidities and side effects are both common and even expected, but when those side effects potentially worsen the long-term outcome of the very condition they are targeting, it becomes paramount to not only avoid those side effects but to preclude them entirely. Avoiding muscle loss is in theory simple because it is based on the 4 key lifestyle parameters of good nutrition, physical activity, quality sleep, and stress management. And many physicians are undoubtedly discussing these things with their patients. But the use of these medications without taking action on these discussions ultimately risks making things worse rather than better in the long term, not only increasing the risk that the meds will be needed indefinitely to sustain their benefits but even needed to avoid things being worse than if they had not ever been taken at all. Again, it is the context that determines the validity of the concept.

TURNING WHAT.S RIGHT INTO WHAT’S WRONG & NOT EVEN WRONG:

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli said of a theoretical research paper he was asked to comment on: “That is not only not right, it is not even wrong.” This quote is often used to indicate when a theory is not only untested but is fundamentally untestable and therefore does not fall within the realm of scientific hypothesis. Here, I am using the term differently to mean a concept that appears to be so correct on its surface that it easily tricks us into doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to achieve the intended objectives. The patently obvious fact that Calorie overload leads to lipid accumulation and disease risk led us to the dieting craze to begin with, first targeting food portions and eventually cutting out dietary fats. The equally obvious fact that processed carbs create an insulin response that depletes our blood sugar) after at first overloading it into lipid accumulation) reversed the demonization of fats into their saving us from carbs in high-protein and keto diets. The prevalence of processed foods combined with our addictive response to those foods has led to an obesity epidemic that has led to the use of Ozempic-type weight-loss meds to reduce the desire to eat. But lowering Calories, carbs, or anything else to the point it hurts the body’s ability to sustain the very goal of that effort ultimately invalidates the effort itself, making what seems logical completely illogical. Making things better by making them worse without an equally strong effort to counter what’s worse is so bad it’s not even wrong.

My discussion of how fake foods & fake hormones have put us into a position of inauthenticity requiring complicated definitions of what constitutes disease: