The Sustainable Diet Scam – Get Ready for the Bull Rush

colinchamp November 25, 2022 6 Comments

As my readers know, I am all about avoiding waste, helping the environment, and preserving the beauty that surrounds us. In our household, we avoid plastic, reuse metal and glass containers, try to walk instead of drive, and minimize consumerism. We live an intentional lifestyle and try to do our best. Our recycling bin is twice as full every week as our garbage (and yes, I know in some areas you can even question this). We also know that few aspects of life are straightforward, and we are also about questioning, reading, and assessing the data, while avoiding relativism, especially when it comes to our health.

Being in the middle on the recent nutrition push (and by this I mean certain groups using our health and nutrition dialogue to push an agenda) has really brought the above to a head. I serve on several boards for nutrition companies and frequent with some individuals who are all the way up the chain in our country’s government dietary recommendations. I found this a good opportunity to discuss the following mockery of a scientific article recently published in JAMA Oncology. You can access the article here, but to sum it up in a sentence, it was basically a strange opinion piece masquerading as a review article where they cherry pick studies to try to explain why a “plant-based” diet is superior to a low carb or ketogenic diet. They even admit at the end that most researchers are currently studying the latter (and that is of course, because the data clearly show a signal with that diet).

We wrote a rebuttal criticizing this study and questioning how it even got published. You can access it here. While most journal editors send a scripted email response, the editor sent us a personalized email explaining we did not use “an academic tenor.” Ignoring her poor word choice, we obviously struck a nerve as any real researchers with more than 4 neurons firing would have never even sent this article out for review, let alone allow it past peer review. Unless, of course, there was a hidden agenda…

When discussing the above article with someone on the board of our government’s nutrition guidelines, it opened my eyes even wider and summed it all up quite nicely for me. As this individual transparently told us, data and studies no longer matter. The government and most health organizations—who are at this point nearly unrecognizable from the government—will be pushing their version of a sustainable diet. That is, a diet that is good for the planet, regardless of whether it is actually good for the planet, and certainly regardless of whether it is good for us.

Dairy, and especially the good full-fat dairy, will be chastised, as will any animal products. Meat, even from the ethical ranch with 100% grass-fed cows that help regenerate and repair the soil (and is exactly 3 miles from my house as the crow flies) is bad for my health and the environment, but kiwis wrapped in plastic and shipped around the world from New Zealand are apparently good for both. Don’t think too hard about the glaring inconsistency and lack of scientific or common sense to back these recommendations, this individual told me, or “your head may explode.”

These are interesting times, where words seem to matter more than facts, particularly in the unsustainable world of medicine and health.

My recommendations and eating style is holding strong. But don’t be surprised when the number of articles chastising those foods your grandparents ate start pouring in. And don’t think too hard when they tell you that Impossible Burgers and artificial meat containing soy, sunflower and other vegetables oils, wheat, mycoproteins, and binders, mixed in with some heme and coconut oil (that same saturated fat that is supposed to be bad for us is now healthy as long as it is in a fake meat burger) and shipped to your door from around the world is both good for you and good for the environment. Ignore the mono-cropping to make their main ingredient soy in them and the countless pounds of pesticides used during the growing process that leaves the soil and farmland scorched. Don’t worry about the facts, they are merely words that can change at any time. Keep on your devices, keep watching the local news, and our health “leaders” will lead you in the right direction.

Or perhaps it is time to wake up, take control of your health, and right the ship.

The Importance of Sustaining our Dietary Culutre

As much as I love Italy and the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean diet has driven me a little a bit nuts at times. I like the Mediterranean Ketogenic Diet, but in terms of the general version, few can define it, and others continually use this poorly defined term to define their diet. What it does illustrate to us—regardless of which area of the Mediterranean one is from—is the benefit of following trial and error over thousands of years, or in other words, those massive experiments that our ancestors conducted that we could never replace. Counter this to the above where ideologies and politics drive health and nutrition.

This is where the conflict occurs with the new “sustainable diet” being poured out of the mouths of many of those individuals promoting the Mediterranean diet. This eating style, and the culture and lifestyle that surrounds it, flies directly in the face of the sustainable diet recommendations, especially those new age ones that recommend concocted foods full of artificial ingredients, preservatives, wrapping food in plastic, and shipping it all over the world. It is hard to think of a food more anti-Mediterrenean that would have left much my grandparents and Leonardo in horror.

I also still think most traditional places in the Mediterranean approach food and health the right way. However, a lot of this tracks back to culture as opposed to a specific diet or specific foods—growing quality food, cooking everything, using good ingredients, walking a lot, and perhaps most importantly, caring a lot about food, where it came from and how one utilizes it. This culture is likely a large part of the health and longevity equation these traditional regions seemed to have solved. Most cultures around the world promote self-determination and resiliency. You can see it all around the US in reverse. As immigrants from these areas become more and more Americanized in their approach to health, losing their culture (and seeming to care less and less about these ideals that were once passed down in their families through the generations) health dissipates. Disruption and loss of culture has led to health issues with people all over the world, from indigenous individuals in Canada, African immigrants and the cardiometabolic disease that often accompanies their loss of cultural identity, and of course those European immigrants who lost their cultural underpinnings a generation or two into their lives in the US, losing their knowledge and respect for the culture that surrounds healthy and real food.

If you often talk about the foods your grandparents ate, or the way your grandmother prepared and cooked food, yet you are now consuming a completely different diet, perhaps it is time to look at the importance of these traditional foods; and while you are at it, don’t be surprised when academic medicine tries trampling them during their sustainability crusade.

*Photo by Adamophoto from Freerange Stock

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