Very different food habits at my husband’s place and my own home along with the burgeoning of dietary recommendations from all quarters- social media, television, newspapers, documentaries, doctors and grandparents, prompted a quest which culminated into this blog.
Until a few years ago, the only diets I knew were vegetarians, vegetarians who ate eggs and non-vegetarians. Lately though innumerable diets: keto diet, paleo diet, Atkins diet, Diabetic diet, veganism, etc have sprung up claiming different advantages from weight loss and fitness to reversing lifestyle diseases like type II diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and even some kinds of cancer!
Probable reasons for such trends:
Increased incidence of lifestyle diseases:
Lifestyle diseases are defined as diseases linked to the way people live their life. This is commonly caused by alcohol, drug and smoking abuse as well as lack of physical activity and unhealthy eating. Cardiovascular diseases, stroke, obesity and Diabetes (type2) and some types of cancer are the most common of lifestyle diseases. The occurrence of these chronic diseases in past 30 years has increased worldwide.
Increased percentage of working women, long working hours, nuclear families/ cheap and plentiful fast food: all these combined have encouraged a quick fix for food. In general, home cooking of food world over is on a decline, the trend is more towards pre-cooked food, frozen meals, takeaways. Food on the go, increased snack consumption, eating on the desk, not having fixed meal times, skipping meals are the side effects of these changes which in turn contribute to lifestyle diseases.
Increased costs of medical care compounded by growing scepticism towards modern medicine: All lifestyle diseases are chronic or long lasting in nature and their treatment involves long-term medication and care leading to increasing costs. Combine that with people’s distrust of doctors due to financial conflict of interest and also due to the easy availability of “medical literature” on internet and smartphones. Many times lay people do not understand the complete medical information and at other times are unable to refer to the right sources of information causing a lot of confusion and misunderstanding between the doctor and patient leading to scepticism.
Changing agricultural practices: heavy use of pesticides, fertilizers and genetically modified seeds (GMOs) have lead to questionable nutritive value of agricultural produce leading to certain types of diseases and scepticism in general public. This has given a boost to organic farming and with it awareness about different types of ‘healthy’ diets.
The pace of life: modern life is pushing humans to the brink of their capacity. More than ever, humans want to maximize their time on earth by increasing their productivity and longevity. They want to be able to give their best at their 8-10 hour work week, be healthy, socialize, travel, bring up a family, all without cutting down on anything. This expectation leads to unrealistic demand on their time and energy. Moderating their diet and health are ways of getting more out of life.
Some interesting facts
I do not have the authority to comment on the different types of diets, but I can share some researched findings that hopefully can aid our understanding of diet and lifestyle link a bit better.
Evolutionary Mismatch 1
Evolution is the process by which species change to become better suited to their environment.
Earth is about 4.6 billion years old; anatomically modern humans, that look like us and have the same brain volume as us, Homo sapiens, evolved about 130,000 years ago and about 10,000 years ago agriculture developed and spread. Until this time, changes in the anatomical constitution and behaviour of man proceeded very slowly. However, in the modern era, the change of pace has been rapid. Evolution has not been able to keep pace with the cultural and environmental changes of the modern urban life.The primary causes of death during most of the history of humanity included infection and famine. Our ancestors had evolved to survive in an energetically demanding environment with moderate access to food. This adaptive pattern is no longer compatible with our actual living environment where demand for energy expenditure is limited and there is immediate access to copious food.
The incompatibility between human evolutionary design and the current style of human life has led to the birth of Evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine or Darwinian medicine focuses on the question of why evolution has shaped our bodily mechanisms in ways that may leave us susceptible to disease. It has provided insights that suggest how evolutionary mismatch has led to conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity which were absent in our ancestors.
Missing Microbes 2
During evolution, microbes developed way before humans. Infact humans evolved alongside different microbes for millions of years.We have more microbes on/in our body that the total number of cells we possess! These microbes live in specific niches or ecosystems in our body- the microbes in our gut are very different from the one on our skin and play an important role in maintaining our health. The commensal bacteria on our skin defend against colonization of opportunistic pathogens like fungal infections, the commensals of the gut ensure proper digestive functioning and immunity. It is only recently that we have begun to uncover many other important roles that these microbes play in maintaining health. Excessive use of antibiotics, western diets, caesarean sections, formula feeding, modern hygiene and urban living have a significant impact on these microbial ecosystems in and on our body. The loss of diversity of these bacterial ecosystem has led to increasing prevalence of autoimmune, inflammatory and allergic diseases in the industrialized world.
Calorie counting and nutritional labels 3
There is a belief that the more accurately we track our dietary inputs, the more control we can have on our health. However, this isn’t true. Nutrition is not a mathematical equation.There is almost no direct relation between the amount of a nutrient consumed at a meal and the amount that is used up by the body because it varies with what the body needs at that moment.For example, the proportion of iron absorbed by the body can vary anywhere from three-fold to almost 19 fold! This, in turn, means that supplementation of large doses of a discrete nutrient does not guarantee the utilization of those nutrients.
Nutrient content of the food we eat varies a lot. If we were holding one peach in each of our left and right hand, it is possible that the one in our left could easily contain 40 times more beta-carotene than the one on our right, depending on the season, soil, storage, processing and even the original location of the fruit on the tree!
While calorie counting can help us be more mindful of our eating habits, it does not really help because the nutritional labels are often inaccurate and there is no precise way of knowing how much of the calories consumed are actually absorbed by the body.
So What should we eat?
The simplest dietary recommendation I came across was by Michael Pollan:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Eat foods cooked by humans
Avoid food advertised on TV
You can watch the detailed reasons behind this recommendation in his documentary: “In defense of food”
Broad-based recommendation: eat local, eat seasonal produce and incorporate different coloured fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes in a regular diet and eat in moderation.
References:
1.Int J Evol Biol. 2015; 2015: 179791) An Evolutionary Perspective of Nutrition and Inflammation as Mechanisms of Cardiovascular Disease María Esther Rubio-Ruiz et al
2.Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues Martin J. Blaser
3.Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition Howard Jacobson and T. Colin Campbell
