The present and future personalized nutrition
After I wrote the past two Fridays about the least healthy “healthy” breakfast and why I think juicing is a scam that makes most of us less healthy, I got quite a few emails from readers asking me, “well, what the heck should I be eating?”
It’s a hard question to answer.
The easy answer is to list the low hanging fruit of unhealthy eating - much of the Standard American Diet (SAD!) - and eat as little of those things as possible.
63% of American calories come from processed foods like packaged snacks, baked goods, and soft drinks. The list of the top 6 sources of calories in the American Diet is seriously disturbing:
Grain based desserts
Yeast breads
Chicken and chicken mixed dishes
Soda, sports, and energy drinks
Alcoholic beverages
Pizza
It’s not rocket science to suggest that we shouldn’t eat those things in the quantities that we’re currently eating.
The question of what you should eat instead is fraught with cultural implications, personal preferences, and widespread misinformation regarding what’s “healthy.”
Once you get past the easy stuff, things can start to feel complicated
Spend 5 minutes searching on the internet and start getting confused by diet after diet. Plant based. Mediterranean. Paleo. Keto. Carnivore. Intermittent fasting (which is a misnomer in the usual way it’s described, but that’s for another newsletter installment).
When you talk to the people in your life, you’ll hear stories of success and failure. And there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why some diets work for some people and not for others.
I have no interest in getting involved in the diet wars.
The diet wars are a place where arguments start off based in reason but quickly turn into a topic like politics or religion - easy to make enemies and impossible to come to an agreement with someone who has a different opinion.
But I am interested in the concept that something that works for person A may not work for person B and what data we can use to make better decisions as individuals.
When it comes to personalizing our diets, there’s a low tech way and a high tech way to do it.
The simplest way to personalize your diet is to conduct N of 1 experiments
This one pretty simple: experiment on yourself.
Now, a self experiment can be confusing - what do you do and how do you start?
The best perspective I’ve heard on how to develop an approach to nutrition comes from Peter Attia. Dr. Attia proposes 3 nutritional “levers to pull” to modify our diets:
What you eat or don’t eat (i.e., dietary restriction or DR), how much you eat (i.e., caloric restriction or CR), or when you eat and don’t eat (i.e., time restriction or TR)
Every diet that you could consider works in the form of DR, CR, or TR.
So to conduct your own experiment on yourself, you try one of those options, stick with it for a few weeks, and see how you respond in a few important ways:
How do you feel?
What’s your mood like?
How are you sleeping?
How do your clothes fit?
What happened to your weight?
What happened with your bloodwork?
The only way to learn what works for you is to try something and see if it does. There’s no blood test or biomarker that can predict it.
That’s the low tech way. The high tech way takes a bit more commitment but provides more quantifiable insights.
The most cutting edge way to personalize your nutrition isn’t a diet
It’s a wearable.
A continuous glucose monitor (CGM) is a device generally worn by diabetics that monitors your blood sugar continuously and in real-time.
This is the future of personalized nutrition - real time feedback about how your own body responds to the food that you’re eating.
When you have an opportunity to see what foods spike your blood sugar and what foods don’t, it influences you in some really important ways.
You might find that something you expected to be good for you actually spikes your blood sugar - this means it doesn’t agree with you
You might find something you thought would spike your blood sugar doesn’t cause a big jump - this means it’s not as bad for you as you might have thought
Forcing yourself to keep track of your blood sugar may influence you to make better choices because you don’t want to “see” the results of your unhealthy choices
These types of insights get us focused on how our own bodies respond uniquely. This is the real personalized nutrition plan.
Of course, there are some caveats - you need a prescription from a doctor, the machines are cheap but the sensors get expensive, and there’s an external sensor stuck to your body. But overall, a CGM is a simple way of monitoring your own response to the things that you’re eating.
Take a look at a few reports of people who have worn a CGM and what they’ve learned during the experience.
The future of personalized nutrition is closer than we think. Let’s abandon the diet wars as we move towards more objective - and individualized - ways of figuring out what works for us and what doesn’t.
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