I’m an Omnivore

Welcome to Part II! Last time, I talked about why you should be consciously creating a healthy diet for yourself. This post discusses the actual formation of that diet.

Heuristics
Ok, I was a jerk and used an obscure term I love from computer science. Heuristics are simply rules you use to make judgments. You could call them rules of thumb. We need a way to select foods and we can use heuristics to guide us. They may not work in all cases, but they are simple and easy to follow. The food pyramid is a good example. This is the old food pyramid created by the USDA:

It splits up foods into “groups” and then gives you a rough estimate of how much you should eat from each group everyday. It works, but it has some issues. I’m sure you can point some obvious problems with this pyramid. There was a new pyramid released by the USDA in 2005. Now think about that for a moment. Up until just two years ago, according to the US government, it was perfectly acceptable to get 11 servings from the bread, cereal, rice, and pasta group in a day. I don’t think this sat too well with low carb dieters. Low carb diets are another example of a heuristic: low carbohydrates, high protein. I like heuristics because they are simple.

The opposite of using heuristics would be counting calories and eating from a very specific list of approved foods. Diets that employ these methods are very difficult to sustain. Some diets are based on the glycemic index. Foods with a high GI supposedly break down very fast and cause a drop in glucose levels, increasing hunger and sapping energy. I read the Sugar Busters book, which is a diet based on the GI in which you eat low GI foods. I pulled away some good concepts out of the book, but it also tells you to avoid common foods you would think are healthy such as bananas, carrots, pineapple, and raisins. So even if the diet is accurate, you would have to consult a chart every time you ate or memorize a list of foods. I think diets need to be based on much simpler principles.

While contemplating and researching dairy, I came upon a very intriguing argument based on evolution. I find evolution and natural selection to be incredibly powerful, yet simple theories. Evolution has recently come into use in a variety of fields other than biology: psychology, anthropology, and computer science. Why not apply it to nutrition? Now I was thinking about our ancestors, specifically the ones we had tens of thousands of years ago. I thought it was highly likely that our bodies are very similar to those of our ancestors and therefore we would have the same dietary needs. If they ate it, we should probably eat it. If they needed it, we probably need it. Bring dairy into the mix and ask yourself how an adult homo sapien twenty thousand years ago came across his two to three daily servings of dairy… crickets anyone?

Getting rid of dairy is a start, but that’s not the point. You can apply the evolutionary argument to any food and we now have a heuristic. To summarize this rule of thumb: foods should be chosen that our evolutionary ancestors ate ten thousand years ago. At its heart, this heuristic is about what our body is expecting us to deliver. If you try to think about it from a biological view, it’s a complex question, but if you look at the ancestor rule, it becomes much easier. You could reword this rule as “a food is ideal if our body is adapted to eat it and it is available naturally.” This is just a guideline, hopefully an effective one.

Make your own heuristics if you want. I don’t mean you should pull them out of thin air. There’s probably someone out there already suggesting one that you like. Research it and make sure that it makes sense. That’s the most important thing. To me, it just doesn’t make sense to eat foods that we aren’t adapted to handle.

Building from the ground up
Diets aren’t about what you don’t eat after all! They are about what you do eat. I’ll use my heuristic, along with general nutrition knowledge that anyone should have, to pick foods. First, the no-brainers. Vegetables top the list as the least controversial food type. You don’t hear too many studies coming out that say vegetables increase the risks of cancer. I think my heuristic allows vegetables and fruits. They’re natural, although you could certainly argue that certain cultivated crops are less natural than others. Both fruits and vegetables seem like pretty good choices. I don’t expect too much disagreement on this one.

The biggest controversial choice in my diet is probably meat. Although, it’s an obvious choice for most Americans, a lot of people would disagree on nutritional or ethical grounds. I didn’t make this diet based on ethics, but I understand where they’re coming from. Consulting the evolutionary view, I see that humans are adapted to eat meat, not meat primarily of course. That’s why we have a wide variety of teeth, to eat a wide variety of food. Also, there are some vitamins such as B12 that are only found in animal products. Vegans can easily get their B12 in fortified foods. However, I think if you’re looking for an ideal diet, you shouldn’t be relying on fortified foods and supplements. Were our ancestors continuously living in a state of vitamin deficiency? Did millions of years of evolution produce a digestive system that relied on substances that weren’t actually available? I find that hard to believe. Therefore, I decided I would eat meat in moderation. I’ve also heard lots of good things about fish, especially fatty fish like salmon. Mmmm… yum.

Nuts seem like a fairly safe choice, as well as eggs. They are both high in fat, but I still hear they are great for you in moderation. And with few exceptions, they are available in nature.

The hardest decision for me concerns grains(wheat, corn, rice). Strict followers of the Paleolithic diet, which is similar to the one I’m am trying, do not eat grains because prehistoric man had not yet cultivated them. There’s been a shift to “whole grains” which is significantly better than the almost useless white flour products you usually see in supermarkets. This is much better, but I still question the benefits of grains. The studies I have seen compare the difference between people eating white flour products and whole grain products, but never with a group eating neither. Cutting out grains would be very difficult though. I don’t live in a bubble and it’s going to be hard to convince family members I don’t eat bread. So I might have to ignore the exclusion of grains and other strict rules that might disagree with my heuristic, such as eating foods raw(bleh), for now. It doesn’t matter if I don’t hit on the perfect diet immediately, however. You don’t have to have the right hypothesis in an experiment. If you prove yourself wrong, it only puts you closer to the correct answer. Therefore, Part III of this series deals with self experimentation and adjustments.