I’m an Omnivore

Some people might think you’re crazy for coming up with your own diet. Let them think that while they mindlessly scarf down the same food they’ve been eating for years. Now, please don’t go on a diet that is nutrient deficient. That would be just stupid. Otherwise, I don’t see the problem. You’ve already been including and excluding foods. You just probably haven’t done it with much thought.

I don’t get it. I’ve mentioned my idea to friends and family and I get really odd looks. Some people act like trying something unconventional will lead to a quick death. Maybe it’s just the dairy indoctrination. A really smart friend of mine countered my idea with arguments that weren’t too far away from a “got milk?” or “milk does a body good” commercial. This is the same guy that talks about DeBeers’s “diamonds are forever” propaganda. Weird.

Alright, I think I might have lost you with that last part. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I do think consumers are driven by advertising, even to the point of thinking that a luxury item is a necessity, diamonds or dairy for example. Advertising is a part of our culture now. If you’ve seen Super Size Me, you know what I’m talking about. Morgan Spurlock interviews some kids showing them pictures and asking them if they recognize the pictures. Most of the kids don’t recognize pictures of Jesus or George Washington, but of course they know exactly who Ronald McDonald is. After decades and decades of invasive advertising, we no longer have a reference point of what to consume. If our parents grew up with the same advertising, how are we supposed to accept what society is telling us about consumption?

Anyways, I think it’s more than just people’s attachment to dairy. I think it’s their attachment to what’s “normal.” And does normal equal healthy? Does normal equal ideal? Usually, no. The majority of people in the United States are overweight according to the BMI. I say all this because it is pretty much guaranteed you will run into some resistance from people you know. There will probably be a good deal of self resistance that goes along with that as well. The notion that trying something new is inherently dangerous is naive. Going on your own diet does not mean you have all the answers. It means you’re doing your best to try to find them.

Self-Experimentation
For a long time, it was a tool of chemists who tasted each new compound they discovered. Although incredibly useful, it was also deadly. Carl Wilhelm Scheele died from this habit, more specifically from mercury poisoning. Therefore, I don’t recommend self-experimentation if your field is chemistry. Psychology, sociology, nutrition? Go for it!

I read about some of Benjamin Franklin’s self-experiments in his autobiography. One thing he does is test out “virtures” weekly. Franklin realizes how useful some virtues are and how hard others are to follow, “Order” in Franklin’s case. I already mentioned Morgan Spurlock. His documentary is a perfect example of self-experimentation. He chooses a diet, an outrageous one, follows it for a certain amount of time with certain restrictions, and examines the results at the end. You might disagree with his methodology and you can certainly disagree with the benefits of such an experiment, but it’s difficult to say he learned nothing from it. I don’t think it would have worked so well the other way. You need to shock people in a documentary, otherwise it just isn’t entertaining. So since you and I aren’t trying to film a documentary(I hope), we can do the opposite. By that I mean, intentionally focusing on a healthy diet. Admittedly, you don’t know how healthy such a diet will be at the outset. That’s the entire point of the experiment. However, I think you can make some better guesses on what a healthy diet might be as compared to eating fast food for thirty days.

How do we get started? Let’s consult our old friend, the scientific method:

1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypotheses
7. Publish results

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Method

This is a very general outline of what might occur. I’ve already defined the question: do humans need dairy? Well, I’m fairly sure I’m right on this, but I need to do the experiment to be confident. A much broader and bolder question would be: what is the ideal diet for humans? Difficult to answer completely, but I think I can learn something anyways. The next step is to gather information. I think you probably already have been gathering information about foods and nutrition for a long time. I talked about this in the Part II of this series. You might want to supplement your existing knowledge with some opposing viewpoints. The internet is a good start.

Oooh, the fun part! Form a hypothesis. I think it’s more interesting to test things on the frontier of our understanding. My hypothesis is that “a lack of dairy will cause no unwanted side effects.” A hypothesis that vegetables are good for you is a bit boring and virtually universally accepted. You can always reinforce your confidence though if you really want.

The longest step is probably the experiment. It’s simple. You decide what you are going to test based on your hypothesis. You test it. You gather data on your test. That’s pretty much it honestly. The results of the experiment will be more reliable if you stick to your original guidelines. I’m choosing not to eat dairy and so a complete elimination of it from my diet is the best thing.

While you are doing your experiment, just as with any diet, you want to gather data. Weight, body fat, perceived energy levels, resting heart rate, cholesterol levels, and feasibility are good examples.I mentioned feasibility because an unpleasant and tedious diet isn’t worth much. Pick as many or as few criteria for evaluation as you like. You can record data on a simple spreadsheet. I’ve already been doing this for months with weight lifting. I write down the amount of weight and how many reps I performed every time I workout. It’s almost necessary to record the amount of weight I’m lifting, so I don’t have to remember it week to week, but it also has the added benefit of showing progress. Trust me, measurable progress is a nice thing to look at.

The analyzing data step won’t take too long. You’ll see the results. This should almost be left out of our steps. Scientists will spend a great deal of effort on this step because they are working with very large groups of highly technical data. A self-experiment only involves data on one person and that person can even see the results as he or she goes along.

Interpreting the data also shouldn’t take too long. Then make a conclusion. Do you like this diet more than your previous one? Do you want to continue it? It might be a small step towards your goal. That’s where forming a new hypothesis comes in. If you were proved completely wrong, you’ll want to distance yourself from your original hypothesis. Either way, you want to continue to explore. After I go without dairy for a while, I’ll evaluate the results. If it seems like it went well, there are still a lot of different things I want to try. Therefore, this steps loops back to forming a hypothesis and the process begins again from there.

Iteration

The first experiment is unlikely to yield all the answers, so we might want to iterate until we’re satisfied. This is the great part of this whole idea. You don’t have to be right from the beginning. You don’t even have to be pointed in the right direction. This process continuously points you towards your goal, whatever that is, and there aren’t really any mistakes. The biggest mistake would be not to try in the first place. This is all theoretical right now, so let’s say as an example your goal is to lose 50lbs. Not an easy task for most people. You could create your own diet. Hell, you could even start with an existing one. You would go on that diet for a week, a month, maybe a year. However long you need to see results, but at least a few weeks is probably going to be necessary. After that time, you see how fast you’re losing weight and how much you like the diet. If you’re completely satisified, stop there. If you think there’s more out there, than you just try something else and evaluate that diet. As long as you’ve made that initial commitment to find out what is correct for you, you’re on your way.

Publishing Results

In our highly connected world, it’s practical enough to publish results whenever you want. With a blog, this can be daily or even more often. It’s not necessary to wait until the complete end of your self-experiment or even one iteration of it. This step is also completely optional. In the scientific arena, it might be unethical not to release results. With self-experimentation, you could just be trying to inform yourself. No one needs to know how that went. Obviously, I’m going to publish my results because I think there’s no one out there doing the same. I think it could help, even if it just got people more interested in their own health.

How Scientific is This?
This whole process isn’t too scientific, I’ll admit. The control data will come from your past diet. The experiment can’t really be double blind nor single blind. You’re both the scientist and the participant! By that I mean that you might psychology skew your data because you have an expectation of what will happen. Even with these limitations, I believe self-experimentation is useful. What I’m looking for is a dramatic result that can overrule any doubts presented by these limitations. If there isn’t much of a difference between two diets, than I can’t really say one is much better for me and it won’t matter. But if I do find overwhelming evidence that something is personally beneficial, I’ll know it.

Eating differently takes almost no extra time and not much extra effort. And the truth of the matter is you’ll be on a diet of your own choosing, even if you’re completely oblivious to it, for the rest of your life. You certainly can’t decide not to eat. So what are you going to do with that opportunity? Are you going to learn something invaluable, make a breakthrough, get healthy, get ripped? Or are you going to revolutionize the dieting industry and make millions? Feel free to let me know what happens, especially if you make those millions!