The Online Photographer

There's a highly anticipated, eagerly awaited book coming soon that you're going to want. How Not to Diet by Michael Greger will be published on December 10th and can be pre-ordered now. It's almost certain to be a bestseller.

The title is a clever (cute?) takeoff on his bestselling title How Not to Die, which outlines what is currently scientifically known about nutritional solutions to fifteen different common causes of death, from breast cancer to suicidal depression. Note that the author donates 100% of his profits from both books to charity.

Highly recommended.

You've probably noticed that information about nutrition, when you first approach it, is very confusing. There are a couple of very good reasons why that's true:

1. The weight loss industry. In the USA alone, the weight loss industry is worth only slightly less than the global digital photography industry (~$72 billion vs. ~$77b). It dwarfs traditional categories such as, say, book publishing (~$4b). The weight loss industry depends on you being confused, so it's constantly stoking public ignorance. This isn't because of any evil centralized conspiracy, mind you. It's just that individual actors spread falsehoods for all sorts of reasons and collectively it muddies the waters.
2. The influence of the existing food industry on politics. The food industry isn't actually evil; they're just trying to maximize profits. If they have to kill you and your children to earn profits, that isn't because they actually want you to die. However, a lot of the things you probably believe about food have been bought and paid for by the food industry. Even the USDA is deeply conflicted. It has a stark conflict of interest baked into its mission: it supervises food safety and recommends to the public what's healthiest to eat on the one hand, and on the other hand it's supposed to do whatever it can to support US food producers. Those two functions are often at odds.

An example of one of those bought-and-paid for beliefs? Well, ever heard the one about "breakfast is the most important meal of the day"? True?

Nope. There's nothing wrong with eating breakfast if you're hungry at that time of day and/or if you enjoy breakfast, but there's no scientifically valid evidence that it's any more important than any other meal. The happy myth is promoted by the makers of breakfast cereals. Which, for the most part, are decidedly unhealthy foodlike substances!

It's worth mentioning that the public is complicit in the confusing of itself, too, because it wants to be told to do all the bad things it likes to do. This can be tracked over the years; there are always fad diets that flourish and fade that tell people what they want to hear. This is another big reason for the confusion...because we want to be confused, if it's going to allow us to feel okay about continuing our bad habits.

Tips
One tip I read in WFPB lit somewhere is that you should eat your salad first when you sit down for a meal, while you're still hungry. Makes sense to me because I don't like salads much, and they're sort of a bother to make (at least I used to think so for some reason—now I'm in the habit and it seems easy), but edible greens are the probably the single most important thing we eat regularly. They contain hundreds and hundreds of phytochemicals, many of which are essential for cellular functioning. They're one of the most nutritious foods we eat. Your daily salad is the last thing you should delete from your daily diet.

I'm not hungry in the mornings, so I start my day with two large mugs of white tea, with lemon added. Then, I just apply that advice about eating salad first...but I apply it to the whole day! Sometime around 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., I "break my fast" with a green salad. It's not just the first thing I eat at my main meal—it's the first thing I eat every day.

Here are a few random tips I've learned about recently:

1. Most fruits don't have much in the way of anti-cancer properties, but two in particular do: lemons and cranberries. So you can guess who's been eating a lot more cranberries recently. They're very bitter, and I don't like bitter taste, so I eat them in clever ways. I base my berry smoothies on a small amount of cranberry juice concentrate, or sometimes I use frozen cranberries in the smoothie; I eat whole organic cranberries from a bowl along with black or red grapes, so the bitterness of the cranberries can cut, and contrast with, the grapes' sweetness, and the grapes' sweetness can mask the cranberries' bitterness; and I mix about one-quarter of a glass of pure cranberry juice with my glass of pure Concord grape juice, which is the last thing I consume in the evenings. Oh, and I routinely sprinkle my salads with a few dried cranberries. (Dried cranberries and cranberry juice are only half as loaded with antioxidants as whole cranberries, but both are still excellent.)
2. Very strangely, a daily vinegar drink does a lot to cut belly fat. Start with 12 ounces of unflavored seltzer water. Add two tablespoons of organic apple cider vinegar and about a teaspoon of lemon juice—the lemon juice is my own addition, just to take the vinegar-y edge off the taste. You might not lose any weight at all, but drink that once a day for a month and see if your belly isn't flattening. No idea how that works, but it does. (After a month you'll get accustomed to the taste, too. I liked it well enough right away, but for others it could take a little getting used to.)
3. You don't have to buy organic for everything. But there are some things that are much more likely to be contaminated by pesticides. You might want to familiarize yourself with the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen. The advice is to be sure to buy organic strawberries, but you don't have to worry so much about avocados...and so on.
4. Brazil nuts (which are actually seeds) aren't good for you in large quantities—they're high in selenium, and eating too many can cause selenium toxicity. But a recent study suggests that just four Brazil nuts per month can lower your bad cholesterol significantly—and they start working faster than statin drugs! And more than four doesn't work any better than four. Four Brazil nuts a month, check.

That last is—forgive me—nuts.

Speaking of cranberries having anti-cancer properties, I eat lots of garlic, too. I have to—the Mennonites peel them for me, but only if I buy them in bulk! (About thirty cloves in a plastic container.) I have to use them up as quickly as I can. But then, garlic is good against cancer, too.

Get in line for that book. I've requested a PDF as a review copy—think they'll believe a photo blogger is worth an early bird copy of a book about nutrition? Maybe not, but it's worth a try. Either way, I can't wait. [UPDATE Monday: The publisher is restricting copies of the PDF to combat possible piracy, but is sending me an advance hard copy. It's only a few weeks before publication, but look forward to a future Sunday book report!]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Trevor Johnson: "It worries me a bit when you get onto the healthcare stuff. OK, so I'm an editor at a Cochrane Group and work part-time at the medical school, running research, etc. And here is the problem. The research from well conducted trials, and systematic reviews, are poorly understood, even by healthcare professionals. So with all due respect, I am afraid that your observations, though interesting, are just that. Subjective."

Mike replies: Well, I'm just parroting what I have learned from WFPB doctors for the most part, so it's not entirely me. It's true that I like to use myself as a guinea pig and experiment to see what works for me. Kicking off the day with a salad laden with goodies and a berry smoothie is working splendidly, which is why I thought I'd share.

But I'm a layman, and only partially educated. I also tend to be an empiricist by intellectual temperament, and (God forfend!) intuitive by psychological predilection, and I have strong opinions and tastes...a recipe for crankery and crackpottery if ever there was one. If that weren't enough, I could also be under the influence of confirmation bias, since I suck up WFPB books and vids like they were black grapes. So your skepticism is well placed.

Then again, the topic is food, and I have no control whatsoever over what you choose to put into your mouth. So the potential damage I might do via my crankery, if crankery it be, is firmly constrained. Even Dr. Greger departed from his usual ethics in recommending four Brazil nuts a month, on the excellent basis that it cannot possibly do harm!

On the other hand, approximately 75% of American medical schools do not teach nutrition at all, and the majority of medical doctors have never taken a nutrition course, much less a nutrition rotation in medical school. The people I listen to and trust (Michael Greger, Joel Fuhrman, Neal Barnard, John McDougall, Kim Williams, T. Colin Campbell, Dean Ornish, Ellsworth Wareham, etc.) are all medical doctors, but ones who have spent their lives and careers studying nutrition and working with patients' diets. My empirical, anecdotal observation (subjective, I know!) so far has been that almost all of the doctors I come in contact with socially or professionally—the ones who have never taken a nutrition course and whose specialties might be very far from anything having to do with nutrition—think they know more about the subject than their colleagues who have made the study of it their life's work. Why that is, I don't know.

I'll put forward a challenge to you. Anyone who is able to a.) feel their bodies and be minimally conscious of how the food they eat makes them feel, and who b.) can somehow contrive to eat a 100% strict whole-food plant-based (WFPB) diet for only THREE WEEKS—purely as an experiment!—will, I believe, be convinced. If you can get a checkup and have your blood work done before and after it will be an additional "convincer."

Of course, such an experiment has impediments—it's not as easy as it sounds. It usually requires time and effort to adapt to a WFPB diet. God knows I have not done very well myself, and not for lack of trying. You have to work out what foods you are going to eat, what you find palatable, what you can cook, and what ingredients you have available to you; you have to get over the four days or so it takes your gut to adjust to a normal amount of fiber; and for at least a few days and maybe as long as the whole first half of those three weeks you might suffer cravings for the sugar, alcohol, oil and grease most Americans are used to.

If a person were rich, he or she could kick such an experiment off with a stay at Dr. McDougall's 10-day live-in program, where they will feed you tasty chef-prepared WFPB food, fill your head with WFPB info, and monitor your body's response. But that costs like five grand and a plane ticket, not to mention ten days free, and almost nobody I know can afford such a thing. More's the pity.

But this is kind of amusing. From pages 305–306 of How Not to Die:

"[Dr. Neal Barnard] often uses what's called an 'A-B-A' study design. Participants' health is assessed at baseline on their regular diets, and then they're switched to a therapeutic diet. In an effort to make sure any health changes participants experience on the new diet aren't merely a coincidence, they are then switched back to their regular diet to see if the changes disappear.

"This kind of rigorous study design improves the validity of the results, but the problem, Dr. Barnard related, is that sometimes people improve too much. After a few weeks on a plant-based diet, sometimes people feel so much better that they refuse to go back on their baseline diet—even though it's required by the study protocol. Since they didn't complete the study as planned, their data have to be effectively thrown out and may never make it into the final paper. Ironically, healthy eating can be so effective that it undermines its own studies of effectiveness!"

James: "Just keep it up Mike. As someone who is still living because of diet intervention in 1982/3, I am always happy you give us 'reminders' occasionally. You will always get someone saying that you are not an expert after every post. We know that you aren't. Maybe you should add 'hey, it's just what I have found' after each nutrition post. Food for thought?"

Kirk W: "I’m with James on this one. I learned of Nutritionfacts.org through one of your posts from early in 2019. It’s making a difference in my life and I thank you for that. Plus, Dr. Greger’s humor suits me. I can’t walk through the produce section without thinking about 'Big Broccoli' competing against the pharmaceutical giants!"

Kirk: "Seeing a whole lot of sugars in your diet (Concord grape juice, cranberry juice, etc.) Sugars seem to be the emerging culprit in just about every disease in the west. Also not seeing nearly enough fun food that you enjoy eating. There is a psychological component to the enjoyment of food that is as important as the basic chemistry. If you hate the taste of cranberries then why torture yourself? I get the whole vegan theology but I always go back to 'moderation in all things.' The brain is a tricky thing. Its response to deprivation and forced eating of foods it doesn't like could sabotage all the 'good' effects of another lifeless bowl of oats and grains.... Just sayin'."

Mike replies: Absolutely. Sugar is my particular Achilles' heel. I'm a sugar addict, which is about 1/10th the intensity of alcohol addiction but on the same spectrum IMHO. Sugar is the reason I fall off every diet after I'm successfully on it. I despair of ever controlling it. But I'll keep trying.

Peter Nigos: "I'm with Trevor Johnson on this one. There are opinions on what we should eat, and there is nutrition science. These two universes are not necessarily the same. It is peculiar that blogs on photography seem anxious to tell us what we should or should not eat. Both Lloyd Chambers (diglloyd) and this blog have promoted doubtful nutritional advice. I have not noticed any comments on photography of food on either site. At least you have not offered us promotion of your paranormal experience, like Steve Huff."

Mike replies: Again, I don't have any control of what you eat. And what is wrong with Michael Greger's knowledge of nutrition science? His schtick is, "Every year, I read through every issue of every English-language nutrition journal in the World so busy folks like you don't have to." He's been studying nutrition science intensively for 25 years. So do you know more about the subject than he does? (Here's the source of the quote—in the video starting at about 2:10.

I agree with one of the YouTube commenters that he has "...one of the strangest speech patterns I've ever heard in my life. It's like if you took a clip of Mr Rogers speaking and randomly tinkered with the speed lol."

Jim K.: "I'm a scientist who has spent his career in the pharmaceutical industry working on treatments for a variety of diseases. I've been regularly exercising for the last few years: what I found was that my body had reshaped itself pretty nicely (well, I still had the belly fat), but I didn't lose weight. And my vitals (blood work, blood pressure) were not particularly good (200–220 total cholesterol, blood pressure ranges 125/78 to 140/90). Thanks to Mike's blogging, I started WFPB dieting at the end of August (so coming up on month three). My diet had been typical standard American (SAD); I love meats, eggs, dairy, other tasty sweet stuff. I ate my veggies too...so while I wasn't eating horribly, I certainly wasn't eating 'right.'

"Into this journey, I've had a couple sets of blood work and a physical. My weight is down 20 lbs. (weight loss is tapering off to a more reasonable two lbs./week). My cholesterol is down from 200–220 to 140. Triglycerides are still a bit high (150–160). Blood pressure is down to 110/65. And as an scientist, I've observed that my skin and nails have gotten much better (on my feet, mainly).

"Most of the dietary strategies used in WFPB dieting are evidence-based: there are scientific studies (sometimes with placebo-controls). It can be hard to tease out cause and effect in population studies, but not impossible. I've been very thankful that Mike has blogged about his experimentation on diet, and I can confirm that many of these strategies are working well for me.

"I'm looking forward to trying his vinegar and lemon seltzer—I bought the vinegar a while ago, but hadn't figured out a vehicle for ingestion (other than salad). And I pre-ordered How Not to Diet a while ago—how can you not with that title?

"PS: I give myself forgiveness for cheats. I know Mike loves sushi—he got me hooked on that too (years ago). I have a weakness for pizza, and I'll do that with my finacée once a month or so."