How to Phil Your Plate

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Phil Nuttridge continues his series of articles looking at the modern take on diet and nutrition.  He explodes many of the dietary myths that have defined the latter decades of the twentieth century and left their legacy of chronic illnesses in the first decades of this century.  In this month’s article he looks at some simple rules on how to fill your plate for a healthier outcome.  More information can be found on Phil’s website cuttingcarbs.co.uk or by following him on Instagram:  CuttingCarbsUK

Open any fitness or health magazine and there will be some new magical diet plan to help you lose weight and get healthier.  Cut the carbs, cut the fat, cut the meat; count your calories, count your points, count your syns; skip a meal, skip a day.  They are all out there craving your attention.

They all have differing levels of science behind them.  They all claim to have had their successes.  But there is one variable that none of them can take into account: You.

You are an individual.  Your genes, your gut bacteria, your preferences, your likes, your dislikes, your knowledge, your experiences are unique.  No one else has your particular combination of all of these factors and yet all of these things influence your relationship with food.  

It is therefore without question unreasonable to expect one particular dietary strategy to work for each and every one of us.  One size does not fit all when it comes to diets.  Inevitably some strategies are going to work better for you than they are going to work for me.  The perfect solution for me may prove not so ideal for you.  So how can anyone ever take a diet plan seriously?

Well the first thing I would say is that, and maybe this is being cynical, some diet plans with little science or evidence of efficacy behind them will exploit this uncertainty.  If no diet can ever be guaranteed to help everyone, surely it cannot do any harm to try the latest fad?  Of course that is what the creators of the latest fad diet want you to believe.  And once they have your money, do they really care?

I care.

Whilst my series of articles on nutrition have some distance yet to cover, I think it is quite timely at this stage in the series to start distilling some points of general ‘wisdom’ with regard changing food and eating habits.   When you see this list, some I hope are common sense. I have chosen just six of my ideas here, but hopefully they are worthy discussion points and quite literally, good food for thought.

1. Avoid the Diet Transplant

We have all been there.  We open the latest issue of a ‘health’ magazine or the weekend supplement of the newspaper and there is the perfect meal plan.  Every breakfast, lunch and dinner is mapped out for us for the next month. Follow the plan and all our troubles will be over, they claim.

Alas it is not that simple.  As I mentioned earlier, what we eat and the way we eat is determined by many factors. Your genes, your food likes and dislikes; what you have time to prepare; what is available in your local shop; what your mother made for you when you were a child; what others in your household like to eat; what hours you work; when you workout; when you sleep and the list goes on. All of these things shape your daily eating habits.   And so your ‘diet’ – the term for what and how you eat – is an evolved concept based on how all of these factors have shaped your eating habits over your entire life.

Similarly, the author of the meal plan you have seen in that magazine will have factors shaping the way he or she eats and those will be reflected in their meal plan. But the key thing is that the factors influencing the author’s way of eating are almost certainly very different from your own.  They may love avocados, you may hate them.  They may have lots of time in the kitchen to bake their own bread, you may not.  They might have enough money to have everything hand-squished, you may not.  They may live alone, you might have three ravenous teenage boys to feed.

But you are still enticed with the promises of that perfect meal plan and so you give it a go.  I call this process the ‘diet transplant’:  Under the anaesthesia of the promised health benefits, you undergo the surgical procedure of extracting the diet you have spent a lifetime evolving and transplant it with the diet from the magazine.  And at first you will cope.  Whilst you are in the expectant honeymoon stage of the transplanted diet you will do anything, no matter how bizarre the ingredient, how fiddly the preparation, you will do it in the expectation of those promised shed pounds. All the while though, the influences that have spent a lifetime shaping the way you eat, are still chipping away at you.  You hate avocados but you will give them a go because that is what the meal plan says. You might now be spending twice as long in the kitchen as before, but you will do it clutching to those images of slim healthy people you saw in the magazine alongside the meal plan.  Your body is trying to reject the transplant, but your willpower overcomes the attempts to reject it.

As time progresses though, your willpower is put more and more to the test.  All those influences that have shaped your preferred diet over all those years, now push ever harder against this diet transplant.  

And then it comes:  That day from Hell.  What little resource of willpower you had left is now exhausted because of the way your boss shouted at you, or how that credit card bill somehow gained a few extra zeros, or because your husband threatens to divorce you if he sees one more avocado.  And so it crumbles, the transplanted diet is completely rejected and you run straight back to your old diet for comfort but now with an added sense of failure to boot.

We have all been there.

My pragmatic solution for this is to use the staircase approach to dietary change. Set a specific goal – let’s say, to cut your bread consumption by three quarters –  then divide the journey between where you are now and where you want to be into manageable steps.  The first step could be ‘make every sandwich an open sandwich’.  The next step would be to ‘replace sandwiches twice a week with a salad’.  The third step might be to ‘buy or make some low carb bread for sandwiches’.  Try the first step; once that is working well for you, take the next and so on.  If a step becomes too much, you only fall back one step from which you can try again. 

You might have several staircases on the go at once.  You might have the bread staircase running in parallel to a staircase which is cutting your synthetic fats by half or a staircase cutting potatoes and pasta from your diet.  Each staircase is progressing one step at a time, but each is on its way upwards.

Avoid the diet transplant, instead take the staircase to success!

2. If your great great grandmother wouldn’t recognise it as food, don’t buy it

In much of the current writing on food and nutrition there is one concept that really cries out to me:  The twenty first century will be remembered as the rise of the food-like substance and the decline of real food.  Since when has mushed, mashed, minced, chemically prodded and poked soya mince been a real food?  What part of a chicken is a ‘nugget’?  How did we end-up thinking a nutritious breakfast could be found in the form of a ‘biscuit’ with 25 listed ingredients?  There is nothing about these that actually looks like food.

Essentially, the more it has to be processed before it gets on the supermarket shelf, the less you should be inclined to buy it.  And there is a simple way of expressing this:  Imagine your great, great grandmother is still alive and just suppose she is accompanying you on your next trip to the supermarket.  The rule is then that you can only put something in your shopping trolley if she would recognise it as food.  No soya mince, no chicken nuggets, no breakfast biscuits, no Quorn sausages, no ‘Heart Healthy’ muesli, no margarines.  Only good natural foods would get past the watchful gaze of your dear great, great grandmother.  In fact, I am pretty sure that three quarters of the aisles in my local supermarket would be out of bounds in the hunt for food that actually looks like food. 

Remember too that once it is in your shopping trolley, you will eat it.  The gateway is therefore the decisions you make in the supermarket.   Imagine great great granny and her beady eyes and I am sure you will then make some healthier food shopping choices.

3. If an ingredient is unpronounceable, it is probably indigestible

If it is a packet food, look carefully at the list of ingredients.  I have a rule that I rarely buy anything with more than five ingredients.  More importantly though, if I cannot pronounce any of the ingredients then it is not going to find a space in my trolley.  Microparticularized whey protein-derived fat substitute, anyone?  Potassium metabisulfite perhaps?  Tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) maybe?  Double helpings of Dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate? Not in month of Sundays and so it should be for you too.

4. Cut the carbs, not the fat and not the protein

From my previous articles you will have read that a big driver in my dietary journey is to minimise the impact of insulin swings in my body’s biochemistry. That is because an impaired insulin mechanism is correlated with so many of the chronic non-communicable conditions of the twenty first century.  And the way to stop insulin swings is to stop eating food that causes spikes in blood sugar levels.

So don’t look at the calorie content of a food, look at the carb content and within that, the sugar content.  My simple rule is that if there are more than 5 grams of sugar per 100 grams of the food, then it is not going in the shopping trolley.  No compromise.  I will then look at the carbohydrate line, if this is more than 10 grams per 100 grams, then that is going to stay on the shelf too.  Those two rules are quite strict and will eliminate much from the standard British diet, but the kindness you will be showing your metabolism by sticking to those rules will be immense.

5. Your fat should be natural, your fibre should be green and your protein should be complete

This is one of the main reasons processed food is so bad for us – manufacturers will use the cheapest ingredients wherever they can to cut costs and improve profit margins.  The sources of fat, fibre and protein in processed foods will be the cheapest, easiest to manufacture and almost inevitably therefore of the lowest quality. Many are actually harmful to us.

Do not be fooled by a margarine that claims to lower your cholesterol. Cholesterol levels in your blood are only very poorly correlated with health outcomes.  In fact, for the over-fifties, the more of the high density liposome (HDL) cholesterol-carrying molecule in your blood (what is often termed as your ‘good cholesterol’), the better your health outcomes will be.  Margarines actually lower this ‘good cholesterol’.  

Vegetable oils, seed oils and many nut oils are bad news too.  Yes, they are cheap to produce, but they have to be chemically extracted, often artificially coloured and flavoured and then further processed to make them stable.  The chemicals used to extract them are bad news for you.  The processing to make them stable is even more bad news for us – the resultant oils are linked to cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers and diabetes. And because of their source, they are high in inflammatory omega 6 fatty acids.  A cocktail of disaster.

Look for oils that are ‘raw’ and ‘cold-pressed’ as these are the ones that are naturally sourced and do not need to be chemically extracted.  Cook with coconut oil, avocado nut oil or lard. Low temperature cooking with extra virgin olive oil, butter and ghee is fine too.  Beware too that not all olive oils are equal – the cold pressed, extra virgin sort is great news.  But, in order to make more profits, oil producers are likely to chemically process the olives to get even more oil out of them.  Olive oil that is just labelled as olive oil (rather than the extra virgin sort) is probably high in the oils resulting from chemical extraction.

If the food you are contemplating has a label, namely a list of ingredients, then you need to look at the list of fats and oils like a hawk.  Shun any food that has vegetable oils or seed oils listed on the label.  As a specific example, shop-bought mayonnaise is very tricky.  Even the leading brand will use cheap, chemically derived and stabilised oils.  You can get mayo made with extra virgin olive oil or avocado nut oil but you have to hunt it down, as it will be the lonely few jars hidden at the back of the top shelf. Better still, make your own.

There has been a strong movement for ‘whole grain’ foods, foods which include the husk of grain and cereals.  Whilst I shall save the detailed discussion of inflammatory lectins to a separate article, suffice to say here that there was a very good reason why we historically removed the husk of grains before eating.  Yes, the husk has lots of fibre but it also has lots of the defence chemicals a plant recruits to stop it being eaten.  These inflammatory chemicals are the evolved weapon of choice in the battle between plants and animals and if we eat them in quantity, the systemic inflammation they cause is significant.  So rather than eat husks for fibre, go to the leafy green vegetables – fibre aplenty but fewer inflammatory lectins.  To make sure that the green fibre you are eating is not sneaking starches and sugars into your diet, there is a fairly simple rule that you should stick to the parts of the vegetables that grow above ground rather than the bits below. The leaves of rocket, kale, spinach are good fibre and low in starches; the tubers and bulbs of potatoes, carrots and parsnips are full of starches and should be limited.  Not an infallible rule, but a good starting point.

Not all proteins are the same.  The amino acid building blocks of protein come in a number of different varieties and whilst all forms of protein have a variety of these amino acids, only animal and fish based proteins have all the amino acids in the right combinations: Humans will find the protein building blocks most closely aligned to their needs in the flesh of animals metabolically closest to humans. The proteins in beans and pulses are a long way down the evolutionary ladder and very unlike our own.  A soya bean and a human a so far apart on the evolutionary tree, that it is unreasonable to expect that there is anything metabolically similar between us.  The way a soya bean makes, uses and stores protein for example will be very different from how Homo sapiensdoes any of these things.  A cow is much closer to us on the evolutionary tree and so its metabolism is more similar to our own.  A mouthful of cow protein is much closer to what we metabolically need than a mouthful of soya protein. 

To use an analogy, it is a bit like taking a modern electric Tesla car to a garage and only having the parts from an ancient Ford Model-T to fix it.  With a lot of effort and compromise you might be able to cobble together a repair but only enough for the Tesla to limp-on.  But if you had parts from last year’s Tesla model instead, you might not even notice the repair.  So don’t rely on plant based proteins if you want to have optimal animal protein nutrition.

6. If it’s in a packet, don’t snack it!

A recent study conducted in the United States suggested that a third of all of Americans have fifteen or more ‘eating events’ a day.  An eating event includes a drink with calories (milky sugared tea or coffee, for example) as well as food, but nonetheless consuming calories in fifteen separate occasions each day is grazing gone mad.  Cows graze because they need to; we do not.

If you do need to snack, can I suggest a few ‘rules’ to reduce the urge?  If you are going to snack during the day, first thing in the morning put the entirety of the food you plan to snack on in a dish. So if you are going to have biscuits (but please try not to), put two in the dish.  If you are going to have some healthier nuts, put a measured portion in the dish.  If you are going to nibble on some cheese, put a cut lump in the dish.  The psychology here is that if you get the urge to snack and your hand dives into a full packet of nuts, cheese or biscuits, one handful of nuts can quickly become two or three and one small lump of cheese can become a slab!  If instead you can see that there are only a dozen nuts in your pre-measured dish and if you take them all now, there will be none for later, you might think twice about the size of the current handful or whether you might leave it and wait until later.

I also have a little armoury of snacks that need preparation – that is they are not available in a packet.  There is for example a low-carb muffin recipe that takes between 5 and 10 minutes to prepare. That then becomes a real test of whether you are actually hungry.  If you cannot be bothered to spend 10 minutes making the snack, then you obviously don’t really need it.  It is all too easy to reach inside a packet for something to snack on but if you have to spend time making it, you will only do that if you really need the calories. 

In my next article I will take a look at cholesterol, a word that seems to stir so much fear when it comes to nutrition and yet is a substance so vital to us.  ‘A Spoonful of Medicine Helps the Sugar Go Down’ will examine how we have got it so very wrong.

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