Trust Your Gut: How To Get Healthier Nutrition With Better Intuition

I like to think of myself as a rational person. Most people do. We all like to think that we make decisions based on reason and facts.

The reality is, most of our major life choices have almost nothing to do with rationally parsing facts and evidence. Instead, we search for facts and evidence that can be woven together in a narrative that fits our biases and confirms the inner picture of our identities.

You’re probably thinking that’s a bad thing, and it doesn’t really happen that often. You think, ‘Maybe other people are prone to bias, but I’m sure of my beliefs. I have an open mind, I’m mostly rational, and bias doesn’t affect me very much.’

Everyone thinks that.

Not only is it normal to fit facts into our existing theories- most of the time it’s a very good way to operate, and I would even argue necessary from an evolutionary point of view.

Our brains are the most complicated devices in the universe that we know of; but like the Windows operating system, the history of our development wasn’t straightforward and the evolutionary process left a number of ancient relics in the program.

Let’s wind back the clocks to the start. Life began roughly 3.5 billion years ago. A billion is a lot. Some simple calculations will show you that 3.5 billion years is 42 billion months, or 1.3 trillion days, or 30 trillion hour-long commutes. In the other direction, 3.5 billion years is 35 million centuries, or the total lifespans of the entire population of Spain put back to back.

Multi-celled life took another 1 and a half billion years to develop. To get to fish it took another billion and a half years. Mammals came a few hundred million years later, and primates another few hundred million years after that, and our earliest modern ancestors came in about 5 million years ago. Homo sapiens? A paltry 200,000 years ago.

To put this in perspective, if you wanted to drive from New York City to Los Angeles, our time on the planet is proportional to traveling three city blocks. (That’s distance; traveling three city blocks in Manhattan might actually take a few million years.)

In that short amount of time, we developed language, art, technology, and everything else that makes up modern society. The scientific method is really only a few hundred years old- it’s not built into our operating system. These new mental tools take effort to use; in a cost-benefit analysis, they’re inefficient for most of our everyday lives.

So what does this have to do with diet?

If you have spent any time researching the optimal diet, you have probably noticed that there are hundreds of books on every diet imaginable. What’s more, each one of these diets has a plethora of studies to back it up. They can’t all be right, right?

I think they are.

Okay, there are definitely some quack theories out there. You can’t maintain a healthy body subsisting solely on potatoes. But I hope to demonstrate that the major dietary theories, although apparently contradictory, are actually completely congruent, and therefore almost totally useless.

Before we delve into any specific nutritional theory, let’s lay the groundwork for interpreting the theories by going through a quick and dirty primer on the history of nutritional science.

For many centuries people have theorized about what foods are best for a healthy body. The renowned (and very entertaining) Pliny the Elder, circa 50 AD, claimed that feeding babies with the brain of a female goat passed through a golden ring would protect them from epilepsy. (I have not confirmed the veracity of this statement.)

But the first scientific efforts towards nutrition didn’t come about until the end of the 18th century, with the advent of the Chemical Revolution in France. Early scientific methods were rudimentary and clumsy, and produced no substantial data for over a century. In the early 20th century, better diagnostic tools and more powerful technology led to the discovery of essential vitamins, nutrients, and amino acids.

But the story only really gets interesting with the arrival on the scene of a man named Ancel Keys.

Even as a child, Ancel Keys was recognized for his intellectual gifts. He had a predilection for pursuing a diverse array of interests. He studied chemistry, economics, political science, and zoology; he worked as an oiler, a lumberjack, a powder monkey, and a bat-guano-shoveler; he got a Ph.D. in oceanography and biology, taught at Harvard, then got a second Ph.D. in physiology.

Then in the 1950s, the country was unexpectedly stricken by a new health problem: heart disease. Although medical science had improved greatly, new data showed that middle-aged businessmen, those who theoretically should have had the healthiest diet, had enormously high rates of heart disease- and they were rising. President Eisenhower’s infamous 1955 heart attack jolted public awareness and scientists focused their attention on the link between heart disease and diet.

Ancel Keys was the right man at the right time. His confident and blunt style of speaking was unusually persuasive. He became immersed in the research and produced the Seven Countries Study, one of the most cited nutritional studies to this day. In 1956 the American Heart Association reviewed his findings and informed the public that the problem had been solved. A diet high in saturated fat— found in foods like eggs, butter, lard (ubiquitous at the time) and red meat- would lead to coronary artery disease. ‘Low-fat’ became the new buzzword of nutrition and the American public took it to heart, so to speak. By the ‘70s, total fat consumption became a fraction of what it had been only two decades earlier.

There was only one tiny little hiccup.

Keys was totally wrong.

The Paradigm Shift

In 2002, the release of Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution signaled a change in nutritional thinking. After decades of ‘low-fat’ flooding scientific papers, government recommendations, and popular diets, nutritional ideas from the fringe became more widely noticed. Although the height of the Atkins craze was short-lived, the diet was at the vanguard of the movement towards new, trendy, low-carb diets like the Paleo or Ketogenic diets.

Nina Teicholz’ 2014 book, The Big Fat Surprise, uncovered the startling corruption and faulty science that led to the demonization of saturated fat and cholesterol. Companies like Procter & Gamble (Crisco producer) and various lobbyists from within the sugar industry were responsible for pushing a low-fat agenda, while scientists who discovered problematic data were ostracized and denied funding.

Today, the diet market has exploded. People are pushing and pursuing diets diversely ranging from veganism to ketogenic, Mediterranean to Paleo. Although there are some broad trends that most diets share in common (reduction of refined sugar) the degree of variety in nutritional approach has never been so big.

So in an era of new technology, more data, and better science, why do people disagree more than ever? Here are five reasons why:

-1. The Science Still Sucks

In any medical/health science, there are multiple ways to gather data. The best way to judge the veracity of a theory is to use a multidimensional analysis; cross-referencing different types of evidence. The best theory, then, is one which is supported by strong evidence of multiple types. The problem is, none of the popular nutritional theories fit into this category; not only is the evidence often weak, but different types of evidence are contradictory.

My rough simplification of medical studies characterizes two main research methods— epidemiological studies and clinical trials. Epidemiological studies can be broadly understood to be correlative, drawing conclusions from observations on a population scale. Because of the adage ‘correlation does not imply causation’ and other weaknesses with this methodology (narrow factor analysis, drawing conclusions from data vs. testing a hypothesis) I argue that these studies are totally useless and misleading to the average person.

Although clinical trials are more scientifically rigorous, with large-sample-size-double-blind-randomized-placebo-controlled-trials at the zenith of the trustworthiness pyramid, the data is still unstable and often conflicting. These studies are also almost totally useless to the average person.

-2. The Health Industry Is Here To Make Money

Although the sugar industry, responsible for a lot of corruption in nutritional science in decades past, has been dealt a serious blow by the people who brought their actions to light, the health and fitness industry has taken on the lobbyist mantle. Every fitness and health guru has their own dietto promote, often a key part of which is selling their own commercial brand of bone broth or mushroom coffee. It’s easy to see how marketing forces muddy the waters for those just looking for data.

-3. Eating Healthy Vs. Losing Weight

“Want to lose 10 pounds of unsightly fat? Chop off your head.” This witty aphorism embodies perfectly the inherent conflict between weight loss diets and nutritional diets. Many behaviors and foods will lead you to lose weight at the expense of your health, and the result is further noise in the nutritional field.

-4. The Boy Who Cried Wolf

After decades of following the mainstream scientific and governmental nutritional recommendations only to discover some serious flaws, many people don’t trust nutritional scientists and mainstream dietitians anymore, looking instead to fringe gurus for advice. Although their distrust is reasonable, this has had the unfortunate effect of propping up total scam artists and normalizing cultish diet trends impenetrable to scientific criticism.

-5. People Are Different

The creation of the Human Genome Project in 1990 ushered in a paradigm shift that few people have realized yet. The field of genetic science is just opening up a door into a vast new territory of human understanding and potential. Although the field is relatively new, one observation which has emerged is that genetic variation among individuals is far beyond what we imagined, and the effects of those differences are palpable.

The popular view of genetics is that it just controls simple things like eye color and height, but no one imagines it controls your coffee addiction, your sense of humor, and your political preferences. The truth is that genetic influence is much more a part of our lives than anyone wants to admit.

When it comes to food, major things like lactose-intolerance, gluten-intolerance, and other food allergies are all genetically determined traits that differ on an individual basis. But a host of smaller but equally meaningful genetic factors are being discovered that affect what ‘healthy eating’ means to an individual— things like gut flora, nutrient bioavailability, insulin resistance, thyroid sensitivity, and inflammatory responses. Numerous genetically determined biological responses to food mean that the nutritional makeup of an ideal diet varies wildly from one person to the next.

So where does that leave us?

To summarize: genes are a huge factor in nutrition. People are wildly different in their nutritional needs. The science is often unreliable and clouded by lobbyists and other more unreliable sources. The health industry hooks you with self-professed gurus and no one is any good at looking rationally at the evidence and drawing conclusions.

At the top of this post, I explained how humans’ capacity for rational thought is a recent add-on to our operating system, and not very easy to use. With that in mind, I have come up with three, simple, actionable guidelines that are easy to implement and maintain, don’t require much effort, and will take anyone in the right direction towards healthy nutrition.

• TRUST YOUR GUT

Your body is complicated, but what’s simple is knowing that it’s designed to work. Thousands of years of natural selection have shaped your body into an adaptable and sophisticated energy-processor that wants good clean fuel. So listen to it. When you eat something, just take note of what your body is telling you in four stages:

a. The anticipation of eating
b. During the meal
c. Directly after eating
d. The next day

Most people put a lot of emphasis on a and b, and little emphasis on c and d. Make the mindset shift from a short-term picture of how your food makes you feel to a long-term picture. Find the food that works for you, eat it when you’re hungry, and stop when you’re full.

• ENJOY YOUR FOOD

“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.” (Frank Herbert, Dune)

How many times have you tried to change a habit by sheer force of will, only to find yourself exhausted after a few days, eventually giving in to your habit? Willpower is limited and no system that relies on it will last very long. So many people try and fail to maintain what they think is a ‘healthy’ diet, but it invariably is filled with foods that are bland and tasteless and aren’t fulfilling to eat. Make the mindset shift to a system that you will enjoy- don’t force yourself to eat stuff that makes you unhappy, only to fold and indulge in trash when your willpower gives out.

• YOUR DIET IS FOR YOU

Stop paying attention to diets, studies, anything to do with nutrition. At this point you know you’re not learning anything. A lot of these studies are untrustworthy, and you don’t know how to tell the difference. Even if the data is accurate, that doesn’t say anything about you as an individual— you are the only one who can figure out what works for you.

Bonus Tips—

• Change one thing at a time— otherwise you won’t know what was positive and what wasn’t.

• You probably need more sleep.

• Exercise is generally good for your health, but won’t make you lose weight. Being an athletic person will do that.

• Spices can make the most boring foods delicious and craving-worthy.

• Don’t revamp your diet every week; give it time for your gut and taste to adjust before drawing a conclusion.

Thank you for reading! I appreciate any feedback. Please follow!

Allan Steele