Eat Whatever You Want!

I was listening to an episode of John Altucher's podcast, episode 302 "It's all relative: nutrition myths debunked". The guest was Aaron Carroll, pediatrician and author of the book "Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully", and his life's mission was apparently to tell people to stop worrying about studies and statistics and to eat what makes your body feel good. If it works for you and your body, Carroll argued, then go for it.

I think that there's something both incredibly freeing and dangerous about his assertion. On the one hand, it is amazing to be told, listen to your body, only you can determine what sits well with you or not. On the other hand, there are things that can harm our body that don't seem to affect our us in ways that we can sense. Plus, we may not realize that what we consider normal for our bodies may actually be abnormal, not until we remove something and realize how much better we feel. For example, we consider the mid-afternoon slump at 3pm to be perfectly normal, that is until we realize that when we eliminate sugar from our diets, we have more even energy levels, and therefore don't feel as tired post-meals. When I eliminated bread from my diet for a long time, I was so surprised at how less bloated I felt, even though it had never bothered me before.

I do agree that we are driving ourselves mad with the constant whiplash of new scientific studies that declare one food good, only for it to fall from grace a decade later. Especially in the States, we are prone to fads and excess, and studies are frequently used by food companies to increase sales for one food product over another (i.e. gluten-free labels). Ultimately the ideal solution would be to regain some autonomy over our food options so that we could avoid processed foods and better understand how real food affects our bodies and go from there.