Nutrition

Let me preface this article by saying that I am a firm supporter of the scientific method. But I’m also a firm believer that we don’t know everything, and that sometimes we don’t even know that we don’t know about something; how can you study something that you did not even known existed? A lot of discoveries are made via luck and trial and error. That said, let me begin with a story about nutrition–of cats.

There was once a man, Dr. Francis Pottenger, Jr., who conducted experiments on more than 900 donated laboratory cats from 1932 to 1942.¹ Dr. Pottenger fed cats raw milk, cod liver oil, and cooked meat scraps of organ tissues such as liver and heart. Pottenger eventually needed more supplies, so he ordered raw meat scraps from a local meat processor and noticed that the cats fed raw meat were healthier.

Pottenger raised three generations of cats in parallel, one group fed the original diet and the other group fed with raw meat and the other with cooked meat. The milk and cod liver oil remained raw. The cats fed the all-raw diet were healthy while the cats fed the cooked meat diet developed various health problems.

The cause of ill health was taurine deficiency in the cooked meat diet, as heat negatively impacts the bioavailability of taurine to cats, and cod liver oil and cow’s milk don’t have much if any taurine. It took until 1975 before scientists knew taurine was an essential amino acid for cats; cats are unable to synthesize taurine ifrom precursors. Today’s cooked cat food has taurine added as a supplement, on which cats thrive.

The point of this story is that science’s understanding of nutrition is incomplete and ever-evolving. We don’t know what we don’t know; and sometimes we don’t even know that we don’t know. Furthermore science knowledge is not as clear-cut as you might think. The Economist recently published an article about how even basic science research is full of false positives.² Indeed, even Pottenger’s cat study might have been a false positive, though the story is certainly plausible given what we know about cats and taurine today.

The point is that it is absolutely foolish to believe that we already know everything there is to know about human nutrition, and that we can do things like refining a product down, adding back all the nutrients, and calling it a complete meal. We can’t do that because we don’t know the full list of nutrients and how they are absorbed in real life outside of the lab. For instance, it took scientists a while to figure out that eating beta carotene by itself isn’t particularly helpful. In real life, beta carotene is often found with carotenoids, and it is this entire group of chemicals acting together that is helpful–not the beta carotene alone.

For those who want to hear about my personal nutritional journey that culminated in the information below, see here. For those who just want the one-page cheat sheet on what to eat, here you go: eat 70% by mass vegetable matter and 30% by mass wild/grass-fed/free-range animal matter.

NUTRITION BASICS: THE SHORT STORY

70% by mass non-animal products:

leafy greens and herbs – very good, eat these in large quantities
non-starchy vegetables – very good, eat these in large quantities
sea vegetables (e.g., kelp, edible algae) – very good
traditional fermented food (yogurt, soy sauce, sauerkraut, etc.) – good
whole grains and sugary/starchy vegetables – limited amounts are fine, but avoid refined grains like the plague
whole fruits (with fiber intact; whole fruit does not mean fruit juice even if the juice contains pulp) – good
nuts – good in limited amounts
vegetable oil – bad due to the processing and temperatures
olive oil – good; use this instead of processed vegetable oil
vinegar – good
sweeteners (including natural ones like honey and presumably agave as well) – okay in limited amounts
salt – ok but processed foods have too much of it, so be careful
fungi – ???
legumes – ???

30% by mass animal products:

seafood (fish, shellfish in uncontaminated waters, etc.) – very good
wild or grass-fed/free-range animal meat/organs – very good; avoid feedlot cattle, cooped up chickens, etc.; can use bones to make excellent stock packed with collagen (apparently almost all cultures make bone broth and recognize it as nutritious and top athletes drink lots of it now)
conventional meat – ok or worse
dairy – very good only from grass-fed/free-ranging; otherwise ok or worse
eggs – very good only from grass-fed/free-ranging; otherwise ok or worse

Other:

coffee – coffee contains small amounts of acrylamide, a carcinogen
alcohol – uncertain (research is contradictory and inconclusive about mild alcohol consumption, though overconsumption is obviously toxic; basically don’t sweat it if you only have a couple of glasses of wine per day or something like that)

NUTRITION BASICS: THE LONG STORY

Your body needs carbohydrates for energy, proteins for building and maintaining organs and muscle, and oils for long-term energy storage, among other things. Sounds familiar, right? That’s what we are taught in schools. What they don’t teach you is how you are never going to have a problem with getting enough carbs and fats–or salt.

Salt, sugar, and fat are abundant in the US, especially in restaurants and processed food, because they taste good–so good that laboratory rats are as addicted to sugar as they are to cocaine.³

Salt makes everything taste better–even sweet stuff. You can even find it in soda like Coca-Cola.

Fat also tastes great and is laden with energy. Our bodies crave it. It’s probably an evolutionary adaptation from back in the day when people starved to death.

Sugars. There are different kinds of sugars: glucose, fructose, galactose, maltose, sucrose, and lactose. Glucose, fructose, and galactose are single sugars (monosaccharides). These single sugars can bond into double-sugars (disaccharides). Glucose+fructose = sucrose. Glucose+glucose = maltose. Glucose+galactose = lactose.

The body is able to break down double-sugars into single-sugars, though some people are unable to break down lactose (“lactose intolerance”). The body also converts galactose into glucose easily. So for all intents and purposes, the only sugar molecules we need to consider are glucose and fructose, because that is what all other sugars turn into in our digestive tracts. (Note that moving from high-fructose corn syrup to table sugar (sucrose) won’t save you, because that’s going from glucose+fructose to glucose+fructose–literally the same thing.)

Sugar is not bad per se–we need glucose to power our brains, among other things–but they are bad if we eat too many calories (our bodies store excess sugar energy by turning it into fat) or if we keep subjecting our bodies to sugar spikes, which of course leads to diabetes eventually. There is also some evidence that fructose is worse for you than glucose.⁴  And sugar is more dangerous to your body than fat.⁵  Even non-sugar carbs can present problems; a carb-heavy diet has been linked to mental problems.

The saving grace of foods like certain types of fruits and grains is that they come with some dietary fiber, insoluble or soluble, which help slow down sugar absorption.

Since salt, sugar, and fat are somewhat unavoidable if you want to be sociable at all (think birthday party cakes, your Aunt Sally’s cookies, date nights at restaurants, burgers and fries at the company picnic, etc.), I’m going to simply assume that you are getting enough carbs, salt, and fat.

Instead, I’ll focus on fiber, proteins and omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, and portion control tricks.

FIBER (INSOLUBLE, SOLUBLE)

Soluble and insoluble fiber are great for making you feel full and for slowing down sugar absorption. You should be getting at least 25 grams of fiber in your diet as a woman, or 30 as a man or eat more. Eating more fiber won’t hurt you. Eating too little fiber can hurt you, sometimes literally (not just constipation, but there is some evidence that having too-infrequent bowel movements can lead to colon cancer).

Soluble fiber dissolves in water and forms a gel which slows down digestion and therefore smooths out sugar spikes. You can find soluble fiber in things like oatmeal, oat cereal, lentils, apples, oranges, pears, oat bran, strawberries, nuts, flaxseeds, beans, dried peas, blueberries, psyllium, cucumbers, celery, and carrots.

Insoluble fiber does not dissolve in water, but it adds bulk and prevents constipation. You can find insoluble fiber in whole grains and vegetables such as wheat bran, corn bran, seeds, nuts, barley, couscous, brown rice, bulgur, zucchini, celery, broccoli, cabbage, onions, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, green beans, dark leafy vegetables, raisins, grapes, fruit, and root vegetable skins.

However, there’s an additional wrinkle. Pediatrician Dr. Robert Lustig, famous for calling sugar a poison, points out that pulverizing fiber makes it worthless to slow down sugar absorption. He gives the example of how “German fitness bread, with the nuts and the seeds … really dense … [is] a very different kind of bread than, say, what you have commercially available. … A lot of the fiber that they tout in these breads is actually added soluble fiber, such as cilium and things like that. Now you need those soluble fiber molecules, but you also need the insoluble ones.” Lustig essentially argues that pulverized insoluble fiber is worthless even if soluble fiber is added back in, because you need both of them working together in order to line your intestines to slow down sugar absorption. Lustig even says that juicers rip fibers into smithereens and thus make the fiber worthless just like pulverizing whole grains does.⁶

Lustig may or may not be right about juicers, and it’s not clear if he believes this to be true of blenders as well. Nevertheless, this is possible a challenge for those who prefer to blend greens and fruit into “green smoothies.” One solution is to simply blend green smoothies less finely. That is, since people chew food before swallowing and this presumably does not destroy insoluble fiber, it should be safe to blend green smoothies to the consistency of well-chewed food. This is not a bad idea, as your body should get a heads-up that it is about to receive a huge dose of food such as a glass of green smoothie. One way to give your body notice is to chew your smoothie regardless of whether it’s necessary for swallowing it or not.

PROTEIN AND OMEGA-3 FATTY ACIDS

Amino acids are the building blocks for proteins. Proteins are the machinery of your body; for instance, your muscle is mostly protein. Your body can synthesize many amino acids, but some can not be efficiently synthesized and must be ingested as food. This means eating plant and/or animal protein.

Animal protein usually comes from overcrowded, poorly-fed animals like caged chickens and salmon and feedlot cattle who are fed the remains of their compatriots and are so disease-ridden that antibiotics are regularly given.

Leaving animal rights and environmental issues aside, from a nutrition point of view, the problem is that these animals are fed a diet of stuff like corn that has a very high ratio of omega-6 fatty acids to omega-3 fatty acids. You are what you eat, so corn-fed animals also have a high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3.

What’s the problem with omega-6? Too much of it seems to be correlated to heart disease, and there is evidence that humans evolved on a diet with a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 of 3:1 or less, but modern American diets have a ratio more like 10:1 or even 15:1 (fifteen parts omega-6 to one part omega-3).⁷

Omega-6 and omega-3 interfere with each other in biological absorption, so in order to get enough omega-3, you should either increase your omega-3 intake or decrease your omega-6 intake.⁸

Not all omega-3 is the same, however. The three major forms are eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA).⁹

ALA is a shorter-chain omega-3 found in plant products like flax seed oil. Some leafy greens also contain ALA.

EPA/DHA are long-chain omega-3s found in abundance in seafood. Grass-fed/free-range terrestrial animals have some as well. Algae-derived omega-3 supplements may have only DHA.

Your body needs ALA, EPA, and DHA. Your body can synthesize EPA from ALA–very inefficiently. Your body can also synthesize DHA from ALA, but even less efficiently (like a painter painting with a toothpick instead of a paintbrush). Therefore, if you are vegetarian, you should not rely on flax seed oil, because you would be missing out on EPA/DHA. However, you could combine algal supplements for DHA and rely on plants (flax seed oil, etc.) for ALA and by extension, EPA.

For people who can eat animal products, you could consume seafood and get DHA/EPA directly. The easiest way to get a lot of EPA/DHA omega-3 in your diet is to consume fish oil such as cod liver oil. Pretty much any seafood is going to have a low ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, especially fatty fish like salmon.¹⁰ Shrimp, crabs, tuna, etc. are all fair game, too. Even seaweed. Leafy greens and plants can supply some ALA. However, beware of farmed fish which may be fed corn and thus have less-favorable ratios of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids.

If you want to eat meat and not just seafood and vegetables for protein, then consider free-range chickens and grass-fed cattle. They eat less corn so their omega-3 ratios are fine. Also don’t fall for the “organic” trick. Organic food is not always better than conventional. Organic eggs, without any mention of free range, just means the chickens are fed organic corn. And cage-free isn’t the same as free-range, either; the chickens are still not eating right. You can tell if a chicken has been eating a more natural diet by the color of its eggs; free-range eggs have slightly orange-ish yolks. This orange color is because free-range chickens don’t eat due to bugs that free-range chickens eat.

Here is a table of omega-3:omega-6 ratios that I derived from Tufts university [Id.]:

OMEGA-3 TO OMEGA-6 RATIOS IN FOOD

FISH	Serving size	Omega-3 fatty acids (g)	Omega-6 fatty acids (g)	Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio
Salmon, cold water, fresh and frozen, cooked	4 oz.	1.7	0.3	5.67
Sardines, canned in oil	4 oz.	1.8	4	2.22
Tuna, canned in water, drained	4 oz.	0.3	TRACE	10.00
Tuna, canned in oil, drained	4 oz.	0.2	3	0.07
Cod, fresh and frozen, cooked	4 oz.	0.6	0.1	6.00
Mackerel, canned, drained	4 oz.	2.2	0.2	11.00
Swordfish, fresh and frozen, cooked	4 oz.	1.7	0.3	5.67
Crab, soft shelled, cooked	4 oz.	0.6	0.1	6.00
Lobster, cooked	4 oz.	0.1	0	5.00
Bluefish, fresh and frozen, cooked	4 oz.	1.7	0.3	5.67
Salmon, canned, drained	4 oz.	2.2	0.2	11.00
Smelt, Rainbow	4 oz.	0.5	0.2	2.50
Scallops, Maine, fresh and frozen, cooked	4 oz.	0.5	0.1	5.00
NUTS	Serving size	Omega-3 fatty acids (g)	Omega-6 fatty acids (g)	Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio
Almonds, dry roasted	1 oz.	0	3.5	0.00
Walnuts	1 oz.	2.6	10.8	0.24
Flax seed	1 oz.	1.8	0.4	4.50
Pecans, dry roasted	1 oz.	0.3	6.4	0.05
Pistachios, roasted	1 oz.	0.1	3.9	0.03
Poppy seeds	1 oz.	0.1	8.6	0.01
Pumpkin seeds, shelled	1 oz.	0.1	5.4	0.02
Sesame seeds	1 oz.	0.1	6.7	0.01
OIL	Serving size	Omega-3 fatty acids (g)	Omega-6 fatty acids (g)	Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio
Walnut oil	1 Tbsp.	1.4	7.2	0.19
Soybean oil, unhydrogenated	1 Tbsp.	0.9	7	0.13
Flax seed oil	1 Tbsp.	6.9	2	3.45
Canola oil	1 Tbsp.	1.3	2.8	0.46
Cod liver oil	1 Tbsp.	2.8	0.3	9.33
Olive oil	1 Tbsp.	0.1	0.1	0.09
Sardine oil	1 Tbsp.			7.40
GRAINS AND BEANS	Serving size	Omega-3 fatty acids (g)	Omega-6 fatty acids (g)	Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio
Soybeans, dried, cooked	0.5 cup	0.5	3.8	0.13
Tofu, regular	4 oz.	0.3	2.1	0.14
GREENS
Spinach, fresh cooked	0.5 cup	0.1	TRACE	5.00
Green leaf lettuce, fresh, raw	1 cup	TRACE	TRACE	2.00
Red leaf lettuce, fresh, raw	1 cup	TRACE	TRACE	0.67
Boston or Bibb lettuce, fresh, raw	1 cup	TRACE	TRACE	0.67
Chard, cooked	0.5 cup	0	TRACE	0.00
Turnip greens, cooked	0.5 cup	TRACE	TRACE	2.00
Dandelion greens, cooked	0.5 cup	0.1	TRACE	1.25
Kale, cooked	0.5 cup	0.1	0.1	1.11
Beet greens, cooked	0.5 cup	TRACE	TRACE	0.25
Collard greens, cooked	0.5 cup	0.1	0.1	1.25
Mustard greens, cooked	0.5 cup	TRACE	TRACE	2.00

Note: I take "0.0" as "0.001" and "trace" as "0.0001" for purposes of ratio calculations

VITAMINS AND MINERALS

In contrast to large amounts of carbohydrates, oils, and proteins necessary for life, only small amounts of vitamins and minerals are needed for good health. However, “small amount” does not mean zero. These are very important nutrients that you need to consume in order to survive. Some vitamins and minerals are more famous than others (e.g., Vitamin C). Some are yet to be discovered.

I started a project where I was going to identify every vitamin and mineral and figure out which foods had the most of each one, but that project failed because, as the Pottenger cat study showed, we don’t know everything about human nutrition yet, so it is not really possible to construct a complete spreadsheet like I intended.

Put another way, there is no real way to know exactly what vitamins and minerals you need for optimum health. You can probably survive on sub-optimal diets–our ancestors certainly did, as the human body is remarkably adaptable to a wide variety of diets, and even Pottenger’s malnourished cats survived long enough to produce a couple of (increasingly sick) generations before all the malnourished cats became too sick to reproduce. But if you want to thrive and reach 100, you will probably want to eat a little bit of everything to make sure you get some amount of every vitamin and mineral. It’s like diversifying your stock portfolio so that a whole lot of stocks need to go down in order to mortally wound your entire portfolio.

My advice on this topic is to eat a lot of vegetable matter, especially leafy greens. They are packed with all sorts of vitamins and minerals. Refer to the one-page cheat sheet at the top of this article for more information. If you are wondering what kind of vegetables are good in particular, or when it’s worthwhile to buy organic and when it’s not, I’ll visit those topics in a later article. It’s a complicated topic, made more complicated by how modern varieties of vegetables can differ markedly in nutritional value. There is a New York Times article making the rounds about how vegetables aren’t created equal and how wild strains can be far more nutritious in some ways than cultivated strains.¹¹

Note: Vegetarians in particular need to worry about vitamin B12, which is found almost always in animals. Some algae produces it as well. The body can store B12 for a long time, so people who have been vegetarians for only a few years may get away with a low-B12 diet for a while, but eventually it will catch up to you. Thankfully B12 supplements are widely available. You may want to take B1/B6 supplements while you are at it, as some evidence links vegetarian diets to B1/B6 deficiencies as well.¹²

PORTION CONTROL

Food marketers have long known that people take cues from their environment, including package sizes. People tend to eat more when they use larger plates. People tend to eat more when bags of food are larger. People tend to pour more liquid into short, squat glasses than tall, thin glasses, even when the glasses hold the same amount of liquid.

The good news is that you can turn the tables:

– Buy smaller food packages or partition one large package into smaller ones yourself.

– Sell or store big plates and squat glasses and use smaller plates and tall, thin glasses to help with portion control.

RULES OF THUMB

As stated near the top of this article in the one-page cheat sheet, 70% of your diet should be vegetables and fruits, especially leafy greens. The remaining 30% of your diet should give you enough animal protein and omega-3 fatty acids, especially EPA and DHA. Wild seafood is the easiest way to get lots of EPA/DHA, but at great cost. Nutritionally, frozen seafood is almost as good as fresh, so stock up when you see things like frozen wild salmon on sale. Canned seafood has lower nutritional value and is often laced with a lot of sodium as well. A lower-cost alternative to seafood is to eat grass-fed/free-range meats and add cod liver oil or other fish oil supplements. These percentages are derived from studies by Weston Price and approximate a typical healthy aboriginal diet in the early 19th century. (Price observed that diets can vary greatly, but a typical healthy aboriginal diet was about 70% vegetable matter by mass.)

If you are interested in ingesting a LOT of plant matter in a short amount of time, try blending green smoothies in a power blender (Blendtec or Vitamix; other blenders will do the job but take longer or break sooner or make less-smooth, chewier smoothies instead). You can use recipes to get ideas if you are just starting out, but once you get the hang of how green smoothies work, you will probably end up doing what I do: buy whatever organic greens are on sale, add frozen or fresh fruit, and add supplements like whey powder and apple cider vinegar as needed.

As far as cooking techniques go, I usually eat things raw, boiled, steamed, sauteed, or (relatively low temperature) fried. I don’t particularly like the carcinogenic byproducts of high-temperature cooking such as grilling. I also eat a lot of yogurt. I will use spices and soy sauce for flavor. Occasionally I will do a braise or make (organic, grass-fed) beef jerky or cioppino or ratatouille. This doesn’t mean I strictly adhere to the above diet; I do still splurge on things like chocolate and ice cream from time to time. As long as the vast majority of your diet is good, the last ~5% hardly matters.

FOOTNOTES