What Is The Right Diet For You?
Happy New Year and best wishes for your health in 2022! At the beginning of the year, people are most likely to consider making dietary adjustments, if only to get over the excesses of Christmas. But what is the right diet for you? What should you really be eating? The amount of dietary advice out there is conflicting, confusing and sometimes downright harmful to health. Labels can be meaningless. For example, a vegetarian diet to some people may mean pizza and doughnuts; to others, plant-based foods, beans and lentils.
Sometimes diets can be confusing both to patient and clinician - for example, why is milk not allowed on the Fodmap diet but camembert is? It doesn’t make sense to me. A low Fodmap diet may leave you with a calmer gut lining but its restrictive list of foods can leave you nutritionally weaker with very unhappy gut bacteria. Over the years, I have seen people get their diets spectacularly wrong.
No ‘one-size-fits-all’
First of all, there is no such thing as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ diet. I use the word ‘diet’ in its widest sense of choice of food and drink to sustain life rather than in its narrowest sense of weight loss. This explains why your friend may do well on a particular diet and you may not. Your body biochemistry is unique to you and therefore your diet needs to be personalised to that degree. How do I as a practitioner figure out what those needs are?
Your lab results show what you need
Firstly, I look at what you are currently eating and your current health status. If you are doing fantastically well, that probably reflects that you are eating the right diet for you. However, in reality, this is hardly ever the case with patients who visit me. I am more likely to see chronically inflamed bodies suffering from fatigue, bloating, brain fog, and aches and pains. This alone tells me of the need for dietary change.
Secondly, I look at your lab test results. These tell me your weaknesses, deficiencies and strengths and give a good guide as to your nutritional requirements. For example, your stool test results tell me if you are eating enough proteins, fats and carbs and whether you are digesting and absorbing your foods. Blood tests tell me your nutritional deficiencies, including whether you are anaemic or have enough iron that is being shunted to the wrong place. They also tell me whether you have greater nutritional needs because of chronic infections, immune suppression, poor thyroid function or greater outpouring of stress hormones. Your lifetime accumulation of toxic chemicals and heavy metals also ‘eats up’ your body’s supply of vitamins and minerals more quickly.
Recommendations based in biochemistry
My recommendations for diet are based solely on your biochemical needs, not on political correctness, ‘saving the planet’ or emotional considerations behind the killing of animals for food, compelling though these may be. I support animal welfare wholeheartedly but if someone is anaemic with depleted hormones and chronic immune suppression, I won’t hesitate to recommend organic grass-fed beef liver once a week as one of the most life-enhancing foods available with its rich source of nutrients, of which copper, choline, retinol, hyuralonic acid are but a few.
Having said that, I am not here to force people to do things they don’t want to do. If someone really doesn’t want to eat meat, even though it looks as though they will benefit by doing so, I will still try to do my best for them. However, I will be honest and tell them that lack of nutrient-dense proteins may really hamper recovery and not to expect too much too soon, if at all. This is sometimes enough to convince someone to opt for a trial of animal proteins for a few weeks to see how they do.
Your nutritional needs can change
Your nutritional needs can change throughout your lifetime. There may be periods of your life where you do best with more of a vegetarian diet, but other periods when you need heavier animal proteins i.e. recovering from chronic illness or toxic stress. That is why relying on the internet for dietary guidance can only give a small portion of the whole picture as Dr. Google cannot factor in your unique biochemical needs. A fruit breakfast may be appropriate if you are following a detoxification regime for a limited period of time, but wholly unsuitable if you are struggling with a low functioning thyroid and chronic infections.
Don’t rely on Dr. Google!
At this time of the year, people often think of detoxifying, courtesy of Dr. Google. However, don’t rely on him as he doesn’t have all the facts about your biochemistry. Fasting may be a good idea for some, but again, wholly unsuitable for others i.e. the chronically fatigued, until they have restored immune, thyroid and digestive function and have the energy to detoxify. Otherwise, they can find themselves moving closer to the ditch. Likewise, people can misuse a potentially useful popular tool like fasting. A fasting mimicking diet (for 5 day periods) as outlined by Professor Valter Longo is not the same as intermittent fasting which involves timed eating windows. Many people think this means not eating until lunchtime, meanwhile they are trying to get their engine going in the morning without enough petrol! Personally, if you want to create a controlled window without food, I favour the old adage: breakfast like a king, lunch like a price and dine like a pauper.
Get the basics right
Despite there being no ‘one-size-fits-all’ diet, we can narrow things down a little to give some basic guidelines as to what a healthy diet should and shouldn’t contain. This can be used as a foundation for personalising your diet to your specific needs. I call these basic guidelines Subtractions and Additions.
Subtractions (i.e. foods to avoid):
Gluten and gluten grains (pretty much indigestible, create a leaky gut and inflammation in everyone eating them; sprayed with toxic chemicals like glyphosate).
Cows’ dairy (inflammatory food and growth factor; we simply don’t need the milk of another animal in adulthood).
Refined sugars/ sweeteners (a non-food that creates a lot of havoc i.e. feeds infections and creates an unhealthy gut as well as being highly addictive and contributing no nutritional value whatsoever). Many people are under the misapprehension that you need refined sugar for energy. In truth, it actually saps energy.
Fake/highly processed foods (these are toxic foods low in nutrients but high in addictive chemicals and additives that do not satisfy the appetite but create craving for more foods).
Vegetable oils/trans fats (these damaged fats found in processed foods, ready meals and substitute butters are tremendously harmful to the brain and nervous system).
Additions (i.e. foods to enjoy):
Dishes made with real food ingredients made from scratch just like the Victorians used to do (this need not be time consuming with modern aids like a slow cooker and Nutri Bullet). The Victorians had more stamina than modern man - they rode and walked everywhere and worked long hours doing heavy manual labour. It was modern sanitation (the flush toilet) which increased longevity, but survival expectations have now started to drop as our diet has become more refined and contaminated.
An abundance of vegetables of different colours (some people do best with cooked, others with more raw).
Healthy fats (can include coconut oil, real goats’ butter, olive oil, meats, fish, seafood, avocados, nuts and seeds).
A variety of adequate organic proteins (can include meats, fish, seafoods, eggs, cheese, vegan cheese, lentils, nuts, seaweed proteins etc.).
The above guidelines contain the bare bones upon which to build an eating regime that will build health, rather than destroy it. Some people will do well with gluten free flour alternatives, others will do better with getting their daily bread from non-flour sources like ground linseeds (flaxseeds) as per Dr Sarah Myhill’s recipe.
The reason that gluten, cows’ dairy and refined sugars are on the Subtractions list is because they have been shown to trigger inflammation and disease in a great many people. This is especially the case with gluten and autoimmunity which is seriously on the increase.
How cases fail
When the condition is severe or threatens to be, I tell people they need to be completely accurate about gluten avoidance - with zero exceptions and no slip ups - regardless of how challenging this may be. If someone doesn’t do this, their case will fail. The difficulty of doing this is irrelevant. I am no longer ‘reasonable’ with a patient. Nor do I negotiate. My job is to manage a person’s biology which doesn’t care about inconvenience; it only reacts. If you eat a small piece of gluten once every two weeks, this is like starting a fire in a dry forest one day every two weeks. The fire will burn all the time, every day. This may also apply to foods which are cross-reactive to gluten i.e. foods like oats which the immune system may mistake for gluten proteins and react to. There are specific lab tests to detect these cross-reactive foods and can be useful in the case where someone is not making the expecting gains on a strictly gluten-free diet for a number of weeks.
If you would like help getting your diet right or if you feel you have slipped away from optimum health, please email the Good Health Clinic on goodhealthclinic@outlook.com or ring on 07836 552936.