What should I eat? Or: what's the best diet for human beings?
July 26, 2020
If there is one area that is full of conflicting information, that’s nutrition. Even the science seems confusing as different studies come to different conclusions. So which advice should you follow?
Cows eat grass, gorillas eats fruits and nuts, lions eat antelopes, mongooses eat insects, blue whales eat krill, etc. Every animal has a diet that is best for them, and the same is true for humans. The best diet for humans is a whole food, plant-based diet. In fact, the science is crystal clear on that point once you filtered out the studies that are poorly designed or that are financed by corporate interests.
I found that the cholesterol aspect is the most compelling evidence. Cholesterol is used in our cell membranes to make them supple, and that’s why your skin is not like tree bark. So cholesterol is totally indispensable for human life. So much so that our human body is able to synthesize it, and to retain it and recycle it as much as possible. The only dietary source of cholesterol is animal products (meat, eggs, dairy products), and we can see that ingestion of dietary cholesterol triggers atherosclerosis, which eventually leads to cardiovascular diseases, such as heart failures and strokes (the number one killer in the western world). A whole food, plant-based diet is the only diet proven to stop and reverse heart disease, which thus shows that (A) our human bodies do not expect to ingest cholesterol, and (B) the ingestion of cholesterol is actually harmful to us.
On the other side, we have vestigial DNA related to the synthesis of vitamin C, which shows that a long time ago, our ancestors’ bodies were synthesizing their own vitamin C. We lost this ability during our evolution, most probably because we evolved to eat foods providing enough vitamin C, such as fruits and vegetables.
Clear information is now available on the benefits of eating a whole food, plant-based diet and the many harms of eating animal products. I would recommend the following:
- Forks over Knives: documentary (sometimes) available on Netflix, or here
- How not to die, a book by Dr Michael Greger and Gene Stone
- What the health: documentary (usually) available on Netflix
- Nutritionfacts.org is a non-profit website created by Dr Greger where he and his team scour western publications to present their findings in an accessible way
- Mic the vegan has some good, science-based, content on YouTube
For those of you athletes reading this, fear not the mythical deficit in proteins or other nutrients you have been taught to ingest in vast quantities! You can watch the Games Changers, another documentary available on Netflix showing a variety of athletes who actually improved their performance after switching to a whole food, plant-based diets.
There are also tremendous advantages of a plant-based diets over an omnivorous diet regarding animal welfare and environmental impact that I will explore in another post.
Switching to a whole food, plant-based diet is hard, but the hardest part of it in my experience is to open one’s mind to the possibility of living, and even striving, on such a diet. There are plenty of resources online (and recipes on my website) to get started. If you miss the taste of meat or dairy, there are vegan alternatives (but to be honest and despite what vegan advocates say, they never really taste the same as the original…)