The Best Diet for Health & Wellbeing
“Wearing a cast on a broken bone will allow it to heal. Wearing a cast on a perfectly normal arm will cause it to atrophy” (Dr. Peter Attia, 2023).
Structured and prescribed diets such as low carb, very low calorie, fasting and juice diets are all used in the medical world to help address medical conditions and make a drastic change to improve health, quickly. If we were to rate these individuals on a continuum from 1-10, where 1 is their worst possible state of health and 10 is the best, the people receiving these prescriptions would certainly be closer to 1 than to 10.
The most drastic of nutritional interventions to obtain weight loss, i.e. ‘diets’, all come with some degree of compromise and are not designed to be followed as long-term solutions. Their aim is simple - to get the individual free of pain and disfunction. They are designed to be easily implemented, quickly, and to a large number of people with little support or guidance; not as individual prescriptions to be followed long term for health and longevity.
When you wear a cast on your arm, it allows the bone to heal by restricting the arm movement. If you were to put a cast on an arm that was not broken it would actually do harm by causing muscle atrophy, i.e. the muscle mass would deteriorate, leaving the arm weaker.
In the same way, cutting out certain foods or food groups from the diet can help to reduce energy intake quickly, and in doing so result in weight loss. However, when you remove certain foods from the diet it results in a reduction or, at times complete elimination, of certain essential nutrients.
For example;
Reduce your dairy intake and you need to ensure that you are maintaining healthy levels of calcium from other sources or it can lead to poor bone health, potentially making you more susceptible to osteoporosis.
Follow a low-fat diet for a prolonged period of time and your sex steroid hormones may be affected, which can lead to reduced fertility levels.
Go for prolonged periods without eating and it is more challenging to maintain your muscle mass as you lose weight, which can result in frailty.
Cut meat out of your diet and it can be more challenging to obtain Vitamin B12 and Iron without a plan for how to obtain these essential nutrients.
The factors which determine our food choices and eating habits are extremely complex. They include genetics, social influences, economic factors, education, metabolic health, marketing, religion, beliefs, personal preferences, and everything in between. As a result, there is no one best ‘diet’ that applies across the board. Instead, a long term plan of individually tailored lifestyle and nutritional changes provide the best, and most sustainable, strategy for weight loss, health and wellbeing.
The take home points
Make nutritional choices that suit you, your lifestyle, preferences and your beliefs; but in doing so endeavour to make well-informed decisions;
Popular dietary interventions are NOT designed to be used long term, and without simultaneous lifestyle changes will likely leave you back when you started when the dietary strategy is removed;
There is a place for extreme diets and it lies with specialist supervision to prevent serious health consequences. For most people, a long term strategy of individually tailored lifestyle and nutritional changes provide the best ‘diet’ for achieving health and wellbeing to live a life you love!