1.
Eggs Are Unhealthy
There’s one thing that nutrition
professionals have had remarkable success with… and that is
demonizing incredibly healthy foods.
The worst example of that is eggs,
which happen to contain a large amount of
cholesterol and were therefore considered to increase the
risk of heart disease.
But recently it has been proven that
the cholesterol in the diet doesn’t really raise the cholesterol
in blood. In fact, eggs primarily raise the “good” cholesterol
and are NOT associated with increased risk of heart disease (1,
2).
What we’re left with is one of the
most nutritious foods on the
planet. They’re high in all sorts of nutrients along with unique
antioxidants that protect our eyes (3).
To top it all of, despite being a
“high fat” food, eating eggs for breakfast is proven to cause
significant weight loss compared to bagels for breakfast (4,
5).
Bottom Line:
Eggs do not cause heart disease and are among the most
nutritious foods on the planet. Eggs for breakfast can help
you lose weight.
2.
Saturated Fat is Bad For You
A few decades ago it was decided
that the epidemic of heart disease was caused by eating too much
fat, in particular saturated fat. This was based on
highly flawed studies and political decisions that have now
been proven to be completely wrong.
A massive review article published
in 2010 looked at 21 prospective epidemiological studies with a
total of 347.747 subjects.
Their results:
absolutely no
association between saturated fat and heart disease (6).
The idea that saturated fat raised
the risk of heart disease was an
unproven theory that somehow became conventional wisdom (7).
Eating saturated fat raises the
amount of HDL (the “good”) cholesterol in the blood and changes
the LDL from small, dense LDL (very bad) to Large LDL, which is
benign (8,
9).
Meat, coconut oil, cheese, butter…
there is absolutely no reason to fear these
foods.
Bottom Line:
Newer studies have proven that saturated fat does not cause
heart disease. Natural foods that are high in saturated fat
are good for you.
3.
Everybody Should be Eating Grains
The idea that humans should be
basing their diets on grains has never made sense to me.
The agricultural revolution happened
fairly recently in human evolutionary history and our genes
haven’t changed that much.
Grains are fairly low in nutrients
compared to other real foods like vegetables. They are also rich
in a substance called phytic acid which binds essential minerals
in the intestine and prevents them from being absorbed (10).
The most common grain in the western
diet, by far, is wheat… and wheat can cause a
host of health problems, both minor and serious.
Modern wheat contains a large amount
of a protein called gluten, but there is evidence that a
significant portion of the population may be sensitive to it (11,
12,
13).
Eating
gluten can damage the
intestinal lining, cause pain, bloating, stool inconsistency and
tiredness (14,
15).
Gluten consumption has also been associated with
schizophrenia and
cerebellar ataxia, both serious disorders of
the brain (16,
17).
Bottom Line:
Grains are relatively low in nutrients compared to other
real foods like vegetables. The gluten grains in particular
may lead to a variety of health problems.
4.
Eating a Lot of Protein is Bad For Your Bones and Kidneys
A high protein diet has been claimed
to cause both osteoporosis and kidney disease.
It is true that eating protein
increases calcium excretion from the bones in the short term,
but the long term studies actually show the opposite effect.
In the long term, protein has a
strong association with improved bone health and a lower risk of
fracture (18,
19). Additionally, studies don’t show any
association of high protein with kidney disease in otherwise
healthy people (20,
21).
In fact, two of the main risk
factors for kidney failure are diabetes and high blood pressure.
Eating a high protein diet improves both (22,
23). If anything, a high protein diet
should be protective against osteoporosis and
kidney failure!
Bottom Line:
Eating a high protein diet is associated with improved bone
health and a lower risk of fracture. High protein also
lowers blood pressure and improves diabetes symptoms, which
should lower the risk of kidney failure.
5.
Low-Fat Foods Are Good For You
Do you know what regular food tastes
like when all the fat has been taken out of it?
Well, it tastes like cardboard. No
one would want to eat it. The food manufacturers know this and
therefore they
add other things to compensate for the lack of fat.
Usually these are sweeteners… sugar,
high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners like
aspartame.
We’ll get to the sugar in a moment,
but I’d like to point out that even though artificial sweeteners
don’t have calories, the evidence does NOT suggest that they are
better for you than sugar.
In fact, many observational studies
show a consistent, highly significant association with various
diseases like obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart
disease, premature delivery and
depression (24,
25,
26).
In these low-fat products,
healthy natural fats are being replaced with substances that
are extremely harmful.
Bottom Line:
Low-fat foods are usually highly processed products loaded
with sugar, corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. They are
extremely unhealthy.
6.
You Should Eat Many Small Meals Throughout The Day
The idea that you should eat many
small meals throughout the day in order to “keep metabolism
high” is a
persistent myth that doesn’t make any sense.
It is true that eating raises your
metabolism slightly while you’re digesting the meal, but
it’s the total amount of food that determines the energy used,
NOT the number of meals.
This has actually been put to the
test and refuted multiple times. Controlled studies where one
group eats many small meals and the other the same amount of
food in fewer meals show that there is literally no difference
between the two (27,
28).
In fact, one study in obese men
revealed that eating 6 meals per day led to less feelings of
fullness compared to 3 meals (29).
Not only is eating so often
practically useless for most of the people out there, it may
even be harmful.
It is not natural for the human body
to be constantly in the fed state. In nature, we used to fast
from time to time and we didn’t eat nearly as often as we do
today.
When we don’t eat for a while, a
cellular process called
autophagy cleans waste products out of
our cells (30).
Fasting or not eating from time to time is good for you.
Several observational studies show a
drastically increased risk of colon cancer (4th most common
cause of
cancer death), numbers going as high as a 90% increase for
those who eat 4 meals per day compared to 2 (31,
32,
33).
Bottom Line:
There is no evidence that eating many small meals throughout
the day is better than fewer, bigger meals. Not eating from
time to time is good for you. Increased meal frequency is
associated with colon cancer.
7.
Carbs Should Be Your Biggest Source of Calories
The mainstream view is that everyone
should eat a
low-fat diet, with
carbs being around 50-60% of total
calories.
This sort of diet contains a lot of
grains and sugars, with very small amounts of fatty foods like
meat and eggs. This type of diet may work well for some people,
especially those who are naturally lean.
But for those who are obese, have
the
metabolic syndrome or diabetes, this amount of carbohydrates
is downright dangerous.
This has actually been studied
extensively. A low-fat, high-carb diet has been compared to a
low-carb, high-fat diet in multiple
randomized controlled trials.
The results are consistently in
favor of low-carb, high-fat diets (34,
35,
36).
Bottom Line:
The low-fat, high-carb diet is a miserable failure and has
been proven repeatedly to be vastly inferior to lower-carb,
higher-fat diets.
8.
High Omega-6 Seed and Vegetable Oils Are Good For You
Polyunsaturated fats are considered
healthy because some studies show that they lower your risk of
heart disease.
But there are many types of
polyunsaturated fats and they are not all the same. Most
importantly, we have both
Omega-3 fatty acids and
Omega-6 fatty
acids.
Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory and
lower your risk of many diseases related to inflammation (37).
Humans actually need to get Omega-6s and Omega-3s in a certain
ratio. If the ratio is too high in favor of Omega-6, it can
cause problems (38).
By far the biggest sources of
Omega-6 in the modern diet are processed seed and vegetable oils
like soybean, corn and sunflower oils. Throughout
evolution, humans never had access to such an abundance of
Omega-6 fats. It is unnatural for the human body.
Research that specifically looks at
Omega-6 fatty acids instead of polyunsaturated fats in general
shows that they actually increase the risk of heart disease (39,
40).
Eat your Omega-3s and consider
supplementing with cod fish liver oil, but avoid the industrial
seed and vegetable oils.
Bottom Line:
Humans need to get Omega-6 and Omega-3 fats in a certain
ratio. Eating excess Omega-6 from seed oils raises your risk
of disease.
9.
Low Carb Diets Are Dangerous
I personally believe
low-carb diets to be a potential cure for many of the most
common health problems in western nations.
The low-fat diet peddled all around
the world is fairly useless against many of these diseases. It
simply does not work. However, low-carb diets (demonized by
nutritionists and the media) have repeatedly been shown to lead
to much better outcomes.
Every randomized controlled trial on
low-carb diets shows that they:
-
Reduce
body fat more
than calorie-restricted low-fat diets, even though the
low-carb dieters are allowed to eat as much as they want
(41,
42).
-
Lower
blood pressure
significantly (43,
44).
-
Lower
blood sugar
and improve symptoms of diabetes much more than low-fat
diets (45,
46,
47,
48).
-
Increase
HDL (the good)
cholesterol much more (49,
50).
-
Lower
triglycerides
much more than low-fat diets (51,
52,
53).
-
Change the
pattern of LDL
(bad) cholesterol from small, dense (very bad) to Large
LDL, which is benign (54,
55).
-
Low carb diets are also
easier to
stick to, probably because they don’t require you to
restrict calories and be hungry all the time. More
people in the low-carb groups make it to the end of the
studies (56,
57).
Many of the health professionals
that are supposed to have our best interest in mind have the
audacity to claim that these diets are dangerous,
then continue to peddle their failed low-fat dogma that is
hurting more people than it helps.
Bottom Line:
Low-carb diets are the healthiest, easiest and most
effective way to lose weight and reverse metabolic disease.
It is a scientific fact.
10.
Sugar is Unhealthy Because it Contains “Empty” Calories
It is commonly believed that sugar
is bad for you because it contains empty calories.
It’s true, sugar has a lot of
calories with no essential nutrients. But that is just the tip
of the iceberg.
Sugar, primarily because of its
high fructose content, affects metabolism in a way that sets
us up for rapid fat gain and metabolic disease.
Fructose gets metabolized by the
liver and turned into fat which is secreted into the blood as
VLDL particles. This leads to elevated triglycerides and
cholesterol (58,
59).
It also causes resistance to the
hormones insulin and
leptin, which is a stepping stone towards obesity, metabolic
syndrome and diabetes (60,
61).
This is just to name a few. Sugar
causes a
relentless biochemical drive for humans to eat more and get
fat. It is probably the single worst ingredient
in the standard western diet.
Bottom Line:
The harmful effects of sugar go way beyond empty calories.
Sugar wreaks havoc on our metabolism and sets us up for
weight gain and many serious diseases.
11.
High Fat Foods Will Make You Fat
It seems kind of intuitive that
eating fat would make you get fat.
The stuff that is gathering under
our skin and making us look soft and puffy is fat. So… eating
fat should give our bodies even more of it. But it isn’t that simple. Despite
fat having more calories per gram than carbohydrate or protein,
high-fat diets do not make people fat.
As with anything, this depends on
the context.
A diet that is high in fat AND high
in carbs will make you fat, but it’s NOT because of the fat. In fact, diets that are high in fat
(and low in carbs) cause much greater fat loss than diets that
are low in fat (62,
63,
64).
