The Current State of Food Affairs

The deluge of information and advice on eating well threatens to drown rather than clear the path to a better understanding of diet and nutrition for many who wish to take control of their consumption habits for the sake of their health. It seems that the purported health impact of certain foods, or substances within those foods, changes with the seasons. In addition, many who have tried the latest diet fads have, in the long run, ended up heavier and more dissatisfied than when they started.

Those earnest to locate high-quality and easily actionable information about diet and nutrition might be wondering why this should be the state of affairs. There may be many reasons for this, four of which we will explore in the first part of this article before seeking commensurate solutions. Note that the perspectives offered here are primarily drawn from the sources listed at the end. Having read this article, if you wish to research further or interrogate the reference for some claim, consult those sources.

The first reason for our diet and nutrition woes is our chronic inability to proportion pleasure, or reward, with contentment, or happiness. And the second reason, which we will get to later, is that the food industry takes advantage of this. Pleasure may be defined as deriving gratification or reward from something external, and contentment as the internal state of being happy despite external circumstances. Pleasure causes us to seek more pleasure, while contentment is content where it stands. These emotional states are correlated with discrete pathways in the brain and their attendant neurotransmitters, dopamine, and serotonin.

Reward is often short-lived (e.g., enjoying a good meal) while contentment lasts much longer (e.g., watching your kids grow up into happy and flourishing adults). Reward is exciting while contentment is calming. Reward can be artificially stimulated with substances such as alcohol, caffeine, and sugar, while contentment cannot. Reward tends to be fulfilled through taking, like the feeling you get when winning the lottery. Contentment, by contrast, is typically achieved through giving, like the feeling you get when you accomplish something that brings enduring value to others.

Hence, reward tends to be something only you can enjoy because it usually does not affect anyone else. An excess of pleasure derived from reward and untempered by contentment can lead to various misery-inducing addictions such as consuming dangerous substances, overusing social media, or eating out your well-stocked refrigerator. Regardless, we should not be too quick to demonise reward. Reward, in itself, has motivated just about all human endeavours. It has led to our collective progress, from vertebrate tree-dwellers to the millennial hipster. If we were not motivated by pleasure or reward to eat or have sex or protect ourselves from predators or keep up with the Joneses, we would have gone extinct a long time ago. Reward is how not only our but virtually all species are motivated to survive and thrive.   

But because reward and contentment affect one another, people must rely on a balanced proportion of both for their overall well-being: Contentment can lead to tempered pleasure-seeking; and moderate amounts of reward-seeking can open the door to a life of contentment, for example, when one’s life goals are met. Likewise, while the neurotransmitters related to those emotional states, dopamine for pleasure and serotonin for contentment, operate different brain processes, are located in different parts of the brain, and targets different areas in the brain, how they work in proportion to each other determines aggregate well-being. In addition to these neurotransmitters, other chemicals affect emotional states, as do genetic, epigenetic, and cultural (or experiential) forces. These two neurotransmitter pathways alone, however, are themselves powerful enough to take people up the tallest mountain or down the deepest valley. So, we should pay special attention to them.  

The driver of reward, dopamine, is best understood as being on a range. Too little dopamine and you will be depressed and tired, lying face down on your bed, unwilling to do anything. Too much, and you get paranoid, aggressive, and easily irritable. About an eighth of the human population are familiar with these feelings. Because rising oestrogen also means rising dopamine, about half of women who are still ovulating and who are already at their optimum dopamine levels normally, receive an unwelcome spike in dopamine when they are ovulating. This spike creates those unpleasant feelings of, for example, wanting to maim family members for getting the incorrect items on a grocery list. Such women likely possess the Met158Met genotype which disposes them to have excess dopamine. Other women who possess the Val158Val genotype have a protein that eats up dopamine, so they have less of it hanging around. Hence, they feel focused, clear-headed, and motivated at that time of the month when it finally enters the optimal range. When anyone’s dopamine is in that range, they are in a good mood and excited to engage in their daily activities.

Remaining in the optimal dopamine range extends beyond biological destiny. Behaviours matter as well. Substance abuse and other behaviours that kill neurons, down regulating receptor sensitivity, makes us need more for less. It could go like this: driven by dopamine, you have a desire to snack on something tasty. You eat a chocolate chip cookie dipped in peanut butter. You get a nirvanic rush from the butter, chocolate, and sugar in your mouth. You eat the second one. The rush is still there but a little less pleasurable. The next day you re-stock on single packet cookies and consume four of them instead of just two. The following week, you buy the six-pack, just about the same time the six-pack on your body (if you ever had one) morphs into a protruding one-pack. You still get some pleasure from eating the cookies, but not much. In one month, the cashier now recognizes you, and you no longer get any pleasure from those cookies even though you cannot stop eating them. This example is just one among myriad choices we are encouraged to make in our dopamine-driven consumer culture. Substitute ‘chocolate chip cookie dipped in peanut butter’ with anything, like ‘video games,’ or ‘shoes,’ or ‘the latest phone,’ and you get the point.

Just like dopamine, too much serotonin, the neurotransmitter for contentment, is deleterious for mental health: it can lead to suicidal thoughts and actions. This explains, tragically, why some people who overuse selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a kind of antidepressant, commit suicide as a result. Furthermore, medications or supplements intended to help people achieve some healthy balance between dopamine and serotonin impact people differently. If, then, it is so difficult to achieve homeostasis when it comes to these two neurotransmitters, what chance do we have of finding lasting happiness?

This leads us to the first reason for your diet and nutrition woes: our inability to proportion pleasure, or reward, with contentment, or happiness. And the second is related to it: The food industry capitalizes on the idea that reward alone leads to happiness by offering highly processed and sugar-laden foods designed to tickle the reward centre of our brain. This is not helped by the fact that some government-run food agencies around the world are happy to oblige since the demand for pleasurable food drives GDP in the short term. The long term, however, may tell a different story. As Robert Lustig, an American paediatric endocrinologist notes, the availability of junk food will leave society ‘fat, sick, stupid, broke, addicted, depressed, and most decidedly unhappy.’        

Regardless, the long-term impacts of eating unhealthy food, which has contributed to higher rates of obesity and diabetes, have forced countries to re-evaluate how food is regulated in their respective societies. They have enacted sugar taxes and the like. But negotiating with entrenched food industry lobbyists remains an uphill battle. One solution for some companies is simply to move where there are no taxes on their products and sell them there. For example, it is easy for Coca-Cola to sell their sugared and caffeinated beverages in developing countries because safe, clean water may be even harder to come by.   

Within segments of the food industry, such as diet sweeteners, the idea of a calorie as an objective equally divisible metric corresponding to weight gain and weight loss is popularized. So, the offer of zero-calorie sweeteners is all the more enticing to prospective consumers. Unfortunately, a meta-analysis of all independent (i.e., non-food industry-funded) studies on weight loss and consumption of artificially sweetened beverages demonstrate no meaningful change in weight. By contrast, learning how to cook healthy dishes for friends and family is one key solution to the conundrum we in the first world find ourselves in. Processed food is addictive, and it is also everywhere. They are pleasure-driven contentment killers, and we know this from experience.  

The problem is that one-third of Americans currently don’t know how to cook; they’ve fallen prey to the food industry’s endgame. Microwaving is not cooking: it’s boiling water. If you don’t know how to cook, you’re hostage to the food industry for the rest of your life and unwittingly will pass this on to your children

Robert Lustig

This leads us to the third and fourth reasons: the findings of food science or nutrition research are commonly funded and promoted by the food industry. This means that these findings will inevitably align with their interests. In addition, nutritional science is notoriously fickle. Science advances when novel hypotheses are tested, confirmed, and corroborated in the lab. There is, however, enough noise, given the sheer number of factors involved in testing the health of participants on certain foods over time, for experiments to be rigged in favour of whatever the funder wishes the outcome to be. For example, if drinking soda did not lead to faster running as intended, a dozen more tests could be done until the desired results (i.e., false positives) were yielded, and that would be the one given to journalists to publish (because it’s surprising and therefore newsworthy). Even better if the study was done over several years: it would take that same amount of time for another set of studies to disprove or cast doubt on the results. In the meantime, companies selling sodas can cash in.    

When bad research is compounded on bad research, because in some areas of science, scientists survive with industry money, much of our common understanding of diet and nutrition, and even possibly related areas in medicine, remains flawed. Furthermore, it is hard to establish causation in these fields. For instance, a recent study connecting fat intake with heart disease failed to factor in the relative consumption of sugar, rather than fat, as a possible factor in explaining low heart disease rates in places like Italy and Japan. Much of this research also relies on recall questionnaires about disease symptoms and eating habits which, as we all know from experience, can be wildly inaccurate.    

Consider the case of the demonisation of saturated fats and cholesterol from the 1960s in America. The diet-heart hypothesis derived from earlier research suggested that high cholesterol caused heart disease and that said cholesterol could be lowered by a low-fat diet. We now know these to be untrue: there is good and bad cholesterol, and consuming saturated fat actually improves the ratio of good versus bad cholesterol. Independent meta-analyses of studies have not shown any significant relationship between saturated fat and increased risk of heart disease, stroke, or diabetes. But because it was offered as consumer advice by the government, the food industry took pains to produce and market foods that met these nutritional guidelines. The saturated fat in many processed foods was replaced with sugar so that those foods could remain palatable to the consumer. Labels like low-cholesterol and low-fat became commonplace in the market and were synonymous with the hidden ‘high in sugar’ caveat. The resultant increase in sugar as a mitigating ingredient saw the average rise of sugar consumption from 80 to 100lb per year per person in 1980s America.     

This had ramifications. Remember that sugar drives dopamine release and is one of the cheapest and most readily available substances to abuse, especially when compared with drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. Increased sugar consumption raises obesity risk, but not in a straightforward way. We thrive on 80 mg/dl of sugar in our blood. Given that the average human has five litres of blood in them, the corresponding amount of sugar most people need in their bloodstream is one teaspoon’s worth. Insulin produced in our bodies helps to keep our blood glucose at the right level. When too much glucose (i.e, sugar) is ingested, the insulin in our bodies will force the glucose away from the blood and into our fat cells. Unfortunately, insulin secretion is both proportional to the amount of glucose ingested and is related to our weight set point. This weight set point is the reason why some can eat ten hamburgers a day and look skinnier than a supermodel while others who seem to only breathe air gain weight each year. More on this later. But the bottom line here is that a higher weight set point cancels out metabolic adaptation. This means weight gain will soon follow. Beyond weight gain, sugar also contributes to type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, visceral fat, heart disease risk, and possibly even behavioural problems. The increased consumption of grains, borne from the same advice about avoiding saturated fats, has exacerbated this weight gain since most of the wheat available is highly refined and hence would affect insulin levels the same way table sugar would.

Numerous national guidelines say we can prevent heart attacks by avoiding saturated fat, mainly found in red meat and dairy products. Again, not one single randomised trial has shown that doing so saves lives

Susan Jebb, Professor of Diet and Population Health at Oxford University

Apart from the rise in sugar consumption, the demonisation of saturated fats, because of its link to cholesterol, also led to the rise of polyunsaturated oils, such as rapeseed oil and soya oil. Until very recently, and to some extent, even today, these polyunsaturated oils, or vegetable oils, were lauded for their supposed health benefits. Before exploring the veracity of those health claims, let us consider how they are made. Seeds from their requisite plants are heated with steam and compressed to separate the oil. This oil coagulate is treated to the chemical hexane and steamed again so that more oil can be extracted. The oil is then put into centrifuges so that all remaining seed bits can be removed. Phosphate is added. At this point, the oil would smell rather rancid, so it has to undergo bleaching with agents such as chloroform. Finally, it is deodorized at 500°C steam to produce the oil that you can purchase on the shelf. This process is similar to the creation of fuels used to power vehicles.      

What are their purported health benefits? They are supposed to be laden with the ultra-healthy omega-3 fatty acid. While this may be true, omega-3 causes food to go bad quickly, and so vegetable oils have to undergo a process of hydrogenation to remove most of the shelf-life-shortening omega-3s they originally had. This process causes some of the omega-3 to turn into trans-fat, their underachieving evil twin. Trans-fats, present not only in vegetable oils, but cakes, biscuits, and processed meats, cause heart disease. They multiply bad cholesterol (LDL type A transport) and decrease good cholesterol (LDL type B transport and HDL) in our bodies and lead to, among other things, inflammation and atherosclerosis.     

Decades of increasing vegetable oil use, not only in cooking oils but in butter alternatives like margarine, and shortening used for baking – 300 percent in 4 decades – led to the heightened risk of heart disease in America and anywhere influenced by the ‘western’ diet. The impact, however, was masked by advances in the medical treatment of heart disease, such as stents, cardiac bypasses, etc., and so, even today, many are not clued in on the problems plaguing vegetable oils. The problem of sugar, i.e., its contribution to heart disease and severe obesity, has also been somewhat masked by modern medicine, with bariatric surgery and the like.  

The whole edifice of modern medicine, it seems, is built on the treatment of these diseases of modern civilization

Andrew Jenkinson, bariatric surgeon

As the bariatric surgeon Andrew Jenkinson notes, while more and more money is poured into the research and treatment of lifestyle diseases, the glaringly obvious solution seems to be ignored: promoting a lifestyle that does not cause disease in the first place. This solution, however, is not profitable for a good number of powerful stakeholders, like companies that sell statins, or cholesterol-lowering medications. Add enough nutritional science noise into the mix, and factor in our propensity to seek short-term reward over long-term contentment, and we can begin to explain the current state of affairs.   

Weaponizing Food Knowledge for our Sakes

In the previous section, we explored how some factors have prevented people influenced by a western diet from finding good, actionable information about healthy food. They include our own confusion over the distinction between pleasure and contentment, the food industry’s complicity in this confusion, their funding of food studies that produce results aligning with their interests, and the messiness of nutritional epidemiological science in general. If so many forces are arrayed against us, what then can we do to take back our health? There is only so much we can do, but arming ourselves with reliable knowledge (or as reliable as they can be at this time) seems to be a modest first step. In this second part of the article, we will do just that by exploring the human gut microbiome, the health benefits of omega-3s, the relationship between metabology and obesity, and issues surrounding a vegetable-heavy diet.

There has been recent buzz about the human gut microbiome – the billion or so bacteria, fungi, and viruses living in the human gut – in the popular diet and nutrition literature. This microbiome is unique to each individual and is sensitive to changes in diet. And because changes in the microbiome have been linked with weight gain and weight loss, some suggest that changing the microbiome through ingesting probiotics, prebiotics, and other substances can lead to weight loss. This may not come as a surprise since it is known that a ‘western’ diet reduces diversity in the gut, which can lead to obesity. Research on the microbiome, however, is still nascent. Many of the studies are new and they may be revisions in years to come. This is not helped by the fact that the probiotics industry will be valued at 6.9 billion by 2022, and much of the research done is funded by companies that stand to gain from promoting microbiome interventions.

Whatever the future of gut microbiome research will be, certain recommended foods may be good to include in our diets because they have spillover benefits on other aspects of our health. Starch resistant carbohydrates purportedly leverage the microbiome to produce healthy fats, i.e., short-chain fatty acids and ketones. In addition, they slow the rate of insulin secretion, which helps to control your weight set point. These include plantains, taro root, parsnips, turnips, jicama, celery root, and some unripe fruits. Indigestible sugars found in artichokes, onions, and garlic, are also recommended, as are mushrooms, and leafy green vegetables and crucifers. Lemon juice, vinegar, and nuts of various kinds should also be considered. While these foods might not have a direct impact on your gut microbial health, none of these foods are actively harmful to you (unless you have a medical condition of some kind), so consider incorporating them into your diet if you can.  

Let us now consider omega-3 fatty acids. We previously earmarked them as an ultra-healthy substance. They help to keep our cell membranes adaptable and less likely to rupture when stressed. They also allow nutrients and hormones to pass through the cell wall and for toxins to leave more easily. In essence, they prevent cells from aging and dying early. Among cells in the brain, omega-3s reduce inflammation, allowing serotonin (the neurotransmitter related to contentment, if you recall) to be released at the usual rates. Some omega-3s regulate signalling devices in our brain related to mood, and so they also alleviate anxiety and depression. Omega-3 deficiency in mothers during pregnancy leads to increased anxious behaviours among her children. Because omega-3s are found in fish, concerns about mercury poisoning have deterred some mothers from eating fish during their pregnancy. This can be solved by consuming omega-3 capsules, although it has to be said that the nutritional benefits gleaned from real food is superior.

Omega fats cannot be manufactured in the human body and therefore need to be ingested from foods or supplements that contain them. They should therefore be a part of everyone’s diet. But there is an important distinction to be made between omega-3s and omega-6s, their less flexible cousin. While both kinds of fatty acids are necessary for good health, omega-6s are in much higher supply than omega-3s. There are two reasons for this. Grass-fed animals have good levels of omega-3 in their tissues and their milk. But the livestock from which the vast majority of us get our meats and dairy products are fed grains instead. While more convenient and efficient for farms, including fish farms, and less costly for consumers, this means that we get a lot more omega-6s than we do 3s in everything we eat. In addition, omega-3s do not have a long shelf life. This is why fresh foods that contain omega-3s go bad so quickly and are not favoured by the food industry.

The disproportionate amount of omega-3s to omega-6s in our cells, approximately 1:20, is bad for our health. Our immune system gets more sensitive as a result and autoimmune diseases, such as arthritis, inflammatory bowel conditions, and more, are likelier to develop. Low-grade inflammation also increases TNF-alpha, an inflammatory molecule which blocks leptin, a hormone that regulates our weight. Hence, getting a disproportionate omega-6 to omega-3 ratio also puts us at risk of obesity. Case in point, rural communities living all around the world with a low omega-6 to 3 ratio generally do not suffer from obesity. Like the gift that keeps on giving, omega-6 can also stop omega-3s from being converted into useful nutrients for our bodies and brains. This deficiency can lead to numbness and blurred vision and is correlated with multiple sclerosis, macular degeneration, Huntington’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease, all of which are common in the western world.

This brings us to the issue of obesity, the elephant in the room (no pun intended). Because there is no formal in-depth study of obesity in medical school, experts in the area tend to be auto-didacts. This field of inquiry is called metabology and can be understood by the layperson to contain two overarching rules. The first is this:

(1) Energy in (food) minus energy out (basal metabolic rate + passive energy expenditure + active energy expenditure) equals energy stored (fat).    

And the second is this:

(2) Unhealthy changes in the body lead to negative feedback activation (by scaling up or down the basal metabolic rate)

Together with the weight set point, something we will get to, these rules govern our current understanding of weight gain and weight loss. Let us explore each of them, beginning with components of the first rule. Adipose tissue, the things that make us fat, is an organ that governs energy regulation. Fat cells store energy for times when they are needed. The more energy the fat cells store, the larger they get, up to six times their original volume. Not only do they get larger, but they also multiply if more room is needed to store excess energy. This function of adipose tissue, or fat, is essential for survival. Famines, migrations, and energy-intensive milestones in life, such as courting and mating, pregnancy, raising a young family, all require fat stores to be called upon.

The things we eat to get energy into our bodies are the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates that we are familiar with. Energy out is more complicated. Contrary to popular belief, energy out does not primarily consist of physical activity. Most of the energy that we expend would occur even if we were to lie down and do nothing all day. Things like breathing, temperature regulation, heartbeat, and cell reactions take up around 70 percent of the energy out equation. This 70 percent is known as our basal metabolic rate. The leftover 30 percent can be divided into passive and active energy expenditure. As their names suggest, passive energy is expended passively, by the things that we do routinely in the course of our daily life, like climbing the stairs, walking to lunch, doing housework, or pursuing a hobby. Active energy expenditure refers to the energy used up when exercising. Unless someone is running a marathon or rock climbing for several hours every day, exercise accounts for only 3 percent of total daily energy used. The above breakdown of the energy in energy out equation, or the first rule of metabology, means that, compared with a sedentary person, someone who actively exercises still owes his or her lion’s share of energy expended to their basal metabolic rate. This is important to understand because we can then better appreciate the limited role of exercise in weight loss.

If exercise alone does not help much with weight loss, would restricting calories help? The answer, generally, is yes, but is not straightforward. People who experience quick weight loss from their low-calorie diet may not realise that this weight loss is transient. The sugar energy in our livers needs water. And it is these energy stores that are the first to be used up when the body is not getting what it needs from the traditional sources of ‘energy in,’ i.e., food. And so, because water is heavy, when it gets flushed out, one’s weight can drop quite rapidly. This is otherwise known as water weight, and it will be gained back plus extra once the person resumes eating regular portions.  

Restricting or adding calories alone is rarely directly proportional to long term weight loss or weight gain. And this has to do with the second rule of metabology, that unhealthy changes in the body will lead to negative feedback activation. To illustrate this rule, let us consider an example. If we looked at the caloric consumption of the average American, we see that they have been consuming 500kcal more a day than they did 20 years ago. Times 500kcal with the 365 days in a year and we get 182500kcal more they eat each year. If there were a proportional relationship between caloric intake and weight gain, based on statistical precedents, we would expect Americans to gain 26kg a year on average. The real figures, however, reveal that Americans have been gaining 0.5kg a year on average. Only a small percentage of the caloric ‘energy in’ is stored as fat. What happened to all the surplus calories?

Controlled experiments also demonstrate similar results. A team of scientists studying obesity decided to use prisoners – because their food environment can be controlled – to test their hypothesis about caloric intake and weight gain. They started upping the prisoners’ calories from 2200 to 4000kcal with the full American breakfast. As expected, the prisoners started gaining weight, but soon stopped altogether. So the scientists upped the dosage, to 10000kcal. The prisoners started gaining weight again, but still some prisoners just stopped gaining weight altogether after a while. They measured their prisoners’ metabolic rates and realised that their metabolisms had increased considerably. It seemed that their metabolisms had adapted to changes in the ‘energy in’ part of the equation. After the study was over, the prisoners returned to their pre-study weight about 12 weeks later without any dieting, further supporting the thesis of metabolic adaptation, or negative feedback.  

Negative feedback is designed to protect the body from what it perceives to be unexpected or unhealthy changes. Because energy storage and regulation are vital parts of human functioning, one would expect there to be mechanisms in place to help the body maintain some kind of equilibrium. Unfortunately, just as it works against unwanted weight gain, this negative feedback also works against unwanted weight loss. This is the reason why diet fads often fail, and why some people are never haunted by obesity no matter how much they eat, and others seem doomed to struggle with it their entire lives. Let us consider another study done on participants of The Biggest Loser, a reality TV show that tracks the weight loss of morbidly obese individuals. The participants under study lost an average of 58kg during their time with the show. But in the six years after that, they had gained an average 41kg back.

What happened was that in the course of the show, as their caloric intake plummeted, their metabolic rate slowed through a process of negative feedback to mitigate this drastic and unexpected change. And at the six-year mark after the show, their metabolisms had become so slowed that in order to stop themselves from gaining back all their pre-show weight, they needed to eat a few thousand calories less every day or run 10 km. The problem was that their original pre-show weight was what their bodies had come to believe was the ‘healthy’ weight for them and so negative feedback was doing all it could to bring them back to it. This ‘healthy’ weight is otherwise known as the weight set point, a concept referred to several times in this article already.

How does the brain calculate and regulate the weight set point? Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain, or the hypothalamus in your brain, how many fat cells you have in your body. When there is more leptin in the bloodstream, the hypothalamus acts by decreasing appetite and increasing one’s metabolic rate. They help to keep weight within a determined range, the range of the weight set point. Ideally, one would expect the weight set point to correspond to something like the healthy BMI range. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that it would. The problem with the weight set point is that it differs from person to person, changes over time, and can be affected by environmental triggers. If, for example, you eat foods that prime the brain for thinking that winter is coming (e.g., sugary fruits), it will store more calories as fat for the winter. How the weight set point is calculated is also based on genetic and epigenetic information inherited from former generations. Twin studies have shown this. A study of 2000 pairs of identical twins (with the same DNA) adopted and raised in different homes revealed a 75 percent consistency in BMI among the twins regardless of the homes and food environments they grew up in. This suggests that obesity risk, or the risk of one’s weight point set at an obese level, is three quarters inherited.

Apart from absolving blame from parents of obese children, this data highlights the counterintuitive fact that people are only partially responsible for their weight (though their health and fitness is another story). If we take a step back and consider the heritable weight set point thesis from a macroevolutionary perspective, we can yet gain new insights into this issue. Obesity league tables list pacific islanders on top, followed by people living in the Gulf states, the United States, and finally Europe. Why would pacific islanders be on the top? Modern humans likely came into existence, having speciated from our common ancestor to present-day bonobos and chimpanzees, in East Africa, close to Ethiopia, before traversing and taking dominion over the whole world. It took our ancestors many thousands of years to do this.

The Pacific Islands just happen to be on the opposite side of the globe and it is one of the last places to be colonised by humans. The journey there by sea, with the primitive tools of seafaring that early humans had, would have been arduous, full of uncertainty and peril. Many did not survive the journey. Hence, there would have been a selection bias for those sailors who did reach those islands: sailors with metabolisms that could slow to a crawl and enable them to survive in the face of starvation, as well as ample fat reserves. The genes of these sailors who settled on these islands would have been bequeathed to their progeny, making them susceptible to obesity when triggered with processed foods and the increased caloric intake that would arrive some time later. Similar explanations can be offered for the other communities in the league table.

We can look at another example from migration, a much darker one: the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved people from West Africa were forced to travel to America in chains. On the way over, they were starved, beaten, and subject to debilitating diseases. The trip lasted two months, and only the young and fit were chosen to go. Despite this, a fifth of them would not survive. Hence, those who did make the trip would have been artificially selected to possess genes like those of the Polynesian sailors. When their progeny with those genes are exposed to the ‘western’ diet of sugar-laden processed foods several hundred years later, it is little surprise that they would suffer from rates of obesity above the average white American population.   

Not just genetic, but epigenetic information is used to determine our weight set point as well. Epigenetics refers to changes in gene expression without any change in the underlying gene sequence. So, these genetic changes can potentially occur a lot quicker than through the traditional process of mutation and natural selection. If mothers are starving or undernourished in some way while pregnant, the child’s genes would be epigenetically expressed to give him or her a survival edge. This is because the child’s brain is primed to expect to live in a harsh environment. Hence, it will develop such an efficient metabolism that the child may be foreordained to become obese, no matter how well he or she eats. But it is not only undernutrition that causes this. Overnutrition can lead to obesity as well, since high blood sugar levels in expectant mothers also correlate with childhood obesity. Why should this be? If the foetus’ developing brain is primed to expect a bountiful environment, why would it be epigenetically disposed to create an efficient metabolism and hence be at risk of obesity? The answer may be in the lack of proper nutrients in the otherwise sugar-rich food environments where many mothers live. A typical western diet lacks vitamins and minerals that a human body needs for optimal health. Therefore, these foetuses may be primed to both have a slow metabolism and want to consume as much food as possible throughout their lives so that some sliver of those nutrients can be accessed.    

As we have seen, obesity is complex and much of it has to do with having the wrong genes in the wrong environment. When the deck is stacked against you, the struggle to lose weight and keep it off permanently can feel like trying to climb Mount Everest on a wheelchair. Before moving on to issues with a vegetable-heavy diet and, in the final part of this article, solutions, here is what Jenkinson, the aforementioned bariatric surgeon who works with obese patients, has to write about the impact of misinformation on the relationship between diet and weight loss on his patients:

This is a typical recurring story of initially successful diets, then weight regains, followed by yo-yo weight fluctuation through the years and, despite the constant conscious battle to diet, an inexorable rise in weight until serious end-stage obesity is reached. It is only at this point, after years of effort and sacrifice, after years of receiving the wrong advice from doctors and dieticians, after years of being misled by the food industry into the health benefits of bad foods, that my typical patient will tearfully admit to failure and blame herself for it.

Misinformation spreads because when people go on new diets based on new-fangled popular selling diet books, they will usually start to lose weight quickly. Water weight typically accounts for a good portion of this. But since the effects are visceral, those who experience the weight loss will share this with their friends and colleagues, and a diet wave will ensue. More and more people will lose weight, and more will get in on the action. A few months later, however, just about everyone will start to gain their weight back, regardless of whether they are still following the diet guidelines to the letter or not. Unfortunately, it does not end here. For those hooked on diet books, their eventual weight gain will galvanise them to look for the next diet fad, but that will probably not have a lasting effect either. This is because most diet books ignore a vital facet of obesity: the weight set point, and your subconscious brain’s determination to keep you within that range unless it is first changed.    

The last issue we will explore is what to consider when shifting to a vegetable-heavy diet. Lectins, not to be confused with leptins, the hormone that regulates weight, are found in many of our foods, but most predominantly in plants. Lectins are the chemical that plants use to protect themselves and their children from organisms that feed on them. These lectins can kill or paralyze insects and do gradual damage to people as they continue to eat them. Hence, while it is universally accepted, and true, that plants are good for you, it is also true that eating the wrong ones (e.g., vegetables with seeds which are in fact fruits) or eating them in wrong proportions, will negatively affect your health and weight.  

There are two general types of plant seeds, those that are encased in a hard shell and those that are not. Plants want animals to consume their hard-shelled seeds so that those seeds can be taken to another spot when they are pooped out from the animal and can sprout in a nutrient-rich environment. Fruit trees are an example of this. Rather than use some chemical defence to deter predators, these seeds want to be eaten and so make themselves attractive through their colour. Before they are ripe, the fruit they are in is oftentimes green, and this signals to the animal that the fruit is not ready to eat, and will not taste nice, because there will not be a lot of fructose. When the fruit is ready to be eaten, the colour will change and it will contain more fructose. This kind of sugar does not raise insulin or leptin levels in primates and humans. This means that we can eat as much as we like without feeling full. Good for the plant, but bad for us.

For seeds that have no protective coating, plants such as grasses and vines would not want their seeds to be eaten at all. So, these seeds contain chemicals that weaken or hurt animals so that they will be deterred from eating them again in the future. These chemicals include phytates, trypsin inhibitors, and lectins. Whole grains contain all of these chemicals in their hull. Lectins, in particular, bind themselves to complex sugars, or polysaccharides, which act like smart bombs in the body of their consumer. They disrupt normal messaging between cells, causing toxic and inflammatory reactions. Besides, lectins help bacteria and viruses lying dormant in us bind to their intended targets more effectively, making us sick more often. When bonded to the right receptors on certain cells, they also produce a chemical compound called zonulin which opens up spaces in the intestinal lining, allowing them to access places in the body that can trigger immune responses. The lectin in wheat: wheat germ agglutinin, is also linked to weight gain.  

Apart from plants, lectins also appear in animal products that have been fed grain or soy-based feed, which, as we have already noted, are far more common than their grass-fed variety. In early human history, consuming animals and tubers allowed us to become big and strong. With the advent of the agricultural revolution precipitated, in part, by the last Ice Age killing off large animals, humanity’s diet shifted to grains and beans because they could be stored in bulk and eaten later in times of famine. This revolution in food production, storage, and consumption was a double-edged sword: it allowed for the human population to explode, but it also introduced brand new lectins into our diets that we were not prepared for.

Animals that have eaten grass for millions of years, such as cows, sheep, and antelope, have developed gut bacteria capable of breaking down or eliminating lectins from single leaf plants. Humans, however, are descended from tree-dwellers, and have not had time to develop gut microbes that can handle the lectins we encounter in many of the plants and foods we eat today. This is one of the reasons why people living in Asia have, since time immemorial, removed the hull from their food staple, rice. These hulls contain lectin, and while brown rice is lauded as healthier than white rice because it has a lower glycaemic index, the current brown rice (or brown anything) fad in the west may explain why, compared with Asian peoples, people living in the United States have been mired in obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions at much higher rates.   

The healthy fad diets that are common in the west, while healthy for certain reasons, introduce excess lectins in peoples’ diets making even and especially the health-conscious susceptible to specific ailments. Robert Lustig, the aforementioned endocrinologist, observes just this trend among some of his female patients:

This compilation of hypothyroidism, arthritis, acid reflux, osteoporosis, bowel issues, and depression (and the drugs they took to relieve them) formed a pattern in these slim women. I started looking for other things they had in common. What were they eating? If you guessed “healthy” foods, you’re right! They dined on whole wheat pasta, whole wheat bagels with fat-free cream cheese, egg white omelets, and salads with dressing on the side. They avoided fats like the plague. And yet, most of them were on a statin drug like Lipitor or Crestor to reduce their cholesterol levels, as well as the fistful of drugs for ailments that they considered “normal.” It seemed that the “healthier” they ate, the unhealthier they became.

Taking all this information into consideration, how then can we take back our nutritional health? Let’s find out.

Feeding our Bellies, the Right Way

In the previous section, we explored foods that are suited for a flourishing human gut microbiome, the health benefits of omega-3s in proportion to omega-6s, the complex relationship between metabology and obesity via the two rules of metabology and the weight set point, and the problem with lectins in a vegetable-heavy diet. In this final part, let us explore the things we can do to take back, or maintain our health, as advised by important voices in this space. We will explore the real paleo diet, i.e., the foods that our ancestors ate that kept them strong and healthy despite their harsh environment; the eating habits of people groups known for their health or longevity today; the effectiveness of several popular diets; certain life circumstances and environmental triggers that can alter one’s weight set point; how to ratchet down one’s weight set point; mindful eating exercises; and finally, a list of foods to eat and to avoid with suggestions for external resources.

Let us begin with the paleo diet. If you have been watching the diet space, you would be familiar with it. The premise is simple: eat like our healthy ancestors did in the Pleistocene and reap the corresponding health benefits. What our hunter-gatherer ancestors really ate, however, may differ slightly from what is being suggested by the popular Paleo diet. Our best guesses come from archaeological evidence as well as present-day data on tribes still living the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They include the Hadza tribe of Tanzania, the Bushmen in Namibia, the Pygmies of the Congo jungle, and others. Their diet consisted of things that they could hunt and gather: fruits, vegetables, plant roots such as yam, cassava, ginger, and the like, nuts, fungi, eggs, snails, green leaves, honey in small amounts, and meat of various kinds.

After a day of hunting and gathering, the tribe would come together to cook their food. This would consist mainly of roots, tubers, and wild meat, along with the animals’ liver, kidney, intestines, bone marrow, and brain, as these were the most nutritional and energy-intensive parts. Contrary to common sense, the innards of animals contain many essential fats, vitamins, and minerals. And these were highly prized among hunter-gatherers because they needed to make the most of whatever they could find. Archaeological evidence likewise suggests that cavemen would break animal bones and smash skulls to access those nutrients. In addition to this wild meat, early hunter-gatherers also ate a wide variety of plant foods. As unrefined carbohydrates, these plant foods would not have tasted nearly as nice as the manicured and sugary ones we have in our supermarkets. They were abundant in variety and contained good amounts of essential vitamins and minerals. While eating all the parts of an animal is no longer considered polite or palatable, do read up on the real paleo diet (not to be mistaken for the popular one) for other feasible suggestions. Again, sources can be found below.

Certain people groups around the world today are also known to have healthy diets, evidenced by their good health. The French population has, on average, what seems like a weight set point that is lower than their immediate neighbours, even though they eat more saturated fat and consume more wine. Not only are they at a lower risk of obesity, they also have lower heart disease risk. What are they eating? Despite access to processed food via globalisation, they prefer to cook with fresh ingredients, and they eat fewer carbohydrates. They do not avoid saturated fat and they do not have a culture of snacking. These habits help them maintain a good omega fat ratio and keep their insulin levels down, both of which positively impact their weight set point. Also, because they generally have better working hours and hence better sleep than other countries, their stress levels are not as high. This is important because cortisol is negatively linked to the weight set point. The French have also largely disregarded American nutritional advice concerning cholesterols. All of this has helped them stay relatively slim and healthy as a result.  

These findings correlate somewhat with research done on the Blue Zones, the five areas in the world where people live the longest: Okinawa, Nicoya, Sardinia, Ikaria, and Loma Linda. Their lifestyle influences include moderate physical activity, the absence of stress, family structured communities, and meaningful social interaction. Concerning food, because these places were all near their respective coasts, the people thrive on a plant and fished-based diet and do not rely on polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Hence, they would have had a good omega-3 to 6 ratio, and that contributes to their overall health and longevity.

We should take instruction from the eating habits of these people, and, instead of going on diet after diet for a quick fix, resolve to choose a life-long habit of healthy eating. Cook your food. Ensure that healthy ingredients, like any of the ones mentioned above, are used. Avoid hydrogenated vegetable oils with lots of polyunsaturated fats. Use non-hydrogenated oils that have a greater proportion of monounsaturated fats like extra virgin olive oil. Avocado oil and coconut oil are acceptable too. Enjoy the process of preparing your food. Having done so as a graduate student in the UK, I can attest to its therapeutic effects. With these habits in place, there is no need to count calories. Weight loss may arrive slower, but it will go down in tandem with rather than in spite of your weight set point, which is gradually being lowered because of this new lifestyle, i.e., much fewer processed, sugared, and polyunsaturated foods. This process of weight loss will not have you jonesing for the next food fix, and it will not slow your metabolism down to a crawl such that you feel like you can only drink water just to stop yourself from gaining weight. It may not be as visceral or rewarding as being on The Biggest Loser and dropping over half your total body weight in a few months (it’ll be more like a few kgs in a year) but it is the best chance you have of permanent weight loss and therefore lasting contentment.

Regardless, some diets remain popular despite their limited impact on weight loss. To understand why, let us consider some of the best. The low-fat diet promoted by Slimming World, a weight-loss organisation, encourages adherents to replace high-fat foods with lower fat ones. They encourage vegetables, lean meat, and fruits, as well as pasta and rice, but discourage dairy products, cereals, and bread. By way of evaluation, the step toward home-cooked natural foods is helpful, but the high carbohydrate content increases insulin and this may have a mitigating impact on overall weight loss. This diet is therefore helpful for health but probably not ideal for weight loss.   

What about low carbohydrate diets? These diets leverage on the fact that once carbohydrate intake is reduced to below 20 grams a day, ketogenesis occurs. By reducing foods that can be broken down into glucose, the body is forced to use its reserves, starting with those stored in the liver. Once the liver stores are used, the body starts to use its own fat, turning them into ketones for fuel. This is a quick way to lose weight, although it has to be noted that the weight loss at the beginning is merely from water weight in the liver’s stores. The first problem with low carbohydrate diets, however, is that they have problematic side effects, from headaches to constipation, to nausea, and even to flu-like symptoms. This is hardly ideal. The second problem these diets have is that you have to stick to them for your entire life if you wish to achieve permanent weight loss. For a diet designed for weight loss rather than health, this can be quite the deal-breaker: the unpleasant side effects would deter anyone from doing this long term.

Another popular dieting strategy that has proven quite effective is intermittent fasting. This method of dieting is what it sounds like. Adherents can either restrict their calories to a quarter of their normal intake for 2 days in a week or eat in an 8-hour window each day while only consuming liquids for the other 16 hours. In addition to the reduced caloric intake, this diet tells you to avoid processed food. These measures have the effect of improving the insulin profile as well as the omega fatty acid ratio of the dieter. Hence, weight loss and other good health outcomes will soon follow. But the benefits do not come as much from the intermittent fasting as from its collateral, i.e., caloric restriction, avoiding processed foods and hence refined carbohydrates, and drinking non-sugary liquids. It would therefore seem to be more straightforward if people just did the collateral, as we are suggesting here. But, if intermittent fasting helps with motivation, then you might as well come up with a routine that works for you.

Vegetarian and vegan diets are a little more complicated. If adherents do so because they care for the welfare of animals or for the sake of environmental conservation, not much can be said by way of critique. Animals do suffer in factory farms in much greater proportional abundance than if they had lived in nature, red in tooth and claw as that may be. In addition, we also know that the livestock industry takes a lot out from the environment, from land use to carbon dioxide emissions to the copious amounts of water required. Sticking to a vegan or vegetarian diet might, therefore, be worth considering for ethical reasons. But since we are focused in this article on the foods’ impact on human health, let us home in on that instead. The good thing about this diet is that the many processed foods bundled with animal products in them are thrown out the window, as are sugars and omega-6s. The problem, however, is that in order to feel full, having given up dairy products altogether, vegans will turn to bread, pasta, and rice to get the satiety they crave and the energy they need. Unfortunately, this will increase their insulin profile, raise their weight set point, and lead to unwanted weight gain. Furthermore, because these diets are alright with vegetable oils as well as nuts and seeds, all of which have lots of omega-6, adhering to them will give dieters a bad omega-3 to 6 ratio. Regardless, these diets can work, but additional thought has to be put into it to ensure that there are no unintended consequences.  

On the subject of unwanted weight gain, what environmental factors affect our weight set point? Uncertainty. For example, leaving home for an extended time to go to a university overseas contributes to it. The body reacts to the impending uncertainty by preparing for a bigger energy store. It likely achieves this through the stress hormone cortisol, which when raised, can cause one’s weight set point as well as one’s appetite to increase. Mating and pregnancy are other times when the weight set point increase. Sensing the extra energy required for these events, and as insurance against unforeseen circumstances such as famines, the body is primed to store excess fat as energy, ready to be called upon when needed. In these cases, it is likely the lowered testosterone in men and raised oestrogen in women from pregnancy and childbirth that alters the weight set point in favour of increased fat storage. Finally, people who move to places where the western diet is influential will risk their weight set point increasing. These places include America, UAE, Europe, and big cities in the developing world.

Given what we know about the weight set point, that powerful genetic, epigenetic, cultural, and environmental forces operate, we should first have realistic expectations about how much weight we can lose permanently. We should not expect any quick fixes from miracle diets. If, for example, you have gained a lot of weight over your lifetime, even if you were to lower your weight set point as efficiently as possible starting today, you will not be able to return to the body size you had when you were a teenager, assuming you were skinny back then. Again, if your weight set point is genetically determined to be high because you inherited obesity genes, you cannot expect to look like a malnutritioned Instagram model one day (unless you go for surgery, though the transformation might only be temporary). Rather, expect modest yet healthy weight loss, and be prepared to be surprised by the feelings of contentment that result.     

As you do so, i.e., change your eating habits and your food environment in favour of a lower set point, these habits will start to build momentum for you, and you will see lasting results in due course. Avoid industrialized or processed foods, avoid foods that contain too much sugar, wheat, corn, and vegetable oils. Buy fresh ingredients and cook them yourself. To all who riposte that they have no time to cook, I feel the same way, but as the saying goes: if there is a will, there is a way. If, therefore, no way is found, blame only your will, not your job, family, or environment. Have breakfasts that are high in good fat and low in carbohydrates. This is important because we do not want insulin to spike in the morning and then bring us on an appetite roller coaster throughout the day. Avoid fruit juices. Clean out your pantry or larder of snacks that contain sugar or bread. These include biscuits, crackers, cake, prepacked fruit juices, and dried fruit. Replace them with healthy snacks you can put in your fridge: cheese, boiled eggs, yogurt, full-fat milk, hummus, salsa dip, sliced vegetables, avocadoes, rice cakes, baked vegetable chips, dried coconut, ultra-dark chocolate, and oat porridge. Get a wide range of herbs and seasonings for cooking. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, avoid all such foods: bagels, cereal, milk chocolate bars, doughnuts, muffins, pastries, pizza, pretzels, waffles, milkshakes, ice cream, jams, fries, chips, potato flour, rice flour, processed cheese, sports drinks, soda, frozen packaged foods, coffee creamers, anything with lots of wheat, such as bread, and all concentrated and synthetic sweeteners.

Getting healthy food from outside the house, for example for lunch at your workplace, can be difficult. Lots of outside food lack a good range of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, and are typically too heavy in sugar or wheat. The kind of oils used to cook the food is an unknown factor as well. In the absence of a workable solution, it is, therefore, best to prepare your lunch from the day before. This can be a pasta salad, rice with cauliflower, or anything with mushrooms and fish. You can consider using diet trackers like apps on your smartphone to track your carbohydrate intake. You will need kitchen scales and a glycaemic load calculator to determine how much you are ingesting on any given day. Remember that when it comes to weight gain, a calorie is not a calorie.  

The idea that obesity is a choice that can be resolved with the right industry approved regulations aligns with the interests of powerful stakeholders: the diet industry, the gym industry, the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and even to some extent, organisations that engage in nutritional epidemiological research. The first four should be obvious enough to the reader at this point. As entities, corporations within such industries support ideas about diet, exercise, nutrition, and medication that, because they must be beneficial to them, may, therefore, be deleterious to individuals. But these entities themselves are made up of individuals, many of whom are thoughtful, caring, and ethical people, who just want to make a living, pursue their passion, and be happy. If they were all given clear unambiguous information about their industries’ impact on people’s health, including the health of their loved ones, you can bet that they would abandon those ideas, if only privately, and instead offer contrary advice to their loved ones so as to protect them from harm. Since we can only act as individuals, so should we. And who knows, when consumer choices slowly start to shift toward healthy foods, industries will start to align to meet that demand. It’s a win win.

Concerning issues with nutritional epidemiological research, we will leave the word to Jenkinson:  

Top researchers and scientists, and influential doctors, have vested interests. If an important public health message that they have been promoting for years is disproved, then their reputations will be discredited and the funding for their labs may dry up. This is the reason there is so much inertia about changing public health advice: too many people have their reputations and livelihoods tied up in the diet-heart hypothesis.

Let us now explore mindful eating exercises. These are designed to unplug you from mindless eating and lower your overall caloric intake. Put your favourite food in front of you and stare at it for several minutes. Take note of the sensations happening in your body. Pick it up and smell it. Ask yourself how much you want this food. Now bite into it and chew it slowly. Take note of the sensations in the mouth and tongue and throat as you swallow it. Once you have taken a bite, ask yourself how satisfying was the food and how much more you would want. Repeat this sequence two more times. Take several minutes for each sequence. People who have tried this have report that their desire for the food, especially if it is a portion of unhealthy food, will go down. They might start to notice how the food gives them an unpleasant sensation or they just lose interest in bingeing. If it works for you, try it more often. It can work at moments when you are experiencing intense cravings. As someone fond of biscuits, I know how alluring the siren call to the biscuit tin is. So, I intend to give this a shot as well.  

As you transition to a more plant-heavy diet, it is important to recall the discussion concerning the harmful effects of lectins in plants. The bottom line is to avoid seeded vegetables. These include zucchinis, tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplants, and pickles. Apart from containing lectins, they signal the brain to store fat for the winter. This will lead to weight gain. Eat lots of good vegetables, including bok choy, broccoli, lettuce, spinach, watercress, artichokes, asparagus, celery, fennel, and herbs like mint, parsley, basil, cilantro, plus garlic, and onions, leeks, and chives. Go for non-starchy root vegetables such as beets, carrots, radishes, turnips, and parsnips. Because many fruits are high in fructose, stick to the ones that are low in sugar content. These include coconut, olives, blueberries, kiwis, pumpkin, eggplant, lemons, limes, and okra. Regardless, try to limit fruit intake in general. In many cases, they are no better for us than table sugar. Finally, when it comes to protein, if possible, consume grass-fed meats and wild fish, i.e., free-range poultry, pasture-raised pork, lamb, bison, and elk, wild salmon, sardines, etc.

In your own journey to discover good actionable information about diet and nutrition, be sure to consult multiple sources to corroborate data, locate references for each claim and check to see if they are reliable, e.g., who funded the study, and are there independent meta-analyses that support the findings. Approach this whole area with some healthy scepticism, including the things you have read here. And consider your opinions provisional and open to revision in light of new evidence. Lastly, consult these sources below for the aforementioned references and for more information if you wish to build knowledge in the areas of diet and nutrition. They contain tables listing the nutritional content of a host of foods not mentioned here as well as recipes worth trying.  

1. Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life by Max Lugavere and Paul Grewal
2. The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in Healthy Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain by Steven R. Gundry
3. Why We Eat Too Much by Andrew Jenkinson
4. The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains by Robert Lustig

As a reward for reading this far, here’s a summary of the practical applications:

• Think carefully about the distinction between pleasure and contentment, especially in relation to your consumption preferences.
• The food industry is not necessarily your friend. Look carefully at the nutrition labels of the things you eat and decode what certain words imply. E.g., low fat usually means high sugar, etc.
• Similarly, the diet industry, the gym industry, and the pharmaceutical industry are not necessarily your friends either. So, don’t expect them to offer you the finest solutions to your diet and health woes.
• Look for corroborating nutritional epidemiological studies from independent sources when ascertaining the purported health benefit of some food.  
• Avoid processed foods. Copious examples of them are provided in the main article. By contrast, learn how to cook with healthy ingredients. Adhere to something like an 8:2 ratio of home-cooked food versus other kinds of food.      
• Cholesterol and saturated fats are not necessarily bad for you. There is good and bad cholesterol and consuming saturated fat improves the ratio of good versus bad cholesterol.
• Sugar in all its many forms is bad. Consume in great moderation; otherwise avoid like the plague.
• Avoid polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Use non-hydrogenated oils with a higher proportion of monounsaturated oils in them instead. These include extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, and avocado oil. 
• Avoid trans fats. They can be found in vegetable oils, cakes, biscuits, and processed meats. Read nutrition labels.
• Leverage your gut microbiome for weight loss.
• Omega-3 fatty acids are awesome. But most crucially, its ratio to omega-6 in your cells determines their impact on your health.
• Obesity risk is to a large extent genetically determined. So, temper expectations about how much weight you can permanently lose.
• Exercise plays an extremely limited role in weight loss. It does, however, improve your shape and bequeath you with a host of health benefits unrelated to weight loss.
• The weight set point determines each individual’s weight. And your body will cross mountains to keep you in that range.
• Lectins present health problems when eaten in excess. Lectins are abundant in seeded vegetables, which are botanically fruits, wheat, and animals that have been fed grain or soy-based feed. Avoid them if possible. Look for grass-fed meat and wild fish instead. Eat the former in moderation if the latter is not feasible.
• Eat lots of non-seeded vegetables, plant roots, fish, and low-sugar fruits. Consume carbohydrates in moderation.
• Refrain from snacking. Even nuts and seeds, in moderation.
• Avoid fad diets. Stick to the essentials as described above. Make healthy eating a lifelong habit. Your future self will love you for it.
• Live a stress-free life by selecting the right vocation, the right spouse, the right friends, and other prudent lifestyle choices.
• Sleep well.
• Avoid fruit juices. Make veggie smoothies instead.
• Meal prep your lunches if there are no healthy options at your workplace vicinity.
• Try mindful eating exercises.