Dude, You’re Overthinking It!

“Low Fat Dairy Products Linked to Lower Stroke Risk”

“Low Carb Diet Best for Lowering Blood Pressure”

How does anyone figure out how to eat healthy with all the conflicting information out there?

Every diet, food, and nutrient seems to have a mountain of evidence both for and against it.

The answer to this dilemma lies in just four words:

Dude, you’re overthinking it!

The Paralysis of Analysis

Most nutrition advice you’ll find is an absolute mess.

First off, there is absolutely no consensus on what is “good” and what is “bad.”

Everything that you could possibly eat has a group of people passionately for it and one passionately against it.

Some people think that soy is the greatest thing to ever happen to the human diet. Others think that it is about as good as eating radiation-poisoned polar bear liver.

Nutrition has become a polarizing topic, earning its place along with politics, religion, and sex as the kind of topic that you should never bring up with people who don’t share your beliefs (unless you’ve got the stomach for an argument that will change absolutely no ones’ mind).

The problem has only been intensified in recent years with the spread of the internet.

Now everyone is just a mouse click away from everyone else, and there’s no better way to get attention than by becoming a single-minded evangelist for or against a certain diet.

The interwebs have also given the public access to untold volumes of scientific literature on nutrition, studying everything from the merits of low fat diets vs. low carb diets, and minutiae such as the benefits of conjugated linoleic acid and acidophilus.

These people represent the culmination of The Great Modern Diet Riddle and why it is so difficult to go forward from here. They know all the studies that support their claim to the tiniest detail, and they are smart enough to find holes in every study that attempts to refute them.

With all of these experts speaking so loudly, and with such intellect and authority, on topics that contradict each other, it’s no wonder that people get “analysis paralysis” and never change their diet for fear they’ll do the “wrong” thing.

The Dark Side of Science

I don’t mean to bash science (I have a degree in Chemistry, and work as an analytical chemist), but I need to call bullshit on most nutrition science.

I think Michael Pollan said it best:

“Nutrition science is sorta where surgery was in the year 1650. Interesting, fascinating to watch, but do you really want them operating on you yet?”

Unlike fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology, nutrition is a young science. And unlike these fields, which have a rock-solid foundation of theory that has been rigorously tested for hundreds of years, nutrition science is still at the stage where people must propose theories left and right in the attempt to find something that sticks.

The reason it is so difficult to learn how to eat healthy is that we just don’t know what that is yet. All we have are countless theories that haven’t been tested enough.

Remember this whenever someone waves a scientific study in your face in support or against a particular diet. If that fails, show them this study: Why Most Published Research Findings are False.

Hell, someone even got a randomly-generated paper of gibberish published in a mathematical journal for laughs, so yeah, the public’s trust in science is being constantly abused!

How to Make Sense of It All

If you are looking for a way to eat that will help you look better, feel better, and live better, then you’ll need two things out of your diet:

1. Something that gives you the results you want.
2. Something you can stick with.

Most people focus too much on #1, and ignore completely the idea that there may very well be more than one ideal human diet. (The horror! The horror!)

Just as important is finding something that you can stick with for the long term. Caloric restriction may very well extend your life, but very few people will ever be able to stick with such a sadistic way of eating.

If you don’t take action, you’ll never get anywhere. But gathering information is critical as well.

Here’s three things to keep in mind as you learn about nutrition:

1. Pay attention to what humans were “designed” to eat. When gorillas are fed a diet closer to what they would have eaten in the wild, they become healthier. It makes sense that we would thrive on the type of diet that we have traditionally eaten. The Paleo world can be pretty controversial, but check out Mark’s Daily Apple for a lot of smart, engaging, and practical material on adapting the ancestral human diet to the modern day (just ignore the carb-bashing).
2. Pay just a little attention to studies. It seems like every time a half-baked pro-vegetarian study gets out, the media goes wild. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything good to be found in scientific research into nutrition. Just be skeptical. And remember that most published science is wrong.
3. Know thyself. Track your progress to see if you are getting the results you want out of your diet. Figure out what you can stick with and what you can’t. A big arsenal of published research means nothing if it doesn’t work for you.

I lay out a more practical approach to eating healthy in The 9-Step Guide to Looking Better, Feeling Better, and Living Better, but here’s a quick summary:

1. Eat Real Food. Meat and vegetables. Fruit, eggs, nuts, and seeds. Even grains, beans, and dairy are all real food. Most of the modern human diet comes from factories and laboratories. Make sure your food comes from fields and farms.
2. Balance Feasting and Fasting. The human body has a remarkable ability to achieve and maintain a certain composition of fat no matter how hard (or not) we try to diet. Work with your body instead of against it by balancing the amount of feasting and fasting you do and you will lower the stressors that cause you to gain weight in the first place.
3. Cheat Occasionally. Having an Animal-Style Double-Double with a shake every now and then isn’t going to ruin your health. If anything, it will make it easier because you won’t be striving for an impossible puritanical diet.

Stop Thinking, Start Doing

Nutrition science is in a weird place.

Hypotheses abound, but there is very little consensus. Theories that have been accepted by the status quo for decades can disappear and be replaced completely different ones.

If you are too paralyzed to take action and improve your diet because of this conflicting information, then you need to stop overthinking it and take action.

It’s better get started and power through the mistakes than to get it 100% correct right out of the gates.

Nobody really knows what’s “right,” anyway. They just think they do.

So get moving!

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