Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and it’s absolutely necessary to have all three daily meals. Only have fat and oil sparingly while making grains, including sugary cereals and chips, the plurality of your intake. Don’t neglect milk and fresh juice, a vital part of your daily diet. Avoid salt. Binge on grapefruits or cabbage soup to cut calories. And most obviously, stay away from red meat, it is horrible for your health.
Slowly but surely, scientists are debunking the most pervasive of these aforementioned lies about nutrition. We now know, for example, that eating more meals is not healthy. Intermittent fasting, the increasingly popular practice of restricting eating to a period of eight hours per day or less, typically by skipping breakfast, is not only a wildly successful weight loss tool, but it also appears to combat the risk of cancer. In an almost complete reversal of past opinion, leading health authorities are now calling on people to eat more healthy fats. Dietary authorities quietly backtracked on dietary cholesterol, which is now fine to eat. And at long last they are finally calling for a drastic cutback in sugar consumption, which, as it turns out, could be the key to our obesity epidemic.
Last but not least, the science now shows that decades of scolding over red meat consumption was nothing more than baseless fearmongering. As it turns out, our current processed and unprocessed red meat consumption levels are just fine. An international group of researchers has found that decreasing red meat consumption doesn’t improve health, and that the notion that red meat increases mortality was based on bad science in the first place.
Two decades ago, the government was telling us to start our day with cereals more sugary than cake. Cocoa Puffs were awarded the “heart healthy” label by the American Heart Association. We were told to eat six meals a day and up to four sweet servings of fruit. And be sure to drink multiple glasses of milk, but stay away from the fat, cholesterol, and red meat!
Finally, science is beginning to debunk every element of this terrible diet. Given decades of obesogenic, diabetes-inducing, and probably heart- and liver-destroying dietary advice, intermingled with useless admonitions to “eat less and move more,” the public innovated. Today, the most popular diets do exactly the opposite of everything the government has advised since the 1970s and get amazing results. The ketogenic and Paleolithic diets emphasize healthy fats, meat, and intermittent fasting while eschewing big breakfasts, all-day snacking, and especially sugar.
Sadly, government and the health establishment aren’t catching up quickly enough. Despite the American Heart Association’s belated (albeit welcome) recommendation that men consume no more than 38 grams of sugar per day and women 25 grams per day (that’s still nine and six teaspoons, respectively), the average person in the United States eats an atrocious 126 grams (31 teaspoons) of sugar daily. Instead of tackling this problem, which has left many obese toddlers with fatty livers as bad as handle-a-day alcoholics, we’ve vilified steak and pasta. In France, where steak and wine are daily habits, the average daily sugar consumption is 68.5 grams. In pasta-loving Italy, it’s just 57.6 grams. Italy is the 92nd fattest country on the planet, and France is the 120th. The U.S. clocks in at 17th, behind mostly minute island nations that were exposed in recent years to the standard American diet.
So, go ahead, have your filet mignon. Enjoy the eggs and butter. Just skip the soda and dessert and enjoy your meal in peace.
