tvenuto wrote:
I mean, almost every workout regimen or product says: "Consult your doctor before beginning any exercise regimen."
Because we live in a society where people are willing to leverage ignorance for personal gain and hence there has to be some mechanism (or mechanisms) to protect consumers and a mechanism to protect people actually doing productive work. If you, in a professional capacity, advise someone of action then they can take legal action against you because of your claimed expert status. The reason most people put the "talk to your doctor" there is because doctors have some measure of competency in that area and just as, or more important, have large liability insurance and they want to be able to use that in their defense if they get sued to shift the blame to the doctor.
Now of course asking a Doctor about nutrition is like asking a knife maker about metallurgy, it makes little sense but it might be the only option and is more sensible than asking a plumber. It is only recently that certification is in place for dietitians and there are still quite a lot of people giving advice which isn't based on any formal training, is not reflective of the literature and the kindest thing that can be said about it is that it is "bro science" at best. How often have you heard someone make an argument and if the justification is requested it turns out to be as sparse as one time one person did something and noticed an effect, hence the conclusion had to be that thing they did caused that effect and becomes "the truth".
Do people say things like "extreme diet" sure, just like they say "super steel", it isn't helpful to use in a discussion as it is meaningless expect in the most basic sense. Is it an extreme diet to never eat grains, I don't know, what do you mean by extreme. I am fairly close to vegan aside from the fact I drink cows milk. I don't buy it to eat it, but I don't avoid it. Is this extreme, well it isn't to me, but most people would consider it to be so. I don't see any point to such labels, they don't get you anywhere. An interesting question would be is it necessary for health. I don't think it is, I don't do it for that reason (it is religious based for me as my partner is a Hindu).
You can not eat whole grains ad libitum any more than you can "refined" sugar. If you do, the outcome will be less bad, but only compared to the worse outcomes associated with sugar.
Yes but the same can be said for many foods. The GI of potatoes is much higher than whole grains and the nutrient profile for them, especially peeled and boiled is fairly low especially for white potatoes. Does this mean that you also can't eat a potato and it can't be part of a healthy diet and that the only diet is some kind of ultra optimized ideal one which maximizes nutrient profile and allows maximum over eating with minimal metabolic over taxing? I would find it hard to see any argument which could support such a claim. Why are potatoes such a valuable food :
-they are extremely cheap per calorie
-very easy to cook
-versatile
-generally decent in nutrition profile
Now if you are having metabolic struggles, if you have an issue with insulin sensitivity, if your appetite to metabolic balance isn't well regulated, ..., well a boiled potato isn't a great option but does that mean that everyone has to stop eating a potato?
By saying you "need X servings of whole grains" it actually makes people seek out carbs, which I feel is deleterious given our current food situation.
The problem here is one of basic education and also language. Grains are the seed part of plants, carrots and potato are the root part of plants, other parts typically eaten are the leaves most people eat the leaf of kale and throw away the stalk. They are all vegetables, seed, root and leaf as vegetables just means the food part of a plant. Why do we eat the seed part, because it is very easy to harvest, it stores very well, and most importantly, it makes flour and that has tremendous benefit for practical nutrition.
Now could you make an argument that if you ate mainly the leafy part, with some tuber/root parts and minimized or excluded the seed part that you would be healthier? Possibly, but it isn't trivial to do cost wise or practical wise and you don't have any kind of easy argument to make for a general populace that the benefit to cost is even significant when compared to other health factors. In many cases you would be advocating something similar to putting on sunscreen before going into combat.
Is it of benefit, maybe in an absolute sense, but is it the critical part most people need to be focused on, is it the difference that is going to show up in their health? Is that really where their attention needs to be focused?
Of course, any discussion on this is confounded by PEDs, but I would say that there is a larger population of higher performing individuals now than any other time in human history. This is MORE than balanced by the absolute sh*ttyness of the rest of the population, and it's largely impossible to verify, but I would guess it's true.
Modern performance is ruled by drugs, and the abilities of drug to produce performance dominates not only nutrition but even exercise. If you strip away the drugs then how much have athletes progressed - not very much at all. The life time drug free raw benchpress is ~20% higher now than Hepburn did in the early fifties. Was Hepburn on anabolics? It is possible as testosterone was synthesized earlier (1935) however even the most stringent drug histories argue that the onset came with the anabolic steroids which came much later because large amounts of pure testosterone have pretty massive and immediate side effects.
But this entire argument is moot because it is a fantasy for a normal person to be thinking about what an Olympic level athletes eats. Even if you forget about the drugs, what is a critical difference to them isn't for a normal person. In the extreme range of performance, the ability to have your weight within a 1/4 lbs in a given day can mean a win or a DQ. A regular guy looking at that kind of information is like when someone wants a knife and asks for what a Navy Seal carries. Unless you are a Navy Seal that is kind of a pointless question.
But even beyond that of course we have higher performing athletes now, there is far more money in it, we have a huge population and we have selection processes in place which catch kids with talent and shuttle them into specialized training programs. Our knowledge of training has increased and people not actually dedicate their lives often from a very young age into just that one thing. Statistically all of this has to produce greater performance. How much of this is training vs nutrition, that is kind of a hard question to answer as what would you be looking at really things like the detriment of being in a catabolic state due to lack of nutrition vs inability to retain balance due to stimulus over load? How would you even measure this to know which one is worse, wrong exercise or nutrition.
On a fundamental level nutrition is secondary to exercise because if you want to improve your 100m sprint then you need to run. Someone with an ideal diet but who does no training will never compete with someone with ideal training with absolutely no care to diet. But someone with no food is dead so if you look at it that way nutrition is more important. But I think those kinds of discussions are pointless as no one ever defines what they are talking about in how you would measure what is "better".
Also, seemingly similar foods, like chicken or beef for example, are very different now than they were 100 years ago.
Yes and fish now has high levels of heavy metals - and guess what so does the air, it is full of toxins, especially if you are in a city. Now if someone is really into trying to improve their diet then you could say things like to try to trim away fats from some of those fish (concentrates the metals) and to avoid predatory fish (which eat other fish and those have higher levels). But take a look at the studies and get an idea for just how small an effect you are talking about. The vast issues with health in Western society are not due with the fact that the beef has growth hormones but the fact that they are in a constant state of metabolic excess, hormone imbalance due to glycogen glutting and have little to no active exercise.
Now are these ideas useful, sure, in ideal conditions is it better to eat small farm chickens who eat natural foods, sure. However is that really the critical problem for a mother of two whose kids are eating Kraft Dinner? When people say "eat whole grains". It is speaking to that audience and it means "instead of potato chips" not "instead of a serving of leafy vegetables". Just think about how you would describe sharpening to someone who has no idea. That is what the general "eat X servings of whole grains" is trying to so, get some kind of starting point. When someone gets beyond that, when they ask about trying to get an edge to push cut newsprint then you need to start looking at some critical details.