Food for thought or Thoughts about food

​I've been on quite the journey learning about food, food systems, and foods role as a medicine or a poison in today's life.

I haven't had a chance to really write down my manifesto on food here (having now written all this out I realize I should just publish this), but let me take you through a quick line of thinking:

• I want everyone to be absolutely the most awesome they can be - most of the time that means increasing their healthspan
• When you look at the health data, or you look around in yourself in a crowd it is abundantly clear, people are really really sick. We're all inflamed, both mentally and physically. This is further brought home by watching any news clip from 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.
• This problem is acute, growing and will present serious challenges for us from bankrupting the country to half of all citizens getting Alzheimer's (aptly nicknamed Type 3 diabetes)
• Something isn't right with our system, in fact I now strongly believe something isn't right with the main input to our system - our food.

Matt's timeline on food:

• Several years ago I became keto and lost bunch of weight
• in 2019 I got into cycling
• in 2021 I started serious cycling training and as a result started looking into nutrition
• towards the end of 2021 and start of 2022 I started to understand/discover much "settled" food science was in fact wrong or unsettled.
• Pushing back against settled nutrition had dogmatic responses which caused me to push further - I want to understand the verify-able truth in our food.

That then takes me to 2022. This year I have been consuming food books, and clinical studies at every opportunity. Something is clearly wrong. Telling people to exercise more has been provenly dumb for a while, but also it appears that the majority of nutrition advice is complete crap.

Plot twist - whole grains are pretty terrible for you, and there is no reliable evidence that red meat causes cancer.

Here's a list of the reading so far:

• Burn 
• This Is Your Mind on Plants
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
• The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
• Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
• The Carnivore Code: Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health by Returning to Our Ancestral Diet
• Nature Wants Us to Be Fat: The Surprising Science Behind Why We Gain Weight and How We Can Prevent--and Reverse--It
• Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat Is Good for You and Good for the Planet
• The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain
• The Carnivore Diet
• Eat Bacon, Don't Jog: A Contrarian's Guide to Diet, Exercise, and What Actually Works
  
• Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
  
• The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet
  
• The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting
  
• The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss
  
• Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle
  
• Fast, Feast, Repeat: The Comprehensive Guide to Delay, Don't Deny® Intermittent Fasting
  
• Belly Fat Effect: The Real Secret About How Your Diet, Intestinal Health, and Gut Bacteria Help You Burn Fat
  
• Lies My Doctor Told Me: Medical Myths That Can Harm Your Health
  
• The Salt Fix: Why the Experts Got It All Wrong--And How Eating More Might Save Your Life
  
• The OMAD Diet: Intermittent Fasting with One Meal a Day to Burn Fat and Lose Weight
  
• Intermittent Fasting Diet Guide and Cookbook: A Complete Guide to Fasting Strategies with 50+ Satisfying Recipes and 4 Flexible Meal Plans: 16:8, OMAD, 5:2, Alternate-day, and More
  
• Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
  
• Life in the Fasting Lane: The Essential Guide to Making Intermittent Fasting Simple, Sustainable, and Enjoyable
  
• Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease―and How to Fight It
  
• Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth
  
• Several Clinical interventionist studies - https://bysimpli.notion.site/Health-Studies-b508dcc8867340a8b7a28fa29233753a

Not listed here are the years of informal reading and existing dogma on the food pyramid and eating big healthy servings of highly-processed grains.

A big discovery for me in this was that the damage fructose does to your body (from lowering your metabolism and increasing irrational behavior & food cravings to inducing insulin resistance and inducing fatty liver disease) is nearly identical to the damage that poly-unsaturated fats do.

I also have had the opportunity to talk to several doctors about this, and the main thing I keep experiencing is that they learned about nutrition for about 1 hour in medical school, rarely know that nutritional ketosis is even a thing and can't explain why the current advice is the advice other than to refer to epidemiology, which to be clear is extremely low quality evidence.

Ultimately this leads to a conclusion that processed food is bad and that zero amount of ultra-processed food is an okay amount to eat, but what even the most proud Englishman who staunchly cares about his health does not realize is that he is silently consuming these things without realizing.

This crap is in your bread, your cereals, your drinks, your snack bars and your baby formula.

And what's more - to reverse the damage. Exercise and eating less is in many, to most cases not going to work.

So what about me?

Well 3 months ago I decided to try something new. A purely animal based diet. Lots of red meat, saturated fat and strictly no vegetables.

I'm actually not going to go into much more detail on this here but to say, it has been fantastic for me.

Anecdotally, my joints feel better and I have had zero soreness from exercise despite taking on the hardest physical challenges in my life. I am never hungry. I think about food only in a curious, scientific way. My energy is improved. My disposition is indescribably more positive. The acne I have struggled with for 20 years disappeared. I lost 2 inches from my waist despite eating 500-1000 more calories a day. My digestion has improved. And my blood markers improved (including cholesterol!! 🤯)

I could talk about it for hours, this is truly fascinating stuff to me, but what's more is its implication for the future. I am slowly journalling away on my journey but also on my understanding of the system and what opportunities there might be to fix things. I'm highly optimistic on the future and that we can correct the course.