Optimal Nutrition

by Martin Collis, PhD

M.E.L.L.O.W. is my acronym for facets of high-level wellness and lifestyle artistry. In successive editions we have looked at the Magic of the Mind, Exercise, Laughter, Love and today it is the turn of Optimal Nutrition.

"Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die", goes the Biblical advice but it no longer works that way. Eat, drink and be merry and tomorrow you'll have diabetes or you'll wake up obese, are more likely results from careless consumption. "Eat, drink and be wary" might be a better maxim to live by.

Perhaps the least understood, most misunderstood, most confusing, contradictory and most profitable (to authors, publishers, and producers of infomercials and videotapes) aspect of lifestyle is nutrition. I read recently that there are more books published about food and diet than sex. This may or may not be true, but it is clearly a subject of enormous interest in our culture.

Charles Dickens opened the novel "Tale of Two Cities" with the famous lines, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness." So it is today in a world of eating, dieting and nutrition. In North America it is the age of organic fruits and vegetables, it is the age of fast food. It is the age of nouvelle cuisine and the age of whoppers and biggie fries. It is an age where we no longer deal with famine (at least in North America) and don't need to store fat on our bodies, yet is an age of obesity. It is the age of supplements and health food stores, it is the age of junk food. There are record sales of cookbooks and kitchen appliances, but a third of meals are eaten out of the home. We can eat like royalty of previous eras with access to food from around the world, but we behave like the nouveau riche stuffing our lives and ourselves with more than we need. We ignore the advice of Euripedes who told us, "Enough is abundance to the wize." and listen instead to Tom Petty who informs us that, "Too much ain't enough."

Every statistic I've seen in the past two or three years points to a frightening increase in overweight and obesity. Here are just a few of the indicators that we are turning into Generation XXL.

I could go on, but the message is clear. North Americans are fat and getting fatter. The research is unequivocal and pervasive. Children are getting fatter, men are getting fatter, and women are expanding, as are Blacks, Caucasians, Hispanics and the people of the First Nations. Obesity is an equal opportunity problem.

I don't have a fat fetish and in my presentations I always refer to the work of Dr. Stephen Blair (see Cooper Watch: Fitness vs. Fatness) who showed that in a prospective study of over 10,000 people fatness was not a risk factor in all cause mortality (death), if you also looked at fitness. In simple terms it was better to be fat and fit, than thin and unfit. However, it needs to be noted that lack of exercise and fitness are much more common among the overweight and obese than in people who are slim.

Our taste buds like food that is fatty, salty and sweet. These preferences go back tens of thousands of years when our taste buds selectively responded to the needs of the body. Salt was necessary in the polarization of the every cell membrane. Fat was essential for food storage (prior to refrigerators) and sweetness was a way of checking for ripeness and even whether something was poisonous. Today the manufacturers of fast food accommodate our taste buds by making virtually everything fatty, salty and/or sweet.

Dave Barry's view on nutrition: the digestive system

We face a triple whammy in trying to eat well and maintain our weight. We eat more, we eat worse and we eat out.

1. We eat more.

I smiled when I read a recent article from London's Daily Telegraph by James Langton. "Doctors and health experts have puzzled for some time why North Americans are so fat. Over-eating does not seem to be the single explanation. Most adults consume only around 100-calories a day more than they did 20-years ago." Only 100-calories a more a day! Do the math: 100 calories x 365 days = 36,500 calories. That's over 10 lbs or close to 5 kilograms per year. Multiply that by a few years and you need to look no further to see why people are wobbling around airports and eclipsing the sun on Floridian beaches. Couple those extra calories with a decrease in daily movement and you have a toxic environment for obesity and ill health.

2. We eat worse.

We are eating more prepared foods, packaged foods, canned foods and things that have little resemblance to their original form. These often come laden with fats, sugar, salt and a variety of chemical flavor enhancers, coloring agents and preservatives. The preservatives are great for shelf life but can have a less positive effect on self-life.

3. We eat out.

In the 1970's 18% of meals were eaten outside the home. Last year it was 36%, exactly twice as many. Typically restaurant food is (i) higher in fat than that prepared at home (38% fat as opposed to 31% at home) (ii) lower in fiber and (iii) lower in calcium.

Taste sells. Last year sales of full fat cookies increased 6.5% while sales of low-fat cookies were down 35%. There is a similar picture for ice-cream sales.

Size sells. We are dealing with a phenomenon that the Boston dietitian, Elizabeth Ward, refers to as "PORTION DISTORTION." The philosophy that "bigger is better" is great for the bottom line of fast food franchises and 'family' restaurants, but not so good for the bottom line of North American bodies. According to the Tufts 'Health and Nutrition Letter,' if you buy a slice blueberry crumb cake at the ubiquitous Starbucks it contains 800 calories and 38 grams of fat, 18 of them saturated. A single 2.5 oz milk chocolate cookie from Mrs. Fields has 280-calories and it's hard to stop at one cookie.

The following table compares serving sizes for some typical snacks in the North American diet between the years 1960 and 2000. Forty years has seen a four fold increase in some of our fast food.

It is difficult to avoid added sugar when you shop or eat out. Sugar shows up in pizza, bread, hot dogs, yogurt, soups, canned food, mayo, ketchup and hundreds of other products. In the past 50 years our sugar consumption is up 41%, approximately 1 lb (0.5 kilograms) per person per year (see 'Liquid Candy'). Stanislav Lec once said, "I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless, the poison is in the sugar."

Epicurus noted that, "Nothing is enough for the person for whom enough is too little." A small burger and fries might be enough, so let's supersize it so that it would take the equivalent of running a half-marathon to burn it off (see the Calorie Calculator at HealthyIdeas.com). Too many supersized meals, biggie fries and whoppers are giving us supersized, biggie, whopping kids, many of whom will have to deal with the social, psychological and health problems that are associated with obesity.

Albert Schweitzer said, "We move from naive simplicity to profound simplicity." In the Top Ten Eating Commandments I have tried to distill some of the accumulated wisdom about optimal nutrition into a few simple truths.

Top Ten Eating Commandments

1 - Balance calories consumed with calories burned. (see 'Forget The Math, Let's Eat!')

2 - Eat food that is natural. Nature makes the locks, nature has the keys. Organic is good. If food comes in a packet and glows in the dark . . . beware.

3 - Eat plenty of complex carbohydrates and fiber (e.g. nuts, grains, vegetables and fruits). Be powered by carbohydrates not hydrocarbons. Go for a rainbow diet with 8 to 10 colors a day. Numerous health enhancing, cancer-fighting phytonutrients are found in colored fruits and veggies.

4 - Hydrate. Drink plenty of fluids, especially water (we tend to snack when what we really need to do is drink). The body is an aqueous medium so try to prehydrate and not dehydrate. By the time you're thirsty the body is already challenged.

"I still manage to find the time to drink 8 glasses of water a day."

5 - Watch the quantity of fat you consume. A high fat diet correlates with heart disease, cancer and other chronic disease states. (Adults have a fat tooth more than a sweet tooth.)

6 - Be aware of the quality of the fat you consume. Move towards unsaturated fats where possible, and avoid transfats that are found in hard margarine, for example. Transfats often show up in commercial cakes, cookies, danish and many packaged foods.

7 - Consider taking supplements.

I follow the advice of Dr. Abraham Hoffer in my supplementation. Dr. Hoffer is still a practicing physician in Victoria at age 83 and was a colleague and co-author with Dr. Linus Pauling. Dr. Pauling won two Nobel Prizes before turning his attention to vitamins, particularly the benefits of high doses of vitamin C. His work was ridiculed by the medical establishment until a couple of weeks ago when an article appeared in the Canadian Medical Association Journal reporting that intravenous vitamin C led to rapid tumor shrinkage in cancer patients. The editors of the journal write, "the success of intravenous vitamin C therapy is no longer implausible. As science advances so does the potential for a miracle." This seems like a reluctant way of saying the old man might have been right all along.

8 - Do not go on extreme diets. Stay away from the dueling diet doctors, with their books, tapes and special foods.

In my song 'You're The Guru' I write:

For more about diet, see my 'Diet' article in the Spring 2000 edition of WELL. If you want to guru-proof yourself beware of any author who does not provide solid data to support their claims. This does not mean case studies of Janet Conclusion from Flin-Flon who lost 150 lbs and became a super model, it means long term data, of large numbers of people who've used a diet or eating program, with a statistically significant number making desired changes. This sounds a bit academic, but it is just common sense. We have a brain and it is appropriate to use critical thinking when making lifestyle and eating style decisions. For a wonderful book on the world of diets try "Losing It" by Laura Fraser (buy it at Amazon.com or buy it at Chapters.ca).

9 - Have a good breakfast.

I like the rocket ship principle for getting through the day. This means a good take-off and a soft-landing at the end of the day. In terms of eating, this can mean having your protein earlier in the day rather than later. Protein has a high specific dynamic action, which increases the metabolic rate about 30%. The amino acids in protein seem to stimulate the metabolic rate rather like adrenaline and tend to wake you up. Carbohydrates and fats have a much lower specific dynamic action and their digestion usually only increases the metabolism 4%. Food such as pasta is great at dinner and helps prepare you for rest and sleep.

10 - Enjoy.

A significant portion of this article is focussed on the connection between our diet and obesity. This was by design, because the problems associated with obesity are becoming a major health concern in our society. There is a relationship between the quality of food and the quantity of the food we consume. If we eat a diet that has plenty of variety, and is rich in grains, fruits and vegetables we are unlikely to overeat. The calorie dense fast foods high in sugar and fat are what tend to throw us out of caloric balance. As Ghandi said in Harijan "The grosser the food, the grosser the body."

I began the article with every mother's quotation, "Eat your fruits and veggies, go out and play." The 'play' part is tremendously important as it burns calories, builds muscle and tells the body/mind that all is WELL.