A plague of bananas.

What to do about food ?

Bananas are healthy right ?……so here’s a question for all of you foodies and diet types “how much sugar and how many calories are there in the average banana ?…..and then for bonus points today how much sugar and how many calories are there in a piece of lemon shortbread from Warrens bakery ?.

So, in the average banana there are about 15 grams of sugar and around 112 calories, given that a teaspoon holds around 4 grams that means that there is something close to 4 teaspoons worth of sugar in the banana that you ate as a ‘healthy’ snack this morning. But we all know, because we have all been told, that fruit and vegetables are healthy yes. so looking at the fussy detail of how many grams of sugar there are in a banana or what the glycaemic index of a potato is is just an unnecessary distraction right. Any anyway…..who understands glycaemic index in the first place ?.

That’s enough questions in one day so lets move along the bus a little.

Diet = asymmetric risk.

For the last few years most this diet or that diet guru’s have gone deeply tribal in that they all seem to have got one idea only and invested all of their attention and personal bias into it, this is most obvious with the vegans, i’m sorry but I keep wanting to call them ‘vogons‘ who seem not to be able to talk about actual nutrition and seem instead to be talking about a pseudo religious belief system. Vogon, sorry vegan, Karen’s seem to be now one of the most extreme in terms of personal opinion and self righteousness ……especially if you’ve just thrown a juicy steak on the barbie this summer .At the other end of the scale we have the blood dripping carnivores who can and do at least talk about nutrition but ‘diss‘ (disrespect) just about everyone else…don’t even get started with the keto-diet heads vs the low carb tribe ?.

It doesn’t really get us anywhere does it ?.

In his recent interviews with other specialists Dr Peter Attia took a different approach to diet and nutrition, he used to be the poster boy for the keto diet and fasting by the way but at least began to realize that maybe several different approaches had similar outcomes. His new approach, at least to my hearing of it is to consider diet as in the world of risk, something that I understand, and states that diet or more properly nutrition presents with an asymmetric risk problem – I guess I need to explain that one. Just before I get into that one though what we seem to have in the developed world is a problem of over-nutrition leading to obesity and metabolic disease and for many of those people ‘diet’ doesn’t work because most so called diets are basically restricting either food type or caloric intake and usually causing uncontrollable hunger which can overcome any amount of willpower.

The idea of asymmetric risk in terms of nutrition or diet is that it is unbelievably easy to get it wrong and the results of getting it wrong are seriously bad ; those results include our entire litany of modern world diseases from ‘simple’ diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer to neuro-degenerative disease such as Alzheimers dementia – now often referred to as Type 3 Diabetes. The other side of the risk equation is that it doesn’t seem to be possible to get it super-right either and thus gain some enormous benefit from it ; all we can hope to achieve is to not get it totally wrong and thus live out one side of a normal human existence reasonably free from disease. The other side or second factor is exercise of course and there is some argument about which one should take priority and I for one get a a bit lost in the weeds with that argument.

One thing often said and rarely challenged is this “you can’t out train a bad diet”, I for one find that kinda-sorta funny because the best health and weight control I ever achieved in my life was when I trained hard and hardly worried at all about what I ate ; in fact I seemed to do better when I ate well and plenty because I exercised better, added muscle mass and was less likely to snack on anything that had sugar in it.

How not to get it so badly wrong…..avoiding the ‘devils brew’ of modern food-like substances.

My attitude towards diet and nutrition now isn’t that I know how to win, rather I seem to be at the state that I simply grasp how little I actually know – but I think I know now how not to do it as badly as I have been doing and the answer (for me) might be startlingly simple in that the main thing I have to do is avoid most of the food-like products developed by the so-called food industry over the last 60 years. That comes from a historical context that we didn’t have high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) huge amounts of cheap sugar, great vats of seed oils and grain silo’s full of corn just needing all of it’s husk and fiber stripping off to go into the maw of the food industry…..we didn’t have any of that 60 years ago and strangely enough nor did we have the rate of obesity and diabetes that we have today. That isn’t the ‘one and only’ answer of course, even for a nutrition simpleton such as myself ; it’s likely that for the first time in my life I’ll have to do the numbers and ‘track the macro’s and it’s pretty clear from Dr Attia’s work that iv’e got to increase my protein intake as I start to exercise again.

The best approach right now is to just avoid those things that form the standard American (British) diet and if you’re wondering where they are then just take a slow wander around the supermarket one day and read a few of the food labels ; even though the small print is shockingly small the information is there. As it happens there are many products that use a ‘devils brew’ of highly processed corn flour, sugar, seed oils and HFCS to make something that is stable on a supermarket shelf. Avoid those and we might be in with a chance of dietary success – by which all I mean is doing ourselves less harm.

If that seems to be a very negative way of considering our diet then a more positive way seems to be in basing it on single ingredients that came out of the ground, out of the sea or from an animal without passing through a food processing plant first. And yes…..I know that if we buy flour to bake with then that is likely to at least have been milled and processed to some extent : so I’m not saying don’t eat bread and pasta or white rice for example…..just maybe a lot less of it.

Having read through Dr Attia’s book ‘Outlive’ once, and just about to embark on my second and more detailed read I think I can see that I have fallen into several of the ‘diet’ mistakes that he writes about in the book. I think now that to start with I was brought up on a diet that included far too much sugar and therefore got used to the drug-like kick it gives – it sounds weird but I am most likely a sugar addict. Then, as a student nurse, I was not so much taught about nutrition as indoctrinated into the fad and enthusiasm of the time which, basically put, was high fibre and the holy food pyramid. When a few years ago I discovered that nearly everything I knew was wrong I then fell into one of the many tribal diet camps – mine was the low carb approach, it worked for a while but failed me quite quickly.

One of the few positive things that I can say with any confidence now is that harder physical training that I once did coupled with eating well for the level of training is the only time that I have been (relatively) fit and healthy. What broke that for me was neither the training or the eating but the fact that another factor kicked in (lack of sleep) and everything went pear shaped…..and yes, including my waist.

But what about the bananas, surely they must be healthy because they are marketed as healthy fruit right ?

Well, the answer seems to be “not so fast bucko” because we also seem to need to understand food products in much greater detail and to be honest the modern banana isn’t exactly an original ‘natural’ plant but one that has been domesticated and modified to produce a higher fructose content. The modern banana seems to contain as much actual sugar as many products taken straight from the cake and cookies counter of the local bakery and yet somehow are seen as being ‘natural’. It might be more interesting and informative to ask why we eat certain foods so lets have a think about our reason for being ‘bananas’.

So, why do we like bananas ?.

Generally speaking we choose and eat foods that give us pleasure and/or are satisfying in some other way – we very rarely eat based on knowledge or information, rather we eat based on emotion and the specific emotional pathway is that of sugar and dopamine. Sugar makes us feel good, at least temporarily because of the sugar hit or sugar rush which is basically the dopamine release and that’s exactly the same effect as we get from opiates, alcohol, cocaine and sex…..sorry about that but you may never look at a banana in the same light again.

The downside is one that few know about and it’s what comes after the dopamine (and insulin) hit and that’s the blood sugar drop accompanied by the stress hormones noradrenaline and cortisol. The presence of that very feature might explain the wild ups and downs that some college psychiatrists are having to deal with in the college age adolescents living on Coca Cola and not much else.

Last question then – is the food industry actually working against you ?.