Have you ever heard of SAD? It stands for Standard American Diet. As discussed in The NEW Food Pyramid, SAD has produced the obesity epidemic and it is out of control.
Lots of encouraging comments and questions about that post, so it’s worth discussing further.
It’s time to do something about this and move past SAD.
Find the truth
It’s sad to see how polarized the world of nutrition has become. We’re all humans, we all need healthy food, why isn’t there a simple answer?!
The short answer is: clickbait. Extreme diets get clicks and sell because they are bold and memorable.
This creates a religious environment that is based on dogma rather than data. We all know the overzealous people that do vegan/carnivore/keto/vertical/paleo/atkins etc etc.
I’ve been researching performance nutrition for more than a decade and have found something very interesting about all these seemingly incomparable diet trends…
They are more similar than they are different.
This is how we find our truth — look for the common denominators in effective diet systems, then combine them to make something that can work for everyone. This is how I assembled The NEW Food Pyramid.
Meet The TRAD Diet System
TRAD: Traditional - Rediscovered - Adaptive - Diet
There is LOTS of history about how humans have changed, how our culture has changed, and how our diets have changed over thousands of years. I’ve read many books on the topic, but my two favorites that summarize this well and that I recommend are The Story of the Human Body and Sapiens.
The long story short is: the world we live in now is very very different from the pre modern world in which humans originated, so our bodies are generally not well adapted for modern stress and environments, because culture and technology have evolved much faster than the biological human body.
With that lens, the current public health epidemic is actually pretty easy to understand. 1) Food companies manufacture garbage which is passed as food, and we eat it, but the human body is not capable of processing it. 2) Most western people have far more calories available to them than they need, and they eat it, but that is much more than was historically available, so the body has a hard time managing the surplus.
The result is this: most people eat too many calories and/or eat too many poison calories.
Fix this and you can fix the problem.
It seems the ideal diet system existed traditionally for a very long time. Something after the agricultural revolution (10,000 years ago) but before the industrial revolution (250 years ago).
Bringing this together…
These are the principles of TRAD, which are consistent with the needs and history of your human body, but is also consistent with the popular modern diets.
Prioritize high quality protein in your meals first and foremost
Minimize or eliminate processed, packaged, and modified foods
Eat in alignment with what suits your body best
Eat less rather than more
These are the simple principles for the TRAD diet system.
To do TRAD, just eat according to The NEW Food Pyramid whenever possible.
I also highly recommend trying The Pointman Breakfast Challenge. Why? Because if you can stabilize your breakfast you have a better chance at achieving your diet goals for the rest of the day. Maybe breakfast is in fact the most important meal of the day. If you can handle it, try skipping breakfast entirely i.e. intermittent fasting. Just be sure not eat too late in the day and keep your overall calorie consumption at an appropriate level.
TRAD Q&A
Great questions these past couple weeks from Pointman members. Some key questions and answers are highlighted below.
From Fred: “What are your recommendations for groceries to buy in order to have proper food for breakfast?”
Eat eggs, meat, or fish that you cooked yourself, in high quality cooking fats. It’s best to meal prep and cook a bunch of protein once or twice a week. Processed meat like lunch meat is full of poison, avoid entirely. Also eat fruit and probiotic food like yogurt or sauerkraut. Honey is great and can be nice for breakfast.
From JH: “Have been searching your site for more info behind your food pyramid, specifically info about quinoa (which isn't mentioned but implied, I think), oats, and beans/legumes . . . and why these are all on your dessert list...?”
This is a great question and could be a long answer, but we’ll keep it short for now. To be considered Food, items need to generally a) be hard to overeat and b) have more nutritional benefit than detriment. The question of grains, beans, nuts, and seeds is divisive in the performance nutrition world. There is compelling evidence that shows that these items are probably not great for you. Why? They are evolutionarily adapted to NOT being eaten, so they have defensive mechanisms and chemicals to prevent themselves from being eaten. Which is to say your body is not great at processing “defensive” food items. Are they poison like soda and seed oils? No, definitely not. But they are easy to over eat and have a significant nutritional risk, so they do not belong in the Food category. Here is a great article that explains this further.
From Ari: “What do you do about restaurants?”
Restaurants are dessert. In theory you could be super diligent and go to the kitchen and talk to the chef and examine their ingredients, but that is never going to be practical. Restaurants are a super low margin business, so it’s literally in their best interest to produce your food as cheaply as possible. This is true for high end restaurants as well! There is no “healthy restaurant”. Personally, I have resolved this by preparing only healthy food while at home, so eating out at restaurants is meant to be a treat, not a hardship. Restaurants are fair game if you are getting high quality calories and protein otherwise in your day.
Nate
Glad you are covering diet Nate, it is great and helpful.