Cutting out sugars and refined flours, as we talked about last time, probably offers the most significant opportunity to improve your diet. Unlike sugar, meat is not all bad. It does in fact have nutrients in it which are readily used by your body.

Unfortunately for steak lovers (my former self included), the negatives associated with eating meat far outweigh the positives (including that buttery rich taste that we all love so much).

There are two major problems with eating meat is well as the issue of animal rights, which I’ll get into at the end.

Animal Protein

Animal protein is ascribed supernatural powers. It’s what makes men manly. It’s what builds muscles. Fat and carbs have been targeted as dietary land mines, but no fad diet has targeted protein.

And, indeed, protein is extremely important to our bodies. Protein is used  to repair our cells and build new ones. Without protein we would all die.

So the argument for veganism, which is the complete removal of all animal products from the diet, is not an argument for giving up protein.

Animal proteins are often recommended over plant proteins because they’re complete proteins, meaning they contain all of the amino acids we need.

In reality, these argument doesn’t carry much practical weight. A decent vegan meal will contain all of the amino acids you’ll need.

The one thing that plant protein DOESN’T have is the ability to kill you.

Dr. Campbell, who I mentioned in the introduction, discovered a direct correlation between eating animal proteins and things like cancer, heart disease, stroke and most other early life-enders readers of this site are likely to meet with eventually.

Plant proteins had no similar effects. It’s important to remember that these conclusions came from lab experiments with rats as well as data obtained from many thousands of people. It represents science’s most current understanding.

The explanation for why this is the case and the experiments that lead to the discoveries can be read in his book, “The China Study“. It is so compelling that I became a vegan the day after reading it.

Where Meat Comes From

Disgusting. That’s really the only word that can be used to describe the current method of producing meat.

Animals are born indoors and very frequently never leave the building they were born in until they are slaughtered. They never go outside. In fact, they barely move at all.

Besides not being a lot of fun for the pig, this poses other problems. The pigs are fed such a strong concoction of antibiotics and drugs that their feces turn bright pink. This pink sludge flows out of the facilities where the pigs are housed, but not before filling the air with noxious fumes that can literally be smelled for miles.

Because of the filthy living conditions and tight quarters, so close that the pigs are usually in contact with each other, they develop festering sores on their skin. That’s not the extent of the disease the pigs experience, either. The great majority are diseased when they are killed.

The one major requirement is that the animals must be able to move to the slaughter house by their own power. This is encouraged through beating and electrocution.

By time that piglet becomes bacon it has been abused by any definition of the word, and has lived in a level of squalor and disease that is totally unfit for food to be in. This is true even of milk cows, whose milk can legally be sold with small amounts of blood and pus in it.

Further compounding the problem, these animals are not fed their natural diet. They’re fed genetically modified corn and soy, which they would never eat in the wild. Cows, for example, have a specially evolved digestive system for digesting grass. It doesn’t work with corn, so they are pumped full of drugs to help digest the food.

This is how the overwhelming majority of livestock in the world, and especially the United States, are raised. This is not the exception. Even “free range” and organic meats are far from the innocence they connotate.

There is fierce competition in the industry, which means that the name of the game is packing as many animals into the smallest area possible without killing too many, pumping them full of any substance that will grow more meat, and doing it as inexpensively as possible.

This does not produce a product that you want to eat. It is sanitized and removed from its original context by the time you get it, but realize that every piece of meat you eat, no matter how nice and juicy it looks, has been through this process.

Dairy is no better. Milk has to be pasteurized to kill all of the gross bacteria that come out of a farm cow. It’s illegal to sell it otherwise. Milk was actually used for several of the studies in the China Study.

Fish

Fish are supposed to be the healthiest meat. They may have been in the past, may possibly still be now, but they are far from actually being healthy.

Fish have the same proteins we talked about earlier which contribute to all of those diseases that the meat eater will almost inevitably succumb to.

But in recent years, things have gotten even worse. They are farm raised in filthy pools, and fed corn because it is cheap. Think about that. How would a fish ever naturally get corn?

Wild caught fish aren’t much better. Pollution levels are so extreme that it’s a fair assumption that any fish you may eat is contaminated. Some fish, like tuna, have heavy metals in them which, once in your body, will never leave.

In the middle of the pacific is a huge sludge of trash that humans have produced. It’s larger than Texas, which is pretty darn big. The sludge is made of everything from plastic bottles to couches and TVs which float on the surface. No nation will take responsibility for the sludge, since it is in international waters, so it continues to grow every year.

The poisons from the trash leach out into the water, accumulate and concentrate in the fish, and are then delivered to you on your plate.

Mmmmmm.

Animal Rights

I’m torn on the issue of animal rights, although as I have stopped seeing animals as food and have started seeing them as amazing creations of nature, I have found myself emotionally more attached and more disgusted by the way they are treated.

If animals were supremely healthy for me, I would eat them. I would find farms that breed them in sanitary conditions with no weird drugs, and I would buy from them.

That’s not to say that I would be happy that the animals are being killed, but I realize that this is part of the food chain, and I will always put my well being over that of animals if push comes to shove.

The current system, however, is nothing short of repulsive. Many of the employees of these factories are sadistic and enjoy beating the animals. On peta.com (who I disagree with on a great number of things and would not use as a guide for diet), you can see videos of people bashing animals’ heads in with cinder blocks, cutting them and violating them in every way possible. It will make your stomach churn.

The Bottom Line

I’ve only barely scratched the surface of the meat issue. When you delve into it you also realize that the amount of pollution, energy, water, and food used for raising animals dwarfs the amount created and used for an equivalent amount of plant crops.

Whether you decide to stop eating animals because it’s nearly impossible to get animals not tainted by our meat producing factories, because eating it WILL eventually kill you, or because you love animals and don’t want to contribute to the atrocious conditions they live their lives in, you’re making a good choice.

After removing animal products from my diet, one question always nagged me. What about high quality farm raised cows who have never been treated with hormones or drugs, and who have always been fed their natural diet? I wrote to Dr. Campbell to ask if those might be healthy, and he replied,

Certain meats may be slightly better under certain conditions for certain people at certain times but we just don’t have any evidence that such differences are anything more than trivial. They certainly are not predictable.

Are these foods delicious? Yes, although they’ve now lost most of their appeal to me. My friend Jeffy once said, “Once you have self respect, it’s inevitable that you’ll become healthy”.

I believe that completely.

Removing meat from your diet is an act of self respect, essentially saying, “I care enough to give up superficial pleasures like a steak for a healthier and longer life.”

Continued in Part IV, “What to Eat?”

Everything you eat is primarily made up of three macronutrients, or building blocks: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.

Today I’m going to focus on what I’ve learned about carbohydrates, because they make up the bulk of most people’s diets and they offer the biggest opportunity for diet improvement.

I will try to not get too technical, because then you will get bored, leave, and not change your life/diet. If you want to get a better understanding, I highly recommend “Live Long Enough to Live Forever” by Ray Kurzweil.

When you eat food your body’s goal is to convert it to sugar, which is what cells actually use for energy. So, in a way, everything you eat actually becomes sugar eventually. Some people like to use this as an argument that sugar is good for you, which is dumb. It’s the journey, not the destination.

Here’s the crux of the problem. Sugar is basically predigested food. Your body is a sugar refining machine, but when sugar comes in, it gets really confused and causes a huge spike in insulin. This triggers your body to store fat (which is why some skinny people who restrict calories are still “soft”).

At the same time, sugar also depresses your immune system, screws up your cholesterol, creates an acidic environment, and a host of other things.

Here’s a page with 146 reasons sugar is bad for you, with scientific research cited for each.

Here’s what I’m trying to get at: sugar is the devil.

There is ZERO nutritional value to sugar. Everything we eat that comes from nature has nutrients. Not sugar.

This doesn’t mean that SWEET things are bad for you, by the way. Take oranges or pineapples, for example. Each one is sweet, but they have fiber, which slows digestion way down (and thus doesn’t cause an insulin spike), as well as vitamins and minerals.

Flour

By the way… white flour and white rice are also essentially just sugar.

Predigested.

The outer hulls which contain all of the nutrients and fiber are stripped away, a process that should have been slowly carried out through your digestive tract, leaving nothing but the starchy and nutritionally devoid inner part.

Virtually every study conducted on the subject has shown conclusively that sugar and other highly refined foods are the LEADING cause of diabetes, cancer, obesity, and a host of other serious problems. Basically everything that “rich”, meaning people in developed countries, die from is caused or at least accelerated by sugar and refined foods.

Poor people in poor countries just don’t have these problems.

Why the hell do we eat it, then?

We eat sugar because it tastes good. It’s a drug for our tastebuds, essentially. This goes beyond analogy - it actually affects our dopamine receptors like real drugs do. That particular effect, by the way, also depresses sugar eaters and causes mood swings.

And we’re being hooked on it. Virtually EVERYTHING the average American eats has sugar in it.

That starts with the obvious like doughnuts and candy, but even extends to things like pasta sauce, granola bars (loaded with it), almost all breads in grocery stores, most “health foods”, and almost all cereals.

As a side note, almost all health foods are a total scam. Granola bars and energy bars are essentially candy bars. Yogurts are basically ice cream. There is very little difference.

Want to hear something terrifying? The average person now eats more than their BODY WEIGHT in refined sugar every year. And that’s not including refined flours which are nutritionally equivalent and at least as common.

This is roughly 10-15 times more than today’s senior generation ate when they were young, which means that we haven’t even seen the very long term effects of sugar consumption are.

This is no mistake, either. National food manufacturers and chains weren’t common things during that generation’s heyday. Now these groups have realized that besides the direct correlation between sugar and terrible ailments, there’s also a direct correlation with their profits.

Which product do consumers go for? The one with the most sugar, every time.

This “cold war of sugar”, where each manufacturer keeps one upping the other, has caused our taste buds to become desensitized as well. When we eat sweet things like fruit or even vegetables, they don’t taste sweet to us. This perpetuates the sugar dependency cycle.

To make things worse, the government is in on it. Don’t rely on them to keep you healthy. Rely on yourself. There are WAY too many lobbyists for food companies exerting their influence on policy.

Quitting Sugar

Quitting sugar is not terribly easy but it is something everyone can do, especially when they understand why it’s so bad for them.

It will take one or two months of not eating sugar to completely quell the cravings. But after that you will find that you rediscover sweetness in other foods. I’ll never forget the first time I ate broccoli and tasted the sweetness in it. It was amazing.

Once you’re over sugar, it’s a non issue. You realize that you are missing nothing at all. It sounds like restriction, but the resensitization of your taste buds means that all the “bland” healthy foods you used to pass by have a world of flavor for you to discover.

This sounds like a bit of hippie propaganda, but it’s not. I have experienced this personally, and I used to be a sugar fiend. To give you an example, I would often bake a thing of brownies and eat nothing but them for two days until they ran out.

Now on the very rare occasions that I eat sweet things (like the one cookie I ate at christmas), I always have the same experience.

“I used to love these things. This is going to be fun.”

Chomp chomp.

“Hmm…. this is pretty good, but it doesn’t taste like I remember it. The taste is so simple and boring… just a blast of sugar.”

Swallow swallow.

“Ugh. That was kind of gross. I’m glad I don’t have to eat that kind of thing.”

That’s exactly how I think every time. Then I immediately search out some good food to get real satisfaction.

Sugar has an effect which makes you feel less full than you are, and makes you crave more sugar. That’s why diets don’t usually work. It’s like quitting crack by only smoking one rock a day instead of five. The crack makes you want more crack.

If you go cold turkey and just ride it out for a couple months, your life will be easy. You won’t crave it and it will be a non issue.

This Sounds Like a Hassle!

You know what? It is. My life would be far more convenient and easy if I just ate sugar and white flour. Sometimes I fantasize about how great it would be if foods I ate were as readily accessible as junk food.

So I’m not going to lie - it does make your life more complex. People will give you a hard time about it and will make up stupid reasons for why they eat it.

“Everything’s good in moderation.”

WRONG. If you believe that, take up heroin. Moderately.

Buying groceries becomes an involved process. You have to find new foods to eat. Restaurants become a bit of a chore.

But hey… let’s get real for a minute. This is your HEALTH. Your LIFE. Sugar impacts you DAILY, whether you realize it or not.

Think about the challenges you face. How hard is it really to check with waiters and examine food labels. Make the decision NOW, rather than when you’re 60, fat, and diagnosed with cancer and high blood pressure.

This is something you can do NOW for YOURSELF that has virtually no downside and can literally save your life.

Continued in Part III, “What’s Wrong With Meat?”

I occasionally mention my diet, which has spawned some questions in a recent thread as well as in my survey results.

So this week I’m going to explain my diet in detail, focusing on what I eat, why I eat it, and the facts behind the food.

The ideas aren’t mine originally, and I’m certainly not the only person to eat this way, but I call it the MaxDiet because there is no formal name for it, and from the research I’ve done it appears to be the best possible diet.

Why MaxDiet?

The diet is optimized for overall health, longevity, and disease prevention. Although it’s not the best diet for muscle gain (the best diet for muscle gain is very unhealthy), it is conducive to building muscle.

The most musclebound person I know is a 40 something year old in Austin who goes by the name “Tarzen”. He eats the same way.

I have personally gained muscle on this diet and so has Todd. Critics who will say that they can’t do this diet because they are working out are mistaken.

The diet is also highly effective for weight loss. There are a variety of ways of losing weight, the most effective being not eating at all.

There are two main reasons for losing weight: vanity and health. If you’re losing weight for health, this is the diet for you. I’d also argue that it’s best for vanity as well. People are attracted to healthy looking people, which is what you’ll be on the diet.

Given my firsthand experience with people eating this diet, it’s safe to say that it will bring you to a naturally healthy weight that looks good on anyone. I will explain more on why it works like this in my next post.

Secondary issues like acne and poor body composition are also remedied by it.

My philosophy towards diet is that one should eat a diet that fits with their lifestyle and is permanently sustainable. Fad diets that people turn to to “lose 20 pounds in a week” or whatever are not sustainable.

True improvement in any area of life comes from the cultivation of constant daily habits. This diet is intended as a permanent lifelong change, and is easily sustainable as such. I’ve been eating this way for two years or so with no regrets.

Sticking to the Diet

Sticking to the diet is simple and agreeable once you are accustomed to it. The first month or two will be a challenge, just like nearly anything worth doing.

Now that I am firmly established on the diet I take a meal off here and there. I actually dread doing this now (whereas I originally looked forward to these meals), but I do it as a matter of necessity because I travel so much and occasionally find myself in a position where there is no available food that’s on my diet.

I don’t worry about these occasions, and neither should you. Just as a daily McDonalds eater won’t miraculously become healthy by eating a handful of spinach, you won’t become unhealthy if you eat a bad meal once a month.

The idea is to do the best you can (for yourself) at all times, and not worry about the rare occasions where you have to compromise.

I continue to read more about diet and am open to change. If I find that a new way of eating is healthier I will switch immediately and update this as well.

Destiny and History

Occasionally people bring up the fact that we can readily eat and process many foods that aren’t on this diet. While some scientists believe that we are evolutionarily intended to be vegetarian, there are just as many who think we are intended to be carnivores.

In the end, it doesn’t matter.

I believe that we are designed for survival, which means that we are designed to eat EVERYTHING so that we don’t die. We have processes to handle a wide range of food and make good use of it.

However, that doesn’t mean that it’s all GREAT for us. A diesel engine can run on regular gasoline, but it’s not as efficient as when it’s fed its optimal fuel, diesel.

We live in a time where we have access to great variety and can make the choices that benefit us most. We no longer have to rely on our evolved ability to digest sub par foods but can instead use our evolved brains to make the best choice.

There’s also the fact that most foods we eat today are so new and unnatural that there is no possible way that we could have evolved around them yet. I will get into specifics in the next couple posts.

Life Expectancy

It’s difficult to estimate the gain in life expectancy by following the Max Diet, because I’ve been unable to find a study where a sample group approximates the Max Diet.

Some studies actually show veganism as being no better that eating meat.

This makes quite a bit of sense to me since most vegans I’ve seen actually eat worse than meat eaters. Instead of cutting out meat and increasing vegetable consumption, they turn to highly processed foods.

However, it just so happens that the biggest study ever done on human diet, The China Study, does track both meat consumption as well as processed flour consumption, which are the two big evils we avoid.

The study was conducted by T Colin Campbell, a nutritional biochemistry professor at Cornell, and it definitively shows that these two types of food must be avoided.

I recently sent him an e-mail asking about life span and he said that the best research indicates that eating the MaxDiet (which is essentially what he recommends in his book) will add around 10 years to your life.

Perhaps more important than life expectancy, the diet greatly improves quality of life. Rather than thinking of it as adding a few (or more) years at the end of your life, think of it as adding them now.

People who follow the Max Diet get sick less often, particularly with serious ailments like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and strokes. Their moods are steadier and they have more energy. I’ll go more into detail on those topics later this week.

Coming up Next…

Now that we’ve covered what to expect from the diet and a few common objections, on Wednesday we’ll cover the worst thing you can possibly eat… something you probably eat plenty of right now.

Continued in Part II