How Not to Diet

by Michael Greger

A study of personal accounts of successful versus failed attempts at major life changes found that altering one’s immediate environment or moving to an entirely different location appeared to help.

To help secure our goals, we can call on our built-in cognitive capacity to create habits to automate our actions.3794 This starts with implementation intentions.3795 Instead of vague self-promises to “do our best,” implementation intentions are specific if-then plans to perform a particular behavior in a specific context.

They take the form of When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.3796 For example, If I get hungry after dinner, I will eat an apple. If the triggering circumstance is a regular, daily occurrence, implementation intentions can be the beginning of a beautiful habit.3797

Note that to break a bad habit or create a new one, we have to select a new action (eat an apple) rather than just give up an existing behavior (don’t eat potato chips).3798 To activate the habit-forming mechanism, you likely...

Evidently, you can’t form a habit of not doing something.3800 Then, to lock it in, you have to purposefully repeat it day after day, week after week, and maybe even month after month before it takes on a mind of its own.

It may be a lot of work up front, but once it’s ingrained in our brains, then the need for willpower is replaced by an eerie compulsion to just do the right thing.

I decided to try to cut down altogether. Every day, I vowed to use less sweetener than the day before. Now, not only do I take my morning tea unsweetened, I prefer it that way. As a “treat” to myself one day, I decided to add a little sweetener, and it just tasted gross. So now I’m in the best of both worlds where taste and health preferences unite.

As I mentioned here, this irrational reaction to overindulge after overeating because now the “day is lost” has a name in the scientific psychology literature. It’s been coined the “what-the-hell effect.”

For example, burdened with the knowledge that dark green leafy vegetables are the healthiest foods on the planet, I’m always trying to intentionally implement ways to fit more into my diet.

Confounding factors, sometimes called lurking variables,3839 are those third elements that may end up being the true explanation for a supposed link between two things.

For example, there may be a tight correlation between ice cream sales and drowning deaths, but that doesn’t mean ice cream causes drowning. A more likely explanation is that there is a lurking third variable—like hot weather or summertime—that explains why drowning deaths are highest when ice cream consumption is at its peak.

Swapping just one sweetened beverage or beer a day with water is associated with a lower incidence of obesity over time.

American children and adolescents drink so much soda that replacing all sugary beverages with water could result in an average reduction of 235 calories a day.3843

Even dairy industry–funded studies have found that drinking less than a cup of milk with a low-glycemic-index meal can exaggerate the insulin spike as much as if you just had eaten high-glycemic white bread.3865

Burn Fat, Preserve Muscle While milk can impair fat burning,3866 water may have the opposite effect.

Well-hydrated individuals experienced the best of both worlds: increased fat burning and decreased protein breakdown.3867 The way the body responds to high water intake is similar to how it responds to acute fasting—by switching toward fat as a fuel source while trying to spare the muscle.

Both of the fridge filters (GE and Whirlpool) did similarly well, removing more than 96 percent of trace organic contaminants, edging out the three pitcher filters, which ended up catching 93 percent (ZeroWater), 84 percent (PUR), and only 50 percent (Brita).

I figured the “change by” dates on the filters were just company scams to get you to buy more, but I was wrong. Since I drink filtered water mostly just for taste, I used to wait until the water started tasting funky before I changed the filter. Bad idea. Not only do the filters eventually lose much of their removal capacity, but bacterial growth can build up inside them, resulting in your filtered water having higher bacterial counts than the water straight out of the tap.3890

The gold standard (or rather, the pale gold standard) is the color of straw. For those of you who didn’t grow up playing on bales in barns like I did, that means a light yellow.

Note that if you take B vitamins or eat riboflavin-rich foods, that can throw off the results.3894 Riboflavin (also known as vitamin B2) gets its name from the Latin word flavus, for yellow.3895 So if you dust your air-popped popcorn with nutritional yeast, a vitamin-packed cheesy topping (spritzing the popcorn first with apple cider vinegar to get it to stick, of course), your urine stream can light up neon yellow like a light saber. This can give the false impression that your urine is more concentrated than it is and, hence, that you’re more dehydrated than you actually are.

Is there any danger in drinking too much water? Absolutely, yes. Even healthy kidneys can only handle about three cups of water an hour.3896 Beyond that, we risk washing the electrolytes out...

The single most anti-inflammatory food component? Fiber.

Since saturated fat is found mostly in meat, dairy, and junk food, whereas fiber is abundant in whole grains, beans, vegetables, and fruit, that information alone is enough to get a general sense of what an anti-inflammatory diet might look like: one centered around whole plant foods.

Indeed, in dozens of interventional trials where different diets were put to the test in thousands of individuals, the more plant-based diets won the day in terms of bringing down markers of systemic inflammation, such as C-reactive protein.3901

What about fish? The purported benefits of the omega-3 fats in seafood are often ascribed to their anti-inflammatory nature, but that’s not actually what the medical literature shows. When healthy people were given fish oil supplements equivalent to eating about a serving of salmon, a can of tuna, or ten fillets of tilapia every day3902 for weeks or months, overall there was no benefit in terms of reducing key inflammatory markers.3903

A completely plant-based diet, however, can help drop C-reactive protein levels by 30–40 percent within just a few weeks in both adults3905 and children, but it need not be all or nothing.

Yes, those randomized to a no-meat diet dropped the inflammatory potential of their diets more than those placed on a low-meat diet,3907 but even swapping out just a few servings of meat for beans, split peas, chickpeas, or lentils a few days a week can lower measures of inflammation in the body by about a third within only two months.

Adding plant foods alone can help too. Five servings of fruits and veggies a day don’t appear to be sufficient, but eight daily servings significantly drop C-reactive protein levels compared to those randomized to eat close to the American average,3909 a paltry two servings a day.3910

whole grains, fruits, and vegetables lower inflammation through different mechanisms, suggesting consuming them all together could have a synergistic effect.3911 So our best bet may be to eat a variety of foods as grown.

tomatoes are America’s most popular vegetable3926 and have been shown to have anti-inflammatory effects in both petri dishes3927 and people.3928 Randomize overweight individuals to a little less than a can of tomato juice a day (330 ml), and see a drop in inflammation within three weeks.3929 Low-sodium V8 juice may also help.3930

Give people about a quarter cup a day of tomato paste, and get an improvement in artery function within fifteen days, an effect attributed to both anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects.3931

Tomatoes are so anti-inflammatory that tomato extracts have been investigated as a potential replacement for aspirin as a blood thinner.

You can also try eating a tomato salad as an appetizer. What I like to do is quarter a ripe tomato, grind on some freshly cracked pepper, and add a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and some shreds of fresh basil. Delish!

Now known as refeeding syndrome, multi-organ system failure can result from resuming a regular diet too quickly.

Some critical nutrients, such as thiamine and phosphorus, are used to metabolize food. In the critical refeeding window, if too much food is taken before these nutrients can be repleted, demand may exceed supply and whatever residual stores are still left can be driven down even further, with potentially fatal consequences.

That’s why rescue workers are taught to always give thiamine before food to victims who had been trapped or otherwise unable to eat.4106 Thiamine is responsible for the yellow color of “banana bags,” a term you might have heard used on medical dramas, used to describe an IV fluid concoction often given to malnourished alcoholics to prevent a similar reaction.4107 Anyone with negligible food intake for more than five days may be at risk of developing refeeding problems.4108

Cancer can also feed on ketones. Indeed, ketones have been found to fuel human breast cancer growth and drive metastases in an experimental model, more than doubling tumor growth.4140 Some have even speculated that may be why breast cancer often metastasizes to the liver, the main site of ketone production.

High-fat diets in general are purported to increase breast cancer risk through “oxidative stress, hormonal dysregulation, or inflammatory signaling.”4144 A strong association has also been found between saturated fat intake and prostate cancer progression.

A meta-analysis of studies on diet and breast cancer mortality concluded that “saturated fat intake negatively impacts upon breast cancer survival,” finding a 50 percent increase in the hazard of breast cancer–specific death for those with the most saturated fat intake compared to those women with the least.

There’s a reason the official American Cancer Society / American Society of Clinical Oncology Breast Cancer Survivorship Care Guidelines recommend a dietary pattern for breast cancer patients that’s essentially the opposite of a ketogenic diet: “high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes; low in saturated fats.”4147

So far, not a single clinical study has shown a measurable benefit from a ketogenic diet for any human cancer.

if Taubes were right, if fat calories were somehow less fattening, then body fat loss would become accelerated on the keto diet.

What happened instead, in the very study funded by his Nutrition Science Initiative, was that body fat loss slowed upon switching to the ketogenic diet.4158

Just looking at the readings on their scales, the ketogenic diet would seem like a smashing success. The subjects went from losing less than a pound a week on the regular diet to losing three and a half pounds within seven days after switching to the ketogenic diet. What wa...

On the keto diet, their rates of body fat loss were slowed by more than half, so most of what they were losing was water. The reason they started burning less fat on a ketogenic diet is presumably the same reason people who start fasting may start burning less fat: Without carbohydrates,...

Switching to a ketogenic diet made them lose less fat mass and...

That may help explain why the leg muscles of CrossFit trainees placed on a ketogenic diet may shrink as much as 8 percent.4160

The study subjects did start burning more fat on the ketogenic diet, but they were also eating so much more fat on that diet that they ended up retaining more fat, despite the lower insulin levels. This is “diametrically opposite”4161 to what the keto crowd had predicted.

In science-speak, the carbohydrate-insulin model “failed experimenta...

what was happening inside their bodies told the real story. The low-carb group was losing mostly lean mass—water and protein.