In the past, I interviewed some health and nutrition experts on various topics related to both. These interviews made fascinating discussions, plus since I knew there would be a medical shortage in the future, it was my way of learning as much as I could about ways I could enhance health in the event that I couldn't see a doctor.
The responses to the interview questions may not represent the views of The Echo Boom Bomb's author. These interviews are provided to inform readers of information from experts and provide these experts with a medium where they can answer questions without any content changes. All linked material to products in interviews such as books or videos are affiliated with the supported platforms, such as Amazon or others. To see the full list of interviews related to Echo Boomers, iGenZ or Automons, see the ending acknowledgements on this post.
"The food pyramid promotes health." "We are stuck with the genes we have." "We cannot affect the genes of our children." Are these assertions and assumptions true? I interviewed Dr. Catherine Shanahan (MD), who has not only written books on these topics (and more), but also assists clients with questions similar to this.
Brief Bio:Dr. Cate Shanahan is a board certified Family Physician. She trained in genetics and biochemistry at Cornell University before attending Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She practiced in Hawaii for ten years where she studied ethnobotany and her healthiest patient’s culinary habits. She has published 2 books: Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food and Food Rules: A Doctor's Guide To Healthy Eating. When not writing or working, she can be usually found on the nearest mountain biking trail. Learn more at her website: DrCate.com
1. The food pyramid tends to be promoted by the medical community, almost implying that a diet higher in fat and protein would be discouraged by medical professionals. How do you see the food pyramid as a guideline to nutritional recommendations?
The Food Pyramid was designed by lobbyists with industrial relationships rather than by scientists intending to help anyone engineer a healthy body. The notion that starches should form the base of your daily food intake and that a person on a 2000 calorie diet should get at least 250 grams of carbohydrates every day makes no physiologic sense because carbohydrates are absorbed into the blood as sugar. So as far as your body is concerned, a plate of whole grain pasta is like a pile of sugar laced with traces of fiber.
We've grown up equating sugar to energy, but research into a metabolic state called "nutritional ketosis" is uncovering incredible advantages to burning fat.
Even if you get those 250 grams of carbohydrate from supposedly healthy whole grains, few people are so active that they can afford 1000 calories of mostly empty energy. Don't forget the FDA recommends those 250 grams from whole grains in addition to several servings of fruit. Fruit, too, is mostly sugar. An average banana has about 30 grams of carbohydrate and only 1 gram of protein.
Topping off the food pyramid is more sugar! In the form of added sweeteners, which should make up 10 percent of your caloric intake according to the government. This would not be there at all without industrial lobbyists and the fact that such a ridiculous suggestion made it to print gives you some idea the degree to which the foxes have taken over our FDA henhouse.
As far as the recommendation of 2000 calories per day, this is way more than I can eat and I exercise regularly. Most women over 40 need significantly less than 2000 calories.
2. What would be some good general guidelines to follow as far as fat and protein consumption?
I'm glad you asked this question because everyone asks this question in attempt to start defining a healthy diet and it's the wrong place to start. I can't tell you how much protein you need because the protein you get from sushi, for instance, is entirely more valuable to your body than any protein you might get from something like whey powder or tofu. I can't tell you how much fat you need because that depends entirely on what kind of fats we're talking about.
We need to start instead by defining what we mean by food. Our definition should not include the words, "protein, carbs, and fat."
Dietitians and nutritionists have trained us all to talk about food in reductionist terms and now health books pretty much only use these terms. Better that our discussion about healthy eating begin using the language of farmers, ranchers and chefs--the people who have been nourishing us all along (up until the past 150 or so years). We got into the mess we're in with rampant obesity and chronic disease partly because we stopped using terms like "good soil" "fresh" and "wild" and started describing foods as "carbohydrate," "fat," or "protein." These words fool people into buying empty calories and unnatural, harmful chemicals that are likely to promote metabolic derangements leading to hormone problems, inflammatory diseases, and more.
Luke and I wrote Deep Nutrition to empower readers with the ability to constantly create and refine their own perfect diet. But to do that you need to completely revise the way you think about how to meet your body's needs for food. We advise doing away with calorie counting and struggling to find the perfect ratio of carbs to protein to fat. These terms aren’t useful because they say nothing about what really matters to your body. The following definition of food comes from from the introduction to Deep Nutrition:
Food is like a language, an unbroken information stream that connects every cell in your body to an aspect of the natural world. The better the source and the more undamaged the message when it arrives to your cells, the better your health will be. If you eat a properly cooked steak from an open-range, grass-fed cow, then you are receiving information not only about the health of that cow’s body, but about the health of the grasses from which it ate, and the soil from which those grasses grew. If you want to know whether or not a steak, or a fish, or a carrot is good for you, ask yourself what portions of the natural world it represents, and whether or not the bulk of that information remains intact. This requires traveling backwards down the food chain, step by step, until you reach the ground or the sea.Make sure you know how to recognize processed foods disguised as health foods so you can avoid them completely--at least that's the ultimate goal. I'll talk about this at Sean Croxton's Real Food Summit.
So how should you portion out your foods?
The most important thing to do is limit your sweet tasting foods to a couple of bites or sips per day. Go for intensely flavored foods as often as you can. Don't follow any arbitrary rules like "eat every three hours" or "don't eat just before bed."
3. Genes play a major role in health and our lives, as we are born with these genes and "stuck with them" in a way. Can genes be influenced by our behavior - such as eating healthier and exercising more often?
It's natural to worry about problems that run in your family and my patients often worry because "My mother was just diagnosed with breast cancer," "My dad had a heart attack at 45," "My grandmother has Alzheimers'." I explain that, contrary to popular medical mythology, which places family history in the "unmodifiable risk factor" column, there IS something you can do to improve the health of your genes.
Our genes are changing constantly. Everything we eat, drink, breathe, and do will affect their behavior and can physically alter the chromosomes in ways that can ultimately rewrite parts of the letter code for future generations. In that sense we are all guardians of our family DNA. This means that, just as an irresponsible debutant can squander his family inheritance, or the opposite--a few smart business moves can greatly enrich a family's wealth--we are the authors of our own family history and have as much control over our health as our parents did.
If your parents got sick early in life, whatever illnesses afflicted them are the illnesses most likely to affect you--if you eat the way they did. This is why certain diseases tend to run in families. But just because your parents developed metabolic imbalance that led to their own illnesses doesn't necessarily doom you to the same fate. No matter your age or your family history, no matter what your current metabolic impairments, your genes are ready to do their part in reviving your metabolism as soon as you get serious about a healthy lifestyle. The improvements in your metabolism won't necessarily happen overnight or in one smooth continuous progression, but every day you can make the wiser choices will be a good day--one that edges your metabolism and your genes towards optimal function.
Editor's Note:Recall the interview with Dan Eisenberg about telomere length and age of fathers and remember his advice about telomere length: "don't eat too much, eat healthy food and exercise."
4. In your experience in practice, what are three common contributors to poor health in the United States and how can we address these?
I like to keep things as simple as possible. In my view, there is one single cause.
When I was in Hawaii, my healthiest patients were those who grew up fishing, gardening, and hunting. When I was in NH, Yankee territory, some of the healthiest people there were in their 60s and 70s and over and over I heard them tell the same story "we lived on a farm and we were dirt poor but we always had good food." Now that I'm in Napa, the folks who can afford to dine out at our world-famous restaurants don't meet me in clinic; they don't need a doctor.
What all healthy people share is access to nature. Our bodies demand that "unbroken information stream that connects every cell in your body to an aspect of the natural world" and when we eat processed foods the stream is broken. The one thing that is contributing to poor health in America now, more than lack of access to healthcare, is lack of access to nature. How many kids now grow up in neighborhoods where there is no place to "go out and play?" As much as the communities we live in have been de-naturalized during the past few generations, the edible landscape has been de-naturalized as well.
Editor's Note:Tom Naughton, the director of Fat Head, made a similar point: "When I was a kid in the 1960s, the only mothers in our neighborhood who worked outside the home were the very few who were divorced. So kids came home from school, had a quick snack, then went outside to play. Now a lot of kids go from school to some organized, indoor activity where they're kept busy until Mom or Dad picks them up after work." Note that obesity is only a recent problem as our culture has favored more sedentary activities.
100 years ago, almost all of our food was organic, local, seasonal and most farms were diversified in that they grew a variety of complementary animal and vegetable products from properly fortified soil. This complementary crop production was key, as one crop enhanced the soil for the next. Over the past century, millions of acres of small family farms have been sold to agribusiness interests. The picket fences and red barns are gone. In their place we find machine-groomed monoculture, chemically soaked, pre-industrial food products (mostly corn, soy, and wheat) that will sit on unrefrigerated shelves in the grocery store before going home to American cupboards where they will sit again for months or years without changing. That's not natural.
The fact is that there is no replacement for nature. So addressing this on a population level is a bit of a political dead end. In fact, in the midst of this chronic disease epidemic, our elected officials are taking actions to shut down the few remaining family farms that can actually grow the kinds of foods we all want to eat.
5. What's the greatest moment you've experienced since you've been a doctor?
There's nothing better than meeting someone, making a couple diet suggestions, and when they come back they're transformed and happy. I get to think "I did that." Of course they did it themselves. I just pointed them in the right direction.
