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“Eat like a king in the morning, a prince at noon, and a peasant at dinner.” Maimonides (1135–1204), a medieval Jewish philosopher/doctor The seventh and final behaviour in our Eat Better Strategy is straightforward: Go 12 hours without eating. Eliminating the extra calories from nighttime snacking may be the most significant impact for many, but embracing 12 hour daily fasts aligns with two principles derived from human evolution - circadian rhythms and fasting physiology.  The earth’s predictable, 24 hour, light/dark (diurnal) cycle has led evolution to develop circadian rhythms.
The light part of the cycle activates many genes while turning off others, preparing our body for what the day holds:
At night, the process reverses with the active daytime genes shutting down and others activating, setting our system up for the expected nighttime activities:
Up to 40% of our genes are affected by the diurnal rhythm. Light is the dominant trigger, but the presence or absence of food also plays a key role. Bottom Line: our bodies expect food in the daytime and fasting in the evening - evolution has designed us this way. Above and beyond the timing of eating, going without eating can trigger biological processes of repair and restoration collectively known as fasting physiology. From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to survive periods of starvation makes sense. Cells reprogram themselves during periods of fasting; recycling damaged intracellular proteins and organelles such as mitochondria. This process, called autophagy, provides energy and building blocks for cellular maintenance. Suppression of autophagy is associated with oxidative stress, inflammation, ageing and cancer. Research has demonstrated that intermittent fasting (IF) provides many benefits:
Consistently going 12 hours without food will likely provide many of these benefits and provide you with the foundation for IF. Before trying IF, we recommend that you follow the Eat Better Strategy principles for 4-6 weeks. If you are taking medications - please check with your doctor and develop a plan before initiating intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating. The EAT Better Strategy:
Need help applying this to your busy life? Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health: The TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices. Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans). Everything you need to transform your diet. The EAT Better Strategy:
Your body's ability to maintain weight over extended periods is truly a feat of nature. At a high level, maintaining weight over the long run, energy expended must equal energy consumed. For example, if you maintain your current body weight within two pounds, your body has matched your energy intake to your output with less than 1 % deviation. This feat is achieved through a symphony of signals between your brain and gut, carefully balancing hunger and satiation, adjusting your resting metabolic rate up or down like a thermostat to maintain such a fine balance. In your brain, the hypothalamus is the control centre for hunger and satiation, receiving nervous and hormonal signals to increase appetite or stop feeding. This signal to stop eating is vital to prevent overeating.  When we eat, nutrients in the food stimulate the release of multiple hormones, cholecystokinin, PYY, GLP-1, GIP, PP, from the cells lining our intestines. As the meal progresses, the circulating hormone levels increase until a "satiation threshold" is reached at the hypothalamus. Paired with this is direct information from the nerves in our distended stomachs and indirect signalling metabolites from bacteria in our gut - all these messages telling us we are full!
Our challenge is not that it is hard for us to know whether we have eaten enough; it just takes time. On average, it takes 20 minutes for these signals to cross the satiation threshold. If we eat too fast, it is easy to overeat as we realize we are full, really full, too late. The best strategy is what the Okinawans call "Hara Hachi Bu" - stop eating when you are 80% full. More often than not, you will feel fully satiated as a few more minutes go by, and your satiation hormones have had their time to work. A closely related strategy is simply slowing down and taking your time with your meal, breaking it into several small courses over 30 to 40 minutes like the French. Either way, you will find it easier to prevent overeating and help your body perform the wonder of energy balance. Need help applying this to your busy life? Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health: The TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices. Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans). Everything you need to transform your diet. The EAT Better Strategy:
Your body has a complex system to alert you to eat when hungry and stop you from consuming too much, Drinking beverages with calories bypasses this control and leads to over-consumption, excess calories and energy overload. In other words, drinking your calories makes it more likely you will get fat.  Substituting water for calorie-laden drinks not only eliminates the extra calories, studies show Increasing your intake of water can contribute to weight loss via two mechanisms:
Getting enough water should be simple - drink when you are thirsty. Many fail to heed their thirst and forget to drink, becoming chronically, mildly dehydrated and prone to weight gain. So if you cannot remember to drink, let your urine be your guide. Drink to maintain your pee at a light yellow colour. Dark yellow and orange urine tells you your body needs more water. How to get more water? Start your day with a glass of have and carry a water bottle with you all day and make drinking it a habit. If water seems boring, try infusing your water by adding:
Missing the carbonation of pop, then carbonate your water before infusing it. Carbonation, while lowering pH, has no detrimental effects, and if it gets you to drink more, it is worth the effort. What about coffee and tea? It is a myth that the caffeine in coffee and tea dehydrates. The only thing you have to watch out for is what else is in your favourite drink. Many of the beverages from Starbucks and other cafes are amongst the most calorie-laden, sugar-packed concoctions ever created. Alcohol is a double whammy - not only does alcohol itself have calories, but most drinks also are loaded with calories from fast carbs. Bottom line - only drink what you love; learn to love water. Need help applying this to your busy life? Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health: The TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices. Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans). Everything you need to transform your diet. The EAT Better Strategy:
If you were to design food to make you fat and sick, you would create ultra-processed food. Ultra-processed food is defined as “formulations mostly of cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives, using a series of processes” and containing minimal whole foods (Monteiro et al., 2018). In other words, food companies manufacture ultra-processed foods by combining substances extracted from whole foods with additives for taste, texture, shelf life and other factors that enhance the product’s profitability. Strip the food of fibre, load it with sugar and fat, then add salt for taste, and you have food that will
In other words, ultra-processed foods hack our appetite control mechanisms, making us fat in the process.  In 2019 Dr. Kevin Hall demonstrated this effect of ultra-processed foods in a study showing that eating ultra-processed foods results in increased calories and weight gain. Hall took ten men and ten women into an in-patient metabolic ward where they were randomly assigned to receive an ultra-processed or unprocessed diet for 14 days followed by another 14 days on the other diet. The subjects were given three daily meals and could eat as much or as little as desired. The two diets matched total calories, energy density, macronutrients, fibre, sugar, and sodium but differed widely in the percentage of calories derived from ultra-processed versus unprocessed foods. Hall’s study found that subjects ate over 500 calories a day more and gained about two pounds of fat in 14 days on the ultra-processed diet. The overeating was almost evenly divided between excess fat and excess carbohydrates while protein intake was unchanged. Not only did subjects eat more ultra-processed foods, but they also ate faster, and bloodwork showed the effects of this diet on essential appetite control hormones. Compared to eating whole foods, subjects showed:
Now you may be thinking, “I get it - it’s junk food, but I don’t eat that much of it.” But collectively, we do: 50% of the calories Canadians consume comes from ultra-processed foods!  A recent review found that increased ultra-processed food consumption correlates with higher risks of obesity, heart disease and stroke, diabetes, cancer, frailty, depression, and death.
No association between ultra-processed foods and beneficial health outcomes was found. Compounding these ill-effects is the fact that the more ultra-processed the diet, the less whole foods consumed. And eating lots of veggies, fruits, legumes, and whole grains has been associated with beneficial health outcomes. So how do you recognize ultra-processed foods - here we turn to Michael Pollan’s food rules:
What to eat? Check out these posts in our Eat Better strategy:
Need help applying this to your busy life? Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health: The TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices. Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans). Everything you need to transform your diet. The EAT Better Strategy:
Most people find fats confusing. They are technically challenging to understand, let alone keep straight:
And there is so much conflicting ‘information’:
Here is the real skinny on healthy fat, a way to cut through this confusion. Fats are an important part of what you eat. They are the most energy-dense food, providing taste and satiation to your meals. Fats also make hormones, modulate your immunity, support your nervous system, transport fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K), and form all of your cellular membranes. Some fats are essential (meaning your body cannot make them, so you have to eat them) - these are the Omega 3’s and 6’s. After over 30 years of demonizing fat, dietary recommendations now embrace the choice of healthy fats.  So far, so good - but what are healthy fats? This may be the most conflicted question in all of nutrition. Here are some things that almost everyone agrees with:
Quick Technical Guide to Fats  Here is our take - it is all about balance: 1. Balance your energy Think about fats and carbs as providing your energy, with protein for repair and maintenance. If you have followed the guide so far, you have built your meals around healthy protein packages and filled out your plates with healthy veggies, fruits, legumes, and whole grains. Now balance out your meal with healthy fats for taste, satiation, and of course, to meet your energy needs. High fat, low carb can work Low fat, high carb can work Medium fat, medium carb can work BUT High fat, high carb won’t work. 2. Balance your types of fats More than half of your fat should be monounsaturated.
Healthy fats come from whole food sources with minimal processing.
Think about the temperature you are cooking at - fats each have a smoke point at which they smoke and burn, yielding harmful free radicals and a burnt flavour. The more refined the oil, the higher the smoke point as the impurities that can burn at a lower temperature get removed.  *for refined oils, choose products that explicitly state that they are cold-pressed or expeller-pressed. If the oil does not note how it was processed - assume that it was extracted using chemicals.
Need help applying this to your busy life? Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health: The TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices. Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans). Everything you need to transform your diet. The EAT Better Strategy:
Following the first step, "Start with a Healthy Protein Package” your next step in thinking about healthy meals is to load up on veggies, fruits, legumes and whole grains. I know, this might sound like your mother. “Eat your veggies - they are really good for you”, but there are some solid reasons why eating more fruits, veggies, legumes and whole grains makes good sense. Here are 7 reasons why loading up on veggies, fruits, legumes and whole grains makes sense: 1. They taste really good
2. They fill you up
 3. They provide sustained energy
 Convinced you need to up you improve your game when it comes to veggies, fruits, legumes and whole grains but not sure where to start? Here are 12 quick tips to get you started: 1. Have a fruit bowl
 12. Have more plant-based meals
Need help applying this to your busy life? Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health: The TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices. Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans). Everything you need to transform your diet. The EAT Better Strategy:
When we eat food - it is broken down into 3 macronutrients:
When we eat proteins, they are broken down into amino acids - essentially the building blocks for new proteins. These amino acids are absorbed into the bloodstream and distributed around the body to tissues that need them.  Dietary protein is predominantly used by our bodies for structure and function and not for fuel. The most important functional molecules of the body - hormones, neurotransmitters, enzymes and antibodies are proteins, as are our structural components - muscle, collagen, connective tissue, and even cartilage and bone. Our bodies need 20 amino acids to be able to create all the proteins that we need for life. Of these 9 are considered to be essential - meaning that we need to get them from our diets.
The body is very good at reutilizing amino acids, but is not fully efficient as some amino acids get damage and broken down. As a result, we always need a to eat some new protein just to maintain our existing proteins. Unlike fats and carbohydrates, we cannot store excess protein, so we are also dependent on our diets to provide enough protein for any growth and maintenance. Excess dietary protein, beyond levels required to restore amino acid balance, are degraded, the amino groups are broken down and excreted as urea, creatinine, uric acid or other nitrogenous metabolites. The remaining carbon skeleton which are keto acids are either utilized as fuel in the liver or converted into glucose or more likely fat. That’s right - excess protein will be turned into fat! This may seem surprising given the popularity of high protein diets for weight loss, but there are two other attributes of protein that may explain their benefit in a weight loss diet. First, of the macronutrients, protein is the most satiating. Meals with high protein feel more filling and decrease hunger for a longer period of time, and a result you will consume fewer calories overall. The other attribute of protein metabolism that helps with weight management is the fact that the process to convert protein into fat is inefficient and about a third of the energy in the protein is consumed in the process. A small percentage of protein is used to maintain blood glucose levels during fasted states. This process, gluconeogenesis, runs at a fairly constant rate throughout the day using multiple substrates including lactate (released from muscle glycogen) and glycerol (from fat breakdown). The amount of protein required for this is very small. Summary
How much protein do we need a day? The official answers from the Institute of Medicine are
0.8 g/kg is meant to be the minimum amount of protein we require without becoming deficient. This is the amount of extra protein our body needs for repair and maintenance or as we discussed above the amount of protein that is lost each day as we recycle our amino acids. As we are more active we need more protein - however the best evidence we have is that these requirements are still rather modest - with up to 1.6g/kg for strength/power athletes who are training to gain muscle mass. There is no evidence that we need beyond 2 g/kg per day.  From these examples you can see that based on functional requirements the range of protein intake that we need is between 10-17% of our total calories. The average Canadian intake of protein is 17% Bottom Line: most people get enough protein. One interesting observation about how our bodies regulate protein comes from nutritional studies where subjects are allowed to eat as much food as they want. Overall, people tend towards overconsumption of fat or carbohydrates - especially if these come in refined and processed foods without fibre. When it comes to protein, most people will maintain a consistent protein intake of between 15-20% of their calorie consumption. So while our brains can struggle to regulate fat and carbohydrate intake well, we do self regulate on protein. The simple rule that can be taken from this observation is that when it comes to protein - listen to your body. If you feel like you need protein then be sure to increase your lean protein intake. Are there benefits to having more protein? As we have reviewed, extra dietary protein above and beyond our maintenance, growth and repair will predominantly get converted to fat. While this conversion consumes 33% of the caloric energy, if your overall caloric intake is excessive, you are still increasing your fat by consuming too much protein. The extra protein may however increase your satiation and result in the overall consumption of fewer calories in which case it will support weight loss or maintenance. One time where extra protein may be beneficial is your first meal of the day: break your fast with a meal containing at least 20-30 g of protein. This will signal your body that you have nutrients, increasing metabolic rate and will decrease ghrelin (your hunger hormone). If you are consuming more calories from protein than you require you must be careful and consider the package that comes with the protein - what fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients come along with protein? Eat protein that is low in saturated fat and processed carbohydrates and rich in many nutrients. Is there harm from eating too much protein? For many years, medical textbooks would caution against the harms of too much protein. Specifically the harmful effect of excessive nitrogen excretion from the kidneys. This harm was overstated - as a result the Institute of Medicine guidelines of 10 - 35%. From a longevity standpoint, there is a line of research from Dr. Valter Luongo suggests that high protein consumption is associated with higher rates of cancer, and diseases associated with inflammation. He specifically recommends that adults under age 65 consume no more than 0.7 g/kg and increase to 1 g/kg after age 65. What about protein for older adults? After age 50, we lose muscle mass through a process called sarcopenia, and as our muscle mass decreases we have less internal protein to recycle so the portion that we require from our diets increases. To help prevent, or at least decrease the rate of sarcopenia, the RDA for adults over 50 years is 1 g/kg. Most older adults easily reach this target, and for them the other key to maintaining muscle mass is resistance training. Regular exercise doing body weight exercises or weights has been shown to be the most effective strategy for sarcopenia. If you are like me these answers are hard to translate into our daily lives - what does this mean in terms of actual foods that I am going to eat? Are there differences in protein quality between plants and animal sources? Advocates of eating meat are quick to point out that animal sources are “complete” proteins, meaning that they contain all essential amino acids and fully meet protein requirements gram for gram. The problem with this line of thinking is that plants contain the same 20 amino acids, the origin of the amino acids in animals is originally from plants. Given that both animal and plant proteins are broken down into amino acids before absorption, there is NO fundamental difference between eating meat and eating a variety of vegetable sources of protein. (For more on this read Chana Davis’s excellent blog post: Busting the Myth of Incomplete Plant-Based Proteins. One factor in favour of plant protein over meat is that the plant packages have more micronutrients and fibre without the potentially harmful saturated fats found in meat. What about protein powder? The thing to ask yourself is why? Why are you taking protein powder instead of choosing a healthy whole food protein package? If it is to make your smoothie a satiating substitute for a meal that makes sense. If it is to get more protein into your body it is probably unnecessary. Remember that if you are consuming more calories than you need, that protein powder will get turned into fat! If you are going to choose a protein powder, the advice from Precision Nutrition is pretty good: Stick to the basics.
Summary
(That’s it - it really is that easy) Next - Add veggies, fruits, legumes, whole grains - (7 Reasons Why & 12 Tips How) Why is nutrition so hard to figure out? Why is it so confusing to know how to eat well and be healthy? When did eating become nutrition? This is our attempt to cut through the noise and help you learn foundational habits that will make eating better easier. The EAT Better Strategy:
 This is not about diets. Diets do not work.
Diets are temporary, highly restrictive programs of eating to lose weight and are unfortunately damaging exercises in futility. (Diets are also about selling books!)
Inherent in the ‘diet’ approach is a reductionist mindset that the precise nutrient composition of one’s diet matters most. Since we cannot see nutrients, we as consumers have to rely on experts to tell us what to eat. These experts have wildly different views that lead to a dogmatic, almost religious element to food advice that divides food into good and bad, demonizing some foods and elevating others to superfood status. Michael Pollan calls this nutritionism, a term he popularized from the work of Gyorgy Scrinis. Nutritionism is an ideology, not science - a view that specific nutrients in food determine whether a food is healthy or not. “This focus on nutrients has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualizing the relationship between food and the body," wrote Scinis in 2008. This ideology has even come to overtake nutritional science and government advice, easily co-opted by industry to market questionable food as healthy. “Twinkies now with Omega-3!” Nutritionism allows the food industry to market highly processed foods as healthy when they add specific nutrients back to the product and market accordingly - think of vitamin-fortified cereals. Nutritionism may even be one of the causes of the current rise of diabetes, obesity and chronic disease we see in the Western world. Specifically, the recommendations in the late 1970s and early 1980s for consumers to lower their intake of saturated fats led to profound shifts in Western diets with refined carbohydrates replacing fat in industrially produced food. This shift is thought by some to be the single most significant causal factor responsible for the epidemic of obesity in the world today. Pollan counters nutritionism with his simple advice (that we have borrowed): "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. This simple advice is the antidote to nutritionism; a holistic counter strategy focused on whole foods. Ready for the EAT Better Strategy? EAT Better is our attempt to cut through the noise and help you learn foundational habits that will make eating better easier. The EAT Better Strategy:
Need help applying this to your busy life? Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health: The TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices. Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans). Everything you need to transform your diet. |
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