The EAT Better Strategy:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together
​
​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 

• Be digested and absorbed rapidly (no fibre)
• Spike insulin (lots of refined carbs, quickly broken down to glucose)
• Stored quickly as fat (that’s what insulin does - it stores glucose, protein and fat)

And in 2 hours, you will be hungry again - although, given the salt, you may have kept eating anyways!

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:

• Decreases in the appetite-suppressing hormone PYY
• Increases in hunger hormone ghrelin
• Increases in the storage hormone  insulin

Along with

• Increased glucose levels
• Increase insulin resistance - the process underlying Type II Diabetes

Ultra-processed foods make people eat faster, eat more and gain weight while altering critical appetite and hunger hormones and disrupting insulin function.

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!

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:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together

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!)

• Low fat-high carb
• Keto
• Low carb-high fat
• Zone
• Atkins
• modified Atkins
• South Beach
• Paleo
• the list goes on.  

These dietary approaches differ dramatically in their macronutrient breakdown, yet hold that their system is the one right way towards weight loss and better health.

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:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together
​​​
​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.​

(Part of our January series on S3 Weight Management - Systematic, Stratified and Sustainable)

​If you are trying to lose weight - here is a  very simple rule - stay hydrated and do not drink your calories.

50% of Americans have high blood pressure according to the new guidelines from American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.

Lost in the debate about whether this makes sense to label so many people with a disease was the recognition that normal blood pressure is now defined as 120/80 and the acknowledgement that the risks from blood pressure increase progressively, and linearly from levels as low as 115/75 in people from 40 to 89 years of age.  

For every increase of 20 mmHg systolic and 10 mmHg diastolic there is a doubling of mortality from both heart disease and stroke. 

Here is the Wellness Garage strategy for high blood pressure:

1. Know your blood pressure:

• be confidant that your blood pressure is normal. 
• If you get high readings in the doctor's office - get an automated BP cuff for home.
• If your doctor is not using an automated cuff - ask her why?  New guidelines are clear that physicians should be using automated cuffs.
• If your arm is large be sure to have a large cuff - make sure the doctor uses a large cuff.

2. Know whether you have insulin resistance:

• if your blood sugars are abnormal then you already have insulin resistance
• if your blood sugars are normal and you have abnormal lipids (high triglycerides and low HDL) and a waist size of >102 cm (40 in) in men or >88 cm (35 in) in women - you likely have a degree of insulin resistance
• insulin resistance disrupts one of the key hormonal systems regulating BP - the Renin-Angiotensin system (RAS)
• if you have insulin resistance - decreasing carbohydrates through a low carb, whole food approach makes the most sense - see #3
• if you are diabetic these changes should be medically supervised

3. Get moving - exercise is key

• aerobic exercise has been shown to lower BP 5-7 mmHg 
• resistance exercise lowers BP 2-3 mmHg
• these effects rival first line drug therapy and lower risk by themselves 20-30%
• recent evidence shows that exercise is superior to drug therapy in preventing death from stroke and is equal to drugs in prevention of heart disease mortality.

​
4. Eat better - lose weight

• optimizing your nutrition to lose weight makes a big difference - real whole foods with adequate protein, healthy fats and low glycemic carbodyrates. 
• studies show that in overweight or obese people a weight loss of 8kg will lower BP by 8.5 mmHg systolic and 6.5 mmHg
• these effects rival drug therapy and are though to be independent of exercise

5. Salt - stop eating packaged food and decrease how much you eat out - see #3

• for years the linkage between salt (sodium) intake and elevated BP has been clear and part of the established recommendations for preventing and treating hypertension
• more recently this has been challenged on at least two fronts
  • there is great variability between people on the basis of race, gender, age and dietary factors - resulting in the observation that some people at some times are salt sensitive - meaning that their BP increases with salt intake.
  • there is little convincing evidence to link decreased salt intake over time with better health outcomes.
• our advice is to start by eliminating the real culprits in the high salt world we live in - restaurants (especially fast food) and packaged food.  Eating real whole foods that you prepare yourself will result in a significant reduction of salt intake and will help with #3. 

6. Reduce Stress - meditate

• there is growing empirical evidence that the exposure to chronic psychological stress leads to the development of high blood pressure
• while many relaxation therapies are recommended and are effective in reducing stress, so far only meditation has been shown to reduce stress and lower blood pressures
• learning to meditate has never been easier with the introduction of apps like Headspace and Calm - finding 10-15 min per day to meditate will reduce stress and help you improve your blood pressure

7. Sleep - develop a great sleep routine

• depriving people of sleep in the short-term clearly increases blood pressure
• chronic sleep deprivation of < 5hrs per night doubles the risk of hypertension, while 
  • insomnia and restless leg syndrome have also been shown to increase incidence of high blood pressure
• if you snore regularly or stop breathing during the night -see you physician and get assessed for Obstructive Sleep Apnea
• develop a great sleep routine - get 7-8 hrs of high quality sleep

This 7 step strategy will allow you to take control of your blood pressure and do everything you can to either avoid medication or take as little as possible.