Nutrition
Health is not a mystery: the key principle is eating minimally processed foods. By reducing bread and pastry products while eating more fruits, vegetables, and protein, you automatically fulfill several important health principles.
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Health and healthy eating remain a mystery to many. The question keeps coming up: "What is really healthy, anyway?"
We can illustrate this widespread confusion with statements from the well-known "Nutrition Doc" Dr. Matthias Riedl, who regularly appears in the media.
He's quoted saying that plant-based proteins are healthier than animal proteins. We wrote a newsletter last week showing the opposite. More recently, he appeared on a television program calling plant-based meat substitutes (essentially plant proteins) "killers" that would increase mortality risk.
To be fair: the core of his statements aren't entirely wrong. Plant-based proteins like lentils are probably healthier than the cheapest processed ham. And of course, minimally processed soy protein is better than highly processed plant-based meat alternatives.
But here's what he forgot to mention: the key principle is simple – lightly processed food is healthy! The more processed a food, the more likely it becomes unhealthy. A salad won't cause metabolic syndrome, but cookies and chips might.
We talk too little about "health principles" that anyone can simply follow. These have already been described [source no longer available] in detail.
They're based on biology's most important principle, and therefore nutrition science's: "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" – so to know what's good for us, we don't just need research; we can also study indigenous peoples who still live traditionally.
And that's been done extensively. Of course, these populations don't experience our modern diseases. Take the Tsimané in Bolivia: most are infected with parasites and have inflammatory markers.
Yet according to researchers, they have the healthiest blood vessels ever found in a population – an 80-year-old has the vessels of an American man in his mid-50s. The same applies to dementia. These people are metabolically healthy.
One simple nutrition principle we can derive from such populations is straightforward: eat minimally processed food. In traditional terms: they might bake flatbread from whole grains, but it wouldn't be their staple. They'd more likely eat grain porridge – a whole-grain mush – which none of us would eat all day.
We, by contrast, eat primarily highly processed grain products. This is a dietary staple in the Western world: pizza, pasta, rolls, bread, and so on. Wheat, the basis for most of these, was specifically bred for this purpose. That means the protein content is relatively high so it forms dough properly.
Moreover, traditional processing methods like fermentation are increasingly abandoned. These products are often enriched with sugar and soaked in cheap seed oils. This is what we call pastries.
If we adopted this "simple nutrition principle" – eating minimally processed foods – it would drastically reduce our bread and pastry consumption. In doing so, we'd automatically fulfill several other important health principles:
Neither the vast majority of our ancestors (agriculture represents only 0.3% of our evolutionary history) nor indigenous peoples who still live traditionally face these problems.
We'd also avoid additional problems associated with modern wheat consumption, which we discuss [source no longer available]. In short: humans are demonstrably not, or only minimally, adapted to wheat proteins. None of us can digest them properly.
This isn't our claim, but rather that of the world's leading researcher in this field, Dr. Alessio Fasano (Harvard) – and German researcher Prof. Dr. Dr. Detlef Schuppan (University of Mainz) supports this with [source no longer available].
Removing wheat or at least bread products from your diet isn't new or revolutionary. Especially over the last two decades, research under the heading "Low Carb" or carbohydrate reduction has flourished. The data is clear: many people would benefit from this from a metabolic perspective.
But our approach isn't about removing carbohydrates per se. Root vegetables and fruits contain carbohydrates too, but valuable ones. It's about bread products. Experimentation often helps. In many ways!
