C'mon folks, it's not difficult at all.

The committee is recommending lower consumption of meat, especially red and processed varieties. And its first sustainability component finds plant-based diets to be better for the environment than those that rely on animal protein.

About half of all U.S. adults have one or more preventable chronic diseases relating to poor diets and physical inactivity such as hypertension, diabetes and some cancers, according to the government. More than two-thirds of adults and almost one-third of youth are overweight or obese.

Again, there are only three sources of energy from food: Carbohydrate, protein and fat.

Not four, not five, not six, three.

All foods contain some mixture of one or more of those sources.

Among carbohydrates there is a wide variation in the speed of absorption of the energy contained into your gut.  Sugars, white potatoes and breads all absorb extremely rapidly to the point that they are almost-indistinguishable from table sugar in that regard.  Juicing, pureeing and other similar processing greatly speeds the rate of absorption as well.

Protein is, for the most part, animal based.  There are exceptions; green peas and various legumes (beans), quinoa (which is actually a seed if you want to get technical), nuts and similar are in that camp.  One to be careful with is anything soy-based, as soy is a known estrogen mimic in the body.  Whether this is actually bad is unknown, but if you are in the camp that any endocrine disruption is to be avoided then soy is on your "use sparingly at best" list.  Beware if you're vegan or vegetarian; there are a number of amino acids your body requires and cannot synthesize; getting all of them is difficult, but not impossible, on a vegan or vegetarian diet.

Fats come in two broad forms -- saturated and unsaturated.  Saturated fat is a solid at room temperature and is typically (but not entirely) found from animal sources.  Fats do not, broadly-speaking, provoke an insulin response.

Unsaturated fats come in two forms, mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated.  There is one major exception to the rule that these are typically found in plant-based sources, and that is Omega-3 fatty acid, which is a poly-unsaturated fat and is found largely in fish.

What is important to realize is that virtually all plant-based oils are not naturally-occurring substances available for you to eat.  That is, while you can eat corn by doing nothing more than cooking it you cannot eat corn oil without processing the corn to extract the oil.

Further, there are no hydrogenated (partially or fully) oils in nature; all of them are man-made, chemically-stabilized so they do not degrade in storage at room temperature (this is called being "shelf-stable.")

Now here are the challenges associated with the "What should I eat?" question.

• Fast carbohydrates all, by definition, produce an insulin spike in your body.  This is utterly necessary to prevent your blood sugar from rising out of control.  However, that process of necessity causes all excess available glucose (that the insulin is being released in response to) being converted to fat and stored in the body.  It has to go somewhere and your liver and muscles, which are the only storage available for glycogen, have very limited capacity (about 1,800 calories TOTAL.)  When they are full conversion to fat is the only option.  Note that the total glycogen storage available in the body is roughly equivalent to one half pound of fat -- in other words, almost-nothing on a comparative basis.  A man who is "fit" typically has 15% or so of their body weight as fat and only about 5% of that is "essential"; for a 170lb man this means he has thirty-five times the amount of energy available to him at any time through fats as through fully-stoked glycogen reserves.  (Women tend to run ~7% higher in body fat and have a higher essential percentage (by about the same amount) as well.)
  
  
• Your body will preferentially burn glucose to fats.  It does so because glucose is cheaper (metabolically) to burn; this is the essence of fat storage in the body as otherwise you could not survive without eating for more than a day or so!  When there is an insufficient amount of glucose available the body can both convert fats to glucose (which the brain specifically requires) and your muscles can burn lipids directly (fats.)  This state is known as ketosis and, contrary to the scaremongers, is not the same as the (very dangerous and life-threatening) diabetic condition called ketoacidosis.  In fact this is the way your body works on purpose.
  
  
• When blood glucose falls off the body reduces its insulin response.  However, that response lags the glucose drop, and that produces hunger.  This is an unavoidable "feature" of eating a fast-released carbohydrate meal; a relatively short time later you will want to eat more.  Anyone with kids knows damn well that sugary snacks produce both a "sugar high" and then a cranky, nasty crash -- that one can satiate with more sugar!  The same thing happens in all of us.

• There was a hypothesis, called the "lipid hypothesis", that saturated fats caused heart disease and obesity.  This hypothesis was factually disproved decades ago and in fact the original data would not have survived any sort of rational review.  But -- this hypothesis and broad dissemination of this myth has driven much of "food public policy" for decades.  The shocker (to you) should be that following the recommendations to remove saturated fats from the diet heart disease, Type II diabetes and obesity all exploded in prevalence rather than subsiding!

The conundrum was this -- in order to remove saturated fats from the diet you had to replace those calories with one of the other two available options -- protein or carbohydrate.  Very high protein levels are known to be ill-advised for any but very serious body-builders, as the body does not efficiently store that excess protein and thus it winds up putting a heavy load on the kidneys.

What replaced the saturated fats was carbohydrates and hydrogenated oils.

Look at the so-called "Food Pyramid", which you were told to eat.

The very base of it, with two to five times the amount recommended of foods above it, are nearly all very fast carbohydrates.

That is, they all provoke a spike in your body's insulin level and you will get hungry again when it wears off.  The same applies to anything in the fruit and vegetable group that is not eaten whole.  

An orange and orange juice may appear the same but one 8 oz glass contains the juice of roughly 4 oranges -- and all the sugar in them, ready for immediate release into your body.  You might well eat one medium orange at a sitting but would you really eat four?

This set of recommendations was and is an outright disaster for one simple reason -- you cannot possibly "count" calories accurately enough to maintain your body mass.  One pound of mass is about 3,500 calories.  There are 365 days in a year; in order to avoid winding up 50lbs overweight over your life you'd have to be able to count calories accurately enough to be within 10 a day.  To put some perspective on that this accuracy level is approximately one small bite out of a banana!  If you're off two bites (because you get hungry after eating a fast-carb-laden meal) you will be 100lbs overweight before you die.

It's impossible to count calories that accurately by hand but your body is capable of regulating itself that tightly, just as it does with blood sugar, blood pressure and dozens of other utterly essential biological processes, provided you don't poison the biological systems that animal bodies developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to regulate caloric intake, and during none of that time (in the evolutionary sense) were those systems challenged by included sugar, pressed juices, extracted vegetable oils and hydrogenated crap in the diet.

How, in short, do you go back to what your body knows how to handle?

Well, since we now know the lipid hypothesis is crap eat few carbohydrates and no fast carbohydrates at all.  That is, the entire bottom of that "food pyramid" should be thrown out and, if you insist on eating anything on that list, do so only as a treat, meaning on a one serving a week or so basis.  At the same time eliminate processed (hydrogenated) oils and avoid, to the extent possible, vegetable oils.  In other words cook with the saved fat from your bacon and put butter on your veggies!

Since you must make up the calories somewhere, guess where they should come from?  Animal fats, primarily, not "lean" animal meat but rather full-fat cuts, which also gives you a moderate protein intake.  The balance should be green vegetables ex-potatoes (which are almost as bad as table sugar in terms of glucose release rates!) and some fruits.

I attempt to keep my carbohydrate intake to 50g/day, with a target of zero for "fast" (sugar) carbohydrates.  I don't achieve the zero all the time, but I am almost-always under 20g/day of sugars of various sorts (including beer, if I have some.)

Guess what?  Doing that caused me to lose 60lbs and more importantly keep it off without counting calories at all.

You want to know what else?  If I play games with this, and start eating the crap again, the weight starts to go back on.  The reason is simple -- I again get hungry, and when you're hungry you have to consciously avoid eating, which is hard.

You can either torture yourself, choose to eat in a way that you don't have to, or you will get fat with a greatly increased risk of all the bad health problems that come with being fat.

Yes, exercise is also important but let's cut the crap, shall we?  If you actually measure caloric expenditure from exercise (I did; I wore a Garmin watch with a heart-rate strap for all of my running and biking while the weight was coming off) you will find that only about one pound in three comes off due to exercise.  I proved this because I have every single work-out from that time period logged and I worked out a lot.

The rest of the weight comes off because your body regulates its caloric demand down the pie hole; that is, you're not hungry as often and when you are you eat less.

The best part of doing this, by the way, is that when you get to where you should be you won't have to change anything or "stop dieting."  Your body knows how to regulate itself and it will slowly stop losing mass when you approach a proper weight and stabilize there without you doing anything differently on a conscious level.

You can argue with the facts if you'd like but the fact of the matter is that these "government stooges" have been killing you for the last five decades and food producers like it this way.  How many boxes of Corn Flakes and packages of brownies would they sell otherwise?

Zero!

If you like Diabetes, blindness, chopped off toes and fingers from gangrene, heart attacks, strokes and being so damn fat and out of shape you can't run a half-mile or make it up a couple of flights of stairs without feeling like you're going to die, keep doing what you've been doing.

If not, then change it.

I did, and it changed my life.

A few years ago I could not run one mile.  Yesterday, aged 51, I did this.

(broken image link) Image showed a readout of time and distance ran 

You choose.