What’s The Healthiest Diet?

Transcript

Speaker 1

A little controversy here. Doctor Furman is telling us limit grains. No starches and Dr. McDougall is a. Starch based diet. Can you guys Duke it out over that?

Speaker 2

It won't be the first. Time you know. There, there's all successful populations that have lived on plant based diets, they've lived on starch based diets. There's no exception. There may be some therapeutic value to limiting starches and adding more green, yellow vegetables. I do it for more weight loss. I wrote about it in a book called the McDougal Program for Maximum Weight Loss. Basically, if a society a a village decided to go on a raw diet or a. High green yellow vegetable diet. Their caloric intake would be so sparse. That what would happen is they'd become too weak to fight their battles, and the next door tribe would come and kill all the men and rape the women and they'd be gone. So it would never happen to live successful. And I believe for a long period of time, you must understand the importance of starches and ingredient in your diet as the Asians have with rice, as the Peruvians have with potatoes as the Native Americans have with corn, as the Hawaiians have with POI and so on, I mean, every single society that's ever existed that live in a plastic bag. Diet always starch, base the diet you need the calories you can't do otherwise you won't win. You won't win the battle. You won't survive.

Speaker 3

I get to comment. Second, all right. See, here's the issue. Look around. See if you all look the same. You're not cleons or robots. We're all different. People have different metabolic rates. They have different genetics and clearly we have to adjust the nutrient per calorie density of our diet to meet our individual need for calories. And some people can do well with a higher amount of calories, and some people can do well with a more liberal use of starch in their diet. But many people can't. Many people have slower metabolic rates, and who are naturally heavier, and they're not going to adequately get to their ideal weight or at which is slim. They're not going to keep, and they're not going to maintain the best weight and the best. Have the best chance for longevity with a starch centered diet. So clearly my and I think that I must have thousands of people who were on vegetarian diets, which were starch centered and didn't do as well. The cholesterol didn't drop and their weight didn't go down as successfully as when they took their diet up another notch. So clearly this is just math. The math for you has to be. Is if your nutrient needs want to be met with the amount of calories you need to sustain you. Yourself at a light adult at an ideal adult weight. So if you think that you're, if you're overweight and you're not adequately, and your and your level of exercise, you can do and your metabolic rate doesn't have you be thin, then you can increase. Then you should be watching the starch content of your diet and the other issue of course, is that there's some type of. How should I? Say it, uh. Preference to use starches like potatoes and rice over fresh fruit or nuts or seeds or avocados from a fear of fat. And I don't think that fear is held up in the scientific literature. A matter of fact, the opposite is true, that a diet with that we don't have to be so fearful of these healthy plant fats, found an avocado and nuts and seeds. And I'd rather see a person. Have a little more fat in their diet in the form of avocado and nuts and seeds, and not be so afraid of fruit because in doing so you increasing the nutrient density of your diet and we get we see large beneficial effects on antioxidants. Scores and on on clipped scores and on SERPS actually too. So there is some benefit in this. There's there's room for differences and there's also room for what's best for each individual. And clearly I don't tell people that they have to only eat one small serving of starch a. Day that was written in my bookie to live because that book was. Designed for people who are overweight for physically active people who are out there working in the fields and they're naturally thin and I don't eat just one serving of starch today either I could so I'm not restricting sweet potato and butternut and acorn squash and corn on the cob and peas and those starchy vegetables that are wholesome for people who are slim and physically active.

Speaker 4

No, but I do. I just got to throw throw just a little. A curveball in this and and just to remind us all that many of the foods that we eat are actually domesticated foods and much of our food is actually corpulent in itself, for instance. Goes if you look at wild potatoes, they're these skinny little things with all this fiber and you know very little starch, whereas the things that we buy in the supermarket are these big, fat, sedentary couch potato things that we, we've we've selected for. So, you know, one way to try and improve that balance is instead of using. Russet big fat white, starchy russet potato. Use red potatoes. Use new potatoes, the smaller ones that have more fiber. Both they have a waxier flesh, and that's because they have more soluble fiber inside and they're sort of skin to flesh. Ratio is better than you find in in the the rustic potatoes. The same thing is true of like corn with bread corn to be. You know this really starchy, kind of corpulent things that we all like to to to boil or roast or whatever. So again, try to look for varieties of food that may not be, you know, as. Domesticated as others, and that will, you know, help you kind of get the starches, but in a I think a better form that has more fiber that will ultimately not be digested and absorbed and will not give you quite as many calories.

Speaker 2

Doctor Mills, have you been to Peru? Have you been to?

Speaker 4

Peru? No, but I read. About it well.

Speaker 2

I've been to Peru and the corn is huge. It's big and the potatoes are huge and the people are small. OK, now you think you gotta get this straight cause I know a lot of you are confused. OK, because there's all kinds of very. Learned people, educated people, and so just look around. You know, watch travelogs travel yourself, see what you will see what the populations of people eat and see what their health reflects. There are 1.73 billion Asians and not a single one of them is fat, leaving on a diet. Based on rice. OK, I went to Peru. The only fat people were working in restaurants, feeding Americans. They're living on potatoes. You don't have to get all that sophisticated with all of these different little niche theories. A starch based diet with fruits and vegetables has never failed. A population of billions of people.

Speaker 3

That is I. That's kind of, I think that's kind of silly. The first of all the the Chinese and most of eat white rice and the rice, we're not looking for a diet that can stain people to, you know, to live for middle age. We're looking at what would be an ideal diet, what would be a best diet and the best circumstance and what would be the best way to eat in American Society with exposure to the stresses and toxic. Environment and nutritional insults we see in our Nation Today and clearly I don't see how anybody could disagree that eating less calories and eating more nutrients, especially the nutrients that nature or God put in real food, is a good thing. We're not talking about something artificial. We're talking about looking what's in food and trying to higher quality food, not lower quality food. And if you think white rice is a good food to sustain a population, then you have to think that white bread is good too. Clearly you can't compare white rice or let me finish.

Speaker 2

I never I.

Speaker 3

Let me.

Speaker 2

Never said that, Joel.

Speaker 3

Let me. But the Chinese and the Orientals. The white rice. But let me just finish. And they do pretty well. We're not talking about pretty well. We're talking doing really well. And the other issue is. Is that if we look at the analysis of the nutritional density of food, we found that brown rice isn't that much more nutritious than white rice. These are relatively low nutrient foods and not all of us have been raised since birth on a perfect diet, we have to maximize our bodies cellular mechanisms that detoxify and heal and repair tissue. And that is only done with nutritional excellence and that's first class nutrition, not second class nutrition. It doesn't matter what populations did, it matters what we need to do to do the to do the best and we have an unprecedented opportunity in human. Every here and to pick foods that come from various parts of the world and increase our nutrient diversity and nutrient density and not just live on all potatoes of all rice, we want to get as much variety and nutritional diversity in our diet as possible. We want to pick foods that are that we know from, from our what we've learned that are more nutritious.

Speaker 5

I'm out. I'm out. No milk. No, no milk. Time out. Time out. I just I have to tell you over the last 20 years now, this is the original group that I started with, who had heart disease and I was sort of a neophyte in this business when I started. And I thought that the only way the rock upon which this study was going to be most likely to flounder would be lack of patient. Compliance and I was not a psychologist and I says I told you before I chose the mantra of how I dealt with my cancer patients. But the other key thing here, I think, why these patients? We may have maintained this now for over 21 years, is that we identified for them the categories of food that I wanted them to eat from. I wanted them to have whole grains for their cereal, bread and pasta. I wanted them to have any of the legumes they wanted for the vegetables. All the vegetables, except I was nervous about. Avocado and I was very nervous about nuts when I saw what was happening with some of them, and then we also had some fruit. No fruit juice. And it's interesting is that was it? I asked him never to count anything. There was not going to be any formula for how much of any type of food or Subs just eat from those categories of food. That's all I wanted, and interestingly enough, when we analyzed all of the group from the for the three day diet diary and so forth, they were all going. Somewhere between 9:00. Percent and 11% fat in the diet when long as they stuck from those categories of food, they all initially lost weight and they regained slowly some of it, but none of them have gotten fat. So I think there's a certain dignity of simplicity when you keep this and you describe for people the. The categories that are going to be most nutritious and that we haven't seen any deficiencies in them.

Speaker 4

I just want to clarify one thing that when I talked about potatoes and corn, I'm talking about the original wild varieties. I don't doubt that what they're using currently in Peru are domesticated versions, just as we're using here, but I you know, for me, I try to look at what was the original diet for human beings. And it wasn't a big fat giant russet potato that you can buy Safeway. It was the skinny little crooked thing that somebody dug up and selected that rusted. And I mean, you know, this is all a little esoteric because I think Doctor Edelstein is right that ultimately you want to get a good balance in your diet. But I do think it it it does help to understand that the original wild varieties of some of the many of the plant foods that we eat were very different from the versions we eat now, and that may help us. Just you know, the composition of our diet to sort of reflect a more natural. Type of plant food.

Speaker 2

If you can hypothesize as to what people used to eat. Like then, then you ought to also ought to be able to understand that they spent their whole day 1214 hours finding and eating food, and maybe they could get by with these very low, calorie dense, very high fiber foods, because that's all they did was scorch for food. But we don't do that and neither do the people who are in Peru who have the same health statistics. Today that we had 110 years ago in terms of heart disease, I I I really you know I have to emphasize the point Dr. Elston made is you need to make this simple and practical. If you do not make this a starch based diet. Long term most people will fail. You must understand it's a very simple thing. You got to get enough to eat and have enough to eat. The foods that you love, you love starch. It's comfort food and every successful population of people who's lived on a plant based diet has lived on a starch based diet.

Speaker 6

No exceptions. OK, I just want to jump in here for a second. I'd like to get the name of the guy who asked that question to make sure he's not here. Next year, can we we check.

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