If you spend any time on nutrition twitter, you’ll find that there’s a lot of hate out there. The vegans hate the keto people. The carnivores hate the vegetarians. The calorie counters hate life in general…
Last week, I reviewed Vinnie Tortorich’s latest film, Beyond Impossible, which is, in part, an attack of the mainstreaming of the vegan diet. Vinnie has shared that since the film’s release, he’s received multiple death threats from vegan advocates.
So what gives? Why are people getting so worked up about what other people eat?
Dr. Drew Pinsky, famous TV shrink, gives an interesting analysis in Vinnie’s first movie, Fat: A Documentary:
We live in a time right now when we’ve had a narcissistic turn. People are very primitive, narcissistic, a lot of injuries in childhood. And it has caused us to perhaps not have the most secure sense of self and identity. And so we start looking around for things to attach ourselves to: political groups, religious organizations, different diet fads. We attach ourselves to these groups and we look to the groups for our identity. So any attack on the dogma, the group, is literally an attack on our self. It’s an attack on our very being. Our going forward in life is somehow threatened by somebody saying: “Hey maybe fat’s not so bad for you.” It’s positively comedic but it’s becoming ridiculous.
why can’t we all just get along?
Into this fray walks physician Dr. Ted Naiman — strolling and whistling right between the two trenches, in fact. Dr. Naiman is an interesting guy. Born and raised in the vegan-advocating Seventh-Day Adventist church, he’s gone over the years from low-carb, to keto, to nearly carnivore and back. Perhaps that’s why he feels so strongly about bringing some peace to the diet wars.
On a recent podcast, Dr. Naiman said: “My goal is to get the low-carb people and the low-fat people to realize they’re really just two sides of the same coin.
“I would like to see plant versus animal go away. I would like to see carbs versus fat go away. These are smokescreens; these are distractions; these are false dichotomies. They’re just muddying the water so no one knows what the hell they should be eating.”
And what the hell should we be eating? That’s where Dr. Naiman’s book The P:E Diet: Leverage Your Biology to Achieve Optimal Health comes in. In it, he posits an interesting thesis: it’s not about the carbs, the fats, or indeed the calories. Or rather, it’s about all these things, but really, it’s all about the protein. Let me try to explain…
When it comes to the three macronutrients — fat, carbohydrates, and protein — each is used differently by the body. Fats and carbs are basically fuel sources. The body burns them for energy. Protein, on the other hand, isn’t readily used for energy. Rather, protein is used structurally, to build muscle, bones, and so on.
algebra 101
So, Dr. Naiman says, when it comes to eating healthy, it’s all about balancing the Protein, on one hand, with the Energy (carbs + fats) on the other. Most people eat far too little of the first, and far too much of the second. This is why the low-carb diet works (when it works). The person reduces Energy (carbs) and increases Protein. It’s why the low-fat diet also works (when it works). In fact, he says, any diet that decreases energy-dense foods while increasing protein will lead to weight loss. (It’s also why these diets sometimes fail, he notes. If I cut the carbs, but eat butter all day long, my weight will stay right where it is. I’m just replacing one energy source with another.)
So how to put this into practice? Simple, says Dr. Ted. Look at the nutrition label of your favorite food. Never mind the calories, vitamins, and all the other business for now. Just compare the grams of protein, to the grams of carbs and fats together. If the protein is equal to or greater than the energy, it’s a food that will help you lose weight.
slammin’ salmon
A few years ago, my friend Rich went on Weight Watchers (or WW, as the cool kids call it). If you’ve never been on it, WW uses an app where you track all your food, and every food is assigned a “point” value based on some super-secret formula. Your job is to eat fewer than your assigned number of points every day — harder than it sounds, for the most part.
However, some foods, such as fresh vegetables, are worth zero points; this is to encourage users to eat healthy. Always one to work the system, Rich decided to center his diet around just one, zero-point food: salmon. He began to buy big slabs of it at Aldi and eat it all day, every day. He tells me that he was pounding about a pound a day, at one point. And you know what? It worked! Sure enough, he got leaner than he had ever been.
Little did he know it, but Rich was following a P:E protocol. A serving of salmon contains a whopping 20 grams of protein, with no carbs and about 4 grams of fat. So its P:E ratio is off the charts.
The downside was that after a month or two, Rich got so sick of salmon that could barely look at it anymore. “I turned on salmon with a vengeance,” he says. I’m not sure he’s recovered to this day. But the point is, it seems there’s something to this P:E idea.
SAD, MAD, and glad
Here’s the thing about protein: most of us aren’t getting enough. According to Dr. Ted, the Standard American Diet (SAD) has become less and less protein-dense over the years, to the point where protein now only accounts for about 12.5% of our total calories.
Where should we be? More like 30% or higher, which is the protein intake level of most hunter-gatherer societies. Dr. Ted suggests eating one gram of protein per pound of your goal weight. With his patients, he works on nudging their protein consumption upward, little by little, to get to this number.
And it doesn’t matter if that protein comes from animals or vegetables, he says. High P:E foods include everything from leafy greens and broccoli to prawns and ground beef. Hence his comment that the so-called diet wars are just a “smokescreen,” keeping us from seeing the one factor that all successful diets have in common.
The book is a fun read, and filled with lots of Dr. Ted’s famous “Naimemes,” handy illustrations that help readers connect to the sometimes-dense science that underlies the book’s ideas. As Naiman and his co-author William Shewfelt say in the introduction, “Our goal is to provide a book that absolutely anyone can pick up, read in an hour, and walk away with a double-barreled blast of extremely easy-to-comprehend, yet life-changing and actionable, knowledge.” They succeed.
After reading it, I wondered how P:E jibed with the ketogenic, Modified Atkins Diet (MAD) that I’ve been following. The carbs are lower on MAD — just 20g net carbs, as opposed to Dr. Ted’s recommended 100 — but as for protein, sure enough, MAD uses that same 30% benchmark.
If you’re wondering about your own protein consumption, Diet Doctor has an excellent guide to protein intake, including handy photos of what, say, 30 g of protein looks like on the plate (4-egg omelette, anyone?).
If you’re someone who’s stalled out on your 2022 weight-loss goals, I highly recommend picking up the book. Or if you’re still not sure, check out Dr. Naiman’s website, where he basically gives away the Cliff’s notes version of the book for free.
If nothing else, it’ll give you lots of food for thought.