Junk Diet Rant

The human body is an amazing machine. Unlike a car that needs a particular octane of gasoline, you can run the body on pretty much anything as long as you don't put too much in the tank. It really is calories in, calories out. And yet... people insist on weird diets.

Atkins: Yes, you will lose weight, simply because nobody at work ever put out a giant plate of meat to blow your diet the day after Thanksgiving. But you're going to fall off the wagon eventually because bread tastes really good, and is an ideal pairing with meat. And really, carbs are not poison. Too many carbs are poison. Too much meat is also poison, plus you'll get the gout. However, you do get to eat bacon all the time.

Paleo: There are worse diets than Paleo, since it is mainly about real food: meat and vegetables, not too many grains. But then they start talking about how the first generations to abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and settle down to farm a grain-based diet were less healthy than their forbears. Well yeah - farming is boom and bust. A few good years, you have a bunch of children, a couple of droughts and they starve. Plus, how long did cavemen live? 32?

Raw Food: This is the most cracked out diet of them all. Paleos want to live like cavemen. Raw foodists want to live like chimps. Newsflash: there might be good stuff in raw food, but that doesn't mean that cooked food is bad, Some nutrients require cooking to become bioavailable, and humans have been eating cooked food for the entire time there have been humans, because fire was harnessed by homo erectus and we are homo sapiens. Raw food people will lose a lot of weight because we aren't made to eat nothing but raw food. Our brains got bigger *after* we learned to cook and break down food into digestible nutrients before eating it, freeing up energy to think instead of digest. Repeat after me: raw food is good, but cooked food is also good.

The Twinkie Diet: Some professor of nutrition tried eating 1,800 calories of junk food every day. Not only did he lose weight, his cholesterol and trigycerides improved too. So this one is... just like all the other ones. Stupid, but it will work.


Bonus junk diet advice:

Acid/Alkaline: Your stomach is full of acid. That is how you digest food. A Tums might neutralize extra acid, but nothing is going to alter your body's PH. Nothing.

Apple Cider Vinegar: Just because it tastes bad does not mean it is good for you. There is nothing in apple cider vinegar that wasn't in apple juice.

Blood Type Diet: I don't know my blood type, so I can't realy comment. I like all kinds of blood.