Nutrition and Diet - too much or not enough?
Carolyn Classick-kohn,MS,RD

Are you well fed? Chances are if you can read this message, you live in a part of the world where food is plentiful, and you are not challenged with the problem of starvation.  With our basic needs for food met, the focus turns from eating to live to optimizing the diet to best fit your health and body goals.

If starvation is one extreme on the nutrition continuum, on the other end are the high performance athletes who are finely tuning their diet to give their performance the competitive edge they need to excel.  In between the two extremes are the rest of us, with interest in changing our diets for various reasons - to improve overall health, to lose or gain weight, to feel better and to have more energy, to live longer and better. For the vast majority of people worldwide, (outside of countries whose people don’t have enough food and safe water to drink), the major nutritional problem is not a lack of food or a lack of a specific nutrient – instead the problem is too much nutrition!

While many people spend a lot of effort and money supplementing their diets with vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, focusing on this is just window dressing. If you’re not optimizing your diet by eating the right foods in the right amounts for what you want to achieve and building a solid foundation of good eating habits, all the supplementation in the world will not help you achieve your goals – it’s like smoking filtered cigarettes. The underlying problem of sub-optimal nutrition still exists – with the results of weight gain, extra body fat, heart disease and other chronic diseases associated with over consumption of nutrients. 

The Big Three 

Whether you want to increase your muscle mass (gain weight and lose fat), lose weight, or eat a diet that will help you manage a risk factor like heart disease, the optimal diet is the same: reduce the nutrients that contribute to poor health, and increase the nutrients that are protective and beneficial to optimal health and fitness. When it comes to controlling the “risky” diet factors, the big three really stand out: 

1. Calories

2. Certain fatty acids and dietary cholesterol

3. Salt

Let’s look at a couple examples of people who have different fitness and health goals, and how these apply to these different situations. 

Example #1: Joe is about 26 years old, and is in really good physical condition, with no major risk factors for heart disease or stroke (other than being a male). He wants to gain weight and build muscle, and minimize his body fat at the same time. 

For Joe, it’s important that he gain weight without compromising his excellent health. While the quickest way to gain weight is to eat lots of high calorie foods, this is not the best way to optimize his body composition or maintain good health. The trick is to increase calories at a livable rate, get on a very constant schedule of eating in combination with muscle building work-outs, and to eat foods that contribute the right types of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, and reducing the amount of highly processed foods that are too high in sodium. It’s an optimal diet for good health, with the right amount of added calories, balanced nutritionally, and the right eating schedule so that he reaches his goal weight in great shape.  

Exercise by itself may help to prevent heart disease – but it’s been difficult to prove because exercise has so many positive effects upon other risk factors – reducing body weight, improving insulin sensitivity, and reducing stress. Add a healthy diet to exercise and you’ll get even better results. 

Example #2:

Jenny is 38 and weighs 190 pounds. She has gained about 50 pounds over the past five years and is fed up with looking and feeling much older than she is. She has no other risk factors for chronic diseases other than the extra body weight and a stressful busy lifestyle. She’s tried several diets, has lost weight, but the weight just returns once she goes off her diet. 

For Jenny, a simple reduction in calories over time will cause weight loss, and she has been successful in losing weight with a variety of calorically restricted diets. The problem is she never developed the eating habits that people have who are successful in maintaining healthy body weight.  While any weight loss diet will work in the short term (just because the calories are reduced), developing new eating habits and eating a diet that is moderately low in fat (no more than 30% fat) is what has been found to be the key to keeping weight off permanently. But this has to be combined with the right types of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates to complete her diet. Just cutting back on calories won’t do, and following any diet plan just for the short term will lead to the same dead end – nothing will change! She needs a plan that will give her a healthy balance of low fat, high quality protein sources, replacing the types of carbohydrates she currently chooses, and adding in more high quality nutrient-rich foods that will give her the energy she needs to keep up a good exercise plan to help burn that body fat. 

Jenny has more reasons to follow a healthy weight loss diet: Being overweight raises blood cholesterol levels at all ages, but extra body fat affects cholesterol levels of young adults more than mature adults. Dietary cholesterol seems to raise blood cholesterol levels more in young adults than older people. Extra body weight seems to have its greatest negative impact at relatively low levels –  LDL cholesterol and VLDL levels increase just as much in moderately overweight people versus the severely obese. Losing just 15-20 pounds will have the greatest impact upon health risk factors.    

Example #3 

 

 

Bill is 42 and doesn’t need to lose weight, although he isn’t in top physical condition. Bill is at high risk for heart disease because he has a family history of early heart attack, he’s too busy to exercise regularly, and he’s reaching that age that puts him at higher risk, in fact his doctor told him that his blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels were moderately elevated. Bill has made some attempts to improve the way he eats, but hasn’t really done that much. 

For Bill, he has a major risk factor under good control in that he’s not overweight. He needs to eat a diet that helps him maintain his good body weight. However, being at high risk for early heart disease means that he needs to make some healthy changes and make his diet and exercise plan a major priority.  Bill can’t control the genetic influence, he most certainly can control his diet and exercise, and he will benefit greatly from controlling “the big three”.  Bill needs a diet plan that won’t make his life difficult or make him feel like he has to eat differently than his family and friends, or he won’t be likely to follow through. The good news is that the way he needs to eat is not really that difficult or different – simple changes and some focus will make a difference. By keeping dietary fat levels moderate, choosing the right types of fats, and choosing lower cholesterol foods, and moderating salt intake, it may be enough to keep Bill off the operating table! 

The influence of making diet changes isn’t very dramatic, but it doesn’t have to be: the risk for coronary heart disease increases 1% for every 1 mg/dl increase in blood cholesterol – so small changes in blood cholesterol can make a real difference. 

These are just three examples of how different people with different lifestyle factors will benefit by optimizing their diet. Focusing on ” the big three” is just one aspect of a healthy eating plan. While everyone has different responses to dietary changes (some people are very resistant to dietary changes, others have major changes), there are very few people who would not benefit from improving their intake of dietary saturated fats, cholesterol and high intakes of sodium. 

The goal of the Personal Diet Plans is to help you reach your personal goals with a solid eating plan that considers your individual needs – and to give you a diet you can live with life-long, and in great health.  

 

 

 

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