Natural Health The Bandwagon Diet part 1

Natural Health The Bandwagon Diet part 1 - We want a balanced diet. We just don't want it to be so hard. And that makes us easy prey for the latest food-fad headlines. Whether it's a newly released nutritional study disparaging whey protein or a friend bragging about having more energy after removing all corn syrup from her diet, we think, "This is it. The cure." And so, generally while not a lot of vital thought, we tend to jump aboard the bandwagon.

Every era arrives with a prevailing food trend or trumpeted foodlike product. Who could forget the fat-free movement of the 1980s, quickly followed by the low-carb Atkins revolution of the '90s? Within those trends, offshoots of nutritional orthodoxy arise. In a 2007 New York Times article titled "Unhappy Meals," Michael Pollan half-jokingly referred to 1988 as "The Year of Oat Bran," when food scientists got the material "into nearly each processed food sold-out in America Oat bran's moment on the dietary stage didn't last long, however the pattern had been established, and each few years since then a brand new "oat bran" has taken its flip below the selling lights." Currently kale, quinoa (see page 15) and chia seed are center stage. "Vegan," "paleo" and "gluten-free" are splashed across restaurant menus and product labels from one end of the grocery store to the other.

Molly Kimball, a registered dietician with Ochsner Health System in New Orleans, believes basic human nature drives our bandwagon behavior. "I was at the grocery store the other day, and the customer said to the checkout person, 'You look great,'" says Kimball. "I guarantee the next question was 'what have you been doing?'" When we see our friends or coworkers looking and feeling better, we want to grab a piece of that for ourselves.

But there's another reason these sensationalist trends persist: They all boil complex nutrition science down to concepts that are easy to grasp and easy to follow, at least for a brief time.

And guess what: Even the trendiest among them would possibly truly be doing United States some smart. "All these diets take one thing out of our current diet," says James O. Hill, Ph.D., decision maker of the University of Colorado Anschutz Health and health Center in Aurora, Colo. "You're cutting either fat, sugar, carbs, blue foods, red foods, you name it." Going paleo, for example recommends dropping processed foods, which are often high in saturated and trans fats-major enemies to heart health. "Removing something from your diet is an easy change to make, and it almost always makes people feel better," says Hill.

That said, removing entire food classes from a diet brings its own set of biological process issues. "We grasp the body depends on the interaction of multiple, varied foods we tend to eat," says Carlovingian Glagola Dunn, a scholarly person fellow at the University of Florida's Food Science and Human Nutrition department. "The variety helps us function, keeps us regular and feeds the healthy bacteria in our gut."

Removing macronutrients such as fat, carbs or protein impacts our intake and balance of micronutrients-aka vitamins and minerals.

"Eliminating sugar or carbs is easy for people to get their brains around for a short period of time," says Kimball. But she and other nutrition experts note that people often cut one "enemy" only to replace it with another. In this respect, people's best intentions to change their diet for the better can actually work against them.

Natural Health The Bandwagon Diet part 2