There's been a lot of talk of late of diets and dietary impact on health and all that, here and elsewhere. It isn't a new phenomena, just one that seems to be increasing or accelerating, in part driven, it seems, by an increase of studies and studies coming to fruition, especially with respect to the gut biome, epigenetics, and other areas only relatively recently delved into. I figured I might as well pitch in, simply because I may have some insights, and do have some tales to tell, if I can figure out how best to do so. So, I'll start with the big attention getter for USians -- a while ago I lost a little over 50 pounds in about 6 months and kept it off, almost half-ways painlessly. I used a very special diet that turns out to also be an ancient and surprisingly widely practiced one, the diet of my ancestors, so to speak, the diet of my people.

I think I was already indulging in said diet when, wandering through Costco one day, I passed somebody handing out samples of a wonderful new food/diet item explaining that yes, they had a veggie version, and not just one, but several, there was a ovo, lacto, something, veggie bar and many more. It occurred to me that that was sort of where I was, I was kind of an ovo, lacto, pescado, bacon, carno, poultry, jamon, et. al. vegetarian. But, since I am a simple person, I felt that there should be an easier way to describe my diet than by exception, and casting my mind back to the days when I was concerned with the eating habits of a wide range of animal types, it hit me -- I was an omnivore. Doesn't that have a nice ring to it?

"Hey dude, whatta you eat?"

FOOD.

That reminded me that I had once read some brilliant dietary advice, which I looked up and found to be attributed to Michael Pollan, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That was me. Everything else gets too confusing. At that time, I focused largely on the "Not too Much", and felt that "food" was simply intended to exclude twinkies. More on that later. The complications come from all of the vast sources of information on just what foods to eat that are floating around and often contradicting one another. My sourdough bread is fermented food, hence a natural wonder drug, panacea, cure all and health supplement; but it's fermented wheat flour, oh my god no, anathema, the deadliest of the killer grains. Beans are a good healthy source of many things, and I love and eat a lot of them. Lectins, however, are deadly killers, to be avoided at all costs. Beans are, of course, full of lectins. Eat more grains, avoid grains like the plague, more beans but no lectins. But wait, brown rice is a grain, dammit, haven't you read You Are All Sanpaku? Was it too far before your time, or simply too zen, too hippy, too out there restrictive? Go read it. OTOH, is not All things in moderation ancient wisdom? I remembered that in my youth I had eaten a ton of brown rice, because of the miracle of lacking money. You could get 50 pounds of it on wholesale for just about nothing. Roast or boil a chicken, strip and shred it, add a bunch of cheap veggies and mix it with a ton of cooked brown rice and you had meals for a month if you had a freezer compartment up to the task. Yep, the historic diet of my people, the laboring class, the universal poor, nothing is prohibited, but everything is scarce. Today this is called portion control.

There came a time when I got horribly ill with the "damned if I knows" - they didn't even have a named syndrome for it, let alone a disease. I began to evaporate and turned to a program called "My Fitness Pal" to try to make sure that I got adequate nutrients while sticking to a limited selection of foods that would stay in my system for at least an hour or two. I eventually beat it, whatever it was, and eventually got seriously overweight. (Wouldn't you?) So, to lose weight I went back to that same program and told it I needed to lose a couple of pounds a week and get down to a target weight by some specified date (it was all pretty arbitrary on my part) and that I led a completely, totally sedentary lifestyle. It didn't prohibit anything, but set minimums for various broad food categories and nutrients, as well as upper limits on things like calories, fats, sugars, carbs, sodium, and I forget what all. I more or less stuck to it and started walking 5 miles per day. Veggies, starches, oils, fats, bacon, pizza, bread, chocolate, whatever, just somewhere around my calorie limit (which was somehow tied to the basal metabolic rate as a sedentary person my size) and walked and walked and walked. I got so damn healthy and invigorated and enthusiastic that I started injuring myself, strains, sprains, pulled muscles, hernias - it's actually funny. So ok, failure to warm up, not simply daily, but as to a lifestyle of seriously increased activity levels period. So that's the magic diet - caloric output at somewhat seriously in excess of caloric input, call it the ditch-diggers' diet. That weight loss was a bit over a year ago and it has stayed off in spite of injuries periodically putting a big crimp in my exercise routine. Simple portion control. I have since learned that Mr. Pollan has 7 rules and they're pretty good, and I kind or unknowingly followed them, but all things Foods in moderation works for me.

One thing I've noticed about the ever growing mountain of dietary advice is the ever growing list of prohibited foods (many of which are recommended by other diet/food/health experts.) This is but one reason why I advocate all foods in moderation and all food and diet advice with a grain of salt (while still restricting one's salt intake, of course). Of course, I am first and foremost an empiricist, so I have other rules, like if you get those sharp needle like feelings in your tongue, spit it out. Don't continue trying things which seem to disagree with you, there's plenty of stuff out there. So, that brings us to toxins, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli, walnuts - all toxic. So what. In moderation they've never killed people or their gut biomes. So many hold vegetarianism to be the epitome of general diet principles, even though veggies are toxic. Fruits and Vegetables Are Trying to Kill You is the title of an article by Moises Velasquez-Manoff who is a science writer and author of An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Auto immune Diseases. The article on veggies as would be assassins was published in Nautilus on July 17, 2014, and may be found here: http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/fruits-and-vegetables-are-trying-to... . It is a deep dive into the world of anti-oxidants, vitamins, food supplements, natural plant toxins and much more, and every body really should read it twice. Like all else, plant toxins, in moderation, are good for you and completely suppressing them erases some of the benefits of eating veggies in the first place. Here's the sub-title: Antioxidant vitamins don’t stress us like plants do—and don’t have their beneficial effect. I've saved it and plan on rereading it yet again. I really think that this is a biggie that hasn't yet had the attention that it deserves.

Back to Michel Pollan, who famously aid to eat food. He meant it. For example food isn't nutrients. We are very complex systems in symbiosis or at lest partnership with another complex system, our biome. A single carrot's worth of beta-carotene, in the matrix and environment of the totality of that carrot, when and ingested and processed, is almost certainly not exactly the same in its effect on our body and genome as the same amount of beta-carotene extracted, purified and injected into a baked potato, or mixed into some wasabi. Yes, it is good to understand our food and what it does and how, but chasing nutrients, in the abstract, is off base, as the article noted above by Moises Velasquez-Manoff also points out. At any rate, his "Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants." exhortation is 7 words and he also has 7 rules for healthy eating, which I copied off of Web MD (here: https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20090323/7-rules-for-eating#1 )

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.

2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.

4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.

5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"

6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.

7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

That just scratches the surface, but, again, it is short and simple. I used to say that beverages weren't food, but that's not true; any old country Italian will tell you that wine is food and I know for certain that fresh squeezed orange juice is food. That said, soda/pop, special flavored waters, energy drinks and all that stuff, as well as "fruit juices" that are mostly water and high fructose corn syrup aren't food. Pills loaded full of lactobacillus aren't food either. As Mr. Pollan has correctly said, foods aren't merely containers or delivery vehicles for the various chemical components of which they are made. With that said, please note a major non-food in our diets - refined sugar. It is in nearly all processed foods and many that we don't think of as such. It makes sense, it is addictive. Our sourdoughs have no sugar, but I can taste the sugar in most grocery store bread when we have to buy some on the road or something. We once had a bread machine - it's in the garage somewhere - most recipes called for sugar, yeast breads usually do. We both binge on candy and cookies and cakes now and then, but try to avid processed sugar and it is generally horrible stuff. TAles and studies recounting its horribleness abound and I will provide you with one more: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-giving-up-refined-sugar-changed-m... . That isn't too long and is a good read. There are those who contend that sugar is sugar, which is probably true in test tubes, but not in our digestive system. Processed sugars aren't food, they were extracted from food. More than anything, sugar is our household dietary problem, the one guilty ingredient in our lives, not any of the other alleged toxins. Ah well, and all the same ....

So, remember, older cultures knew a lot that they learned the hard way, and they left that knowledge behind in their diets and foods. Indians in parts of the US had the 3 sisters, others ate nopales, and it turns out that a partial return to these dietary elements can alleviate certain illnesses and ailments they are prone to when consuming our modern western diet. With that said, I'd like to point out that the Maya knew with certainty that chocolate was the food of the gods, but they didn't load it up with processed sugar either. Just sayin'.

Title Image is fresh sourdough batard 1; author's photo of author's loaf

It's an open thread, so have at it. The floor is yours
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