Dr. Anchors’ Weight Loss Lesson 2.5: Don’t balance meals

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Thursday, July 12, 2012 10:24 pm Email this article

​I have added a new lesson to my list of six. Call it lesson 2 1/2. It is this: Don't balance meals. Americans are taught that the dinner plate isn't healthful unless it has (1) a high protein food, which will, of course, have some fat as all natural high-protein foods do, (2) a vegetable and (3) a starch. Uh, that is wrong; no other country teaches such foolishness. 

Where did the idea come from? 1954. President Eisenhower appointed the first President's Council on Nutrition. With inadequate science to make a recommendation, the Council turned to the Beef Board and the Dairy Council and invented, out of thin air, the Five Food Groups. Don't blame only the Republicans. Sixty years later on Michelle Obama's behalf, your government paid the Porter-Novelli Company, a PR firm, to produce www.MyPlate.com. The pretty plate with the five food groups now appears in every school room. Even worse Eisenhower's men only asked you to get servings from each food group each day; Michelle wants you to have the groups on each plate. Look. I'll tell you. For 200,000 years Homo sapiens, ate almost entirely meat and fish. You have carnivore teeth and biochemistry. Conclusion #1. Do you really believe we would have evolved in such a way that our main food was bad for us? Is that how evolution works? Next time anyone tells you red meat is bad for you, tell them they are an idiot. Leaving the ancestors of chimps and gorillas in the forest, humans ventured out onto the plains of Africa and hunted antelopes during the heat of the day. THAT IS WHY men lack body hair, sweat on their bodies, and can run long distances. We chased animals. They ran away, at first, but we persisted until the animals overheated. They could only pant. We killed them with spears and knives, and ate them. Granted, we ate whatever healthful vegetables we found, too. Eating meat & fish allowed us to develop big brains. Big brains led to tools, and better tools, and then we faced a new problem. The number of animals decreased, or the herds moved away, leaving us to look for a new food source. We made food, starch, from grass. (That's what grain is: ground-up grass seed.) To grow grain we developed settlements and more tools and cooperation and roads. Thus meat & fish gave us big brains; starch gave us civilization. Starch has been around for only 10,000 years. That's not long. Recall that high-protein foods were around for 200,000 years. And sugar we have had only since Columbus. The body has not had time to adapt to carbs. So don't balance meals. Your dinner can consist entirely of high-protein food, i.e. meat or fish or cheese. Men would be perfectly happy to dine on sausage & beer. I would. You can have a meal of just vegetables, too. You can have just starch, and in Asia that's what most meals are. Asians often eat meals of rice only, or noodles only. The high-protein foods, because they have fat, have a lot of calories, but the calories don't get in completely because fat itself does not touch insulin. Starch and sugar drive up insulin and EVERYTHING gets in. Starch & sugar are not calorie-rich, but they unhinge the regulatory system. So conclusion #2. Do not combine high-protein foods with starch in the same meal. You must separate them. (Veggies can go with either.) You are no longer a meat & potatoes man; you are a meat OR potatoes man. Not a poultry and rice person; a poultry OR rice person. Not spaghetti and meatballs; spaghetti OR meatballs. Get it? You must decide before the meal whether it will be a starch meal or a not-starch meal, and act accordingly. To make dinner, all you need is one pot or one pan. Since I have been teaching this new lesson, I have had much better results with patients.The idea un-stuck the people who had gotten stuck.

Articles on the same subject can be found here:

• Diet: What should I eat?

• Dr. Anchors' Weight Loss Lessons