What I think about diets

Seeing I’ve put on some excess pounds, I’ve taken up the goal of losing some this year. As part of my research into the available diets – all of which claim to work, of course – I couldn’t help but notice that most – if not all – of them claim that we should hold on to these particular diets for life, by just varying the amount of calories we eat and whatnot.

Then on the other hand, I hear the opponents of this one particular diet, or the proponents of another claiming that that one’s no good because it’s high in fat and fat means cholesterol, and cholesterol means a wide variety of diseases, or it’s high in sugars (carbohydrates) which is also bad for a long list of reasons.

What is the single constant I’m running into? All diets have its downsides and therefore they have opponents. There is only one advice which is always given: eat healthy and exercise. The thing that varies is the definition of “healthy.”

So now as I read about calorie restriction and about Raymond Kurzweil’s dieting program (not related), I come across a comment on Amazon on Ray’s book which claims that it is historically inaccurate – in 1900, it says, people didn’t die of cancer and heart disease at such high rates as they do today. Therefore, he concludes, these diseases are caused by processed foods.

Being the intelligent man I am, I don’t believe this without some data. So I figure that it would be prudent to check out the life expectancy at that time, and compare it to today’s life expectancy – after all, it is older people who die most frequently of such diseases, ages 40 and up (of course, it happens earlier too, but not as often).

It appears that in 1900, a life expectancy of a white male infant was 48.23 years. Today, or rather 2004, this has grown to 75.7 years, which is nearly 30 years more (data from here). So, that person’s “argument” is invalid because there weren’t enough people alive back then who were of the age when people actually die of heart diseases or cancer.

Improved technology and quality of life – AND better foods (they wouldn’t process foods unless they were actually better that way) – made it possible for us to live longer. With longer life, new diseases became a problem.

If evolution is to be consulted in matters of life expectancy, then everyone over the age of 30, maybe 35 should be dead already. For the most of our past, we humans have lived in caves or in huts, eating foods filled with dirt and sand. Having a lifestyle primarily of hunters, people were happy if they saw the age of 20. Today, many of us live to see the age of 50, not to mention 60, 70, 80, heck some even live to be 100 years old and more!

It is easily concievable that with this drastically prolonged lifespan, our bodies will go bad more frequently. During such a relatively long lifespan, EVERYTHING is a factor determining how long we are going to live and what we are going to die of, including our diet. If we’ve eaten too many fats, we might get high cholesterol and die of a heart attack. If we’ve smoked, we might die of cancer. If we’ve eaten too many carbs, we might die of some infectious disease that our immune system can otherwise handle.

I say “might” because our genetic makeup is also a factor. Some people’s bodies just handle their bad habits better than other people’s do. Some people eat too much and then they die of lung cancer. Some people smoke too much and then they die in a car crash.

So, no matter what diet you follow, or no matter what diet you try to follow and then fail, you can bet anything that what you ate – whatever you ate – is going to play a role at some point in your life, all other things being equal.

In short, diets can’t increase your life span – how could they? You can’t know how long you’re gonna live anyway. This can only be measured statistically, not individually. Some can only increase the probability that you’ll live longer than the average, but in the end – again, statistically speaking – that very same diet will be the end of you, provided your death isn’t a violent one.