Ask Dr. Cheryl

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• What does it mean when we say “a diet works?” (1:25)
• Understanding the keto diet (1:51)
• Understanding the Mediterranean diet (2:17)
• Understanding the vegan diet (2:48)
• Understanding Dr. Jenkins’ Portfolio Diet (3:32)
• Understanding the nutrition that comes from food sources (4:15)
• Determining a healthy diet (9:32)
• Building The Perfect Plate (11:43)
• Results from TakeTEN^Ⓡ program (12:24)

Transcript:

What is the healthiest diet you can eat? Is it keto, mediterranean, low-fat vegan? This is one of the most common questions that I'm asked as a doctor of clinical nutrition, and this session will serve as the foundation for all of our food and health conversations to come. If we haven't met yet, I am Dr. Cheryl, and I am so glad that you decided to become a member of our wellness community. Welcome to wellness. I've spent my entire career staying up-to-date, learning, and evolving to find the healthiest diet. In this session, we will walk through what works, what doesn't work, in each of today's trending diets and how to solve the confusion that each one presents in science. Then we'll discuss what is the healthiest diet, and how to eat in a way that makes you happy because believe it or not, I know for a fact that you can eat well and love it. So what have you tried? What have you heard? The truth is when we find something that works for one person, Aunt Susie, they tell five people who tell five people. We love to spread good news. We find that most nutrition advice becomes viral because one doctor or one person had great results. If keto or gluten worked for Aunt Susie, and now it works for an influencer, it must be the right diet for me. I have also realized that when we say a diet works, we often only mean weight loss. When I say a diet works, I mean changing genetic expression, feeling full and satisfied, healing metabolic risk factors, energy levels returning, and eating food that fills us with joy while creating a lifestyle that lasts and getting you to your healthy body weight. Let's look at a few popular diets together as we decide what is the healthiest diet. Let's begin with keto. Keto is a low carb, high protein, and high fat diet focused on animal foods and vegetables and in this lineup, carbs are bad. There seems to be a new low carb diet with a different name every 10 years, like the Atkins diet. What is the best that we can take from keto? Keto helps us understand that managing insulin resistance will help with weight management and cardiovascular disease. Next we have the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet is high in healthy fats from food sources like olive oil and nuts with lots of fruits and vegetables and red wine. In this lineup, the type of fat matters. Animal sources of saturated fats like red meats, processed meats, and butter are limited in this diet. We learned from the Mediterranean diet the type of fat matters when we want to design our perfect diet. The Mediterranean diet has been proven to improve cardiovascular disease, brain health, and all-cause mortality. Next, we have the vegan diet, and this is typically a low-fat diet as well. It's high carb and low fat and in this lineup diet and animal foods are restricted. This is an all-you-can-eat, high-carb diet which is why it works for so many people. In this lineup dairy products, eggs, avocados, seeds, nuts, and peanut butter are restricted. This diet can be very confusing when we look at research because vegan diets can be both refined or whole fiber-filled foods. And this can totally change the outcomes dramatically in the research. It's important to remember, in a vegan diet, someone can technically live off Oreos, chips, and Coke. So with this diet, it depends on if they eat processed foods or whole plant foods on what the outcomes are. Next, we have Dr. Jenkins' diet. It's all about the protein. And in this lineup, it's all about the type of protein, soy and pea protein, with soluble fiber supplemented. Fat and carbohydrate don't matter in this diet. It's only about the type of protein. To be exact, it's plant-based protein, combined with soluble fiber at every meal. So we learned from Dr. Jenkins that plant protein can improve cardiometabolic risk factors and decrease our risk for cardiovascular disease. Each one of these diets has something that we can learn and take away while also having some baggage. Let's look at what that baggage is that comes along with foods before we decide which diet is really the best one. Cheese comes loaded with calcium, pork is full of protein, beef gives us iron, and fish gives us healthy fat. But what about the baggage that comes along with these foods. The dose of dairy hormone, the lard and saturated fat from the pork and the beef, the mercury from the fish. Food's a package deal. You can't say hold the mercury when you order fish in a restaurant or say hold the saturated fat in my steak. Dairy is the number one source of calcium in the United States, but it's also the number one source of saturated fat. Now let's talk about the baggage you get with dark green leafy vegetables. You get fiber and calcium and folate and iron and a lot of antioxidants. Some of these are the very nutrients that lack in milk. And we can't forget the gluten-free diet. One study showed that gluten-free diets came with the baggage of higher levels of mercury and arsenic in the blood. This was assumed to be connected to eating more fish and rice in the gluten-free diet. So even rice comes with baggage, arsenic. And why does a gluten-free diet have any benefits? Gluten is protein in wheat, by the way. Aside from those with celiac and a gluten allergy, unless your gluten's been sprayed with Roundup, which is why I recommend organic, gluten is a great plant protein. But sometimes this packaging can work to our benefit. When we choose whole fruit, it comes naturally packaged with fiber and resistant starches that create this gel-like substance. So we can eat the whole apple, and this gel slows the absorption of fruit sugar in the apple. So we get to enjoy the sweet taste of the fruit, the fiber that takes care of that sugar and delivers it to our body just how it needs it, so we don't get a post-meal blood sugar spike and our blood sugars are balanced. The fiber and resistant starches also provide prebiotics to feed the healthy bacteria in our gut and create a healthy gut lining and boost immunity. How great is that? This packaging works to our benefit for sure. What comes in the package with beans and nuts? When we choose a plant protein like beans and nuts, this plant protein comes packaged with soluble fiber, insoluble fiber, and resistant starch. And we know our gut microbes thrive on these foods. And the nuts come packaged with healthy fat. And walnuts even add the essential fats that our body needs. What about flaxseed? Flaxseed comes packaged with essential fats plus fiber, lignans, and antioxidants. Some of the very nutrients lacking in fish. We need these every day. When we choose avocado, it comes naturally packaged with fiber as well and the oils in the avocado are slowly delivered to the body so we don't drive up triglycerides after a surge of refined fats from a meal. The avocado is loaded with antioxidants and it gives a smooth, buttery texture that we love to eat. Plant foods are packaged with antioxidants. Plant foods are the highest source of antioxidants and animal foods are the lowest. Whole plant foods come loaded with fiber and resistant starch to feed the healthy bacteria in our gut and boost our immunity. Animal foods all have zero fiber. In fact, that is why I refer to animal foods as refined foods. The cow eats the plant, they refine it by excreting the fiber. We eat the energy their body stored as fat and muscle along with any hormones, antibiotics, and nutrients that are left behind. And just to note, I reference food as whole foods or processed foods, and animal foods are in the refined food group. Plant foods are processed, would include white flour, sugar, fruit juice, and even Oreo cookies. Let's talk about carbs. Carbs get a bad rap because of the confusion of processed versus unprocessed carbs. Carbs are only in plant foods, other than dairy products. On the other hand, meat, poultry, fish, and eggs come without carbohydrates. The keto camp thinks that not having these carbs is a benefit, so we don't get the surges of energy and become insulin resistant. But there is an answer to this. Carbs that come packaged as whole plant foods, think oatmeal, beans, wheat, broccoli, are all intact with the fiber and resistant starches and can actually on their own give us fuel that we need for our body to have energy and at the same time balance our blood sugar surges and improve insulin resistance. And that's a big win. Remember carbs are not just in bread. The research is very consistent with the health benefits seen from whole plant foods loaded with carbohydrates. Again, it's the packaging, but all carbs are not the same. So if you eat a lot of refined carbs, including sugar, soda, fruit juice, white bread, chips, and Oreo cookies, in order to balance your blood sugar and not spike insulin, you're going to need to add high protein and high fat foods to this meal. Let's just think about McDonald's and about their meal plan. They know this very well. So when we consider the baggage that comes with the food and how it's packaged, a diet of mostly whole plant foods is the clear winner for me. You get mostly the bonus and the least amount of baggage. So how do we determine a healthy diet? First, weight loss would not be the main criteria in determining my healthy diet. We can lose weight on any diet that restricts calories. We can even lose weight by eating chocolate. But losing weight isn't our number one goal here. When we lose weight, our risk markers might look good for short term, but in the long term, we need to look for a diet that gives us more than just weight loss, and it improves our long term health. Beware of diets claiming to know their research and are simply a disguise for another quick fix weight loss with all the false hopes of losing weight quickly and easily and permanently.

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