What to eat to live your best life
Does it really come down to seven little words?
Conflicting diet and health advice is everywhere, and has been for quite some time. There was a period when fat was demonised, and we were encouraged to switch to low-fat versions of everything. Then it was sugar. Then it was grains. (Or maybe it was grains before sugar; I can’t remember). Depending on who you listened to, you should not eat potatoes, or bread, or sweets, or bananas. Or you could only eat bananas. There were superfoods, and ideal times for eating, and hacks like putting butter in your coffee which would do… something (I’m not entirely sure what).
But it seemed like there was a general consensus amongst most researchers, nutritionists, dietitians, and doctors about what constitutes a healthful diet: eat mostly whole foods, a good variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, and limit the meat, dairy, and sweets. You should be good to go. It doesn’t have to get more complicated than that.
Yet it does get more complicated than that, and there are entire books written about this very topic. Many entire books, in fact. I’m reading one right now, How Not to Age by Michael Greger, and this is what prompted me to write this. I read a lot about food, and listen to podcasts about food, and watch YouTube channels about food and cooking, and probably more than half of my Instagram feed is related to food in some way. From all of this consumption of food media, I’ve found that there are loosely three schools of thought on how to eat for your best life. Irritatingly, these three perspectives can and do contradict each other.
Eating for pleasure
This section of the food landscape is, for me, the most fun one. This is where food, cooking, and eating is about taste, flavours, pleasure, and delight. When viewing food from this perspective, there is joy in baking your own bread, making your own yoghurt, cooking meals from scratch, experimenting with new flavours and techniques.
There is science here — the science of cooking. This is where I learnt about the importance of salt, fat, acid, and heat (appropriately from the excellent book Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat, and all of the 4 Levels episodes from Epicurious where cooks of three different skill levels cook one dish that is then critiqued by a food scientist (it was a delight when
, one of my favourite cooks on the channel, graduated from a Level 1 cook to a Level 2 cook. And yes, I’ve watched so much Epi that it feels like I know everyone on that channel even though I actually don’t).In this school of thought, you should always salt your pasta water, salt your meat hours before you cook it, and salt at every stage of the cooking process. There’s a lot of salt. You should also use fat. There’s a lot of butter, too. You should use acid in dishes and learn that you can squeeze lemon juice into many dishes to bring them to life. And you should not be scared of high heat because that’s how you get caramelisation — and where there is caramelisation, there is flavour.
I love this part of the food media because I love food. I am rather fond of eating, and after almost a year without a kitchen and not being able to cook much at all, I’ve realised that I do like cooking and baking. I don’t do it just because I like the end results, as I initially thought — I like the process as well.
Eating for longevity
But did you know that all that salt and butter and meat cooked at high heats is slowly killing you? Another food-related area where I spend a lot of my time concerns health and the way different foods affect all manner of bodily systems and functions. These include books like Food for Life by Tim Spector, How to Eat by Mark Bittman and David Katz, What to Eat by Marion Nestle, the aforementioned How Not to Age as well as Greger’s earlier book How Not to Die.
To be clear, the contradictions between the eating for health and eating for pleasure camps that I’m referring to are largely things that come up in Greger’s books. I haven’t had the same urge to write quite so much after reading Marion Nestle, Tim Spector, or Mark Bittman’s works (and in fact, I get the impression from their books and interviews that they get pleasure from food and a well-balanced diet as much as I do). For the most part, the healthy eating advice is all the same — limit your consumption of meat and animal products, eat more plants, eat whole grains, limit ultra-processed foods, and eat a good variety of plants (Tim Spector recommends thirty different plants a week).
The advice given in these books are backed up by many references to studies and research on various foods, nutrients, supplements, and their effects. There is research done on cells in petri dishes and test tubes in labs, on animal models, and on humans (the research done on humans is typically very different to the kind of research done on mice in a lab. Understandably so). I respect science, I respect the research process, and I’m not disputing the findings or conclusions reported in these books. I try to mostly follow the guidelines for healthy eating in what I cook and eat.
But back to Greger. In How Not to Age, Greger outlines eleven different pathways of ageing such as AMPK, autophagy, inflammation, oxidation, and telomeres, and discusses how diet affects each of those things. It’s very science-y. I think I believe the things he says, mostly. However, there are aspects of Greger’s approach to food that contradict other elements of health and diet.
One in particular stood out to me: protein requirements. Greger argues that the current levels of protein recommended by various government agencies around the world are adequate, and that levels higher than that can actually be detrimental to your health. Nevermind whether the protein is from plant or animal sources, we’re talking here about the amount of protein itself. He advocates for protein restriction and sticking to 0.8g per kilogram of body weight (0.36g per pound), which translates to about 45g a day for an average height woman and 55g a day for an average height man. This is wildly different to advice about protein coming from the health and fitness world.
Eating for fitness
I don’t write or talk about fitness and exercise very much, but it is a pretty integral part of my life and everyday routine. I’ve been doing strength training for a couple of years (I did write about this once, here), and I’ve been doing some kind of exercise regularly for about fifteen years. One of the obsessions in the fitness world, and especially in the strength-training, muscle-building part of it, is protein.
Protein is king. Eat it at every meal, eat snacks that are high in protein, aim for 1g per pound of body weight (which is more than 2.5* what Greger recommends). Rather than Greger’s 45g a day for an average height woman, you’re looking at closer to 130g a day for an average height woman. Do this to build muscle, to be satiated, to lose weight.
There are less extreme recommendations, too. Dr Stuart Phillips is a professor in kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario. He is the Director of the Physical Activity and Centre of Excellence and has spent decades studying exercise, muscle growth, and protein requirements. I first heard him on a BBC Food Programme podcast about protein powder. He noted that he tends to rub people the wrong way with his protein recommendations. For ideal muscle protein synthesis, especially as you age, he recommends consuming 1.2–1.6g per kilogram of body weight, or about 0.5–0.7g per pound (this ends up being about 90g a day for the average height woman). So, about double Greger’s and the official government recommendations, but also quite a bit less than a lot of fitness professionals’ recommendations. Hence rubbing people the wrong way.
This recommendation for eating more protein as you age (but not quite to bodybuilder levels) is also shared on a recent NPR Life Kit podcast, What to know about protein and muscle mass. In this podcast, they talk about sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle mass. This affects over 45% of older adults in the US, especially women, and one of the doctors interviewed describes the US as being ‘undermuscled’ as a country. This affects metabolic health, physical functioning, and the ability to live independently as you age. (This is also discussed in the book Outlive by Peter Attia — coincidentally also a book about longevity but this one didn’t tell me to not use salt in my cooking.)
The recommendation in the NPR podcast is also to eat more protein than the official government guidelines: ‘The optimal amount could be quite a bit more. Like, for instance, sports medicine experts recommend up to 1.7 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.’
To be fair, Greger does discuss sarcopenia and the loss of muscle mass. But he seems quite firm that the lower protein recommendation is ideal, in contrast with experts in kinesiology and sports medicine. When experts in different fields disagree on one topic, I suppose that’s when you have to decide which expert you should listen to.
The other contradictions
In reading How Not to Age, there were a few things that stood out that went against everything else I knew about food and eating.
Don’t use salt in cooking. Your palate will adapt, he says. This goes against everything I know about food from the food science books I’ve read, the food science things I’ve watched, and, you know, actually eating. I made bread without salt once, accidentally. You know what it tasted like? A facsimile of bread. It looked like bread. It felt like bread. But it tasted like… not quite bread. If used properly, salt doesn’t make food taste salty, it makes it taste more of itself. If done well, it adds depth and flavour to dishes.
Eating berries with dairy negates the benefits of eating berries. One meal that’s often promoted as healthy in the fitness world is a breakfast with Greek yoghurt, fruit, and nuts. I’ve been eating mixed berries, Greek yoghurt, nuts, and chia seeds as my regular breakfast for ages now. I like it because it’s easy, it tastes good, and it keeps me full until lunchtime. I did think that it was reasonably healthy too, but apparently I’ve ruined any health benefits by incorporating yoghurt.
Putting milk in tea takes away any health benefits that could be derived from drinking tea. It’s not that I disagree with this statement — I’m sure the science is legit. But let me return, for a moment, to the aspect of food for pleasure. There is something deeply comforting about a mug of Yorkshire tea, steeped for four minutes, with a splash of milk. You’re going to have to pry my morning brew out of my cold, dead hands because I’m not giving that up willingly.
The protein thing. See previous section. I don’t eat the amount that bodybuilders and some fitness professionals recommend, but I also eat more than Greger’s and the official recommendation. Low protein might be beneficial for certain ageing pathways, but less for muscle preservation and muscle growth. I lift weights three times a week, run three or four times a week, and swim two or three times a week. I would be very very hungry (and probably very very hangry) on the protein-restricted diet. The recommendations from the experts in kinesiology and sports medicine seem like a happy medium.
So… what should you eat to live your best life?
Given these three rather different approaches to food, it seems impossible to have a perfect diet. Certainly, there isn’t one that is going to please the longevity doctor and the foodie chef and the gym junkie. It seems then, like much else in life, it comes down to an issue of balance and priorities. I drink green tea and I drink Yorkshire tea with a splash of milk. I eat a lot of beans, tofu, and vegetables but I also make a damn good chicken noodle soup. I eat lots of fruit (including berries) but I also make and eat my own yoghurt.
I’m probably not going to live forever (apparently the homemade burger I ate the last time I had dinner at my in-laws’ house took half an hour off my life) but I’m not willing to entirely give up salt and all animal products to marginally reduce my chances of succumbing to all sorts of age-related diseases. Maybe it’s good enough to eat mostly whole foods, and mostly plant-based.
After all of this reading, and all of this listening, it seems that the best advice on what to eat to live your best life can be summed up by the seven little words that Michael Pollan wrote forever ago: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Everything else is just details (annoying, sometimes contradictory details). Pass me my tea, please.
