Diets are for diseases

They're designed to treat illnesses that you don't have

Most popular diets are restrictive, limiting entire categories of food. When all the food seems so unhealthy, this can sound appealing.

But there is a hidden downside, summed up eloquently by a frustrated reader of Tan Land, who became less healthy after trying out multiple restrictive diets, from carnivore to pro-metabolic and more:

I no longer know what is healthy and what is not. Fiber, yes or no? Vegetables, yes or no? Dairy yes or no? Everything is confusing, and I don't know what to eat anymore, and I don't know what to do. I know it's not a specific question, but do you have any advice for such a situation? I am desperate.

I personally have experienced the same issue over many years of diet hopping, each leaving me (seemingly) less healthy than the last.

How can “helahty” diets, which so many swear by, cause such confusion and despair?

diets can be deceiving, but don’t let food frustrate you

Diets as medicine

Many people will hop on a new diet without much thought, although they would never be so cavalier about going under the knife or taking prescription meds.

People think that diets, and food in general, aren’t that serious. That they can’t be dangerous or have such a big impact on your health as an actual medical procedure.

But what few understand is that most diets are designed to treat a specific, serious disease, just like surgeries and pharmaceuticals.

In order to make this point clear, let’s take a look at some popular diets and what illness(es) they’re designed to treat.

• Keto was originally invented for epilepsy

• Carnivore is for people with serious digestive conditions like ulcerative colitis (not your garden-variety IBS— colitis patients suffer from frequent and excruciating rectal bleeding, among other things)

• GAPS is for autism and other serious neurological disorders

• Veganism is for eliminating sexual urges (John Kellogg, its primary proponent in the US abstained from sex even after his marriage, only “fathering” children through adoption)

Importantly, these claims are made by the inventors/proponents of the diet themselves. We’re not making baseless accusations here— the people promoting these diets know that they are powerful regimens designed to solve a disease.

Whether they work as intended or not is not the point of this article.

The point is that most of the people who adopt these diets don’t have the disease in the first place. I.e., they are taking medicine that they don’t need.

And even if they did have the disease, once they are cured they should move on to a more normal diet— although few do.

That’s how you get otherwise healthy people doing carnivore for example, utterly destroying their mostly-healthy gut microbiome in the process, coming out of it less healthy than before.

The wrong tool for the job

If you tore your ACL, would knee surgery help you? Possibly.

But if you had a healthy knee, surgery would make it worse, and no doctor in their right mind would prescribe it.

What about chemo? If you had cancer, there’s a chance it would help.

But if you had no cancer, you would be insane to take chemo.

That’s obvious. Everyone knows that medical procedures, from surgeries to pharmaceuticals, are designed to treat a specific illness, and if you don’t have the illness, you don’t get the procedure. (whether or not they actually do that well is a topic for another day).

And if you did have the illness, once cured you’d stop taking the medicine.

But the same is true for food, which is just as powerful as medicine, if not more so. After all,

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.

— Hippocrates

And yet, diet culture is full of people without diseases taking medicines designed to treat them.

This happens as the diets gain popularity, with many testimonials and vocal supporters. As the audience expands, this original purpose is lost and more and more people who do not have the intended affliction start adopting it.

But every diet has its side effects, just as every medicine does, and people eventually start to realize it. Then they hop onto the next one and the next one, until they are unhealthy, frustrated, and confused, as the reader for whom this article is addressed expresses.

That’s not to say these diets cannot be helpful for their intended audience. It’s just that you are likely not the indended audience.

And when you don’t have a disease, but take a strong medicine for the disease, it won’t be surprising if you end up worse than when you started.

So what should you do about all this?

Dieting Responsibly

If you don’t have a serious disease, but want to just “be more healthy,” the first step is to understand what’s going on and why restrictive diets don’t work (if you’ve read this far, then you can check that off your list).

This will prevent you from doing more harm than good.

Then the next step is to understand what your goals are, both personally and in general. Read this to learn what health looks like. That’s your goal, and you should assess where you personally fall short, and subsequently measure your progress against that ideal.

Now it’s time to go to do it. How?

Unfortunately neither I nor anyone else has an immediate answer to that. Some doctors, nutritionists, and health coaches are better than others, but ultimately an extended period of self experimentation will be necessary. Why?

Because everyone is different enough such that universal diagnoses and protocols are impossible.

That being said, here is a pretty reasonable starting point that has a long history of efficacy, particularly among the cultures from which most of my readers hail:

• Eat 3 meals a day, no more, no less. Don’t stuff yourself.

• Stick to “normal” food, meaning something that a normal person from e.g. the 1950s would not roll their eyes at (e.g. no need for coconut cassava flour cookies, raw eyeballs, etc. You get the idea)

• Focus on quality of ingredients— everything should be as natural, organic, and local as possible (read this series to learn what that looks like across food groups)

• Try to eat all food groups (meat, starch, fruit, veggies, fish, etc.). If something doesn’t sit right, wait a few weeks and come back to it with a small dose, increasing slowly over time

• Experiment with probiotic foods. Not all of these are good for everyone, but they have helped me and many other people with mild digestive problems

• Ruthlessly eliminate stress. Limit screen time, go to bed at the same time every day, relax during meals and eat slowly, go for walks after eating, get sunlight, etc. etc. (stress kills digestion)

Why? Because this is how healthy people lived (and ate) for many hundreds of years.

Your ancestors did not need restrictive diets to avoid obesity and bad health. Neither do you.

just eat real food. however, if your health has been damaged by restrictive diets, you’ll have to work up to it

Conclusion

While I can provide further details in future articles (let me know if you have specific questions in the comments), unfortunately there’s not a ton more universal guidance I can give. There are just too many factors at play.

The main takeaways are the following: