Isn’t It Important to Eat a Balanced Diet? – CarbSmart Podcast Episode 25

Originally published 8/22/2019, Updated 02/02/2025.

Watch the CarbSmart Podcast Episode 11 on YouTube

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Show Notes for the Podcast

Image courtesy of Atkins Nutritionals.

Isn’t it important to eat a balanced diet?

Well, maybe. The big question is, what the heck is a balanced diet? The phrase doesn’t seem to have any concrete meaning. Certainly, it varies from species to species. A balanced diet for a tiger would be very different from a balanced diet for a rabbit. Similarly, historically, human diets would have varied dramatically from region to region and from season to season.

Is the government, my plate, successor to the food pyramid, a balanced diet?

It certainly suggests more of some kinds of foods, in particular grains, than of others. Is it balanced to eat six to ten one-ounce servings of grains a day, but only five or six one-ounce portions of protein foods? Is it balanced to omit fats entirely as a food group and recommend low-fat or fat-free dairy, restricting saturated fat to 10 percent of calories?

Keep in mind that there are essential fats, but the essential level of grain intake, and of carbs in general, is zero.
Remember hardcore low-fat diet, some as low as 10 percent of calories from fat, Ornish, Pritikin, those guys? I never heard “not balanced” thrown at them. Many of the same people are now pushing a plant-based diet, i.e. vegetarian or vegan diet, nearly devoid of saturated fat and cholesterol.

Yet, the critics aren’t going after the plant-based gurus for their unbalanced diets. Low-carb critics also sometimes contest that leaving sugary stuff out of the diet is a bad idea. As if there were some sort of actual dietary need for refined sugar?
The notion that it is part of a healthy, balanced diet to deliberately include – food stuff – and I use the term very loosely – that has absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever is nonsensical in the extreme and can only be seen as a sop either to people’s addictions or to the food processing industry depending on who’s suggesting it.

Is the Zone Diet a Balanced Diet?

Indeed, one of the programs that comes closest to a truly balanced diet is the Zone Diet. In the 1990s. The Zone advocated that you get 30% of your calories from protein, 30% from fats, and 40% from carbohydrates. The only way it could get more balanced would be to eat to a 33⅓ percent, 33⅓ percent, and 33⅓ percent ratio.

Yet Barry Sears has been taken to task over his “low-carbohydrate diet.”

The notion of the balanced diet has no actual scientific definition. It is simply a reflection of how people have generally eaten over the past few hundred years.

I have in front of me a mainstream nutrition text that asserts, as currently consumed, sugars pose no major health threat.

I find it incredible that we could increase our intake of any highly concentrated substance by over 2,000 percent in 200 years time, the increase in American sugar consumption between 1800 and 2000, and not have it be a health threat. Heck, if we drank that much more water, it might be a danger.

Two better questions would be:

What diet comes closest to that on which the human race evolved?
And, What diet makes my own personal body work best?

We aren’t entirely sure what diet the human race evolved on, but some things are clear. First of all, it didn’t contain any refined sugar, since refined sugar has only existed for the past several hundred years, and has only become inexpensive enough for the masses to consume within the past couple of centuries Refined sugar is not a part of the evolutionary diet of humankind. Secondly, the original diet of humankind did not contain grains or beans in any great quantity. How do we know this? First, to get substantial quantities of grains and beans, one has to farm them.

The Rise of Agriculture

And agriculture was only invented about 10,000 years ago. Sounds like a long time, but the history of humankind is estimated to be somewhere around 2 million years. Secondly, grains and beans are largely inedible without some sort of technology. Grains must be threshed, that is, removed from their inedible seed coats and cooked at the very least. The other possibility being that they might be ground into a flour or meal which takes even more technology. Beans, too, must be cooked to be edible. Heck, kidney beans are flat out toxic if eaten raw. Further, unlike grains, which can be cooked by the relatively low-tech methods of either simply parching the individual seeds or by making flatbreads on a hot rock – note, though – that this would require some sort of milling into flour.

Beans require a vessel to cook them in.

Again, some sort of technology was required, if only that of making a simple heat-resistant pot. So, you can scratch large quantities of grains and beans from the pre agricultural, pre civilization human diet. Oh, no doubt Paleolithic folks chewed on a handful of grass seeds now and then when they were short of real food, and pulled up and ate the bean when they went after a sprout. But they surely weren’t eating six to ten servings of grains a day.

We do know that prehistoric humans were hunter gatherers. There is a large, multinational, multi university study of paleo anthropological evidence and the few hunter gatherers left that indicates that our ancestors got between 50 and 60 percent of their calories from animal foods.

Those foods are far denser in calories than fruits and vegetables, so the bulk of the volume of the diet would have been vegetables, along with nuts and fruits in season. Keep in mind that those vegetables and fruits would have been considerably lower in sugars than the ones we buy today. Modern plant breeding has made virtually all fruits and vegetables sweeter than their wild ancestors.

Hunter gatherers would also have eaten a far wider variety of vegetable matter than the average American does today. I can’t speak for other nations. My experience is somewhat provincial here. Since it’s likely that they ate anything they knew wasn’t toxic. Two, many of us eat a little iceberg, lettuce and a tomato on a sandwich and the occasional green pepper and onion in a fajita, and that’s it.

We know that prehistoric humans ate meat. Indeed, some species, the North American mammoth for instance, were hunted to extinction. Which is pretty impressive for a bunch of guys with homemade stone spears, don’t you think? What sorts of animals they ate no doubt varied with where they lived. I have a hunch that if you lived near the ocean, you might find it a whole lot easier to dig for clams than to chase a deer.

We also know that surviving hunter gatherer peoples eat bugs and grubs, and I’m guessing that these were a goodly part of our historical diet. There are a lot of them, and they’re easy to catch. And just about every omnivorous mammal finds eggs to be a delicacy, and they don’t run either. So, I’m betting that our ancient ancestors ate just about any kind of eggs they could get their hands on – bird, turtle, insect, whatever.

One of the things we don’t know is how high or low in fat this diet was

We do know that game is much lower in fat than grain-fed, farm-raised meat. However, many Americans eat only the muscle meats anymore, including of meat they hunt, while we know that our ancestors ate the whole thing – liver, kidney, spleen, thymus, brain, marrow, spinal cord, you name it. And most of those organ meats are higher in fat and cholesterol than the muscle meats. Indeed, such meats were favored over muscle meats. There is a speculation that the increase in animal fats when proto human hominids learned to hunt led to the growth of our brains, letting us become truly human. Two, those bugs they ate, and many societies still do, many bugs are rich in fats as well, and of course nuts are high fat. We strongly suspect that the fatty acid profile of the meat our hunter gatherer ancestors ate was considerably different than what we get today, since we know that game and even grass-fed beef is lower in cholesterol and saturated fats, and higher in omega 3s than farm-raised meats.

What impact this shift in the fatty acid profile is having on our health is unclear. So, we’re looking at a diet of meat, fish and shellfish, birds, eggs, bugs, nuts, seeds, lots and lots of vegetables, and fruits in season, with all the fruits and vegetables being lower in sugar than those we can get today at the grocery store.

Add to this the occasional lucky discovery of honey, and that’s about it. Were they eating an unbalanced diet? Well, if you consider grains, beans, and sweets all to be an essential part of a balanced diet, they sure were. Yet, somehow, humanity survived and thrived. Then there’s the question of what diet your own personal body runs best on.

What Diet Your Own Personal Body Runs Best On?

That’s a question only you can answer. Those of you who have read my book, How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds LINK, or listened to my last podcast LINK, know that I do not advocate one specific low-carb program for everyone. Nor can I assert, you should eat X number of grams of carbs per day, no more, no less.

I can’t tell you whether you should eat dairy, or if you’re one of the people who will lose weight and feel better without it. Although I can tell you that, at least from what I’ve read, herding started earlier than plowing and planting, so dairy products seem to have an older history in the human diet than grains and beans, at least in some regions.

I can’t tell you if you’re one of those whose cholesterol will drop in a low-carb diet, regardless of the amount of saturated fat you consume, Or, if you’re one of the smaller group, who will need to cut not only carbs, but also concentrate on fish and poultry instead of beef and pork for your protein, and use primarily olive oil, avocados, and nuts instead of butter for your fats.

Are you worried about total cholesterol?

Personally, I think it’s a red herring. I pay attention to my HDL and triglycerides, both of which are golden, I might add. But worry about total cholesterol, not at all. I can’t tell you if you’re one of the people who will do best on a basic low-carb diet such as The Atkins Diet LINK or Protein Power LINK, or if you’re one of the few people I’ve communicated with who find that they simply never adjust to such a diet, feeling tired and mentally foggy all the time, and will do far better on a – dare I say it?

More balanced program with a few more unprocessed low impact carbs.

I can tell you that I suspect that it is possible to damage one’s ability to metabolize carbohydrate foods safely by abusing the mechanism for years and years. with vast quantities of sugar, white flour, processed cereals, and other high impact carbs.

I suspect this is the case with my own body. If this is indeed true, then perhaps there are many of us who could have eaten a diet somewhat richer in carbohydrate if we hadn’t abused ourselves for many years, but who now need an unbalanced, low-carbohydrate diet to compensate for those years of abuse.

I can tell you that your body has no inherent need whatsoever for separated, concentrated sugars, for white flour, for highly processed cereals, and that you will do yourself no harm at all by eliminating them from your diet entirely, no matter what epithet the world may throw at you and your way of eating.

I can also tell you that carbohydrates are nutritionally inessential. Since your body can make all the glucose it actually needs for from protein and fat, so long as you’re eating plenty of them, or burning body fat.

And I can tell you that if you feel dramatically better when you restrict your carbohydrate intake, if you lose weight, if your energy level is higher and more constant, if your moods are better, if your blood work improves by any reasonable measurement, a low-carb diet makes you healthier, then you are approaching a balance that is right for your body.

And adding back foods that make you tired, fat, and unwell to be nutritionally correct would be a sad and foolish thing to do.
If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

Balance your diet for your body, not for some abstract notion fabricated by the government influenced by the lobbying of the agricultural and food processing industries.

Find your balance.

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