Go Hungry

How to think critically about diet and nutrition in a world that is awash in cheap edible substances

"bow and arrow" by Leo Reynolds is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Most essays on Sharpen Your Axe have a common theme: developing our critical-thinking skills. This week’s essay has a slightly different subject matter. Today I will teach you how to eat. Or maybe how not to eat?

Diet and nutrition are both areas that are dying out for a little critical scrutiny. You’ve probably heard that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” but have you ever wondered about the methodology that was used to develop that conclusion?

Researchers will pick a bunch of people who have breakfast every day and then look at a contrasting bunch of people who normally skip breakfast. They will then track any health issues across both groups over an extended period of time. The breakfast-eating group will normally tend to be healthier than the breakfast-skipping group, on average, which will support the conclusion.

However, there is a big problem with this approach. The people who enjoy breakfast will tend to be better organised. They will plan their meals ahead of time, make good choices when they go to the supermarket, go to bed at a reasonable time most nights and jump out of bed as soon as the alarm clock rings.

By contrast, people who tend to skip breakfast will on average tend to be less organised. They might drink too much booze in the evening and then go to bed a bit later than expected. They might turn the alarm clock off to sleep a bit more and then not have enough food in the house to make a quick breakfast. They will rush to work, arriving a little late, and then lose energy in mid-morning before buying an ultra-processed snack to keep going. A nutritional researcher called Fernanda Rauber memorably described the typical snack as “an industrially produced edible substance” to author Chris Van Tulleken.

The differences between the two groups of people are problematic for nutritional research. However, it is possible to control for the average difference between people who eat breakfast and those who skip it. If researchers match organised people who eat breakfast with organised people who just happen to prefer a coffee in the mornings, any advantages to eating breakfast disappear into thin air.

We can see something similar with five servings of fruit and vegetables a day, which is a simplification of health advice that is heavily influenced by special-interest groups. The people who follow official advice like this tend to lead healthy lifestyles in general. This is not necessarily true of most people who eat fewer servings of fruit and vegetables. However, if you look for people who are generally healthy but fall short of “five a day” because they prioritise putting fewer calories in their mouths, any advantages also evaporate into thin air.

Both examples are taken from Roy Taylor. In a field full of gurus, he stands out as an unusual figure with serious credentials to his name. A physician, he has done cutting-edge work on diabetes 2, a disease that now affects some 450m people worldwide (more than 6% of the world’s population). This figure is up dramatically from around 100m in 1980. Taylor has identified the main cause of the disease and has clinically proven that it can be reversed in most cases.

The condition is rare in populations short of food but common in those with plenty of food. And if populations with plenty of food suddenly run into food rationing, type 2 diabetes becomes much less common, as was documented in Cuba after the economic collapse in the 1990s, Such a simple change determining the frequency of a disease implies one single cause.

Taylor’s advice is both simple and clinically tested. To reverse type 2 diabetes, most people will need to lost around 15 kilograms in around eight weeks. If these people can keep 10 kilos off for at least two years, two out of three will stay in remission. To reverse pre-diabetes, most people will need to lose 10 kilos (or 10% of your bodyweight if you weigh less than 80 kilos).

If you want to avoid developing pre-diabetes, you should keep your bodyweight the same throughout your life. In a western world awash with industrially produced edible substances, most people gain half a kilogram a year throughout their lives in a way that would have shocked most of our ancestors. We nowadays expect people to be much heavier in their 50s, 60s and 70s than they were in their 20s and 30s in a way that wasn’t true in the past.

Taylor’s advice works. I personally know two people who have put type 2 diabetes into remission through aggressive dieting. In order to put some skin in the game, I lost 10 kilos in a couple of months last year in order to earn the right to publish this essay. How did I do it? I skipped breakfast most days; avoided any snacks except on special occasions; cut back on booze; skipped chocolate, dessert and anything with added sugar; and gave up protein shakes after the gym.

In my experience, losing the weight was fairly easy, even though I have a sweet tooth. The hardest part was psychological: I had to find a way of coping with feeling hungry for much of the day! What was particularly hard was trying to remain pleasant company as I dealt with gnawing hunger pangs and a feeling of not being full after meals. Once my body adjusted to the new regime, though, I found that it was much easier to keep the weight off than it was to lose it in the first place.

Going to the gym was much less enjoyable while I was losing weight - I must have lost a little muscle along with the belly fat. I have been able to rebuild much of the lost strength by focusing on my technique, but it is a slow process in my 50s. My running times got significantly better, though.

My experience showed me in a very visceral way that while we might well be slaves to our habits, we have just enough freedom to build new habits and overcome old habits. Changing our habits can be hard, but it can be done. We are just free enough.

If you want to set up your own experiment, what should you do? Taylor is refreshingly undogmatic about what exactly you should eat. He does set out five golden rules, though. You should only eat at mealtimes instead of snacking; make sure you eat purposefully instead of feeding yourself in front of the television (TV); avoid commercial ready meals; and also avoid sweetened drinks. While you can enjoy special occasions, like birthdays and parties, you should cut back on your calories afterwards to compensate.

Taylor’s advice is very different from what you will see around you. How many of you ate too much chocolate at Easter? But how many fasted for Lent beforehand? I will bet any amount that the first figure is significantly higher than the second one.

Our ancestors evolved to expect a certain amount of hunger most days. Our biology is conservative; and any understanding of human beings needs to be grounded in the scientific study of life, as biologist E. O. Wilson memorably argued. Saturating our bodies with industrially produced edible substances will tend to lead to bad results. Adding a little hunger back into your day will tend to be good for you.

In a similar vein, author Michael Easter talks about the importance of a lifestyle that includes a little discomfort now and then.

Consider a day of the average American office worker. He wakes up on a pillow-topped, waist-high mattress, then slides his legs onto the floor. He shuffles around the house a bit, then moves into a car seat to commute. Once he arrives at the office he sits in an office chair, which has a slew of dials and switches, all of which are designed to offer ecstasy-inducing ergonomics. After sitting at work, the man is back sitting in his car. When he gets home, he sits at a table for dinner, then a couch for TV. Then it’s back into the horizontal position for bed. Repeat until retirement.

By contrast, for most of human history our ancestors would have had to carry objects and small people, walk, run, squat and dig through most of the day, not to mention throwing (or shooting) projectile weapons. With this biological legacy, is it any wonder that many of us suffer from diseases of captivity, like obesity, pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes, when we become too sedentary and panic at the first sign of hunger?

Embracing discomfort and hunger is all well and good, but when it comes to preparing and cooking healthy meals, what should we do? A physician called Catherine Shanahan studied a wide range of traditional diets to find what they have in common. She suggested that we can see recurring themes across a wide range of diets from around the world.

The four pillars that Shanahan promotes involve basing mealtimes on some combination of animal organs, meat cooked on the bone, fresh food, and fermented and sprouted foods. Obviously, no traditional diets would recommend industrially produced edible substances, which have only been developed in the last few generations - a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

All the advice in this week’s essay pushes in a similar direction: go hungry, get uncomfortable, avoid snacks and eat real food at mealtimes. Twelve words. Simple! This common-sense approach is very different from what you will see elsewhere in popular nutrition, where various gurus at the heads of food-purity cults will spin biologically improbable yarns about avoiding meat / stuffing yourself with meat / insert fad here; and governmental bodies will water down any semi-sensible nutrional advice after intense lobbying by the food industry.

We are omnivores, as mentioned before. There are different routes up the mountain. As long as you regularly feel a little hungry and then choose foods your great-grandmother would have recognised, you are going in the right general direction. The actual choices of food are less important than the gurus would have you believe.

Finally, some readers might think this column is an example of “fatphobia.” Nothing could be further from the truth! Discriminating against people based on their bodyweight is just as wrong as discriminating against people based on the colour of their skin, their gender, their gender identity, their sexuality, their nationality, their mother tongue, their accent or their income.

I think there is an interesting parallel with education. Discriminating against people based on their education level is wrong - we should fight any moves to remove rights from people who crashed out of school early. Having said that, education tends to be good for individuals and for society as a whole. We should encourage anyone who wants to improve their education at any stage of life.

Likewise, if you carry around significantly more weight than your ancestors did, I strongly recommend clicking on the link to the Kindle edition of Taylor’s book below and seeing what he has to say. The comments are open. See you next week!

Further Reading

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter

Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health by Denise Minger

Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Everyday Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Life Without Diabetes: The Definitive Guide to Understanding and Reversing Your Type 2 Diabetes by Roy Taylor

Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? by Chris Van Tulleken

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson

This essay is released with a CC BY-NY-ND license. Please link to sharpenyouraxe.substack.com if you re-use this material.

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!

If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the third anniversary post. You can also find an ultra-cheap Kindle book here. If you want to read the book on your phone, tablet or computer, you can download the Kindle software for Android, Apple or Windows for free.

Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky, Mastodon, Post and X (formerly Twitter), are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.