Daily musings #596 - Friday, 9 September 2022

My cousin has been specializing in and researching diets and foods for the last decade or more. With a focus on diets and their impact on diabetics. She recently moved from Kuala Lumpur to Spain and I am looking forward to seeing her in October when I travel there.

It is her birthday today and I wish her the very best of everything <waves hand>. And I wanted to share with all of you her thoughts on how to eat based on years of strong evidence-based research. She has distilled her advice into 3 key things:

1. No single food or nutrient is a villain or a superfood. Sorry to disappoint. The health effects of diet are a result of foods eaten in combination. So what you eat, how you eat, and what you eat together are important.

2. Ultra-processed foods with lots of additives are best avoided. They are hyper-palatable, are too high in calories, and who knows what these chemicals do to our system. So lesser processed or not processed at all the better.

3. No one diet fits everyone... I believe everyone has the right fit. But we aren’t there yet. We are still a while away from personally engineered diets.

That is pretty much all of it. I warned you earlier that you might not like it.

And to add to all this I have my own single point of advice - when in doubt always eat less than what your body needs.