Those New Year’s Diet Resolutions:
What Is the Best Diet for Me?

By Donovan Adendorf, D.C.

A new year, a new diet, a new determined resolution to change your evil ways—and then to your own surprise—you do not follow through! So what is really new? Nothing! Forrest Gump would say: “New is what new does!” And until your mind’s eye has visualized the practicality of the new change, life would be just like another box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get—from yourself. So, you are your own worst enemy on this subject.

To combat you in your weaker moments, I suggest that you sign a contract with yourself (on paper) that states what you are agreeing to do. Seeing it on paper gets the “wow effect” going. As in, ‘Wow, I really am going to do this!’

Outlining your diet makes it easier to follow. Let’s see how we get to decide which diet works for you. Let’s make it simple: the major sources of nutrition are proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Each source has its benefits and disappointments and each also is much hyped in the media. The ‘80s and some of the ‘90s were targeting fat as the ultimate enemy, professing low-fat diets as the means to weight loss and general cardiovascular health. The problem was that excess carbohydrates got converted immediately to body fat and thus was not always the answer.

The current fad is, as I am sure you’ve noted ad nauseam, low carbohydrates! The problem with the low-carb diet (specifically Atkins) is that excess dietary fat can (arbitrarily, at least) clog up arteries. However, I vividly remember Dr. Atkins defending his diet (before his death) on a popular morning show in saying that clogged arteries on his diet have not been proven. I am also reminded of President Clinton’s sojourn to the operating table and his connection to the “Atkins spin-off” called the South Beach diet. It makes one think. There seems to be unanimous agreement though that a diet purely consisting of fat is not in the running and we can concentrate on the other two major sources of nutrients, namely proteins (meats, beans, etc.) and carbohydrates (sugars, pastas, fruits, etc.). The quest for our new diet lies in the balance between these two sources of nutrition.

So, how do we decide which one is the best for me as a person? The answer is that every person is so individually different that we will have to experiment armed with knowledge, and our own medical background, and then make a decision.

Let’s take a trip up to northern Alaska and visit the Eskimos. Here we have a healthy Native American person that lives on purely protein and fat. Until the introduction of sugar into that culture, tooth decay was nearly non-existent. (This excludes the everyday wear on teeth, of course). The Eskimos live a very healthy lifestyle based purely on protein and fat alone. The addition of the so-called “good” fats into their diets cannot be ignored (in the form of poly-unsaturated fatty acids found in fish oils). The latter is a protective fat that keeps arteries and veins supple and also prolongs heart health. If anyone that has a familial predisposition to heart disease goes on a purely “Eskimo diet” (something similar to Atkins) the results might be disastrous.

Let us next look at an average diet in Southeast Asia, where meat is scarce and expensive, and rice is the mainstay of existence. The average person is not overweight and appears to be healthy, just by living on carbohydrates alone: rice, fruits and vegetables. The average Southeast Asian seems to be in great shape and the lack of regular protein (in the form of meat) does not seem to negatively affect overall health.

So, here we see the two diet extremes of carbohydrate versus protein illustrated in a lifestyle dictated by finance and circumstance. We, in the States, have the money to afford just about any diet we want to and thus the choices are so much easier, yet so much more difficult.

My suggestion for a new diet for each person would be to evaluate your individual health status and then decide which way to go. Should we cut down on carbohydrates or cut down on proteins, or cut down on both and just count the amount of calories in total? This decision is so individualized and personal that generalizations will not help, but could hurt you.

I leave you with decisions that dictate your new diet. If you are a borderline diabetic without a family history of heart disease, your immediate enemies are complex carbohydrates, therefore a modified South Beach Diet would be the way to go. If you suffer from gout, staying away from the Atkins diet would be the way to go. A family history of heart disease could precipitate a study of the Dr. Dean Ornish (Heart Healthy) diet.

The examples of helpful diets are plentiful but also very individualized and, therefore, require the input from a knowledgeable health care practitioner with training in diet care. Having said that, just realize that a new year brings new expectations for positive change. We did not manage to change the political situation this time around, so why not change what we can by starting with ourselves and what we eat?

Dr. Adendorf practices at West Bay Chiropractic on West Bay Shore Drive in Traverse City, MI (231-941-4030) and also in Gaylord, MI (989-858-2345).