As It Is, With Mark Bittman and Dr. David L. Katz
Forget about paleo, keto, and intermittent fasting – we’re getting to the truth about how you should really eat this week with Mark Bittman and Dr. David L. Katz. Their latest book is As It Is: Answers to All Questions About Food and Diet , and in this issue they discuss the importance of using science and common sense when it comes to our consumption. Hear their conversation with Alice and Melissa about the downsides of the latest health fads and diets that actually contribute to more overall health. (Spoiler alert, we can’t live in stable ketosis.)
Mark is one of the world’s leading food products, having written over 30 books on the topic, including the New York Times bestseller How to Cook Everything . Dr. Katz is the Founding Director of the Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center at Yale University and the founder and president of the True Health Initiative.
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with Mark Bittman and Dr. David L. Katz
Dr. Katz on why the paleo has not survived to this day:
In the Stone Age, we were scattered, isolated groups of gatherers in a vast, empty world that seemed endless resources. And the world’s leading paleo experts, indeed, the people who put this in the peer-reviewed literature in the first place say we absolutely can’t eat like that right now. We can learn from our adaptations. But now we need to get this protein from beans and lentils because you can’t feed 8 billion hungry people with a Stone Age diet. It just doesn’t work. I actually counted for an article in the Huffington Post I wrote years ago. I looked through the literature to find out how much space it takes on average to make a living as a hunter-gatherer. And then I applied that to a population of 7.8 billion. According to my calculations, we need 15 times the total surface area of the planet.
Mark Bittman on whether there is a “perfect” diet:
[T] is not an optimal diet here except in the broadest sense, and in the broadest sense, an optimal diet means a mostly plant-based diet that eliminates ultra-processed foods and most animal products. And it’s kind of that simple. This is very general. This gives you a lot of flexibility. This allows you to say, “I don’t want to eat beans, I just don’t like them.” This allows me to say, “I don’t even want to eat a lot of vegetables.” It lets you say a lot of different things. And the fact is, there are many so-called optimal diets or many good diets. (There are probably more bad ones at this point.) But there are many, many versions, many variations of the good ones. I talk a lot and think it’s safe to say that any traditional diet is a good diet, and almost any modern diet is a bad one.
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