Work had a "Clean Eating" presentation today

#1

Can you guess what their recommendations were? Yea, mostly the standard crap.

They did emphasize drinking water as being a good thing, and sugar as a bad thing, but of course fat and salt are bad like sugar, and you need to eat lots of fruit and whole grains (even though she said many times that sugar is sugar…).

I kinda heckled the person on a bunch of topics, like how eating so frequently would prevent autophagy at one point, and asked her why saturated fats would be such a problem to which she said “it just is!” Also had a fun rant about their recommendations being a recipe for diabetes due to increasing insulin in the system, causing insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia.

Eventually got the “we can talk after, we’ll have time for questions later” even though she started with ‘feel free to interrupt with any questions throughout the presentation’.

I thought about going up after, but after seeing a line I decided not to bother.

(Mike Keathley) #2

Interesting. What were her macronutrient recommendations? What kinds of fats did she recommend? If her recommendations have moved away from the typical 300 g of carbs per day and also emphasizes eating other good fats from wild fish, nuts, seeds, olives, avocados, etc. I would say that’s progress!

Hopefully you weren’t too hard on her. It would be great to have someone like her preaching the virtues of low carb. :slight_smile:

#3

Recommendations were not so precise, but basically “half [whatever half means] of food as fruit and vegetables [put in same category], a quarter as whole grains, a quarter as lean protein”. Moderate (meaning as low as possible) amounts of sugar and ‘good’ fats (unsaturated fats) as opposed to bad fats (trans and saturated fats treated as the same).

Also spouted out the AHA’s recommendation of below 1.5grams of sodium a day.

Now, granted, some of that is fine. Getting rid of sugar is very important. Just didn’t seem to mind that there’s a lot of sugar being recommended. Drink lots of water is great, and mentioned how hard it is even for her to drink enough water (to which I said just have some more salt and you’ll be motivated to drink more).

(Mike Keathley) #4

Hmmm…seems like it’s just myplate. Even still I agree with you that not differentiating between fruits and veggies is a pretty big mistake. I can actually think back to when I tried to fulfill these caloric requirements using grains and fruit. Nevermind how much food I had to eat to eat enough calories (a lot!), but I inflated like a balloon, had massive gastrointestinal bloating, and had the worst depression and brain fog ever! I wonder what she would suggest in response to something like that happening?

#5

Who knows? See a real doctor? Eat more? Get rid of the fat and sugar more?

HR tried to talk to me just now about coming off as rude. Had a fun discussion about that which ended with her essentially giving up and saying she’s just not going to invite any more people to talk to us concerning nutrition anymore (though also added that if I wanted to do a lunch and learn to instruct on these things myself I could do so. That’s tempting but I don’t really feel qualified enough to do that either but… eh, we’ll see i guess?).

(Dustin Cade) #6

sadly these presentations are not good places to discuss the reality of the situation… most often the person presenting has learned the course material and not much else, so having an intelligent conversation is not really possible, as there is no real thoughts behind what information they are providing…

the front lines and trenches of this war are right where you or I sit… people seeing progress, people asking questions on their own… That is grass roots change…

(Mike Keathley) #7

I can certainly understand why she would consider that rude. You yourself described it as heckling and said that you went on a rant. I think one thing that is important to keep in mind is that if we present our arguments in a way such that others will feel defensive, insecure, or otherwise being attacked, not only do we lose that person but also everyone else observing the interaction. The important thing to remember is that people buy into how they feel around you before they will give your ideas a fair shake.

#8

I’m using more colorful language for the description now to make it sound more interesting and for simplicity, it really wasn’t that bad at the time, and I certainly tried to keep it to simpler questions of “why this?” “wouldn’t that cause this problem?” “Didn’t you say to avoid sugar but isn’t this suggesting sugar?” until it was clear she didn’t have anything to back anything up and didn’t care for any question_ing_ of the information, and also until it was clear the advice was terrible. Even then, my “rant” was say 10 seconds(if that even, possibly less than 5), of as quickly as possible saying the all the “good foods” they pointed out (carbs, primarily grains and fruits), and at the frequency recommended in the proportions recommended, would cause insulin secretion, which would likely lead to insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia and type ii diabetes.

But, meh, at that point it was clear what we were getting. I didn’t even bother saying anything after that, just wanted it to be clear that what was being presented as definitive “fundamentals” of “clean eating” were not really so definitive.