Food

Food #

Goals #

  1. Delay chronic diseases as long as possible. Described well in this talk by Peter Attia. The big ones are:
    1. Cardiovascular disease.
    2. Cancer.
    3. Neurodegenerative disease.
    4. Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome.
  2. Maintain sustained energy levels as much as possible, avoiding:
    1. Periods of low motivation.
    2. “Food coma-ing”.
    3. “Snack train-ing”, or continuous distraction by a desire to eat more.

Current Eating Habits and Opinions (3/2022) #

NOTE that these habits are obselete, up to date ones can be found at Daily Habits!

Food Timing #

I try to eat a breakfast after I wake up - around 9am, since I wake up around 8:30am. Then I tend not to eat lunch, and instead eat my second (and last) meal of the day at around 5 or 6pm.

I converged on this strategy via the observation that eating food when I am not hungry (too quickly after my last meal) really kills my energy levels. With this strategy, I can eat two large meals and avoid this problem, maximizing the amount of time I can stay capable of doing whatever I want during the day.

With this strategy (and any food timing strategy IMO) it’s important for me to suppress suggestions from my mind to combat momentary ebbs in energy with a snack. This pretty much never works for me, always making me more tired then before I ate the snack. Green tea is a good placeholder to have instead. Or even better, an engaging activity that captures my attention.

This strategy also has the danger of going on a snack train when having my second meal. If I eat too much in the evening, it leads to much poorer sleep for me (possibly because the energy in the food is released as heat and excitement when I am sleeping). I don’t have a great consistent way to avoid this problem yet, besides my willpower (which is not consistent :/). Some tricks that kinda work are:

  • Lining up an engaging activity to do right after I eat, so I don’t just default to snacking more.
  • Drinking tea or broth after eating as a replacement behavior.

Fasting. #

I haven’t done a long fast in a while, but am experimenting with fasting one day a week (Saturday) and still want to do a long fast 3x per year.

Diet Composition #

I’m playing with using this eatthismuch meal plan as a general description of what my food intake looks like. I should probably eat less fat to adhere to Valter Longo’s recommendations.

Confidence Levels #

Because it is hard (for me at least) to get good, immediate feedback from my body about which foods are the “healthiest” for me in the long term, I instead have to rely on information from other people to figure out what food I should eat. I’m working to combat this but realistically will need to continue to do this for a while. Unfortunately, there are many opinions out there about what food is healthy, and trusting one necessarily means discounting others, which might be right. Here I try to be honest with myself about where my personal opinions come from so that I can more effectively identify and correct them.

  • 📺 = I’ve been exposed to a lot of random media supporting this opinion, but don’t really understand the details.
  • 📈 = This is an interesting statistical trend, but correlation != causation.
  • 💡 = This is a plausible idea, but I haven’t found evidence that it has health effects in humans. In other words, it’s a nice conjecture, but requires more criticism.
  • 📚 = This is the best explanation I know of, and has withstood a good amount of criticism, although of course it might still be wrong.
  • 🧠 = This is a personal observation I’ve made about myself.

TODO move these emojis to a more central location so I can use them in other writings.

Meat (non-fish) #

I try to avoid eating meat. There are a bunch of weak reasons for this:

  1. I perceive the supply chain that produces meat as being messy and suffering-causing 📺. Another way to phrase this is: I don’t think I would want to run my own personal meat-producing supply chain even if it was low-effort.
  2. Meat consumption using our current supply chain is energy/space/time inefficient compared to other food sources 📚. I don’t think this is a problem that we should rely on individual choices to solve (like other climate change related problems), so it’s a pretty weak reason for an individual to not eat meat IMO. Larger systemic changes like taxes on meat seem to me like the more effective way to take action on this information.
  3. Meat consumption seems be to weakly associated with cancer 📈 and other common causes of death. This may be because of the proteins in meat causing up-regulation of growth factors like IGF-1, which may accelerate aging 💡.
  4. The “blue zone” communities around the world with high health- and life-spans eat little meat 📈.

Protein #

It seems like low protein consumption (especially animal protein) might slow aging. See this comprehensive macronutrient mouse study. See also this review: The impact of dietary protein intake on longevity and metabolic health.

Note that it seems like this is NOT true for people over the age of 65. At this point, loss of muscle becomes a dangerous problems (leading to falls, etc.), so the benefits of eating more protein to maintain muscle mass seem to outweigh the downsides.

Fish #

I eat fish and other seafood, but rarely (I don’t cook it myself).

Eggs #

I eat ~4 eggs a day ~4 times per week.

Dairy #

I eat a small amount of yogurt and cheese. I try to avoid all other dairy products as best I can. My throat is irritated when I drink plain milk and excessive consumption of any dairy product upsets my digestion, so I think I am somewhat personally intolerant of at least dairy from cows 🧠.

Whole Foods #

This includes any food that has not had components stripped from it at a small scale. For instance, I would consider a berry a whole food even though it was separated from the plant at the macro scale. But jam would not be a whole food because it involves removing some fiber and other unknown stuff from the berry and adding parts of other plants (sugars) that were themselves removed from their whole plant part.

I like the story I’ve heard about whole foods 📺. At the very least, it seems like we evolved to eat whole foods, so the floor for how bad they can be for us is fairly high and well known. Note that this theory does not say anything suggesting that whole food are the best diet, just that they aren’t that bad.

It also seems well supported and not controversial that eating whole foods helps delay the onset of the most common causes of death (cardiovascular disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease) 📚.

Organic? #

I haven’t found strong evidence that organic food is healthier than non organic. But it could be that the right studies just haven’t been done yet or I haven’t seen them. Here is an interesting review:

I buy mostly non organic food because it is cheaper.

What should I eat and when? (2021) #

The most convincing diet structure I’ve found has been The Longevity Diet by Valter Longo. This diet is mostly vegan, with fish 2-3 times per week, keeping protein intake low. This podcast has a compelling dissent of Longo’s thoughts here; basically it states that Longo’s ideas makes sense, but so do many other ideas and we know now that insufficient protein can be unhealthy (I need to dig more into this) - the evidence to lower intake in spite of this is not strong enough yet. Note that personalizing protein intake levels while optimizing longevity seems to be possible by measuring Blood Urea Nitrogen levels as described by Michael Lustgarten.

Cool paper about food group epidemiology: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/105/6/1462/4569801.

There are a couple of amendments I’ve made based on my personal experience (in service of goal 2 above). These include:

  1. Not eating breakfast. I find myself most productive in a fasted state (even a prolonged fast, and eating breakfast breaks be right out of this in what otherwise would be a very productive time.
    • This is counter to Longo’s suggestions, some other research on circadian rhythms by Sachin Panda, and the American Heart Association. The arguments here often revolve around weight loss (which I don’t have a problem with yet), and don’t seem too strong to me.
    • This does help keep a shorter eating window on my day which is widely recommended:
  2. Trying to eat grains and/or starchy foods later in the day. These foods uniquely mess with my energy levels. I’m eager to get some Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) data to see if I can quantitate this.

Some interesting thoughts on meal timing for energy levels can be found at https://www.workingagainstgravity.com/guides/nutrition-guide/meal-timing.

Other tenants I try to live by:

  1. Eating whole foods as much as possible.

My 2021 Food Strategy #

Things I try to avoid #

In practice I may have small amounts (<1 “serving”) of these things about once a week.

Note also that avoiding animals products is partially for health reasons (avoiding cancer primarily), but also partially because the animal food industry is not easy for me to support.

Things I try to moderate #

  • Eating more than 1/2 cup of (dry volume) beans or grains at once. A large amount of my calories come from these foods - I’ve just noticed that eating a lot in one sitting saps my energy, I assume because they take work to digest.

One Meal A Day (OMAD) #

I tried this for a while, and I found myself falling into the recurring pattern of overeating because “this is all the food I’ll eat today”. This is especially bad with lots of low-calorie-density, high-fiber foods (which I want to eat no matter what). The overeating would make me feel unfocused and uncomfortable for 4+ hours, which is not worth it for me.

Recently, I’ve found that a better thought pattern for me is to say “I’ll eat that later” when I get a craving for something right after a meal. This avoids a state of overeating, and I may later end up not craving that thing, which means I’ll eat less overall that day (which is generally good).

Hunger, and Physical States of Being #

One thing I’ve noticed is that my body can be in different “states” that affect my hunger levels. Some examples:

Induces Hunger:

  • Sitting around for a while (not moving).
  • Being bored, or not knowing what to do with myself.
  • Eating some food (e.g. a snack sized meal). The effect is more powerful when I eat something, then am presented with something of a different flavor profile.
  • Overeating will sometimes make me hungry/snack-y for the rest of the day (or an extended period of time). I think this is partially because feeling overfull makes me less motivated to do stuff, and so I get bored.
  • Working on something that isn’t going well. Generally stress. Food is a good procrastination tool.

Suppresses Hunger:

  • Exercising
  • Being busy
  • Social interaction
  • Taking a shower

One theory I have is that my body gets hungry when it notices that (1) there is food around and (2) I have time/space to digest after I eat (I wont need to immediately do something that requires lots of energy).

Some habits that take advantage of this concept include:

  • Distracting myself with busywork when I feed hungry but don’t (consciously) want to eat.
  • Eating one meal a day, so that I don’t have a “snack-train” problem of having future meals induce hunger.

“Snack Train”-ing #

One pattern I’ve noticed in myself that eating food will put me in a lower-focus mood for 1-4 hours depending on how much and what I ate. If I try to do something that requires focus in this mood, my body will resist me and often want to eat more food instead as an alternative activity. Unfortunately, eating more food will just perpetuate the cycle; in fact it will become even harder to focus as more of my energy needs to go to digestion.

The key here is to break the cycle by somehow riding through the low energy mood without pushing myself so much that I want to eat. Sometimes this is really hard, because doing things that require focus is fulfilling :(.

I’m basically just writing this as a reminder to myself to push through when I’m in this mood for the sake of my future self!

Measuring Personal Dietary Effects #

Ideally, I would measure the effects of different foods on my personal health directly so that I know what works for me (as opposed to what should work generally). This takes work unfortunately. Here are some options that I should probably explore at some point:

What fats to eat? #

Probably mostly mono- and poly-unsaturated fatty acids (not saturated fatty acids).

Protein #

Cool table of calories per gram of protein: https://www.healthyalyona.com/nutrition/plant-based-protein-lowest-calories/

Specific Food Notes #

Sodium #

Too much bad. See this Kevin Bass video for a review of studies that show it’s beneficial to use part potassium chloride in your salt source.

Processed Meat #

Carcinogenic according to the WHO. They estimate that 34k cancer deaths worldwide can be attributed to processed meat, compared to 1mil to smoking, 600k to drinking alcohol, and 200k to air pollution.

Advanced Glycation End Products #

Created by high heat cooking of especially protein-rich foods (e.g. meat/nuts). But all foods contain. Ideal to reduce the amount of this eaten.

It would be cool to measure this in blood. Perhaps a1c inflammation test is a good proxy.

These are also formed endogenously when sugars react with proteins/fats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product). This may be one of the reasons why sugar is bad for you.

Flax Seeds #

It seems like baking flax seeds will not degrade omega-3 content (biased source).

Nutritional Yeast #

Contains MSG (probably not harmful) and uric acid (probably harmful in large quantity) (source). Also is a fairly processed food.

Categories: Health And Longevity

Backlinks: Manifesto, Aging Science, Biomarker Correlator, Fasting, Daily Habits,

Calendar February 14, 2025
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