MaxDiet Week: Objections

The biggest obstacle to jumping in with both feet is preparing meals. I think it is a good idea to eat this way and I am eager to try it for several months as a test, but about 10% of what I currently know how to cook fits the MaxDiet. So I have a lot of work ahead of me.

I’ll put forth the effort, but it will be gradual and I’m afraid many people would just rather not try. Rationalizing is always easier than doing the work. ;)

I don’t think the problem is necessarily that you didn’t write convincingly enough. The problem is that 90% of the time people are told to change their diets, it’s in a hostile nature. As such, people’s natural first instinct is to get defensive of their own diets.

You know how vehemently omnivorous I am. I’m pretty compelled to come up with a hybrid Max/MeatDiet now. Not cut out meat completely, but definitely cut it down a sizable amount, and make sure I get very good quality meat.

Your arguments are there to see, it’s just that most people don’t want to open their eyes.

I’m going to give this a shot. I’ll probably continue to eat eggs and milk because they kick so much ass, but eliminating sugar, meat, and flour from my diet sounds like a great idea.

Tynan: Is there a compelling health reason not to eat things like eggs, sour cream, etc?

Tynan,

Great series of posts, you have changed my life, though as the rest of the people here im a little reluctant to cut meat completely. I was wondering though why do you preach an entirely different diet in the skinny snob? isnt the skinny snob unhealthy now according to ur standards posted here?

I totally buy into about 75% of your max diet, and that part is straight along what many of the Crossfit people do and recommend. AKA the zone/paleo diets. I’ve been doing that since December and had incredible results, lost weight, gained muscle (thx Xfit too), allergies/asthma almost entirely disappeared. Feel totally awesome all the time, better than ever before in my life.

I started eating meat again when I swapped into this diet. I used to be a semi-vegetarian (ate some fish and ocasional chicken).

The cutting refined grains, sugar, industrial food in general is spot on, don’t get me wrong that in itself goes a long long way.

Where I disagree is the cut meat and replace with grains and beans. Believe me I did tons of reading into this myself because I wanted to decide for myself if I needed to swap back to meat. I found enough compelling evidence to convince me. Again read some of the Weston Price stuff, there’s quite a lot free on their website.

To sum up: The protein available in beans and nuts is not as readily used by the body, and there are much smaller amounts of it than in meat. To get equal protein from beans/nuts, you have to consume vastly more calories of fat and carbs, which is unbalancing hormonaly. There are also things in meat you’ll never get anywhere else. Most of the same research saying cut the refined grains and sugar also says any grains are nearly as bad. It all has to be processed a certain amount to be digestable, and most of human evolution didn’t involve any.

Also yes industrial meat is disgusting, and almost all the evidence against meat, is based on it. Unhealthy animals with chemically unbalanced meat. I’d rather not eat meat at all than that.

Evidence from hunter-gatherer societies ans the few studies done with people on naturally raised meat shows vastly different results.

But, I discovered, you don’t have to eat industrial meat to eat meat. There’s a growing movement of local pastured farm animals available. It takes a willingness to research and get outside the supermarket, but it is there. For example this is what I finally found as the best answer for me in my area with my busy schedule at the moment: http://www.farmfreshdirect2u.com/.

It probably takes even more effort to procure it than what you’ve been discussing, but really isn’t that hard once you know where to look. So don’t finger point meat eaters as all taking the easy way.

Again don’t take me wrong, I like where you start with your diet for the most part. I just disagree that cutting meat is as healthy or even sustainable as an ideal when you start looking at sustainable farming practices. Which, by the way, produce better vegetables as well due to having animal fertilizer instead of imported chemicals.

One of these days I’ll get around to compiling what I’ve found in something easy to read, but again recommend starting with the Price foundation, or look into “paleo” diet and reading Pollan’s books.

This is the most horrible idea I’ve ever heard. Tyanan, no wonder you look like a person could breathe on you and blow you over. I think your resources are flawed by hippy shit heads.

Most of my family have lived to be in their early to late 80′s (Above normal life expectancy!) while eatting a fuck ton of red meat, working around hazardous shit all day (read lax EPA or no Standards at all), and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Hell, my grandfather could have probably out lifted you while he was on his death bed. You look horrible, Skeletor! Eat lean meat!

This article is just supreme. Consolidates my own research, views, and experiences and presents them in a concise, readable, fun form. I could not have done better. It’s so great to see others making informed choices to the benefit of their health, and that of the environment. Mad props.

The assertion that animal protein directly causes cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or obesity is crazy. Your blog doesn’t any actual evidence, and the one book you reference shows otherwise if you look at the actual stats it’s based on.

Modern industrialized meat which is composed of a huge amount of fat and chemicals we can all agree probably isn’t good for you. We can probably all agree that eating lots of green vegetables is very good for you.

What does decrease your life expectancy is eating a large number of calories. The easiest way to get calories is via animal fat. This is why many studies may loosely correlate vegetarianism with extended life (the china study isn’t one of them). People that typically live a very long time eat almost nothing and it’s difficult to eat a lot of calories when you’re eating lettuce. You can live a 100 years on not much more than a couple sweet potatoes a week, but that doesn’t mean you’d want to.

Simply dropping your calories will reduce the risk of most diseases above. You don’t have to throw protein out just to do this. Carbohydrate intake is more highly correlated with cholesterol levels in arteries than protein intake, despite what popular culture may indicate. Basically sugars cause cholesterol to bind to the walls, which is more important that the free floating cholesterol in the blood.

The reason most vegetarians are fairly frail looking is that they don’t get enough protein, cholesterol, and a hand full of vitamins. Cholesterol performs important functions (it’s used to make testosterone).

For a 160 lb male the RDA for protein (which I argue is super low) would be 72 grams a day. Eating nothing but black beans which are higher than most anything else a vegetarian would eat, would mean you’d have to eat 4 cups of beans a day. This isn’t going to happen. Add to this that black beans are relatively inefficient because they aren’t a complete protein. Further, most of the numbers I’ve seen is that trained athletes, which we should all be, need closer to 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight just to prevent a loss of muscle mass. If you work out with intensity, eating less than this will result in you excreting more nitrogen than you’re taking in. To put on muscle mass you’d need more than this. Also protein intake doesn’t affect the liver until about 2 grams of protein per lb a day (have you ever heard of someone dieing of liver failure that didn’t drink all their lives?)

Just because those eating cheeseburgers for MCd’s are dropping like flies doesn’t mean that animal protein is the cause. No more than pale vegans eating processed soy indicates that lettuce will make you a pussy.

As a vegan you probably went from cheese burgers and pizza to vegetables. You’ll obviously have a huge improvement in your health. Try adding small amounts of organic grass fed beef, free range chicken, and wild fish. I have two great grandmothers who lived to be over 100 and neither was a vegetarian by any means, but they both weighed about 90 lbs most of their lives. I can tell you that the last 10-15 years wasn’t worth it.

As a scientist and after fighting candida glabrata for 8 months and experimenting with diets, I can only say that blood groups do have an incidence on the way you react to food. As an O group, Meat must be part of my diet with green leafy veggies and no refined products, lentilles are not adviced and I had problems digesting it. I think the best way is to cut ALL refined products and eat simple foods, in that you are right. When it comes down to cutting down meat alltogether, if you fish yourself and eat organic meats only, I don’t see where the problem is:)

I got the China Study as soon as I read up on your blog about this diet.

Three hours of reading later, I gave up all refined sugars, and animal protein products.

1.5 weeks in I feel wonderful!

Thanks!

Hey Tynan great writing mate. I like how you said that with every expert opinion there is another expert opinion that disagrees with it. I think the only real way with anything is to try it for yourself if you get the results you want then great. I’m pretty sure Hypnotica does the same diet and he is freaking huge. I love meat and the thought of taking it out of my diet is scary but thats another reason I should do it!! I will give this a 30 day challenge at the least.

What do you say about the fact that, in the same way that food animals are in horrendous conditions and things like fish being fed corn, it is nearly impossible to purchase all of these wonderful fruits and vegetables without ingesting poisonous pesticides and other chemicals?

Even supposedly “organic” items are probably on par with your view of “free range” animals.

Hey Tynan,

I’m almost totally convinced on this subject and I want to do myself a huge favor by doing this but I have a slight obstacle to overcome: I’m underage and living with my parents. I can’t necessarily change my diet because I eat what my parents buy. What they buy is JUNK. My dad is Filipino so there are a lot of foods that he makes that are associated with high cholesterol and heart disease. My mom just won’t change her diet (even after having a stint put in for her heart because of 80% blockage in her main artery). She keeps trying to show that she eats healthy but she has too many “indulgences”. I feel that I shouldn’t have to eat the way that my parents eat.
As a 16 year old , I ask for your advice on the situation.