“Our success with carbohydrates, however, has had a serious downside: a worldwide plague of obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases.”
~Gerald C. Nelson
The conventional view on diet promoted by establishment figures and institutions is based on the idea that all calories are equal. In dieting and fat loss, this has meant promoting a philosophy of calorie-in/calorie-out which translates as calorie counting and calorie restriction. Recent research has brought serious doubt to this largely untested hypothesis that has for so long guided public health recommendations.
There is also a larger background to this issue. The government has spent immense money promoting and subsidizing the high-carb diet. For example, they’ve put decades of funding into research for growing higher yield staples of wheat, corn, and rice. But they have never done anything comparable for healthy foods that are nutrient-dense and low-carb. This promotion of high yield crops with industrialized farming has denatured the soil and the food grown on it. This is problematic since these high-carb staples are low in nutrient-density even when grown on healthy soil.
This mentality of obsessing over food as calories is severely dysfunctional. It ignores the human reality of how our bodies function. And it ignores widespread human experience. Calorie-restricted diets are well known to have one of the lowest rates of compliance and success. It doesn’t matter how many or how few calories one tries to eat, as long as the food one is eating is of such low quality. Your hunger and cravings will drive you in your body’s seeking nutrition.
As I’ve eaten more nutrient-dense foods as part of a diet that is ketogenic and paleo, my hunger decreased and my cravings disappeared. I certainly don’t consume more calories than before and possibly far less, not that I’m counting. I no longer overeat and I find fasting easy. Maybe too many people eat so much making them fat because the food system produces mostly empty calories and processed carbs. It’s what’s available and cheapest, and the food industry is brilliant in making their products as addictive as possible. The average person in our society is endlessly hungry while their body is not getting what it needs. It’s a vicious cycle of decline.
I remember how I was for most of my life until quite recently, with decades as a sugar addict and a junk food junky. I was always hungry and always snacking. Carbs and sugar would keep my blood sugar and serotonin levels on a constant roller coaster ride of highs and lows, and it wrecked my physical and mental health in the process. It wasn’t a happy state. And anyone having told me in my deepest and darkest depressive funk that I should count and restrict my calories would not have been helpful. What I needed was more of the right kinds of calories, those filled with healthy fats and fat-soluble vitamins along with so much else. My body was starving from malnourishment even when I was overeating and, despite regular exercise, eventually gaining weight.
We don’t need to grow more food to feed the world but to grow better food to nourish everyone at least to a basic level, considering how many diseases even in rich countries are caused by nutrient deficiencies (e.g., Dr. Terry Wahls reversed multiple sclerosis symptoms in her self, in patients, and in clinical subjects through increasing nutrient-density). The same amount of food produced, if nutrient-dense, could feed many more people. We already have enough food and will continue to have enough food for the foreseeable future. That of equal and fair distribution of food is a separate issue. The problem isn’t producing a greater quantity for what we desperately need is greater quality. But that is difficult because our industrial farming has harmed the health of the soil and denatured our food supply.
The U.S. gov pays some farmers to not grow anything because the market is flooded with too much food. At the same time, U.S. gov pays other farmers to grow more crops like corn, something I know from living in Iowa, the corn capital of the world. Subsidizing the production of processed carbs and high fructose syrup is sickening and killing us, ignoring the problems with ethanol. Just as important, it also wastes limited resources that could be used in better ways.
We have become disconnected in so many ways. Scientific research and government policies disconnected from human health. An entire civilization disconnected from the earth we depend upon. And the modern mind disconnected from our own bodies, to the point of being alienated from what should be the most natural thing in the world, that of eating. When we are driven by cravings, our bodies are seeking something essential and needed. There is a good reason we’re attracted to things that taste sweet, salty, and fatty/oily. In natural whole foods, these flavors indicate something is nutrient-dense. But we fool the body by eating nutrient-deficient processed foods grown on poor soil. And then we create dietary ideologies that tell us this is normal.
What if we could feed more people with less land? And what if we could do so in a way that brought optimal and sustainable health to individuals, society, and the earth? Now that would be a food revolution worthy of the name!
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The global food problem isn’t what you think
by Gerald C. Nelson
Here’s what we found:
Under even the worst conditions, there will be enough food, if we define “enough” as meaning sufficient calories, on average, for everyone — with 2,000 calories per day as the standard requirement. . . [T]he post-World War II Green Revolution efforts to boost the productivity of staples such as wheat and rice have been so successful that we are now awash in carbohydrates. And because so much has already been invested in improving the productivity of these crops, solid yield gains will likely continue for the next few decades. The productivity enhancements have also made them more affordable relative to other foods that provide more of the other needed nutrients.
Our success with carbohydrates, however, has had a serious downside: a worldwide plague of obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases. The World Health Organization reports that in 2014, there were 462 million underweight adults worldwide but more than 600 million who were obese — nearly two-thirds of them in developing countries. And childhood obesity is rising much faster in poorer countries than in richer ones.
Meanwhile, micronutrient shortages such as Vitamin A deficiency are already causing blindness in somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 children a year and killing half of them within 12 months of them losing their sight. Dietary shortages of iron, zinc, iodine and folate all have devastating health effects.
These statistics point to the need for more emphasis on nutrients other than carbohydrates in our diets. And in this area, our findings are not reassuring.
Marmalade 
I grok all that you say here. In taking a large overview, to include observations while recently being a first-time tourist in Southern Louisiana, I perceive that we (in “The West”, primarily) have become de-Natured–ever more distant from and out of touch with that from which we emerged and on which we are vitally dependent.
I’d rather for the time being that people would ignore the debate over eating meat or not. That is secondary, at least in terms of human and environmental health. There are good and bad ways of raising meat, and on the good side traditional cattle ranching as part of crop rotation could sequester all the air pollution created since the industrial age. But there are still ethical questions about killing animals. That is a debate that won’t be resolved anytime soon.
I just wish we could disentangle the greater threats we face and at least temporarily ignore the divisive issues. More than ever, we need to find solutions and that will only happen when people understand the most basic problems. But the problem of health is built on the even deeper problem of disconnection. So many issues we face are so immense and pervasive that they are nearly invisible to individual humans.
Some refer to environmental catastrophe as slow death, even as the death count is so high (e.g., 40% of global deaths are correlated to air pollution). I’d argue the health crisis is another form of slow death because nutrient deficiencies in rich countries don’t appear in immediate ways, as health conditions such as autoimmune disorders only show up after a lifetime of creeping harm to the body. That has been the same challenge for climate change. Even when people know it on an intellectual level, it’s hard for most people to feel the immediate urgency of the threat. It’s not viscerally real.
Like so much else, the biological reality of nutrient-density and nutrient-deficiency is invisible, at least until you learn to pay attention (look at the photographs taken by Weston A. Price and you’ll quickly learn how to visually differentiate the two states of health). The attraction of the calorie model of health is that it matches the bias of the modern mind and the science that developed from it. Nutritional science has aspired to be a hard science and so uses the language of physics. Calorie-in/calorie-out may be true for a car engine, but it isn’t true for the human body-mind.
Your last sentence offers the truth that we are not machines, although we tend to treat our bodies as if they were. We go to the doctor to fix it, after having ignored and abused it. What’s missing in this metaphor is one’s soul and spirit.