I Reject Your Meta-Narrative & Substitute My Own!

Meta-narrative - otherwise known as a story of everything - completely saturates many dietary "camps."  Vegans, low-carbers, paleo dieters, keto dieters, raw food dieters, etc. each and all have particular stories to tell about the food we eat and how said food affects our lives.

I won't lie here, in my study and evaluation of several different dieting strategies and philosophies, the temptation to join this or that school of nutrition dogma (by dogma, I mean theoretical principles only - I mean nothing degrading nor derogatory) has proved quite powerful.  Moreover, my disdain for certain schools of thought is readily apparent by my as yet uncompleted series on vegetarianism (which I promise I will eventually finish).

While regular readers may think that I have a special place in my heart for the paleo cause, I have failed,
many-a-time, to reveal my subtle dislike for paleo.  Although, to put things in a more accurate light, I don't have misgivings about any one dietary school per se.  Rather, I only reject their respective meta-narratives - that being each camps' story about all things healthful and harmful.

I reject their meta-narratives for 2 reasons:  1)  I've found bad in most all dietary philosophies; 2)  I've found good in most all dietary philosophies.  This rather oxymoronic discrepancy tells me one very important thing:  that many dietary philosophies are on to some "truth," meanwhile, the meta-narratives these philosophies use to orient us toward this truth somehow miss a very crucial component of it.

In my opinion, if a meta-narrative for diet is really going to be a comprehensive story of all things healthful and harmful, then points of misalignment cannot exist within this story's framework.

So what are points of misalignment for paleo?:  That not everyone, at all times and all places, ought to give up eating grain based goods.  While many people who go down the paleo path experience great health benefits by avoiding whole grain foods like the plague, not all people share this same experience.  Low-carb diets, especially, have a number of misalignments in their meta-narratives.  While restricting carbohydrates may work quite well for a sedentary, overweight/obese individual, a low carb diet might spell disastrous effects for an active, relatively fit and thin person who weight trains and does high intensity interval training on a regular basis.  Low carb works wonders under a certain set of parameters, but it can do great harm within a different context.

The problem, therefore, with most dietary meta-narratives arises from their lack of nuance.  Advocates of given schools have extensive lists of "medicines" and "poisons."  However, what is medicine but the proper dose of poison?  As the ancient Greeks tell us, "let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food."  If medicine equals the right dose of poison, and poison the improper dose medicine, and if medicine should be our food, then the healthfulness or harmfulness of any food is a matter of dose.

So then you ask:  "Tell me wiseguy.  What is the right dose?"

My answer:  "Whatever doesn't kill you!"

Put more practically, we can know the right and wrong dose based on how our body reacts.  If we start putting on unwanted weight, we know that our dose of food is too high.  However, the dose which leads to such weight gain will vary from person to person.  Olympic athletes have to consume upwards of 6,000-12,000 calories a day just to maintain their weight and their performance.  If I ate that much in a day, I'd be a fat tub of lard.

Think about it this way:  would a doctor prescribe the same dose of a certain medicine to a 100lb woman as he would a 225lb man?  To do so would be absurd!  In the same manner, prescribing a low carb diet to a competitive athlete would, in effect, "poison" said athlete, at least in terms of said athlete's performance and hormone regulation.

Thus, we need to replace our paleo, vegan, low carb, high carb, semi-high carb, high protein, low protein, etc. meta-narratives with the doctor's meta-narrative.  This meta-narrative entails that we self-prescribe dietary strategies that accord with our unique goals and food tolerances.  Someone who is not wheat sensitive, but who easily succumbs to hyper-palatable food (i.e. - someone who readily overeats when exposed to pizza, brownies, cookies, ice cream - basically all the foods that cause me overeat :( ), may be
able to easily get away with having brownies once or twice a month to no ill effect.  Someone who is wheat sensitive, however, depending on the severity of the sensitivity, may have to avoid brownies altogether.

The paleo meta-narrative automatically assumes the latter situation (that we need total abstinence).  The "doctoral" meta-narrative allows for both possibilities (whether one can or cannot have a brownie is subjective).

It's easy to fall within a given dietary meta-narrative and, from there, make universal prescriptions of healthful and harmful foods.  It's incredibly hard to be a doctor.  Being a doctor requires practice.  Not only do you have to know certain aspects of nutrition and fitness, but you also have to know what's relatively nutritious and fit within a given context; whether that context be your unique situation or your next door neighbor's.

So what meta-narrative will you choose?

I plan to be a doctor (like one anyway), rather than a patient, because frankly, I don't have the patience (pun intended) to put up with a faulty meta-narrative that doesn't apply to me in my unique situation.