The Biggest Change I'm Making in 15 Years

This will probably startle most of you. And no, I haven't found Jesus.

This week, I was looking for the algorithm for my Zeo sleep manager - it's a well kept secret and I wanted to do some additional crunching of the data, so I went searching. I was led to a website called The Bulletproof Executive, and sure enough Dave A, the "Bulletproof Executive" knew the formula because he was friends with one of the founders at Zeo.

During my time hunting down this information on his site, I couldn't help but notice that, in addition to "sleep hacking" and "brain hacking", he had a section on "body hacking". I thought this would be pretty much the same thing as I do - mostly vegetarian, lots of complex carbs.

Wrong.

It was the total opposite of what I do. He calls it a modified Paleo diet - mostly meat, lots of fat (some saturated, which I've been told is evil), lots of low-glycemic vegetables, no breads or grains. Pretty much the diet our ancestors that lived in caves ate - but a little more high tech.

I dismissed him as a nutbar right away. But I thought "what the heck" and did some research on diets that were paleolithic in nature. I looked for search terms like:

The link between heart disease and saturated fat.
The link between complex carbohydrates and heart disease.

I wasn't too interested in the Paleo diet, but it was a great jumping off point.

What I found astounded me. Since I last took a serious look at this in 1995, much has been learned:

• When you reduce the animal content of your diet, you replace those calories with carbohydrates. They should have been replaced with healthy fats (olive oil). It's very hard to be a "low carb vegetarian".
• Saturated fat isn't evil. Actually the link between saturated fat and heart disease was debunked.
• Fat isn't evil. Fat is actually quite good. And the right kind of fat is even better.
• We eat sugar. Almost anything processed with grain in it is easily converted to sugar. Even the healthy bread I eat is converted to sugar. The cereal I love is converted to sugar. Even Raisin Bran, which I thought was pretty healthy, is sugar.
• With all this sugar, your insulin goes haywire. In my case, the insulin response, combined with my naturally low HDL (the "good" component of cholesterol), makes for very bad news. Things like I've experienced - heart disease and stroke.

I'm halfway through a book called Why We Get Fat, and it's basically a rewrite of Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes. Gary is a science writer (famous for the expose on the whole cold fusion thing), and has lots of praise for his investigative work. But don't think I'm taking his word on this. I just can't find any credible rebuttal to what he says. And tons of others (scientists, doctors), are now saying the same thing, and are angry with the government for sticking to this "complex carbs are good and saturated fat it bad" argument.

I consider that I've been unwittingly running an experiment on myself for 15 years - and the results are self evident. What I propose to do isn't hard for me - it'll be a change like I made in 1996. I'll take the best of what I know now and combine it, and try to come up with the best fit for me, starting now:

• Back to meat - the wilder the better - grass fed beef, buffalo, deer, wild sockeye salmon
• Eggs for breakfast - probably omelettes with lots of vegetables. No toast though.
• Vegetables that are low-glycemic - cucumber, pepper, asparagus, brocolli, cauliflower
• Fruits that are low glycemic - strawberries, blueberries, raspberries
• Oil - Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• Nuts - Cashews, Almonds
• Grains - Brown Rice sparingly, very little bread, no cereal
• Dairy - Not much - maybe cream on strawberries

So the net-net for you is no separate meal for Doug anymore. I'll pick and choose among what the rest of the meat-eaters are having. Just make my hamburger without the bun.

** Please no "I told you so's" here - because both of us thought I was doing a credible thing....That's the neat thing about science - facts are stubborn things.