When talking with people day in and day out about the food they eat it’s hard not to notice trends and consistencies. Research findings can be motivating, but it’s been even more inspiring to witness the world of health and disease first-hand. While it is not formal research, these unofficial findings may be insightful.
Some reoccurring themes seem obvious. High blood pressure? Often a diet of salty fast food, or just many meals eaten at restaurants, and energy drinks. High cholesterol? A common theme is eggs for breakfast, deli meat with cheese for lunch and a big slab of meat for dinner.
The less obvious connections weren’t clear at first, but after thousands of conversations about what people eat, trends are very apparent. When someone complains that they are way past puberty and yet their face continues to break-out, an assessment of their diet usually confirms a steady flow of sugar – pastries, cookies, candy, chocolate, snack foods, etc. A second guess would be dairy. Most who cut out the dairy come back amazed at how quickly the break-outs subsided.
Constipation? With current diet trends, a safe bet might be a high protein, low carb diet. Fiber comes from plants. Limiting veggies and eliminating fruit, starches and grains really slows things down.
Bloating? A diet recall likely includes granola bars, protein powders and other processed stuff. Based on observation, many people don’t seem to tolerate the additives in these products well.
Greasy face? That’s often a high fat diet trying to escape – think meat, eggs, cheese, fried foods and even vegetable oils and fish.
Red face? A few glasses of wine each and every night.
A sudden jump in cholesterol? Recently this has eventually led to unearthing that they are adding coconut oil.. to everything.
High blood sugar paired with “but I barely eat anything?” Soon the discovery is often made that little or no food is eaten during the day and then a BIG meal is devoured late in the day.
Again, this isn’t sound science and these scenarios are not correct 100% of the time. This is simply observations based on years of hearing about what people eat. Yes we are all different and we can’t generalize, but it’s amazing that what we put into our bodies can consistently lead to the same results.
