Right before I got diagnosed with colon cancer, I wrote a book on our guts, called Tending Your Internal Garden. In it, I found some pretty exciting things (like you have thousands of unique species living inside you right now).
But science marches on, and now we have research that shows why diet books and diet experts don't agree. They are all right, and they are all wrong.
Why? Because you're unique.
No, seriously. This isn't a "feel good" moment.
This is an "Oops, that means they don't know" moment.
Yep. All the diet experts out there cannot tell you what the best diet is for you because you have a unique ecosystem. Your responses to food are your own. You literally can make yourself sick eating like they tell you to if you ignore yourself. Just because it worked for "buns of steel" diet-guru-of-the-week does not mean it will work for you.
Here's the TED video detailing how they found this out, with some suggestions about tracking your own blood sugar response (not something most people are going to do).
But the question on my mind is this: how long until they figure out that all of our drug reactions are unique as well? Will that be an Aha! moment for modern medicine, the moment we realize that the framework of "managing patients" and "following algorithms" is just an icing on what is guesswork based on nothing? Will we start the movement toward individualized care as being not only the only sane model, but the only scientific one as well? I can dream.
But science marches on, and now we have research that shows why diet books and diet experts don't agree. They are all right, and they are all wrong.
Why? Because you're unique.
No, seriously. This isn't a "feel good" moment.
This is an "Oops, that means they don't know" moment.
Yep. All the diet experts out there cannot tell you what the best diet is for you because you have a unique ecosystem. Your responses to food are your own. You literally can make yourself sick eating like they tell you to if you ignore yourself. Just because it worked for "buns of steel" diet-guru-of-the-week does not mean it will work for you.
Here's the TED video detailing how they found this out, with some suggestions about tracking your own blood sugar response (not something most people are going to do).
But the question on my mind is this: how long until they figure out that all of our drug reactions are unique as well? Will that be an Aha! moment for modern medicine, the moment we realize that the framework of "managing patients" and "following algorithms" is just an icing on what is guesswork based on nothing? Will we start the movement toward individualized care as being not only the only sane model, but the only scientific one as well? I can dream.
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