Speaker 1 – fads come and go. And our next guest says that for National Nutrition Month, it’s time to start thinking and eating holistically. Dr. Erica Steele is with holistic family practice. And she joins us now. Hey, Dr. Steele. Good to see you again.
Speaker 2 – Hello, Cheryl, how are you?
Speaker 1 – I am doing fabulous. So a lot of people are on special diets. Sometimes it’s for dietary restrictions, other times because it’s a fad diet, maybe they want to do it to be healthier. Maybe they want to do it to lose weight. But let’s talk about this. Why do you think they are so popular?
Speaker 2 – I think fats are really popular because people Americans in general are always looking for that quick fix, right? And so, you know, they’ll follow an Instagram influencer, or they’ll YouTube something. And then they’re like, Okay, this sounds good. This resonates with me. So I’m going to jump on it and do it. And maybe they do it, well, maybe they don’t do it. Well, maybe they need it. Maybe they don’t need it. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t work, you can see the dilemma.
Speaker 1 -Alright, so what are some of the issues with fad diets that people can run into.
Speaker 2 – So a lot of people like they’ll they’ll just kind of pick one, there’s no science behind it. And as you know, and we’ve talked about before, like, I’m very science based, very individual, it’s all based off of lab work. And so people don’t have that data. So they’re just kind of randomly picking one that resonates with them intuitively, and then they may try it. And again, they may not be optimising it, they may not be doing it well, right. Or their body just may not not, you know, respond to it. And so they can actually create a lot of damage to the digestive system. And as you know, there’s so many fads that come and go, and sometimes they get rebranded and renamed and that sort of thing, because it’s all really based off of your macro ratios, right? And so macro meaning your macronutrients, your carbohydrates, your proteins and your fats. But if you’re not consistent with anything, the body doesn’t really get used to, it doesn’t adapt to it. So you actually can create a lot of damage to the digestive system that you want to be concerned about. And because the majority of the hormonal system, immune system, as well as neurological system is housed in your digestive tract, if you’re going on these fad diets over and over and over again and changing it up, you can really do a lot of damage to those systems as well.
Speaker 1 – Oh, yikes. And so it’s hard though, when you’re seeing influencers on Instagram eating this and doing try this, you’ll feel better, you’ll lose the bloat. So what can people do to avoid the diet fads and then having all these problems?
Speaker 2 – Again, it really boils down to data. So you know, looking at a person’s lab work, right and evaluating that. So if your lipid panel, let’s say your cholesterol, your triglycerides, your HDL LDL, are really high, right? That means that your liver is not processing fats. So you probably don’t want to go on a high fat diet, right. So high fat diets, unfortunately, don’t shoot the messenger. But keto is a high fat diet, Atkins is a high fat diet, even veganism and vegetarianism trend to go higher fat because the protein sources are also fat sources too. So I think it’s really about understanding nutrition and how how the nuts and bolts of nutrition work the carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and understanding those ratios. And I’m a big tracker, I’m all about tracking my food, mostly just because of data, we don’t have data, we don’t really know it doesn’t really exist, right not to give licence to go eat anything unhealthy. But, you know, the fact of the matter is, is we really need to look at the data and modulate and see what it works. There’s a place for intuition. As a holistic doctor, I’m all about the feeling and all about how it feels in my body. But if we don’t have the data to back it up, we don’t have balance. And so using the data along with intuition, and once your body kind of clicks in, and you know what it feels like, for me, I do really well on a high protein, mid range carb, low fat diet, and I can feel if my body if I’ve eaten maybe a little bit of fat, that’s a little bit more and so then I’ll overcompensate. And I’ll have some carbohydrate, but that’s after years of training myself and training my body. And also looking at my data.
Speaker 1 – I understand this because when I eat certain things, my stomach just rejects it. And so I know, okay, don’t eat like that. But that’s what you were for. I mean, you look at the lab work and the data and you also educate people and you have some nutrition programmes. Tell us about that real
Speaker 2 – quick. Yeah, we’re super excited. We have a holistic nutrition programme that’s actually coming out. And it’s a four week programme. So you don’t even necessarily need to, you know, use a provider like myself. This is a baseline programme that really teaches about all of the macros metabolic rate it teaches about, we talks about heart healthy, right? We talk about what’s healthy, what’s not healthy. We go through all the fads, we look at the ratios, and really empower people to really understand how this these things work, especially just in the world that we’re living in with all of the influencers in YouTube and Facebook groups and all this sort of stuff. I really find a calling to really educate people on The actual science behind nutrition and how it works
Speaker 1 – good to have you break it all down Dr Steele thank you so much as always
Speaker 2 – awesome thanks for having me Cheryl
What do you think?