Frequently Asked Diet Questions

What's the number one dietary myth?
The biggest dietary fallacy is the notion of a "healthy, balanced diet." There is no such thing. The only "healthy" diet for you is one that is compatible with your metabolic type.

Why do diets fail? In other words, why do so many people find it impossible to lose weight and keep it off?
Most weight loss approaches only address the symptoms of obesity, not the underlying cause of obesity. The underlying cause of obesity is metabolic imbalance caused by peoples' failure to meet their individualized, genetically-based nutritional requirements.

Why is obesity a runaway epidemic in the United States? Why are people in Europe and other regions of the world far more fit and trim?
The robust health and fitness often seen in people in other cultures has a great deal to do with the fact that they adhere to "native" or "ancestral" diets, i.e., they eat specific foods and food combinations that their systems are genetically designed to handle.

What's wrong with high protein diets? Or high carbohydrate diets? I know people who have succeeded with both these approaches.
There's nothing wrong with these dietary approaches. They can and do work for some people. The problem is, standardized or "one-size-fits-all" diets only work by chance -- for those people who happen to have metabolisms well suited to these approaches.

I tried a high protein diet and it worked great for a while; I lost weight and felt energized. But now it's not working anymore. I feel fatigued and the weight is coming back.
Peoples' dietary needs are not only infinitely variable; they can also shift, for any number of reasons. Metabolic typing is revolutionary because it allows people to tailor a diet to their own highly specific needs, and to modify their diets if their metabolism shifts.

Why do I feel tired all the time, even though I eat a very healthy, balanced diet, exercise regularly, and get plenty of sleep?
You can be eating all the highest quality foods and taking good care of yourself, but if you're not eating according to your metabolic type, you won't be able to efficiently convert food into energy; you will store it as fat instead.

Why have Americans gotten so much fatter in recent years, even though we're consuming much less fat?
Contrary to popular wisdom, fat is not what makes people fat. What makes people fat is their inability to eat the right proteins, carbohydrates and fat in a ratio that is appropriate to their metabolic type.

The high protein, high fat diets are all the rage now, but they seem dangerous to me.
In some places in the world, there are people who have thrived for centuries on diets very high in proteins and fat. Their metabolisms have evolved in accordance with their habitats. For instance, in traditional Eskimo cultures, there is virtually no heart disease or cancer, even though these people consume extraordinarily large amounts of meat and fat.

Don't I have to be very careful about how much cholesterol I consume?
No. Unlike what you've been taught to believe, the build-up of unhealthy cholesterol is not a function of how much cholesterol-rich food you consume. Rather, it's the result of disordered cholesterol metabolism, which is caused by eating a diet inappropriate for your metabolic type.

Is it true that "one man's meat is another's poison?"
Yes, it's literally true. The very same diet that can cause chronic illness in some people can actually prevent and reverse the identical health disorders in other people. For example, people who come from cold, harsh, northern climates tend to need high-protein, high-fat diets in order to sustain themselves. On the other hand, people from tropical or equatorial regions tend to thrive on much lighter foods, i.e., diets much lower in protein and fat, and higher in carbohydrates.

Why is there so much variation in peoples' dietary needs?
People have different metabolic and dietary needs as a result of evolution and adaptation. Over a period of many years, our ancestors developed specific dietary needs in response to specific aspects of their environment -- climate, vegetation, food supply, etc.

Why do we need metabolic typing to identify what our needs are?
One reason is that our society has become a "genetic melting pot." Before the modern age of mass transportation, when societies were far more isolated and homogenous, people just automatically followed their "ancestral diets." The food they had available was the very food that was healthiest for them. But today, due to industrialization, our food choices are endless. And due to so much intermarriage and intermingling of people from so many different cultures, many of us have genetic influences from many directions, and no clear cut or readily identifiable "ancestral diet."

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