More Spuds Please!

Rabbit looks happy on a Plant-based Diet!

I’ve been doing this for years, no … decades, but the more I delve into the world of diet & weight loss, the more I think I’m just following Alice into some surreal place of delusion & horror. Pick any dietary regimen you like, say the ketogenic diets for our purposes here, and then do an internet search for something like the “benefits of keto diet”. That brings up about 6.9 million hits. Looking for the “dangers of keto diet” only brings back 353 thousand, or about 5% of the first lookup’s total. Now try something that most would think contrary to keto: search for the “benefits of plant based diet”. That kicks back 15.6 million results. Doing the opposite: “dangers of plant based diet” yields a list of 784 thousand items. Again about 5% against. I know, I know, I could have used an alternative word to “danger” but the point is that there is huge support for just about any semi-reasonable dietary philosophy out there. And a very similar push-back ratio to both, quiet different, programs.

Just for fun: “plant based vs keto diet” provided 3.5 million results, with most on the first couple of pages favouring the plant based diet.

Let try one more. A couple of searches on the benefits of fasting vs the dangers of fasting produced 463 million on the positive side, with 1.7 million on the danger side. Only 0.4% were negative.

Now this is awfully loose data so we can’t call it science, but it does suggest some questions …

• Why is fasting, with that massive 463 million hits, that much more interesting to people?
• And perhaps most importantly, is fasting better than the other diets because of that high interest AND that low negative response rate?

Now I’m not making my dietary decisions on these seagull-in-the-sky views of unexplored data but I think it’s tough to argue that there isn’t just a little lack of clarity out there. There’s a lot. Though regardless of the program, there seems to be a lot of optimism among supporters that it’s the right one. Could there be more than one right one?

Despite the enjoyment I get from reading about nutrition, diet & weight loss, sometimes, I think I’d rather just be thin & get on with my life! I have this horrible, teeth-grinding suspicion that the words of my grandmother will ring true one day & that I’ll then be preaching that old parable … everything in moderation! Though likely with one significant difference … the foods in my fridge & cupboards are not the same as were in hers back then.

And now I’m wondering why plant-based positives had almost two & a half times the number of keto!!! Oh Boy, here we go again! 🙂