The Baby Boomer Diet

Baby Boomers have lost their spiritual connection to the food they eat. How do we find a balance between eating healthy and eating happy?

Food is truly one of the great and enduring pleasures of life. Many of our earliest childhood memories are tied to the evocative smells, colors, and tastes of our favorite foods; and there are few things more satisfying than a thoughtfully prepared meal shared with the people we love.

Ironically, before food was readily available, it actually had greater intrinsic value. Many backbreaking hours were spent planting, harvesting, storing, and preparing it. Because it came from the sweat of our own labor, food was very precious to us and connected us in an intimate way with the earth. Mealtimes were bonding occasions when the extended family got together, often offering a prayer of thanks for the bountiful food they had been given and asking that it nourish and strengthen them.

Even in the early 20th century, food was still treated in this respectful way. The mass production of food and the advent of the refrigerator in the 1920s and ’30s were milestones in human evolution (not unlike the discovery of fire or the invention of the telephone). Refrigeration transformed how, when, and what we ate. Before that time, food was preserved by cooling it with snow and ice or by fermenting, pickling, dehydrating, salting, smoking, or canning.

Food often had the power to bind communities or countries together in times of need. During World War II, people planted “Victory Gardens” in their backyards and on rooftops. These vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens helped reduce the pressure on the food supply brought on by the war effort. After the war was over, many people continued this practice, growing what we might now call “organic” produce. The harvesting of crops in the fall and the preserving of produce for the winter months were often a community effort. It was the season when neighbors and families often gathered together for canning or pickling and preserving foods in large mason jars for the winter. As a Baby Boomer, you might remember your own mother or grandmother devoting an entire day of the week just to baking loaves of bread and pies or putting up casseroles.

Today, food can play many different roles in our lives. We eat what we want, when we want it. Food makes us feel good and satisfies our cravings. It appeases and soothes us in times of stress. Unfortunately, many of the things we eat to satisfy these urgent hungers and emotional voids are low-vibrational foods that are stripped of their nutrients and depleted of their life force.

Accordingly, food is no longer appreciated as a source of sustenance. More attention and money are invested in the marketing, packaging, and distribution of food than in its nutritional value. Foods are mass-produced and prepared with an emphasis on how they taste, not on how they nourish. It would be unthinkable to our ancestors that today’s foods—so easily found in the supermarket—contain hundreds of harmful ingredients and chemicals, and give us so little energy to live.

The busy, fun-loving lifestyle of the typical Boomer led to an entirely new industry in America: fast food. It seemed like a great idea at the time—to be able to eat exactly what we wanted, cheaply, and on the go. But we are paying a heavy price for this self-indulgence—our children and grandchildren even more so. Do we ever stop to think about the message we convey to them when we take them to fast-food restaurants?

We are telling them that food is merely a means of quick gratification, rather than a way to fortify and sustain us in the days and years ahead. We have taken food for granted, and this thankless attitude is now reflected back to us in the mirror in our appearance and in our behavior. We are not happy, healthy people.

At Body Ecology, we, like our ancestors, view food as energy and fuel for the body. We know that whole, pure foods vibrate with a positive, spiritual life force. These high-vibrational foods are the ones that create the greatest chi—that optimal youthful energy we so desire. And they can actually restore our constitutional prenatal jing. The healthier we are, the more we will vibrate the kind of energy that makes us—and those around us—feel good.

In Part IV, you will be introduced to the foods that can prevent and reverse aging. These foods provide you with the quality of nutrients you need to stay young, but what about quantity? Does how much you eat matter? If you eat too much or too little, will that affect how well you age?

Most Americans eat far too much—about 12 percent more calories per day than they did in the mid-1980s. With many fast-food restaurants promoting “supersize” options, and most sit-down restaurants offering excessively large portions, it can be challenging to eat moderately today. And even when restaurants do adopt a “smaller-servings strategy,” as Ruby Tuesday tried to do a few years back by trimming portion sizes and printing nutritional information on the menu, consumers balk at the change. This is because we’ve become accustomed to a “Bigger is better” mentality that associates food value with size. The more you get—we think—the more you get.¹

At Body Ecology, we, like our ancestors, view food as energy and fuel for the body. We know that whole, pure foods vibrate with a positive, spiritual life force.

Most of us are mindful that we should be limiting the calories we consume each day to a certain quantity, and most weight-loss diets involve some kind of calorie restriction.

But many people become quickly frustrated or even obsessed with having to curb what they eat all the time. They become shackled to their bathroom scales in a never-ending cycle of one step forward, two steps back. But research has clearly shown that there is a connection between longevity and limiting the number of calories you consume in a day. In fact, of all the research to date on aging and diet, the most promising option for extending longevity is calorie restriction.

The effectiveness of calorie restriction as a weight-loss option was discovered more than 70 years ago. It means a restricted diet that involves the reduction of food consumption by a significant amount—in fact, by as much as 30 to 40 percent compared with what is considered normal for that species.

In a Washington University (St. Louis) study over a three-year period, participants who reduced their calories by 66 percent scored vastly better on all major risk factors for heart disease, including total cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood pressure. All three factors tend to increase with age. Other findings were lower markers for inflammation, which causes disease and aging, and lower body fat. This could mean a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, with associated obesity.²

Some researchers actually believe that calorie restriction is a “biological stressor,” something that elicits a defensive reaction in our cells that boosts our chances of survival. As a mild stressor, calorie restriction triggers the longevity genes into action. Once these genes are “switched on,” there is an orchestrated shift in our metabolism, including “improved DNA stability, increased repair of DNA damage, improved immune function, prolonged cell survival, and enhanced energy production.”³ These “longevity genes” have been around for as long as we have, and have helped us during times of drought or famine or other kinds of environmental stress.

Intermittent Fasting as an Alternative to Calorie Restriction

Intermittent fasting has been proposed as an alternative to calorie restriction, and some people find it easier to implement than continual calorie restriction. The way intermittent fasting typically works is that you fast every other day. You can eat as much as you’d like on the days you eat, but eat nothing on your fasting days. Studies, mostly on mice, show that intermittent fasting had results similar to calorie restriction, including slowing the progression of Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease; and increasing insulin sensitivity and resistance to stress.ⁱ

The Center for Conservative Therapy (CTC) in California specializes in all-water fasting programs that range from 5 to 40 days. These fasting programs have been found effective in the treatment of hypertension. They have also proven useful in cases of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other problems such as arthritis, because they clean the arteries and increase circulation to the joints. But even with these positive results, the CTC recommends fasts of shorter duration and encourages participants to gradually reintroduce food back into their diets after fasting, as this reinforces good nutritional habits. Fasting is not recommended for people with low body mass, those in the end stage of cancer, pregnant women (as it shuts down their milk supply), or people with AIDS.ⁱⁱ

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ⁱJule Klotter, “Fasting & Neurodegenerative Disease,” Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, November 2003: 1.

ⁱⁱAlan Goldhamer, D.C., “Benefits of Fasting,” Well Being Journal, September/October 2005, http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/benefit.htm (accessed October 19, 2009).

Recently, the discovery of a family of enzymes called sirtuins (sir-two-ins) has provided us with another piece of this complex puzzle. Sirtuins appear to play a major role in the lifeextending effects of calorie restriction. Found in organisms ranging from baker’s yeast to roundworms to humans, they function as cellular “guardian angels” that come to our aid when called upon. They protect cells and enhance their survival.

Medical research is under way to develop medications that modulate the activity of sirtuin enzymes; and these would be used to treat certain conditions such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease.⁴ Most of the benefits of calorie restriction are likely related to its influence on blood sugar and insulin. Eating fewer calories each day lowers blood sugar and insulin. Excess insulin depletes your body of essential anti-aging hormones and suppresses your immune system. Normalizing blood sugar and insulin is crucial if you expect to reach your maximum life span. Both, when elevated, lead to acidity and mineral loss, not only causing premature aging, but also making us more prone to diseases such as diabetes, yeast infections, viruses, and cancer.

Eating fewer calories also lowers oxidative stress. We don’t “rust” as fast (see the free-radical theory in Chapter 3).

If done properly, calorie restriction not only allows us to live longer but also better. Most neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are forestalled, and restriction can actually modify our cellular defenses. There is, indeed, an abundance of recent evidence that supports the efficacy of calorie restriction … so is it recommended on the Baby Boomer Diet?

There is some evidence that we humans are predisposed to calorie restriction, and even periods of fasting, because our early ancestors were forced to go without food for extended periods of time. This was because they may have had plenty of food available at one time of year and a scarcity at others. But this was hardly an ideal state of affairs. Does it serve our needs in this day and age? To starve one day and binge the next is today’s dictionary definition of an eating disorder! At Body Ecology we believe that, unlike our early ancestors, modern people have unique stressors that make our bodies ill equipped for lengthy periods of restriction.

Although it is true that calorie restriction positively affects biomarkers of longevity, it is unlikely that most people would be willing or able to adopt a severe calorie-restriction diet. That’s why many health professionals are eager to find a “therapeutic intervention” that will produce the same health and longevity effects of calorie restriction without compromising reasonable food intake. Let’s look at some of the drawbacks to severe calorie restriction, and how Body Ecology has discovered that optimal therapeutic intervention researchers have been searching for.

Restricting, fasting, and weight-loss dieting all stem from a place of shortage and self-denial. Chapter 2 talked about how many of us perceive our lives in terms of what we don’t have instead of in terms of what we do. Anything that comes from a place of lack has an energy-lowering impact on mind, body, and spirit, making us overcompensate in self-destructive ways.

Long before the Washington University study mentioned in the previous section, a study conducted in the 1950s took 36 healthy, psychologically normal men and restricted their caloric intake by 50 percent for six months. (Keep in mind that this is a smaller cut in calories than the two-thirds reduction used in the calorie-restriction studies on rodents.)

The University of Minnesota study followed the men for three months of normal eating and six months of eating a calorie-restricted diet. Participants lost approximately 25 percent of their former weight. They were then followed for another three months while they resumed their normal caloric intake.

During the six months of “semi-starvation,” as it was called, the men became preoccupied with food—thinking, talking, and dreaming about it; and playing with what was on their plate. They even smuggled food out of their rooms so they could take their time eating on their own after group meals. Coffee and tea consumption increased dramatically, and many of the men admitted to episodes of binge eating, followed by extreme guilt.

Once their normal diets were resumed, it took time for the men to get back to where they had been before the study. Some of them reported a continuous preoccupation with food, including binging and other behaviors associated with eating disorders.⁵

Here we are back to the emotional side of eating again. We can see how when this activity comes from a place of deprivation or unfulfilled cravings, it can have a detrimental effect on how we look at food, and even alter our behavior and mood. As early as 1995, a Johns Hopkins study reported that food restriction was the number one cause of depression and was an unsafe way to lose weight.⁶

Many of us define ourselves by our chronological age. We become obsessed with numbers, and we may lie about how old we are. Calories are numbers as well, and we may begin to define our health and our eating habits based on what these figures are saying to us. If you are a calorie counter, do you feel as if your day was good or bad depending on how many calories you consumed? That’s no way to live!

A calorie (the amount of heat it takes to raise the temperature of water) is the measure of energy that scientists created as a guideline for determining how much to eat. But counting calories (energy) doesn’t tell you how much fuel actually reaches your cells to produce cellular energy.

In fact, you could be eating a greater amount of food and still be thin, as long as the foods you’re eating are nutritious and well digested. By the same token, you could lower your calorie intake, but if you aren’t eating nourishing foods, you could be malnourished.

An excellent example of this is the people of Okinawa, an archipelago southwest of the main island of Japan. Okinawans appear to be the largest and healthiest population of centenarians on Earth. They suffer significantly fewer heart attacks and have an 80 percent lower incidence of breast and prostate cancer. Their rate of diabetes is also lower, and they have far fewer cases of ovarian and colon cancer.

What is their secret? A calorically low, nutrient-dense diet. Okinawans eat fewer calories, but they also eat more food! They consume many vegetables, some of the least calorically dense foods you can eat. Fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins are also calorically low. By contrast, Okinawans avoid caloricdense foods, such as fatty proteins, oils, and sugars.⁷

The quality of what you eat, the way it is prepared and combined with other foods, and the critical manner in which you digest and assimilate it determine the quantity of nutrients that nourish your cells. A calorie is not a true measure of nourishment!

By now, most of us Baby Boomers are not healthy enough for extreme calorie reduction or fasting. Poor digestion, infections, toxins, and a high-stress lifestyle have made us too weak to bounce back from periods of food deprivation. Although Body Ecology promotes the idea that eating smaller portions is best (see Chapter 13: The 80/20 Principle), most people are so nutritionally depleted at the cellular level that they would need to rebuild their bodies first if they tried to practice true calorie restriction.

For example, the adrenals and thyroid, very small organs responsible for producing the energy in your body, have to be fed and nourished well. Fasting and calorie restriction can have a weakening effect on them. As you get older, you’re already experiencing loss of muscle, lean body weight, and bone density, which fasting and calorie restriction can further compromise.

In addition, studies show that people who repeatedly engage in crash diets or yo-yo dieting also radically alter their metabolism, which hinders rather than helps weight loss. This is because over time their bodies become very efficient at conserving calories and storing them as fat. Frequent fluctuations in weight also increase the risk of hypertension and endometrial cancer, and can lead to a preponderance of body fat in the upper body.⁸

Many people have come to the conclusion that calorierestriction diets don’t work, simply because they are too difficult to maintain over the long term. Dieting also has psychological consequences; and people will often become weak, irritable, and even depressed from chronic food deprivation. In their attempt to restrict calories, some will end up feeling emotionally and socially starved as well, which can create an entirely different category of health issues.

In her excellent book The Mood Cure, Julia Ross warns: “The short-term nutrient losses sustained in a diet can easily add up to long-term mood deficits. Dieting, fasting, restricting—all have indelible effects on your brain. There is no such thing as a ‘successful’ low-calorie diet: dieting starves and literally shrinks your brain.” Besides throwing off your blood sugar, restricting food intake also inhibits serotonin and thyroid hormones, causing depression.⁹

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if we could reverse the aging process simply by eating the right foods in the right way?

At Body Ecology we view the theory of calorie counting as unnecessary, unsound, and passé. Clearly the whole idea of measuring our daily intake of food is flawed. Let’s say you want to limit your calories to 1,000 per day, so you consume one hamburger, one doughnut, and one slice of turkey. Is that enough? You’re reaching your maximum calorie intake, but you haven’t come close to covering all the nutritional bases.

Instead of calorie counting, it’s far more important for you to evaluate the potential a food has to support your daily physical and mental needs. You must choose foods with the greatest vitality and potential for creating and sustaining life. And now, with your new goal to rejuvenate and reclaim the vitality of your youth, a new way of assigning value to your food choices has never been more critical.

It is better to focus instead on eating smaller amounts of very high-quality foods that are nourishing and that leave you satisfied and fulfilled. This is especially important so that your adrenals and thyroid are fed well, because they must provide you with a constant supply of energy to fuel you throughout the day. Remember, one of the goals of the Baby Boomer Diet is to restore your constitutional energy.

When done correctly—the Body Ecology Way—decreasing your calories is not starvation, but simply a lowering of food intake, while at the same time optimizing nutrition. Like the Okinawan diet, Body Ecology offers you a calorically low yet nutrient-dense eating plan—with food choices that are more familiar and readily available to us here in the West.

Body Ecology foods are so satisfying, rich, and nourishing that you simply won’t want or need as much. While you may eat less, the foods you do eat, such as fermented vegetables, are highly nourishing to every cell in your body. This means that they are properly digested; assimilated; and distributed to cells that remain healthy, active, clean, and pure. In fact, the friendly bacteria in these foods even communicate with each other to ensure they are creating the specific nutrients that your body needs.

As you focus on building your inner ecology, you may find that you reconnect with nature—a key goal of the Body Ecology system of health and healing. You may discover that you become aware of a rhythm to your physical self, just as there is a rhythm in nature. Getting to know your body’s signals allows you to tap into your own optimal energy—and align it with the energy that exists in nature. Over time, you will find that you are, in essence, following the principles of calorie restriction because you will need less food to meet your nutritional needs. Instead of feeling deprived, you will be pleasantly surprised to feel satisfied—even enjoying a light feeling you may have been missing from your life.

As you follow the Body Ecology Way, you may find that you no longer struggle to determine whether your hunger is emotional or physical, because the foods nourish you on all levels. The more you learn to separate emotional from physical hunger—and the more you learn how to nourish your mind, body, and spirit—the less you’ll fall back on your former cravings. You’ll discover that what you want to eat gradually changes. In fact, your taste buds begin to change. You’ll find that you can actually taste and savor foods properly when they are not masked by sugar, bad oils, and lackluster ingredients.

We can move from counting calories and counting years on the planet to feeling grounded in our health and well-being.

As you will discover in the next chapter, what is most revolutionary about the Body Ecology approach is the way it lays down a “unified theory” of health that no other diet attempts to do. It does so because it embraces the true secret to health and longevity that lies hidden deep within us—a miraculous internal ecosystem that mimics the world around us.

From the Physician’s Desk

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“To be maximally healthy, happy, and functional, you need to find a balance. You need to honor your own individuality.”

The problem I see with many strict calorie-restriction programs is that they are used solely to lose weight. This is an unhealthy approach, because many people who practice calorie restriction aren’t exercising. They’re not using their hearts, lungs, and muscles actively, so they become targets for tissue breakdown.

Yes, you can certainly lose fat with calorie restriction, but you can also lose strength, aerobic capacity, muscle, endurance, and other important indicators of health. And many people who practice calorie restriction also don’t eat properly. So they may be eating less, but what they are eating is not optimally nutritious. It’s all a question of balance.

It’s very true that the biomarkers of aging decrease with calorie restriction. This is because when you stop eating, sirtuins (enzymes connected with genes that affect cellular metabolism) will begin to down-regulate (that is, decrease the activity of ) the genes that promote inflammation. Calorie restriction lowers from 153 to 144 the number of genes that have been activated by eating too much of the wrong food.

However, if you combine intelligent exercise with moderate restriction of calories, along with optimal nutrition, you will probably come out with biomarkers that are better than those you might get if practicing calorie restriction alone. To be maximally healthy, happy, and functional, you need to find a balance. You need to honor your own individuality.

If your latest medical exam shows elevated LDL (bad cholesterol), triglycerides, blood sugar, and insulin, along with decreased levels of HDL (good cholesterol), this is an indication that your genes are in storage mode, because your body is perceiving itself as being stressed. Your ratios are off, and the game has become one of “storing for the fight for survival that is coming.”

Exercise builds skeletal muscle, and this is integral to health, especially as we age. Skeletal muscle is very metabolically active. When we have good muscle mass, the sugar we eat goes directly into the muscles to be used for fuel, instead of turning into fat. In addition, when we exercise, enzymes that break down fat for fuel are released from our muscles into the blood. Lean muscle mass also helps protect us from inflammation and keeps our energy levels high. We were meant to have strong muscles as humans, and to be able to use them … simply a healthier way to live.

The traditional body mass index that many people use as their guide can be misleading. A person could be obese because he has too much fat relative to his muscle. But because he is tall and slim, he might not know it and think he’s safe. That’s why bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) is a much more accurate measurement of body composition and health.

BIA simply involves placing a pad and a wire on your forearm and ankle for a few seconds to measure tissue resistance, which is then picked up as an electrical signal (you can now also get a basic BIA device in bathroom scales). From this the BIA extrapolates interesting information related to lean body mass (which includes bones, organs, and muscles; and is ideally a higher number), as well as fat mass (which should be a lower number). It also measures total body water, along with intra-and extracellular water. Whether you’re training for a marathon or just starting on the Body Ecology program, measuring the lean mass/fat ratio and the ratios of hydration allows you to see how diet and lifestyle changes are affecting your body composition, which is far more important than monitoring weight loss.

Why is this so important to Baby Boomers? Because as we age, we confront a condition called sarcopenia—the degenerative loss of skeletal muscle mass. From the Greek, meaning “poverty of flesh,” sarcopenia is most common among the elderly, but it can be true of anyone with too much body fat and not enough lean muscle mass. Such a person is effectively “malnourished.” As we age, most of our hormone levels decrease. We have lower growth hormone, testosterone, DHEAS, and melatonin. Poor sleep, malnutrition, and immune imbalances create a chronic lowgrade systemic inflammation that causes chronic increase in cortisol. Increased cortisol further weakens immunity, lowers thyroid function, and breaks down skeletal muscle to raise blood sugar, which increases insulin and promotes further fat storage, which then completes the vicious cycle by promoting more inflammation! Sadly, if we don’t maintain enough skeletal muscle, sugar is very easily converted into fat.

A study from the UCLA School of Medicine showed that 28 out of 30 premenopausal women who were at an increased risk of breast cancer had “sarcopenic obesity,” or the “too much fat, not enough muscle” syndrome. It is interesting that these women had a normal body mass index, which means they did not appear overweight based on their height-to-weight ratio. So how one looks or what one weighs may not be as important as body composition. Remember, fat leads to inflammation, which in turn leads to all kinds of problems, including cancer.ⁱ

In the elderly it has been shown that sarcopenia can be reversed by supplementing the diet with the nine essential amino acids: isoleucine, leucine, valine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, trytophan, and histidine. Dr. Robert Wolf and his team at the University of Texas–Galveston found that adding essential amino acids to the diet was needed to rebuild protein and muscle and help restore normal function.ⁱⁱ

In the past, there were two topics of conversation we were told to avoid in polite conversation—religion and politics. Now we can add a third—diet—because it generates so much heated controversy today, and there are so many options. People who are focused and passionate can derive benefits from many different diet programs … for a period of time. But the question is: “How long will it last?”

What is most important is to start with a solid foundation, not a quick-fix weight-loss program. Body Ecology is a good foundational starting point for most people. I have often told patients that they are an “experiment of one.” Be honest with yourself, and let your long-term results be your guide.

— Leonard Smith, M.D.

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ⁱD. Heber, S. Ingles, J. M. Ashley, M. H. Maxwell, R. F. Lyons, and R. M. Elashoff, “Clinical detection of sarcopenic obesity by bioelectrical impedance analysis,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 64 (1996): 472S–477S.

ⁱⁱE. Volpi, H. Kobayashi, M. Sheffield-Moore, B. Mittendorfer, and R. R. Wolfe, “Essential amino acids are primarily responsible for the amino acid stimulation of muscle protein anabolism in healthy elderly adults,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 78 (2003): 250–258.