Your Opinions on the 80/10/10 diet

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Your Opinions on the 80/10/10 diet

Postby Symphonyofdreams » Wed Jun 17, 2009 11:37 pm

Checking what your guys opinions on the diet? IT's very similar to this diet, but at the same time very different. Pretty much the same macro ratios except a little lower protein levels and also 100 percent vegan. obviously the differences is that starches are the devil and fruit is where it's at. Many people following the diet started on the mcdougall or similar diets and then moved on to that diet and claim they feel much better
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Postby Golden Ghost » Thu Jun 18, 2009 5:57 am

Why follow a diet? I know plant foods are the way to go so that is what I eat. Some days, weeks or months I eat more fruit, carbs, fat or whatever but then the next day, week or month I eat less. Maybe watch your fruit or fat a little.
Follow this and you will be 90% healthier than most.
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Postby TerriT » Thu Jun 18, 2009 6:27 am

You might find it useful to read Dr McDougall's thoughts on grains and starches:

http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2008nl/jan/grains.htm

People Are Obligate Starch-Eaters
For the past 35 years I have been teaching a “starch-based diet” as the fundamental means to health and healing. This is different from a “vegan diet,” which could be at its worst, colas and potato chips; and different from a “plant-food-based diet,” which could focus on low-calorie broccoli and apples, or high-calorie nuts and avocados. Most people—lay and professional—fail to grasp this simple lifesaving premise: people are starch-eaters. And they suffer horribly from this unawareness.

The most important support for my conclusion that we are starch-eaters is based on an observation that you can easily validate for yourself: All large populations of trim, healthy people, throughout written human history, have obtained the bulk of their calories from starch. Examples of thriving people include, Japanese and Chinese in Asia eating sweet potatoes, buckwheat, and/or rice, Incas in South America eating potatoes, Mayans and Aztecs in Central America eating corn, and Egyptians in the Middle East eating wheat.
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The 811rv people seem to eat crates of fruit...

Postby veggiecat » Thu Jun 18, 2009 7:26 am

it's much easier to stay full on grains & veg than fruit & greens.
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Postby MilesA » Thu Jun 18, 2009 7:44 am

We need a high proportion of carbs in the diet. At least they agree on that. Your hunger drive is most easily satisfied with carbs.

McDougall says that fruit in moderate amounts is healthy, but in excess it will raise triglycerides. Also, it is easy to overeat on fruit, since it is not so filling as starches and it is digested more quickly than starches.

McDougall demonstrates that a starch-based diet is both healthy and economical by pointing to the large populations that have been sustained with this type of diet throughout history.

If someone reports they "feel" better on one diet than another, it is difficult to know exactly why. Do they just like the food more? Is it more acceptable to their family and friends? Were they not getting enough nutrients with their previous food choices? Or maybe it's just the placebo effect?
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My take...

Postby f1jim » Thu Jun 18, 2009 8:59 am

A lot of the people moving from McDougall to this diet (has to be a pretty small group) are those that will move from any diet to another. The world has no shortages of those moving from diet to diet and for a brief moment in time feel better. I guess you have to believe in the tenants of this diet and if you do enough reading and research you will be convinced. But only if that is the source of doubt. We should all have a bit of knowledge about the choices of food we choose to eat. Never follow anyone blindly, including Dr. McDougall. From what little I've seen of this other diet the person promoting it is sorely lacking in nutritional knowledge. Basing your diet around some component that is only available a small part of the year doesn't seem to be a terribly natural way to eat. "Fruititarianism" sounds about a fadish as anything I have seen. If it looks like the answer for you from what you had discovered I wish you luck on it. Not sure what kind of reassurance you are expecting from McDougallers. If we thought it was nutritional nirvana we would be over there, not here.
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Where is the proof

Postby SactoBob » Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:10 am

As Jeff often points out, anybody can say anything. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.

The claims of Dr. McDougall, Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. Ornish, Jeff Novick, etc. are backed up by solid studies of populations, clinical results, and scientific experiments. It is not Jeff's job or anybody else's to shoot down every fad diet out there.

I tried this way because of the scientific evidence. My experience shows me that this way of eating HAS to be the right way. When everything points in the same good directions, it can't be an accident.
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Postby erin » Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:16 am

i read the book both out of curiousity and because i love fruit. it was marketed toward veg athletes as an ideal way to eat for energy and endurance but i just can't imagine going for a run with 10 bananas in my stomach :/.
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Postby Symphonyofdreams » Thu Jun 18, 2009 10:24 am

I don't plan to go on this diet for many reasons, i was on it for 20 days 9 months ago and it was far to expensive and i was starving all the time even when i was eatting enough calories. I just bring it up becasue there's alot of interesting points he brings up and it sounds logical
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Postby MilesA » Thu Jun 18, 2009 10:56 am

Symphonyofdreams --

I have seen a lot of posts from you over the past couple months, and, from what I can tell, you have been eating the SAD for awhile, though you were eating veg*n before. Now, you seem to be trying to find the optimal diet because you want to get off the SAD.

Some of the recent veg*n diets are based on a lot of speculation about what hunter-gathers ate, or what paleolithic people ate, or hominids ate in the distant past. The assumption being that is the healthiest diet for us today. We don't really know for sure what they ate. The short answer is they probably ate whatever they could find. Most of them probably lived a very short life, as well.

One of the reasons humans have been so successful in evolutionary terms is that we are flexible and can survive on a wide range of foods. We evolved on the tropical savanna, but we can live successfully near the Arctic Circle, because we know how to adapt.

One of the good things about diets like the McDougall plan is that it is based on observations of large populations of real people in recent history. We don't have to speculate. We know what has worked well for these people. Is it the absolute best possible diet? Who knows, but it's at least one of the best diets and has been shown to be successful.

Nowadays, humans don't live on the savanna in small bands of hunter-gatherers. We don't live the life of primitive agriculturists. We don't live the life of Adam and Eve. We live a modern life and we have to ask ourselves what has proven to be a healthful diet for the way we live today.

So, why not give a diet like the McDougall Plan a fair trial? It's got to be better than the SAD! You can be well-nourished. It's very economical. You can get everything you need at the supermarket. You hardly have to cook unless you really want to. It's even pretty flexible and no great hardship to stay within the allowed food groups.

Above all, it's a healthy way to live that can help you avoid many of the degenerative diseases of modern life.
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811rv

Postby vgpedlr » Thu Jun 18, 2009 12:06 pm

I've been hoping there would be a thread on this topic as I read the book a while back and found it challenging and very interesting. A few thoughts:

1. The one thing I disagree about with McD is the fruit issue. I find the fiber and water content of fresh fruit very filling and can't imagine how one could overeat fruit. I also like the nutritional density of fruit compared to starch, so I eat a lot, particularly around workouts.

2. I know some very fast bike racers who eat a similar diet. They, literally, eat crates of fruit. They buy it wholesale.

3. Dr. Graham centers a lot of his argument around the unnaturalness of cooking, and how that detrimentally alters food. I am not convinced by his science, but the logic fascinates me: all animals eat a raw diet straight from nature, only humans set fire to their food, and that is weird. Primates are frugivores, homo sapiens are primates, therefore aren't we frugivores as well? Is it the abundance of amylase alone in our saliva that changes the game?

I am satisfied with the results and simplicity of McD's program, but I am also always interested in other viewpoints, and I am always watching for more info on this. In the end, I use the 80-10-10 book for its wonderful recipes for salads with blended fruit dressings, or blended "soups". They're really good, especially now in summer with all the fresh fruit.

Fruit AND Veg Powered!
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Fruits and veggies....

Postby f1jim » Thu Jun 18, 2009 12:21 pm

I don't think Dr. McDougall would argue against a diet with a substantial part of the calories coming from fruits. But remember, Fruits are a seasonal thing. A potato is in the ground growing all year and grains can be harvested and stored easily. Think, if you lived in the wild, could you survive on a fruit diet?

As far as fire, heat has proven to not significantly impact the nutritional value of most things. It has proven itself, over the course of time, to have value in battling bugs, germs, bacteria that could be lethal to our population. I am sure this lesson was learned the hard way over time.

The sugar in fruit provides near instant energy, but the vast number of endurance athletes I have read about have chosen to "carbo load" to provide a solid, steady, source of energy.

Yes,it is a different take on nutrition, and there is no shortage of people with different takes on it. Just ask yourself if you could survive and thrive on a diet mostly fruits. I don't think I could, as much as I love them. They do have good fiber but just throwing in fiber doesn't make it "stick to my bones." To me they are the compliment to my meals, not the base of my diet. I don't find them to be a long lasting, satisfying component as I do my starchy vegetables and grains. I do agree when the great fruit starts rolling in I up my consumption greatly.
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Re: 811rv

Postby MilesA » Thu Jun 18, 2009 12:58 pm

vgpedlr wrote:...Dr. Graham centers a lot of his argument around the unnaturalness of cooking, and how that detrimentally alters food. I am not convinced by his science, but the logic fascinates me: all animals eat a raw diet straight from nature, only humans set fire to their food, and that is weird. Primates are frugivores, homo sapiens are primates, therefore aren't we frugivores as well? Is it the abundance of amylase alone in our saliva that changes the game?...

It is an interesting argument but personally I am not persuaded. (BTW, "Dr." Graham trained as a chiropractor, not a medical doctor. He quit practicing as a chiropractor to become a full time raw food advocate. Chiropractors have a lot of dubious beliefs, such as the cause of most disease lies in skeletal misalignment.)

I believe most primates are opportunistic omnivores. Gorillas eat mostly green plants, not fruit. I don't think there is enough fruit available to sustain them throughout the year. If we ate like gorillas, we would have to eat constantly because their food has such low caloric density.

If cooking is unnatural, wearing clothes is unnatural, living in houses is unnatural, warming ourselves with fire is unnatural -- in short, a civilized life is unnatural. Pardon me, but I think this is rather silly.

Cooking is an adaptation. Humans found a way to get more calories and nutrients, as well as a more palatable diet, through cooking. It's one of the reasons we are successful as a species and as a culture.

With grain, we found a food that could be cultivated in abundance, provided a lot of energy, could be stored a very long time, etc. All this gave us enough spare time to work on things other than survival. I see this as a hugely positive thing.

We aren't burning our food, we are releasing its nutrients, making them nutritionally available, expanding our available foodstuffs. This is smart, not unnatural.

Would you want to go back to a primitive and precarious hand-to-mouth existence? I know I would not.

This is why I think these raw food diets represent something other than nutrition. They are a reaction against modern life, modern technology, modern society. It is a desire to go back to a mythical Garden of Eden. A place that never really existed except in people's dreams.
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Starch and humans

Postby TerriT » Thu Jun 18, 2009 4:28 pm

There's some interesting recent research (referenced in Dr McDougall's article which I quoted from above) that the ability to digest starch may be a key factor in human evolution.

http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/press_releases/text.asp?pid=1553

Other primates eat mainly ripe fruits containing very little starch. A new ability to supplement the diet with calorie-rich starches could have fed our large brains and opened up new food supplies that fueled our unrivaled colonization of the planet...


The new discovery is a separate line of evidence pointing to the importance of starch in human beginnings, Dominy said. When early humans mastered fire, cooking starchy vegetables would have made them even easier to eat, he added. At the same time it would have made extra amylase gene copies an even more valuable trait.

"We roast tubers, and we eat French fries and baked potatoes," Dominy said. "When you cook, you can afford to eat less overall, because the food is easier to digest. Some marginal food resource that you might only eat in times of famine, now you can cook it and eat it. Now you can have population growth and expand into new territories."
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Postby Symphonyofdreams » Thu Jun 18, 2009 4:47 pm

MilesA wrote:Symphonyofdreams --

I have seen a lot of posts from you over the past couple months, and, from what I can tell, you have been eating the SAD for awhile, though you were eating veg*n before. Now, you seem to be trying to find the optimal diet because you want to get off the SAD.

Some of the recent veg*n diets are based on a lot of speculation about what hunter-gathers ate, or what paleolithic people ate, or hominids ate in the distant past. The assumption being that is the healthiest diet for us today. We don't really know for sure what they ate. The short answer is they probably ate whatever they could find. Most of them probably lived a very short life, as well.

One of the reasons humans have been so successful in evolutionary terms is that we are flexible and can survive on a wide range of foods. We evolved on the tropical savanna, but we can live successfully near the Arctic Circle, because we know how to adapt.

One of the good things about diets like the McDougall plan is that it is based on observations of large populations of real people in recent history. We don't have to speculate. We know what has worked well for these people. Is it the absolute best possible diet? Who knows, but it's at least one of the best diets and has been shown to be successful.

Nowadays, humans don't live on the savanna in small bands of hunter-gatherers. We don't live the life of primitive agriculturists. We don't live the life of Adam and Eve. We live a modern life and we have to ask ourselves what has proven to be a healthful diet for the way we live today.

So, why not give a diet like the McDougall Plan a fair trial? It's got to be better than the SAD! You can be well-nourished. It's very economical. You can get everything you need at the supermarket. You hardly have to cook unless you really want to. It's even pretty flexible and no great hardship to stay within the allowed food groups.

Above all, it's a healthy way to live that can help you avoid many of the degenerative diseases of modern life.


I was following the mcdougall plan 100 percent for just under 3 months and have been off for 2 months or so. I plan on going back tomorrow. You bring up something that i agree with that the mcdougall diet is similar to what alot of people have been doing. But at the same time there not 100 percent vegan nor is any culture under 10 percent fat even though there are some in the low to mid teens
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