Dear Reader,

Who won this round in the diet wars? Find out below.

You’ve probably seen this paper doing the rounds.

Your Keto influencers are declaring another victory. Your vegan and Mediterranean diet fans are busy picking holes in it.

TL:DR: in a randomised controlled trial*, 3 diets were pitted against each other - Keto, Vegan and Mediterranean.

*nutrition research is almost entirely nonsense - see below for a note on the futility of nutrition science.

All 3 were structured to produce the same weight loss: the goal was to study changes in cardiometabolic health markers (greater reversal of pre-diabetes, greater liver fat loss, greater reduction of insulin resistance).

Keto won

Hands down.

Good for Keto!

However….

I’m Switzerland 🇨🇭in the diet wars.

If you’ve received my 12 Golden Rules of Fat Loss or read the 6-part How we Really make energy, you might have got the impression I’m a keto or even carnivore guy 🥩.

That’s understandable but most people don’t take into account the following considerations. I do.

1 The people I want to coach back to health are typically middle-aged, having spent decades destroying their health (often times unwittingly). The diet I prescribe - as laid out in the Meal Builder - is intended to roll back these decades of detriment in a matter of months. It’s an intervention. What happens after the metabolic destruction has been rectified depends on other factors.

2 The factors that influence your metabolism are more then just diet (as clients and long-term subscribers already know): today I’m focussing on the under-researched and under-appreciated role of the light you expose yourself to, and when you do that. For instance, take the work of the research of Glen Jeffery and his multi-disciplinary research team. This paper's title is all revealing:

You can listen to him in detail on a Huberman podcast episode here (click image)

He's talking primarily about red and near-infrared light (hint: both are abundant in sunlight or incandescent bulbs, but practically non-existent in standard LEDs). The spectral composition of the light you're exposed to is critical to how your cells use your food energy (and much more besides). He also features in this recent New Scientist cover story (click image for article):

3 Your latitude and geographic location are important. Where you live defines what type of sunlight you're exposed to. Lower latitude = all-year round, steady solar yield, with higher UV portion / higher latitude = seasonal shifts from little daylight and UV to long days with UV.

This is important because practically all energy for complex life on planet Earth comes from the Sun's light (electromagnetic photons) -> Light delivers a thermodynamic code (the energy of the photon dictates the physical boundaries of the information it can transmit, cf. Leo Szilard, Claude Shannon, Rolf Landauer, Charles Bennett and Christopher Jarzynski) -> your cells respond not only to the energy contained in the food you eat, but also the light code chemically embedded within.

When you consume a plant or an animal, its specific nutrient density and molecular arrangement trigger precise cellular sensors. These act as software commands that programme the peripheral clocks = If you eat tropical, high-carbohydrate food (a high-solar, summer "code") during a dark, northern winter night, your central clock says "sleep/winter" while your gut clock says "sun/summer". This creates circadian mismatch, causing metabolic chaos because the data streams do not align.

This area is understudied in science, but currently there are 3 main lines of evidence:

​Xenohormesis: the idea that

• when a plant experiences intense summer sun, drought, or autumn cooling, it synthesises unique defense molecules called polyphenols. Human cells possess specialised enzymes called Sirtuins.
• Sirtuins do not extract energy from these plant molecules; instead, they read them as a data stream.
• By consuming a highly stressed, sun-baked summer plant, human sirtuins decode the "abundance/intense solar" information, shifting cellular behaviour toward high activity and rapid replication. Conversely, autumn/winter plants send a data stream that triggers cellular repair, longevity pathways, and fat preservation.

​The Lipid Switch Study: Saturated vs. Unsaturated Fats model:

• Plants naturally alter their fat composition based on the season.
• As summer approaches and solar radiation intensifies, plants produce higher ratios of saturated fats relative to polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs).
• When mammals consume these foods, the saturated fat interacts directly with a core clock protein called PER2, which regulates both fat storage and circadian pacing.
• The continuous availability of summer-profile fats in modern grocery stores tricks the human circadian system into a "persistent summer rhythm".
• When consumed during winter’s short daylight hours, this mismatch desynchronizes the two key environmental stimuli (light and diet), telling the cells to aggressively store energy for a winter scarcity that never arrives, driving metabolic dysfunction.

​The Hutterite Population Study: Natural Seasonal Dietary Shifts

• Researchers turned to the Hutterites - a communal lifestyle group in North America that only eats fresh produce and high-solar vegetables during the summer and autumn harvest month,
• Tracking this population revealed significant, population-wide seasonal shifts in their gut microbiome composition and diversity. The sudden influx of summer complex carbohydrates completely flipped the expression of microbial genes responsible for carbohydrate processing and fatty acid biosynthesis,
• Your gut microbiome acts as a secondary endocrine organ. When seasonal food flips the bacterial genetic profile, the bacteria emit metabolites (like short-chain fatty acids) that enter the human bloodstream. These metabolites bind to human cell receptors, directly turning on and off human metabolic and inflammatory genes.

4 Anthropological studies track a clear biogeographic rule: human plant-versus-animal consumption scales in direct alignment with latitude. This macro-nutrition matches the local solar yield and spectral composition of the planet. Absent the modern noise of agricultural grains and legumes, ancestral populations relied on a food matrix dominated by wild fruits at the equator and marine or mammalian fats at the poles, proving that human biology is hardwired to consume the exact chemical codes synthesized by local sunlight.

I've laid out some evidence for you. Now for the practical bit!

My basic premise is:

This means:

• If you’re living a typical indoor, sun-avoiding lifestyle at the 50° N (e.g. London, Paris, Berlin, Prague), then whole food, seasonal keto or carnivore is a good choice,
• If you live in the tropics and spend large parts of your day exposed to the sun then Mediterranean (fruit, seasonal veg, fish, meat and perhaps some low processed grains) should be sustainable,

But only if you’ve already reversed the mitochondrial damage you’ve acquired since childhood.

(just 1 place left for the October 2-4 pilot weekend. Hit reply asap if you want more info, first come, first served!)

• Friday evening: local grass-fed beef roasted on the fire, seasonal vegetables from the market, celeriac chips
• Breakfasts: pasture-raised eggs, homemade beef burgers (perhaps mixed with local lamb’s liver)
• Saturday lunch (hill hike): packed, selection of local cheese, ham, salamis, homemade almond biscuits
• Saturday dinner: local trout (pan-fried or on the fire), seasonal vegetables

Back to you at home : typical modern urban life doesn't permit eating outside and requires us to spend much of the day inside (and switch on lights after dark). If you've taken all the above in then you've probably got a hunch that it's not good for you long term.

Luckily, we understand enough about this (common sense, 1st principles) stuff to have created technology to help us out. So, you can still take action and improve the environment for your poor, overloaded mitochondria. Just download my Product Guide (1st draft) for info and tips about how to improve your light diet. Download it here.

If you're still with me, here's the * I included at the beginning (why nutrition science is largely rubbish). Skip it if you still want to believe the same science that told you for decades that eggs were bad, and then changed its mind (a direct consequence of what I'm about to write).

If you're skipping, then take care and be well!

If you're staying, buckle up!

Quick note about nutrition science:

Generally media and influencers brandish 2 types of nutrition studies in your face:

• Randomised Controlled Trials (potentially (double)blind, placebo). These are considered the gold standard, although IMHO this is open to debate.
• Observational population studies (epidemiology), either retrospective (statistical games using the data of an existing trial data set "Lies, damned lies and statistics") or prospective (study goal is set up at the beginning). Unfortunately these form the majority of the media headlines you read about, frequently suggesting causality. However observational studies can offer at best association and the Hierarchy of Evidence Pyramid puts observational studies as at best directional.

The goal of each type is to study one specific variable while keeping all others equal. In the case of the trial at the top of this newsletter, they’re looking at the dietary composition.

Nice in theory, impossible to do convincingly in practice. I could write a book chapter on this, but in short: humans are free-living - the more people you need for your study, the harder (more expensive, decreasing ethics) it is to exert control over all variables.

Observational studies have to be enormous (10s or even 100s of thousands of people) to be worth even considering (= high cost, lack of control, unreliable self-reported data).

The more stringent RCTs are as big as the funding they get, typically dozens or hundreds of people (high cost, small data set, better control). O

ne of the things nutrition science never controls for is daylight exposure and ALAN (Artificial Light At Night) exposure.
Given what we already know about the effects of light and circadian rhythm on metabolism and the accelerating research in this area, you would only be slightly misguided to dismiss nutrition science entirely.

And I haven’t even gone into the rampant study, personal and financial biases of the researchers and the institutions they work for...

Looking at you Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health!

So, the golden rules when someone tells you that "nutrition science has demonstrated xyz" are:

• Check the study type: Ask if it is an observational study or an RCT. If it is observational, instantly downgrade the claim from "this food causes X" to "this food is merely tracked alongside X."
• Look for the "Free-Living" flaw: Determine how the researchers tracked what people ate. If it relies on Food Frequency Questionnaires (recalling what you ate months ago), treat the data as highly unreliable guesswork.
• Isolate the healthy user bias: Identify the lifestyle of the people eating the "healthy" food. Are they healthier because of that specific food, or because they also sleep more, smoke less, exercise, and have higher incomes?
• Examine the circadian blind spot: Check if the study accounted for light hygiene. If the researchers ignored natural daylight exposure and Artificial Light At Night (ALAN), they ignored the very master clock that controls human metabolism.
• Follow the funding and philosophy: Investigate who paid for the study and the researchers' historical biases. Food industry funding, corporate lobbying, and deeply held personal ideological biases frequently distort study conclusions.
• Look at the scale vs. control trade-off: Evaluate the study's size. If it is a tightly controlled RCT, check if it only lasted a few weeks and used a tiny group of people. If it is huge, check if they had zero actual control over what participants did.
• Apply 1st principles thinking based on our evolutionary environment in nature!

To demonstrate just how chaotic this field is, a group of researchers recently took an existing epidemiological data set on meat consumption and ran it through various accepted statistical models.

The results are hilarious.

In their paper, “Grilling the data: application of specification curve analysis to red meat and all-cause mortality,” they played the standard statistical games to see how easily the data could be manipulated.

The final tally?"Of 48 statistically significant results, 40 had indicated red meat to reduce all-cause mortality and eight indicated red meat to increase all-cause mortality."

Same data. Totally opposite conclusions.

It's crazy out there!

Good luck!

Roderick :)

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​MidlifeMetabolicHealth.com​ ​Robot clicks here​

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