Nutrition

By Serge Kreutz
2025

Hippocrates argued that "All disease begins in the gut". And while we all need a wide range of nutrients, when it comes to nutrition-related health, what we avoid often does the trick, rather than what we do.

While vegetables have a great reputation for being heathy, many of them are packed not only with nutrients, but also with anti-nutrients.

Take for example nightshades, which include potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, and bell peppers. They contain solanine, an alkaloid the plant produces as insecticide. Solanine makes people sick... all people if they ingest too much. How much people can stomach is highly individual. Symptoms are headache, fever, and diarrhea.

Other potential foods that make people sick one way or another are grains and diary.

Meats and animal fats, when fresh, are usually a gentle food. When no longer fresh, some of their proteins degrade into biogenic amines that can make people feel really lousy. An extreme example is scombroid poisoning, caused by common fish, including mackerel and tuna, which have not been kept cold enough, causing a high accumulation of histamine.

Obesity, obviously, is the mother of all food borne diseases. Eating too many carbs plays a major role in obesity, and so does ultra-processed food.

Overweight men never look good. Overweight women can be attractive, even sexy, in their own way.

As a man, try aim for a body mass index between 22 and 23. Most people are way beyond that. And once a person is obese, it can be really hard to get back to an ideal weight.

Diet advice is a big industry, but it was even bigger before the Internet took off. On no topic was it easier to write a bestseller than on weight loss.

At the end of the day, most of these diets didn't work. That is why people turned to more radical measures like liposuction, tummy tucks, and gastric bypass operations.

Those are also no solutions. Gastric bypass operations often result in an reduced capability to absorb vital minerals and vitamins.

There is also an easier behavioral solution. One can bypass a lot of calorie absorption by just not swallowing all food.

This means: swallow just a small selection of healthy food, and apart from that, fulfill your lucullan desires by putting delicious foods into your mouth, but instead of swallowing it, discard it into a plastic bag.

It works. People can shed tens of kilos. Cravings that kill any other diet, are not an issue. You can put chocolate into your mouth, then spit it out and cause satiation by just drinking several glasses of water.

Such a no-swallow diet achieves its purpose so well that people have a tendency to overdo it. They can go from a body mass index of 42 to a body mass index of 17, and feel that this is a great success.

The medical community considers no-swallow diets an eating disorder.

But as long as an obese person is sensible enough to use a no-swallow approach only to get down to a healthy body mass index of around 22, the strategy is rational, and way healthier than invasive procedures such as liposuction, tummy tucks, and gastric bypass operations. And it is preferable over weight loss injections of Mounjaro and Wegovy.

The general opposition to no-swallow diets has probably less to do with concerns about a patient's health than the fact that on such a behavioral weight loss strategy, nobody can make a buck. Not the medical community, not the pharmaceutical industry, and not even weight loss gurus. Because, once people hear about it, they intuitively understand it. No need for book-length explanations.