An article was recently published in The Hill entitled Nutrition: The national security threat no one is talking about that I feel compelled to comment on.
Agreed both ad nauseum and infinitum. The military and government will not be the ones to solve this problem, a bottom-up culture of like minded professionals will. Until you can tell your buddy "Really? Burger King AGAIN for lunch?!" and he actually changes his ways, not much is going to get fixed top-down.
However, there are better things that could feed into this from the top. Look at how we train Soldiers right now. If the training methods demanded that people eat to perform their best, they would have to do so. But the truth is that junk food is high octane crap for people exhausted from running so much. The ready-to-go line in the DFAC is the longest line, even when the Soldiers are strapped for time to eat. If they'd rather eat a burger and fully-leaded green Monster, it seems like they're willing to make sacrifices to do so (not to mention their budget). The culture from the bottom looks like the only way.
Being a reformed ultra-runner, I can say you're also correct that the training goals matter. How many people have we seen get a MSK injury and get fat afterwards because they kept their diet the same as when the infantry made them run 30 miles per week (thus leading to the injury). It's a fucked up sort of self-licking ice cream cone. Until the impact of the education (more than the info itself) gets to Joe, nothing the experts or Sergeants or regulations or even Generals is going to change a damn thing. Horses being led to water.
This probably sounds more like commiserating with you than providing anything meaningful, but thank you for giving me an outlet for this topic either way.
I couldn't agree more on the point about accountability for performance. There is zero accountability for objective performance of any kind, and this infects everything we do. It saps the will to put in the effort and consistency required to perform your best, and this applies to all health behaviors (physical training, what you eat, putting the phone down and going to bed etc.)
This is why I harp on the spiritual component so often here. We could have the nicest DFACs with the healthiest foods, the widest variety, the best gyms, and the best strength coaches money can buy, but if you don't have the will to translate those resources into habitual positive health behaviors because you have no reason to, it simply won't happen. That is the hard problem to fix. Worrying about guidelines is an easy problem to fix. Just don't worry about them (nobody I know does, honestly, who's going to burger king thinking "oh, it'll be easier to get in my government recommended RDA for carbs here than at the DFAC!"
Absolutely. In fact, I enjoy junk food (as you well know) and know how to incorporate it into a sustainable model- for a specific goal. The biggest part is knowing what you're doing has a purpose that you can get behind. If you don't care about the endstate AND agree that the major intermediary steps matter to get there, you won't care about the small steps that are ESSENTIAL to building positive habits. Putting the damn phone down and going to bed is an insanely easy task, right? Not if you don't have an objective you really care about getting up to see completed.
Ironically, Soldiers kind of DO have some of the best resources available to them- for free. The DFACs can be made to work without a ton of extra brain-power (you and I have done it several times each), the gyms are honestly better than any civilian gym I've paid for, the nutritionists will be coming to Brigades soon (and Army Wellness Centers can help in the meantime), and the H2F manual is not the worst programming manual I've ever read. Not to mention the NSCA has their Basics of Strength and Conditioning manual as a .pdf for free online if you REALLY wanna get nerdy with it as an NCO.
The missing link is spiritual purpose to the practice. You're dead on. Command emphasis + cultural emphasis = expectation. Expectation is exponentially increased or decreased by the amount of spiritual energy a person can pour into the same topic.
I'd like to think that it is possible for Commanders to do this at echelon if the political obstacles were removed, but I don't know if, as a nation we have enough people with enough competence who are also willing to put up with the chickenshit of military life.
While agreeing with everything else, it seems reasonable to me to put quite a bit of blame on official government food pyramids and plates. These recommendations have spread all over and definitely change what people eat. The drop in trust of government and official scientists may have the salutary effect of reducing automatic acceptance of bad advice.
The food pyramid was a disaster, and it definitely had an impact, as do all official government regulations and recommendations. I'm not trying to argue otherwise, rather that attempts to modify behavior in a beneficial manner via further tweaking of official government recommendations wouldn't be nearly as effective as just removing such endorsements for particular strategies entirely. The authors point about having nutrition guidelines for specific diseases is especially misguided in my view, as such individuals, certainly within the military, will have an opportunity to sit with a subject matter expert in nutrition to develop an individualized plan.
Absent the government getting out of the business of advising the public on matters of health (which is my extremist position), the best we can hope for is leaning into the loss of trust and legitimacy and contravening the bad advice. Of course this creates risk for medical providers who are enmeshed within the CMS system, and I expect litigation and threats to credentials to only accelerate absent dramatic political change such that the only people getting truly candid advise from medical professionals are those paying cash.
Thanks. It sounds like we agree that the government recommendations have had an effect (bad!) but perhaps aren't taken seriously by many today. I agree completely with your "extremist" position that government should get out of the business of making official dietary and other health recommendations. Government agencies have their own incentives and soon become captured by special interests.
Good point also about the importance of individualizing diet. At almost 60, I'm working out a lot with heavy weights. I tend to be anti-carb (within reason) but know that a decent amount of carbs is good for working out. If I were not trying to build and maintain, I would probably aim for 100-120 grams of carbs daily. There is a lot we don't know but we do know that people with one or two copies of the allele that raises Alzheimer's risk also makes you less efficient at metabolizing fats. Until we know much more about the complex interaction of diet with genes, gene expression, the metabolome, etc., each individual should pay close attention to what works for them.
I think no matter how far the science of nutrigenomics gets, once you've achieved an intermediate level on your own particular health and fitness path, everything becomes an n=1 experiment as you continually refine your lifestyle and habits to optimally align with your goals. That said, I definitely agree that these chronic diseases with such delayed symptoms may be better avoided if such relationships get better delineated.
Regarding being moderately anti-carb, if you haven't before, try having some extra carbs before your workout when you're doing anything high intensity. Most people experience a notable bump in performance.
I do find for many Soldiers the best thing they can do to optimize their holistic health and fitness is to ETS as quickly as possible. In fact, when talking to new Soldiers I often emphasize that most of them will be honorably discharged in just a couple short years and to use their time to establish positive health behaviors now, because it won't get easier later (although it seems like a lot of folks assume that it will be, which might account for some of the magnitude of the health issues facing the veteran population).
It may not be possible to attain healthy nutrition in the US military. I can't imagine that they buy anything but commercial grade foodstuffs.
Have a look at Stephanie Seneff's "Toxic Legacy" to see some of the residues available in commercial grade food and consider the metabolic damage that we endure. Fortunately most of the enlisted recruits are out within 20 years so the real cost is borne by the VA.
Also it is worth viewing the Epoch Times documentary "No Farmers, No Food." There is an ongoing attempt to reduce the private production of food in western countries and move farmers off the land as part of "The Great Reset." There are some concerns about the toxicity of chitin in our planned 2030 diet.
Agreed both ad nauseum and infinitum. The military and government will not be the ones to solve this problem, a bottom-up culture of like minded professionals will. Until you can tell your buddy "Really? Burger King AGAIN for lunch?!" and he actually changes his ways, not much is going to get fixed top-down.
However, there are better things that could feed into this from the top. Look at how we train Soldiers right now. If the training methods demanded that people eat to perform their best, they would have to do so. But the truth is that junk food is high octane crap for people exhausted from running so much. The ready-to-go line in the DFAC is the longest line, even when the Soldiers are strapped for time to eat. If they'd rather eat a burger and fully-leaded green Monster, it seems like they're willing to make sacrifices to do so (not to mention their budget). The culture from the bottom looks like the only way.
Being a reformed ultra-runner, I can say you're also correct that the training goals matter. How many people have we seen get a MSK injury and get fat afterwards because they kept their diet the same as when the infantry made them run 30 miles per week (thus leading to the injury). It's a fucked up sort of self-licking ice cream cone. Until the impact of the education (more than the info itself) gets to Joe, nothing the experts or Sergeants or regulations or even Generals is going to change a damn thing. Horses being led to water.
This probably sounds more like commiserating with you than providing anything meaningful, but thank you for giving me an outlet for this topic either way.
I couldn't agree more on the point about accountability for performance. There is zero accountability for objective performance of any kind, and this infects everything we do. It saps the will to put in the effort and consistency required to perform your best, and this applies to all health behaviors (physical training, what you eat, putting the phone down and going to bed etc.)
This is why I harp on the spiritual component so often here. We could have the nicest DFACs with the healthiest foods, the widest variety, the best gyms, and the best strength coaches money can buy, but if you don't have the will to translate those resources into habitual positive health behaviors because you have no reason to, it simply won't happen. That is the hard problem to fix. Worrying about guidelines is an easy problem to fix. Just don't worry about them (nobody I know does, honestly, who's going to burger king thinking "oh, it'll be easier to get in my government recommended RDA for carbs here than at the DFAC!"
Absolutely. In fact, I enjoy junk food (as you well know) and know how to incorporate it into a sustainable model- for a specific goal. The biggest part is knowing what you're doing has a purpose that you can get behind. If you don't care about the endstate AND agree that the major intermediary steps matter to get there, you won't care about the small steps that are ESSENTIAL to building positive habits. Putting the damn phone down and going to bed is an insanely easy task, right? Not if you don't have an objective you really care about getting up to see completed.
Ironically, Soldiers kind of DO have some of the best resources available to them- for free. The DFACs can be made to work without a ton of extra brain-power (you and I have done it several times each), the gyms are honestly better than any civilian gym I've paid for, the nutritionists will be coming to Brigades soon (and Army Wellness Centers can help in the meantime), and the H2F manual is not the worst programming manual I've ever read. Not to mention the NSCA has their Basics of Strength and Conditioning manual as a .pdf for free online if you REALLY wanna get nerdy with it as an NCO.
The missing link is spiritual purpose to the practice. You're dead on. Command emphasis + cultural emphasis = expectation. Expectation is exponentially increased or decreased by the amount of spiritual energy a person can pour into the same topic.
I'd like to think that it is possible for Commanders to do this at echelon if the political obstacles were removed, but I don't know if, as a nation we have enough people with enough competence who are also willing to put up with the chickenshit of military life.
While agreeing with everything else, it seems reasonable to me to put quite a bit of blame on official government food pyramids and plates. These recommendations have spread all over and definitely change what people eat. The drop in trust of government and official scientists may have the salutary effect of reducing automatic acceptance of bad advice.
The food pyramid was a disaster, and it definitely had an impact, as do all official government regulations and recommendations. I'm not trying to argue otherwise, rather that attempts to modify behavior in a beneficial manner via further tweaking of official government recommendations wouldn't be nearly as effective as just removing such endorsements for particular strategies entirely. The authors point about having nutrition guidelines for specific diseases is especially misguided in my view, as such individuals, certainly within the military, will have an opportunity to sit with a subject matter expert in nutrition to develop an individualized plan.
Absent the government getting out of the business of advising the public on matters of health (which is my extremist position), the best we can hope for is leaning into the loss of trust and legitimacy and contravening the bad advice. Of course this creates risk for medical providers who are enmeshed within the CMS system, and I expect litigation and threats to credentials to only accelerate absent dramatic political change such that the only people getting truly candid advise from medical professionals are those paying cash.
Thanks for reading and for the comment!
Thanks. It sounds like we agree that the government recommendations have had an effect (bad!) but perhaps aren't taken seriously by many today. I agree completely with your "extremist" position that government should get out of the business of making official dietary and other health recommendations. Government agencies have their own incentives and soon become captured by special interests.
Good point also about the importance of individualizing diet. At almost 60, I'm working out a lot with heavy weights. I tend to be anti-carb (within reason) but know that a decent amount of carbs is good for working out. If I were not trying to build and maintain, I would probably aim for 100-120 grams of carbs daily. There is a lot we don't know but we do know that people with one or two copies of the allele that raises Alzheimer's risk also makes you less efficient at metabolizing fats. Until we know much more about the complex interaction of diet with genes, gene expression, the metabolome, etc., each individual should pay close attention to what works for them.
I think no matter how far the science of nutrigenomics gets, once you've achieved an intermediate level on your own particular health and fitness path, everything becomes an n=1 experiment as you continually refine your lifestyle and habits to optimally align with your goals. That said, I definitely agree that these chronic diseases with such delayed symptoms may be better avoided if such relationships get better delineated.
Regarding being moderately anti-carb, if you haven't before, try having some extra carbs before your workout when you're doing anything high intensity. Most people experience a notable bump in performance.
That's exactly what I do before a workout. Some carbs, creatine, and taurine.
Get fit? Sounds great!
So you can die in globalist wars?
Get fucked.
I do find for many Soldiers the best thing they can do to optimize their holistic health and fitness is to ETS as quickly as possible. In fact, when talking to new Soldiers I often emphasize that most of them will be honorably discharged in just a couple short years and to use their time to establish positive health behaviors now, because it won't get easier later (although it seems like a lot of folks assume that it will be, which might account for some of the magnitude of the health issues facing the veteran population).
It may not be possible to attain healthy nutrition in the US military. I can't imagine that they buy anything but commercial grade foodstuffs.
Have a look at Stephanie Seneff's "Toxic Legacy" to see some of the residues available in commercial grade food and consider the metabolic damage that we endure. Fortunately most of the enlisted recruits are out within 20 years so the real cost is borne by the VA.
Also it is worth viewing the Epoch Times documentary "No Farmers, No Food." There is an ongoing attempt to reduce the private production of food in western countries and move farmers off the land as part of "The Great Reset." There are some concerns about the toxicity of chitin in our planned 2030 diet.