Food Fridays: The Problem of Goals

Advisers can improve your chances of achieving a goal. Let’s say you set a goal to have more money. The money has to come from somewhere; most likely you have to earn more or spend less.

You can break down each task and form a plan. You can earn more by revising your resume and interviewing around. You can cut spending by scaling back or removing certain habits. If you want information, it’s as easy as a trip to the bookstore. There are best-selling advice books about precisely these topics.

I think we are generally good at achieving goals, with the right motivation and a little bit of luck.

But is that sufficient to make us happy?

I don’t think so. I’ve seen too many people achieve goals at the expense of enjoyment. I think of a friend who earns a lot of money, but is under immense stress that manifests in occasional heath problems. I think about another friend who became president of a student group, only to find that the new responsibilities overwhelmed her social life to the point she rarely saw her boyfriend. I think about myself, and how I pushed myself academically and ended up running out of math classes at my high school; I now wonder what the rush was.

Are we pursuing the wrong goals?

We can easily get obsessed with bad targets. Over the last few years, I have been improving my diet. One of the earliest steps I made was to cut out trans fats and lower saturated fats, the silent killers that increase your cholesterol.

Recently, I came across an article that made me rethink the whole issue. It’s an op-ed in the New York Times from Gary Taubes titled “What’s Cholesterol Got To Do With It?” It’s a great read.

The article gives a brief history of cholesterol research. The main question is about the role of cholesterol in heart disease. Taubes suggests it’s not as clear as we think:

So how did we come to believe strongly that LDL cholesterol is so bad for us? It was partly due to the observation that eating saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol, and we’ve assumed that saturated fat is bad for us. This logic is circular, though: saturated fat is bad because it raises LDL cholesterol, and LDL cholesterol is bad because it is the thing that saturated fat raises. In clinical trials, researchers have been unable to generate compelling evidence that saturated fat in the diet causes heart disease.

The article reminds me that it is hard to establish causality, and that public health officials have a tough task of digesting medical evidence.

The article reminds me not to get obsessed with specific goals. How do I try to hedge my bets?

In my diet, for example, I have relied on friends, family, and medical articles to learn about things like lowering cholesterol. But I was never content to follow advice like “take this supplement to achieve your weight loss goal” since the advice was too narrowly focused. I might achieve the stated goal, but that might not be good enough since the goal could be a bad one.

I think advisers are best at telling you how to achieve a goal. It’s up to you to figure out why you want to.

In my diet, I tried to make changes that would improve many dimensions, like increasing exercise (burns calories, works heart, and elevates mood). The change has been felt in several areas. I feel more energetic. I can lift more weights. I have more endurance.

So what if cholesterol is not a good measure? There are five other things I’ve improved. I have not burned myself by getting obsessed by following too specific advice.



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  • http://nutritionscienceanalyst.blogspot.com/ David Brown

    Hi Presh,

    The controversy over cholesterol and saturated fat is far more important than you think. For instance, the belief that high fat intake causes obesity and saturated fat clogs arteries is the basis for recommending that everyone consume a high-carb diet to prevent obesity and heart disease. Many have followed that recommendation with disastrous consequences for public health. For more discussion on this Google “saturated fat truth benefits” or “nutritionscienceanalyst.”

  • chrischow

    I agree wholeheartedly with your take on specific health goals. People are often too obsessed with certain dimensions of health without realizing the big picture.

    There are cases (diabetics, hypertension) where it is important to measure these metrics and have reasonable target goals — but even overly tight sugar control in diabetics has been called into question in the recent weeks after a study was halted early (the ACCORD Trial).

    People in my family tend to have this habit of jumping on the latest medical bandwagon based on some new article reported on the news. Oftentimes these studies are followed by more in depth studies that make the original findings less clear cut (my favorite example being high dose antioxidants and cancer).

    There’s definitely research in mice for instance, to suggest that low caloric intake over a lifetime will lengthen lifespan considerably. In humans, it would be consuming approximately 1000-1200 calories per day. Very little meat if at all (mice in the study were herbivores after all ;) ).

    On the one hand, I could probably live a few extra years, maybe even a decade if i switched to this extreme diet — but my energy level would suffer, my mood would suffer and the food would not be palatable to me. For the benefit of living a few extra years? Not sure if it balances out.

    A medium rare steak is pure pleasure. My body needs the protein. Maybe not so much of the fat from the marbling…but with portion control and common sense — no food is really off limits IMHO.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @David Brown: I am interested in learning more and will check out your blog. Perhaps this new knowledge will allow me enjoy coconut milk with less guilt :)

    I still suspect that saturated fats are present more in “bad” foods than “good” foods. So from a public health perspective, telling people to lower saturated fats might naturally lead people to eat more “good” food like fruits and vegetables.

    But often the message is lost in translation. People wanting to lower saturated fats instead substituted trans fats, which it looks like are much worse.

    @chrischow: Thanks for sharing your medical expertise–that adds more precision and I trust it more than things I read :)

    I agree that preferences are important. If you feel completely deprived from food, it’s not worth doing. On the other hand, we are often unaware of how much we might enjoy a new diet, so it’s worth trying.

    I used to think I would need meat in every meal, or at least every few days. But I’m finding that’s not the case. I’m not sure I’ll ever give up meat, but I never expected I could be eating as little as I do now.

    I’ll have to discuss vitamins in another post. As I understand it, synthetic vitamins don’t really absorb that well, so to borrow a phrase I heard, they basically make your urine more expensive. The proble is there for natural foods too. I think someone once told me that the phytates in spinach block the absorption of iron, so you need to combine it with another food like milk. Interesting stuff.

  • http://nutritionscienceanalyst.blogspot.com/ David Brown

    Hi Presh,

    I feel there’s not enough appreciation for the biochemical and physiological differences that define our inner workings. Benjamin Franklin said, “You are what you eat” and Ross Hume Hall pointed out, “You can’t be more than what you eat” and “Michael Pollan suggests, “You are what you eat eats” and Jeff S. Volek observes, “You are what your body does with what you eat.” Franklin’s, Hall’s and Pollan’s statements refer to food quality which seems obvious. Volek’s observation refers to the appropriateness of food intake which gets far less attention and is often a point of contention between omnivores and vegetarian activists.

    If you’re interested in studying this out, I recommend two books by my favorite biochemist, Roger J. Williams, PhD. They are “Biochemical Individuality” and “Nutrition Against Disease.”

    You are wise to experiment with your food intake by varying the meat content. Some people ought to be vegetarians and others absolutely require animal products for optimum health. Unfortunately, government Dietary Guidelines do not take individualized biochemistry into consideration.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @David Brown: Those quotations are excellent. Thanks for recommending the books, too.

    I agree that diets are more individual than guidelines suggest. That’s the same way I feel about personal finances. For some people, it makes perfect sense to max out retirement accounts. For others, it makes no sense but they are still told to do it.

  • http://nutritionscienceanalyst.blogspot.com/ David Brown

    Hi Presh,

    I have one more comment. Among other things, I’ve collected newspaper articles about the connection between diet and heart disease for 25 years. In all that time I’ve never seen an article linking sugar intake to clogged arteries. It’s always been about saturated fat. So yesterday I was astonished to read these two sentences that concluded an article about cholesterol medicine.

    “There is no substitute to an active physical lifestyle in combination with a diet that avoids high levels of simple carbohydrates when it comes to health. In 2008, we do not have a medicine as powerful as these simple measures when it comes to avoidance of heart disease and stroke.”

    You can access the article at http://www.richmond.com/health-fitness/23476

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @David Brown: Thank you for the link. That was a very interesting article, and the conclusion is elegant. I haven’t read such advice anywhere, but it makes a lot of sense. Please keep sharing such interesting health articles :)

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @David Brown: I came across an article that might be of interest to you:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120277403869360595.html?mod=home_personal_journal_left

    It’s about how statins might help the heart but hurt the brain. This is because:

    “On the other hand, the brain is largely cholesterol, much of it in the myelin sheaths that insulate nerve cells and in the synapses that transmit nerve impulses. Lowering cholesterol could slow the connections that facilitate thought and memory. Statins may also lead to the formation of abnormal proteins seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.”

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