The new year begins and many people make the same resolution as always: eat better. During the first weeks of January, the objective is being met. But as the days go by, the new diet becomes more and more difficult for us and we end up quitting it before the end of the first month of the year. And the lack of knowledge about nutrition, the contradictory information that circulates on social networks and the imposition of overly restrictive diets causes many people to quickly abandon their goals or not even start them. They receive so many messages and so confusing that the challenge is overwhelming.
“Most diets fail due to ignorance about nutrition,” says Ramón de Cangas, dietitian-nutritionist and doctor in Food Science, “because of believing that you have to do exactly what you shouldn't do or ignoring the importance of certain food". “Many food myths have been established; and social networks sometimes also promote diets that cannot be maintained over time and that are doomed to failure,” explains the expert.
The failure of these New Year's resolutions that we set to take the step towards a healthier diet is linked to the lack of knowledge about nutrition that exists in Spain. According to a study by the Fruit Juice Science Center (FJSC) and the market consultancy Savanta ComRes (based on the responses of more than 2,000 consumers), more than half of Spaniards do not know how to correctly identify the most important nutrients for the cardiovascular system and immune.
Although 34% of the population intends to improve their diet and, therefore, creates new resolutions to eat better and healthier, only 45% of the population is able to identify that vitamin C is important for the immune system. . This nutrient is present in tomatoes, kiwis or orange juice and protects against the oxidative damage that occurs when we play sports (which is precisely one of the goals that many people also set at the beginning of the year).
“95 out of 100 diets fail in their objective and people end up regaining the lost weight or more,” says De Cangas. According to the doctor, we should be guided by the Mediterranean diet, as it is the one with the most scientific evidence in relation to weight control and the prevention of chronic and cardiovascular diseases, in addition to being sustainable over time.
The first step to improve your diet is to reduce ultra-processed foods. “Think about more market and less supermarket,” says De Cangas. We need to incorporate more real foods: foods that we have to cook instead of just take out of a package. “Limiting precooked and processed foods is a very good first step to improve health,” says the nutritionist.
Although it is key to minimize ultra-processed foods, the dietitian emphasizes the importance of not prohibiting any food. For De Cangas, the diet must adapt to reality, not to an ideal world, and if we start a diet by forcing ourselves to avoid absolutely all the foods we like, we will not be able to be consistent. “Timely consumption of food is never a risk and is part of enjoying life, maintaining our gastronomic culture and our mental health.”
“Most diets fail because they are not realistic,” says the nutritionist. The key to obtaining results is to be consistent, and to achieve this it is necessary to design a diet that is attractive to us: “You have to look for a diet that gives results, but that is also bearable,” he advises. “If we decide to eat dishes like boiled chicken and lettuce every day, it will not be attractive to us and we will end up giving it up.”
According to the nutritionist, we have to incorporate foods into the regimens that motivate us to maintain it. “For example, including orange juice at breakfast can make it more attractive,” he says. "There are people who may not include it because they consider it better to eat the whole fruit, but including that juice may be better if it makes that habit more bearable over time."
It is also necessary to move away from “weight-centrism,” which makes us link food more to our weight than to our health. “Many people weigh themselves every day, but this information is only useful in the short term to know if we are eating well,” says the dietitian. In the short term, there may be variations in body water levels, and it is easy to weigh one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon.
“We have to think more in the long term and measure other aspects that really show us our evolution, such as the perimeter of the abdomen,” says De Cangas. For example, if a person starts going to the gym, he will train muscle and lose fat, but this muscle also weighs. For this reason, “the scale may not move, but I am improving my health anyway,” she concludes.
Furthermore, social and aesthetic pressure to fit into beauty standards educates us to care more about weight than our state of health. The tyranny of the scale makes people look for quick physical results, and that makes many people end up falling into miracle diets, completely eliminating carbohydrates from their diet or even replacing meals with diet shakes.
“It is common that these populist messages end up being more popular, because it seems that they bring us the magic solution for everything. But in reality, health and weight depend on many factors and there are no magic or simple solutions,” says Ramón de Cangas. According to the dietitian, these types of diets can have serious consequences for health because they are deficient in micronutrients.
The goal is to maintain a good diet every day, without succumbing to “miraculous” methods that promise to lose weight quickly. “In addition,” adds De Cangas, “with the weight loss they offer you, what is lost, above all, is body water, with which I am deceiving myself because I am not really losing what I should lose, which is body fat.” . What these diets achieve over time is cause loss of muscle mass, which can have negative consequences for many aspects of our health.
For De Cangas, “all foods have a place for specific situations,” because “it is about improving habits, but also about enjoying life, because at the end of the day it is also mental health.” You should not force yourself to give up nougat at Christmas or the typical Easter sweets, but what you cannot do is eat them on a daily basis. For the nutritionist, knowing that a day is a day “is also part of nutritional education.”
The FJSC and Savanta ComRes study also shows that a significant part of Spaniards continue to resort to trying quick diets such as intermittent fasting (17.6%), detoxification or cleansing (12.2%), not eating after 9 p.m. at night (11.7%) and the Keto diet (6.2%). According to the nutritionist, these types of diets are only useful for certain people in specific situations.
Ramón de Cangas comments that this type of dietary patterns should be evaluated and recommended by a health professional. “They are not diets that should be generalized, because they can have negative consequences in certain people, and no one should, on their own, do intermittent fasting or a ketogenic (or Keto) diet, since only a professional can consider when they can be useful.”
Many of these diets become fashionable on social networks, where there are profiles that give advice on nutrition without being professionals in the field. This can lead to health dangers: “Eating in an inadequate way over time can increase the probability of suffering from certain pathologies, such as colon and rectal cancer, osteoporosis, or nutritional deficiencies of all kinds that affect our immune system and the intestinal microbiota,” says De Cangas. “If we have nutritional concerns, we must consult with health professionals, because nutrition is a health activity.”
For all those people who look for nutritional information on the internet, they must ensure that the profiles they follow to obtain information are controlled by professionals, although, for De Cangas, it is best to always go to the pages of scientific societies, such as the Academia Spanish Society of Nutrition and Dietetics or the Spanish Society of Community Nutrition. These types of sources are where we can go to consult good information.
For Ramón de Cangas, “education in nutrition is the only way to create new good habits and be able to maintain them over time.” For this reason, he claims the importance of including nutrition training in schools. “It would also be interesting to include dietitians and nutritionists in the public health system, because nutrition plays a key role in the prevention of many pathologies and is an adjunct to the treatment of practically all of them.” De Cangas assures that this would allow us to reduce health spending by preventing it.
