btw, this is my walkaway conclusion from researching my diet and trying to be a little bit more healthy...

"eat food. not too much. mostly plants."

this is more or less how i've lived my whole life. i'm more confirming my existing philosophy than deriving a new one...

...and i don't think that's an oversimplification. it's not that it doesn't matter what you eat, it's that it only matters in relation to how your body *stores* what you consume, which is what happens when you eat *too much*. so, processed carbs are worse for your heart than red meat, but it's not because of how your body metabolizes it but because of how your body stores the fat. there's a growing problem with people that replaced too much red meat with too much processed carbs. basically, they didn't grasp that the real problem is that their lifestyles have them eating far too much relative to the amount of exercise they get. in the end, your body stores processed carbs as badly as or worse than it stores red meat and the same problems end up happening; replacing too much of one thing with too much of another doesn't solve anything.

i don't think studies have been done on it, but i would suspect that you'd see the same problems amongst people that eat thousands of calories worth of fruit and vegetables on a daily basis. if you eat so much fruit that your body is forced to store it, stuff starts getting clogged....

so, if the problem is the way your body stores fuel (perhaps we're not really evolved to store fuel as fat as well as we could be), then the solution is to reduce the amount of fuel it's storing by reducing diet as much as possible, or burning it all off. it's less about *what goes in* and more about *how much gets stored*.

it follows that a bagel that contains 15% of your daily carb intake is absolutely fine if it's also 50% of the carbs you eat through the day. and etc.

this is not a problem for me to accomplish because i don't follow set eating times. i follow my stomach, and eat when i'm hungry. i really couldn't imagine eating thrice daily - that strikes me as pure insanity. twice, at most....

but, extrapolating what i've learned, that's maybe the best advice there is: don't eat unless you're hungry.