My husband eats a keto diet. He was convinced it would work for him – largely, I suspect, because he was sick of me nagging him about his diet and decided the only way to get me to stop was to do something drastic.
He’s been doing it for about a year now. More energy, rarely ill, and a dramatic improvement in the way he used to eat, which (and I did actually calculate this) involved half his calories coming from chocolate. I had my concerns at the start: fibre, vegetables, long-term sustainability, and the fact that I know quite a lot about nutrition, and he does not. He listened politely and then carried on anyway.
It pains me to say that, on this occasion, he was right. His diet has improved, his blood tests are all excellent, and he feels great.
It doesn’t prove anything about keto. But it does remind me that the gap between what works in theory and what works for an actual person is often larger than we realise.
Online, though, everyone seems very sure they’ve already solved it. Vegan, carnivore, keto, seed-oil-free, glucose-stable, hormone-friendly. The certainty is remarkable, and there’s very little sense that more than one approach might work, or that context might matter.
The answers, somehow, all contradict each other.
We know quite a lot about what good eating generally looks like. What we do not have (and probably never will) is one perfect universal template that works for everyone. There are patterns with better evidence behind them, broad principles worth following, and a lot of individual variation that no dietary manifesto can fully account for.
Why this question is harder than it sounds
Part of the problem is that “best” means different things to different people. Best for weight loss is not necessarily best for enjoyment, or for family dinners, or for someone managing IBS alongside a blood pressure problem. We talk as though there should be one winning answer, when really we have collapsed several quite different questions into one and then argued about it online.
The more extreme corners of the internet promise that one way of eating will fix everything – weight, inflammation, energy levels, cancer risk, and hormones. On the other hand, I sometimes think mainstream advice can dismiss alternatives a bit too quickly.
I find myself drawn to the middle: trying to be honest about what the evidence says, while leaving room for the fact that people have different biology, preferences, constraints, and actual lives to get on with.
Why nutrition online is such a mess
It is remarkably easy to build a convincing case for almost anything in nutrition if you are selective enough. A small trial in a specific population, a mechanistic paper, an animal study – all of it can be interesting, and all of it can be pushed far beyond what it can actually tell us. This is how seed oils became the root of all modern illness, why perfectly ordinary foods suddenly acquire hidden dangers, and how a single study about breakfast can generate seventeen contradictory headlines in the same week.
The problem is that studying nutrition properly in humans, at scale and over time, is genuinely hard. That is precisely why it matters to look at the whole body of evidence and the broader scientific consensus, rather than treating one isolated paper as the final word. When someone is giving health advice to thousands of people online, cherry-picking evidence to support a preferred conclusion is not just intellectually sloppy. It is quite irresponsible.
That does not mean early evidence is useless, or that we should ignore anything that has not yet accumulated decades of data behind it. Some ideas do look promising early on, and some approaches genuinely seem to help people before the evidence base is fully mature. I do not think there is anything wrong with saying that.
What is not okay is presenting early or limited evidence as though it were a done deal, and selling people a level of certainty the research simply cannot support. There is a big difference between “this may help” and “this has been proven, and everyone else is wrong.”
And yet the irresponsibility rarely slows anyone down, partly because diet has become identity. Once someone has built a story around a particular way of eating, evidence stops being evidence. It becomes something to bend into support for the position they already hold, and anything contradictory starts to feel like a personal attack.
The loudest voices are usually the most certain, and certainty travels well online.
Most people are tired and already making too many decisions. When someone turns up with a neat framework, a lot of confidence, and the suggestion that they have cracked the code, it is, of course, appealing. Nutrition is rarely as settled as the internet would have you believe, but “settled” does not get many clicks.
The label tells you almost nothing
One reason this debate becomes so unhelpful is that diet labels can hide a lot. Two people can both say they eat Mediterranean, vegan, or low-carb and end up with diets that differ enormously in fibre, food quality, variety, and nutritional adequacy. The label tells you far less about what is actually on the plate than people like to think.
Consider pizza. It is a good example of how unhelpful these categories can become. A highly processed frozen pizza eaten because you are exhausted at 9pm is not the same thing as a homemade one on a sourdough base with tomatoes, mozzarella and vegetables. But both can end up in the same category.
One is simply a better version of the same thing, made when someone had the time, money or energy.
That is why I care much more about diet quality than labels. What matters is the overall pattern: what the diet includes, what it crowds out, and whether it is realistic enough to hold up in everyday life.
What most good diets have in common
Once you strip away the branding, most sensible dietary patterns look surprisingly similar. More plants, more fibre, more whole or minimally processed foods, enough protein, better fat sources. Honestly, most of it is not that complicated, but it is not very exciting to say so.
This is part of why Mediterranean-style eating tends to perform well in the research. Not because there is anything magical about it, but because it happens to capture most of those principles in one place: vegetables, beans, nuts, olive oil, fish, and relatively little heavily processed food. It is not that scientists discovered the Mediterranean diet and declared it the winner. It is that it turned out to be a reasonable approximation of what the evidence was already pointing towards.
For similar reasons, I think the Blue Zones are useful, though not always in the way they are presented. Yes, places like Sardinia and Okinawa are associated with diets that include plenty of plants and relatively simple foods. But long life there is not just a nutrition story, and trying to reduce it to one probably misses the point.
These are cultures shaped by movement, community, routine and purpose. Food is shared. Meals are eaten with other people. There is genuine enjoyment in the eating of it. People in Sardinia are not logging their macros while sitting in standstill traffic after an hour-long commute, with three group chats pinging and somebody emailing to ask if they have “seen this yet”. Their food sits inside a wider way of life, and I suspect that matters a lot.
This is where wellness culture often loses me. It wants to reduce health to biomarkers and optimisation, as though longevity can be engineered through nutritional precision alone. But the healthiest way of eating might not be the one with the most impressive nutrient profile on paper. It might simply be the one that is satisfying, sociable, and sustainable enough to become a normal part of life. A diet that makes you miserable and difficult at dinner parties is not, on balance, a winning strategy.
Where I land
What eating well looks like, to me, is nothing particularly special. Lots of fruit and vegetables, as much variety as you can manage, enough fibre and protein, nuts and seeds, food that is minimally processed where possible, and meals that are affordable and realistic for the life you are actually living. If you have children, that probably means cooking things they will also eat, because the alternative is often everyone ending up with something out of a packet.
It also means enjoying your food. Really enjoying it. A pistachio cream pastry is one of my particular weaknesses and I have no intention of giving it up. Birthday cake should be eaten with enthusiasm. A coffee and croissant on a Saturday morning is one of life’s greatest pleasures. The goal is not perfection. It is making the majority of what you eat reasonably good, so that the rest of it does not matter very much.
It also means paying attention to how food actually makes you feel, which is more individual than a lot of dietary advice allows. I could eat an entire loaf of bread and feel absolutely fine. A few mouthfuls of avocado or egg, on the other hand, can make me feel genuinely nauseated. If something does not agree with you, it is worth noticing. Just make sure it is your own body telling you that, rather than something you have been told to expect.
What I am much less patient with is the tendency to demonise entire food groups, declare everything inflammatory, and make people feel guilty for eating things that are, for most people, perfectly fine. Some of this is just confidently stated nonsense. It may work for the person saying it. That does not make it a universal truth.
Some approaches need a bit more attention to detail to do well. Plant-based eating, for instance, is absolutely fine nutritionally, and if you are doing it for ethical or environmental reasons then good on you, but it does tend to need a little more planning to keep everything balanced. Likewise, if lower-carb or keto genuinely makes you feel better, that is worth taking seriously, but it still needs some care around fibre, food quality, and plant variety. Where I get more cautious is with approaches that are genuinely very restrictive, because nutritional deficiencies, a difficult relationship with food, and long-term sustainability are real risks that tend to get glossed over.
There are genuine debates in nutrition, but completely ignoring decades of research, as some of the more extreme approaches ask you to do, is not a position I would be comfortable taking with my health. Focus on the things with broad, consistent evidence behind them. Enjoy your food. Sit down to eat it when you can. And be very wary of anyone who sounds as though they have solved nutrition once and for all.
Leave a Reply