The food critic suggests merging moderation with satisfaction.

Excerpt from Mark Bittman, May 7, 2013

MARK BITTMAN, New York Times Food Columnist; Author, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good

In conversation with JOEY ALTMAN, Chef

JOEY ALTMAN: Your TED talk was so depressing, but it was so important. Both ends of the spectrum are blowing up; we’re getting much better food – everything’s artisan this and artisan that – and at the same time we’re getting a lot more obesity and diabetes from food policy that’s making our food less healthy. What was the feedback from your talk, and how do you feel about the way things have been going since then?

BITTMAN: That talk was about five years ago, and that was a year or two after the beginning for me of starting to talk about this stuff publicly, which was something I’d been thinking about for maybe 10 years prior to that. But in the last five years I think things have gotten both better and worse. If there’s a bell curve of food in the United States, we might be just on the upswing, just past the worst possible place.

That’s a guess. But there is some evidence that people are cooking at home more, which is very important for a variety of reasons; there is some evidence that people are getting fat less quickly than they were; there is more local and regional food; there are more small and medium-sized farmers. There is evidence that things are getting better, but only incrementally. The real struggle is that we’re fighting against an entrenched bureaucracy that’s basically beholden to an entity that might as well be called “Big Food,” which is spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on getting us to eat what amounts to junk. So no wonder a lot of people are sick.

ALTMAN: Was part of the mission for writing the book just trying to get people to eat healthier because you experienced that in your life and wanted to share it with people?

BITTMAN: There’s kind of an interesting happenstance, which is that what’s good for us is good for the planet; if we eat better the planet does better. When I first started writing and thinking about this stuff, a lot of it was based on the fact that in addition to everything else that’s wrong with industrial animal production, I found out in 2006 that something like 20 percent of greenhouse gasses come from the industrial production of animals. I thought that this was an interesting thing, because we know that eating [a] less than ideal [diet] is not good for us, but as it turns out it’s not good for anything.

As far as the diet goes, there’s a science here and the science is at this point pretty much indisputable. What’s indisputable is that what’s good for us is to eat more plants. Those of you who’ve been following nutrition for the last 30 or 40 years know that we’ve seen a ridiculous rollercoaster of misinformation and bad estimations of what’s going on and an entrenched bureaucracy that’s been beholden to the money of Big Food. We’ve heard all kinds of things, but what’s really, really clear right now is that eating more plants than we Americans eat on average is good for us.

So VB6 is just the strategy for applying the science. The science is eat more plants; VB6 is my personal way of figuring out how, for a variety of reasons, I was going to eat more plants. As a strategy for me it’s worked, and it’s worked for others also. But it’s not the only strategy; it’s a strategy, and I think it’s important to remember the bottom line: what’s most important now is to eat more plants. One mistake the United States Department of Agriculture made 25 or 30 years ago was to tell more people to eat more foods that were low in saturated fats; the USDA was afraid to say “eat less meat” so they said “eat more foods that are low in saturated fats.” Instead of telling people to eat less of what they thought was bad for them – which may or may not be the case – they just said eat more and as a result we’ve seen the biggest explosion of weight gain ever in the history of the human race, right here in the United States [during the years] since the 1970s.

What’s clear is that we have to eat more plants; now we have to eat less of something else also, and what we have to eat less of is processed junk, which is mostly highly-processed carbohydrates and sugar. This is nearly indisputable [and] it’s safe enough for me to say with full belief that we should be eating more plants and less highly processed foods, and that for a variety of reasons we should also be eating fewer animal products. So it’s a tradeoff, and it’s pretty clear what the science says we need to do, and VB6 is my strategy for how to get there.

ALTMAN: So you came up with this “flexitarian” diet that allows you to be mindful of what you are eating – which I think is really critical to the success of any diet. And you know that you can do this for a certain amount of time because you know that at the end of the day you are then free to have what you really want to eat. You created this opportunity for people to have that wiggle room.

BITTMAN: I wanted to do something pragmatic. I wanted to do a diet for myself – [I started it] six years ago – that was a “diet” in the old-fashioned sense: the way we eat is called a “diet.” That’s different than “going on a diet.” Losing 21 pounds in 21 days is “going on a diet.” I wanted to do something that was going to work, and I needed rules.

Everybody in the world eats on a spectrum. On [one] side of the spectrum is Morgan Spurlock eating his Supersize Me diet, and on [the other] side is the purest most wonderful diet imaginable, which we actually have not yet defined, but it has something to do with eating a lot of plants. Everybody in this room and pretty much everybody in the world is on this spectrum, and the idea for me was to find a way that would work to move toward [the latter] part of the spectrum, to move toward a more plant-based diet. And I didn’t want to do it in a way that was so dramatic that three months later I would think, to hell with this; it’s great, but I’ve got to have a life.

So I thought, I’m going to do this diet of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds, [with] no processed food. I’m going to do that all day long, and then at night I’m going to do whatever the hell I want to do. That’s what I did, and that’s what this diet is.

ALTMAN: If you eat really healthfully throughout the day, and then at 6:00 you indulge, don’t you just throw away all the good things that you’ve done?

BITTMAN: The idea is that we all know that Americans in general need to moderate our diets and we all need to move toward the healthier end of the spectrum. By eating a strict diet during the day and letting yourself go at night you’re still not letting yourself go as much as you do if you’re completely undisciplined in the first place.

ALTMAN: So it’s really a personal set of rules that you created that you knew would be attainable and sustainable?

BITTMAN: I didn’t know; I sort of hoped. I was doing it with a friend – “VB6” is her term – and we both got kind of bad news from our doctors at the same time and we said, “Let’s do this thing where we try to eat really strictly during the day, but we want to have a good dinner.” We have to write cookbooks about cooking everything, so we have to continue to eat everything and I wanted to eat everything. So we tried it, and after a week or two my friend called me up and said, “So were you VB6 today?” I said, “What?” She said, “You know this thing. This vegan before six thing.” I said, “Yeah. I’m still doing it.”

I wasn’t thinking about it too much. It was kind of fun. It was kind of a challenge. Then six weeks went by and I weighed myself and I had lost 15 pounds. [In my case] that was the exact definition of positive reinforcement. I did it another six weeks and lost another 15 pounds. Then I went and had my blood work done and all of the stuff that was in the bad doctor’s report in the first place got better, basically. Then I thought, This is OK; I’m living my life like this from now on. I was going out at night; I was having wine; I was having steak – not every night, as I said. I was indulging at night, but in the daytime [for example] I’d have a breakfast of oatmeal or fruit salad; I’d have a lunch of salad or rice and beans; I’d have snacks of nuts and fruit. Then in the evening I’d have whatever I wanted to for dinner and I thought, This isn’t bad at all, and five years later I thought I believe in this enough to write a book about it.

Some people are going to think, Oh, this is a great idea and I’m going to do this, and you’ll probably have success with it. Other people are going to think, That’s crazy! I don’t want to do that, but he’s kind of right. I need to be eating more plants. And you’ll figure out some other strategy that might work better for you or might work better for the world. But this is what works for me, and it seems worth talking about. You can be vegan five days a week and eat other stuff two days a week; you can have your biggest meal in the morning; you can have your biggest meal at lunch. I don’t care what strategy you use, but I can say that, from a discipline point of view, I think that [the VB6 strategy] is the easiest thing, because you’re delaying gratification. You aren’t miserable during the course of the day because you know you’re going to get to eat whatever you want a few hours down the road. And you’re eating real food throughout the course of the day, and you’ll feel better.

[Of course] the question of cheating is going to arise instantly. One of those questions is, can you put milk in your coffee. The answer is, yeah. The point is not to be dogmatic about this; the point is you’re eating unprocessed plants before six. Is it going to kill you to put a teaspoon of cream in your coffee? No. There’s a big difference between having a teaspoon of cream in your coffee every day and having two double cheeseburgers four times a weak. So there’s cheating and there’s not doing this. [Laughter.]

ALTMAN: [Why did you call one of your earlier cookbooks] How to Cook Everything? Did people say, “Really? Everything?”

BITTMAN: I’m not that arrogant, and I didn’t like that title. [The book] was four years in the making, and we were calling it How to Cook or The Big Book or The Basic Book, and then the marketing department came up with How to Cook Everything and I said, “There’s no way I’m letting you call this book How to Cook Everything.” They said, “Yeah, you are, because we’re printing 85,000 copies and we intend to sell them and you’re not going to get in our way.”

ALTMAN: While we may be able to [follow the VB6 diet] quite easily and readily here in San Francisco, [in] inner cities or rural areas it may be a lot more difficult.

BITTMAN: There’s certainly access to food issues in the United States and they have to be dealt with. But this is a diet that could be followed by anybody who could make it to a supermarket. 

I also think it’s important to think about people who can’t make it to supermarkets and can’t afford to shop in supermarkets, but that’s not what this is about. I think it’s clear from my work that I’m not making an excuse here; I think there’s a political solution to our dietary problems – which also are environmental problems and public health problems – and there’s a personal solution [to our dietary problems] and this [VB6 diet] is a way to address the personal solution.

The way to address the political solution is a whole other discussion. I think the way for us to work on these things now is locally. We can all have impacts on our local school systems. We can all have an impact on what happens in our cities and our counties and our states.

I think that working on local and state levels is the way to go right now. It’s unfortunate, but to look at things on a national level is depressing and makes you feel ineffectual, makes you feel powerless. There are many instances in history of things happening locally, including our seatbelt and cigarette laws which have saved tens of thousands of lives every year, and both started on state and local levels and are now essentially national. But it was not the federal government that did that stuff for us.