Dr. Brian McDaniel discusses fad diets and if they work.
Learn more about BayCare's primary care services
Selected Podcast
Fad Diets: Do They Work
Featured Speaker:
As an Obesity Medicine board certified provider, Dr. McDaniel is an expert in helping patients achieve and maintain a healthy weight. He can help you make changes to your lifestyle and if necessary discuss weight loss medications and bariatric surgery.
Dr McDaniel has additional training in dermatological procedures. If your skin check reveals any concerning lesions, his office is fully equipped to perform skin biopsies and cryotherapy “freezing.” He is also certified in Wilderness medicine, and has extensive experience providing telemedicine video visits.
He is here to help patients with a wide variety of illnesses, injuries, and chronic diseases while also emphasizing prevention and routine screenings. Dr. McDaniel can handle over 90% of your medical needs without giving you unnecessary referrals. However, when specialists are required his location adjacent to Morton Plant Hospital means he is well integrated with many local providers.
After obtaining a graduate degree in public health from the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, Dr. McDaniel earned his doctor of medicine from the Florida State University College of Medicine in Tallahassee, Florida. Dr. McDaniel is a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Florida Academy of Family Physicians, and the Obesity Medicine Association. He frequently participates in medical mission trips and founded a free clinic in Gainesville, Florida.
Learn more about Brian McDaniel, MD
Brian McDaniel, MD, MPH
Dr. Brian McDaniel is a primary care physician who is board certified in family and obesity medicine. He is dedicated to providing men and women with compassionate, high quality primary care. His goal is to maximize patients’ well-being, function, and longevity. He believes that more medicine is not always better medicine and that the pros and cons of each treatment should be carefully weighed while taking into account the latest research and the patients personalized goals.As an Obesity Medicine board certified provider, Dr. McDaniel is an expert in helping patients achieve and maintain a healthy weight. He can help you make changes to your lifestyle and if necessary discuss weight loss medications and bariatric surgery.
Dr McDaniel has additional training in dermatological procedures. If your skin check reveals any concerning lesions, his office is fully equipped to perform skin biopsies and cryotherapy “freezing.” He is also certified in Wilderness medicine, and has extensive experience providing telemedicine video visits.
He is here to help patients with a wide variety of illnesses, injuries, and chronic diseases while also emphasizing prevention and routine screenings. Dr. McDaniel can handle over 90% of your medical needs without giving you unnecessary referrals. However, when specialists are required his location adjacent to Morton Plant Hospital means he is well integrated with many local providers.
After obtaining a graduate degree in public health from the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, Dr. McDaniel earned his doctor of medicine from the Florida State University College of Medicine in Tallahassee, Florida. Dr. McDaniel is a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Florida Academy of Family Physicians, and the Obesity Medicine Association. He frequently participates in medical mission trips and founded a free clinic in Gainesville, Florida.
Learn more about Brian McDaniel, MD
Transcription:
Fad Diets: Do They Work
Melanie Cole (Host): Welcome. I’m Melanie Cole and today, we’re discussing fad diets. Joining me is Dr. Brian McDaniel. He’s a Physician in Family Medicine and Obesity Medicine at BayCare. Dr. McDaniel, it’s a pleasure to have you on. What a great topic. So important. Because so many people are misled, they see so much in the media and late night TV. Before we head into this great topic, you are Obesity Medicine Board Certified. For the listeners, what does that mean?
Brian McDaniel, MD, MPH (Guest): Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, so Obesity Medicine is a relatively new subspecialty of medicine that doctors can receive extra training in, and it focuses on treating obesity as well as the complications of obesity.
Host: So, then let’s talk about fad diets. Is there a difference, Dr. McDaniel, between eating healthy and eating to lose weight?
Dr. McDaniel: Yeah in a lot of cases there are. And a lot of times you’ll see in different ads or in news articles what they’re really talking about is what we would call fad diets, short term changes where they advertise at least that you can lose a lot of weight in a short period of time with relatively little effort. And they’re usually trying to sell you a book or a product and, in some cases, the diets are so unbalanced that they can be potentially detrimental to your health because you are cutting out entire food groups.
Host: Well let’s clear the air right now - is there one magic pill, magic book, magic fad diet that will work to make people lose weight?
Dr. McDaniel: So, certainly there are sales people that would have you believe that they figured out the one little trick that no one else has figured out but that’s not backed up by any sort of research or medical evidence. So, it’s kind of a personal thing so everyone has their own kind of culinary cultural backgrounds and tastes and everybody’s health is a little bit different. So, there’s not one perfect diet for everybody. What works for one person is going to be different than what works for somebody else. And the research is pretty consistent that there’s not one diet that works better than the others. Now certainly if you kind of cherry pick out one study here, there, some people try to make an argument for one over the other. But when we take a step back, and look at all of the medical research, there really isn’t any convincing evidence that one is better than the other.
Host: Well thank you for that. So, let’s talk about some examples of fad diets. I mean we’ve heard about low carb, no carb, Atkins, the diets that deliver food to your house. There are so many on the market. Tell us a little bit about some examples of the fad diets and why or why not that you think that they hold some merit.
Dr. McDaniel: So, there’s an endless list of these fad diets. There’s a new one just about every day. On the extreme end, there’s one where like all you eat is cookies or grapefruit or you only drink juice. Or on the lesser extent, there are some diets that just try to cut out carbs or fat. Other times they may kind of tout the effects of so called super foods like certain berries or green tea. But for the most part, they kind of have the same fundamental flaws. They tend to be very restrictive and tend to be things you can’t keep up long term.
Host: So, let’s think about the ones first that people have heard so much about is these no carb ones, the Atkins-style, high fat, very high protein and some of these diets and it amazes me as an exercise physiologist that some of these diets really tell you that even vegetables which are carbohydrates like carrots and tomatoes are not necessarily great for you because of their sugar content. However, carrots and tomatoes are so good for you. Speak about how those things interact and confuse people.
Dr. McDaniel: Yeah. It’s very confusing at the very least. You are hearing all these different messages and one day they’re telling you the news is touting that fats and I mean you have to cut out fats and then the next day they are on to something new. So it can be very frustrating to patients. Because they’re not sure what to believe or what not to believe. And there’s a lot of mixed messages and there’s a lot of biased opinions out there. A lot of the people who are talking on these subjects are trying to at least grab your attention with the new story if not trying to sell you on something. But yeah, in particular, any diet that tells you like fruits and vegetables aren’t going to be good for you; I would be skeptical of those and anything on the extreme end where you are trying to completely cut out food groups like that I also would not recommend. Because that’s not going to be something that you can keep up long term and you want to hit the different food groups and have a balanced diet to make sure that you are hitting all your vitamins and nutrients as well.
Host: What does that look like, a balanced diet? So you’re saying that carbs are not the enemy and maybe certain ones are, maybe white products are or starchy or obviously very processed high sugar foods. Tell us which ones really look like a balanced diet. What should our plate look like?
Dr. McDaniel: Yeah, so certainly there are people out there who would have you believe that sugar is the enemy or fat is the enemy and I think that’s overly simplified. On the one hand, there’s not a particular nutrient that’s worse than all the others. And when you try to completely cut out food groups, that’s (A) potentially very unbalanced, not getting you the right nutrients and (B) it’s going to be very hard to keep that diet up. So, when I’m talking to patients about nutrition recommendations, we want to focus on more subtle changes not drastic things where you cut out a whole bunch of stuff or very restrictive diets. We want to more focus on subtle changes that you can keep up for long periods of time and really think of it more of a shift in your perspective on nutrition that you can hopefully keep up for your lifetime rather than something that you’re just going to do for a number of weeks or months. This really needs to be a long term change.
And I try to tell patients that you don’t necessarily need to completely cut out whatever is your favorite pleasure food. A balanced diet can have the occasional piece of cake at the birthday party and things like that. But it’s all in moderation. So, it’s really the amounts of those things that can become troubling when they’re kind of out of whack.
Host: One question I’ve gotten over the years, Dr. McDaniel, do you want to use – to diet, to lose weight, portion control or bigger portions of foods that are nondamaging? Like a big salad versus portion control of a quarter of a hamburger or a piece of steak and a tiny piece of a baked potato. Are you a portion control person which takes a lot more willpower or larger amounts of really nondamaging foods?
Dr. McDaniel: So, a little bit of both can certainly be helpful. So, when you are going to splurge and have like a burger or something, having half of that burger is going to be a big step up from having the full one certainly. But there’s plenty of foods out there like salads which are going to fill you up sooner and are having lower calorie densities that can make it not as apparent to your stomach and your GI system that you are cutting back on calories. So, having a big salad like that can be an easy way to cut calories but also not be starving immediately after.
Host: How much weight should people try to lose? What is a realistic goal? I know it depends on how much weight they have to lose but how much weight should you look to weekly, monthly, how can we be realistic?
Dr. McDaniel: So yeah, setting realistic expectations and goals is really key to success here. And this is where the fad diets often kind of lead people astray. They make you think that you can lose 20, 50, 100 pounds in a couple of weeks or something. And that’s not realistic or healthy even if you could really do that. It’s important to note that you don’t have to be a supermodel or have six pack abs to be healthy. In most cases, losing just five percent of your body weight starts to bring your blood pressure down, your cholesterol down, your blood sugars down. Can help with things like joint pains and arthritis. So, that’s typically where I set patients as their first goal, about five percent of their body weight.
And in some cases, we need to set another goal after that and after that if they are on the heavier side, but we want to do things in baby steps and not have some kind of insurmountable number that’s going to get people discouraged when they are not making enough progress there. As far as the rate of weight loss, what I recommend is for people to aim to lose about a pound a week. That’s certainly not easy but it’s doable. It’s reachable. And it’s sustainable over a period of time. And when we look at the calories of that so that’s an average of about one pound of weight loss per week comes out to roughly speaking about a 500 calorie deficit compared to normal. So, if you are stable at your current diet, you count how many calories you are eating and if you cut about 500 off of that per day, roughly, you’ll lose about a pound a week.
Host: Are you a fan of journaling? Writing down to keep track of what we’re eating because it can be very easy to mindlessly put food in our mouth and then not realize how many calories we’ve built up during the day.
Dr. McDaniel: Absolutely. There’s some good evidence to show that people who track things like their food intake and their weight have a little bit better weight loss success there. So, there’s a number of different apps out there, printed hardcopy journals where you can track your weight and track all your calories. And I think that can be really helpful and when we really take the time to kind of count up the amount of things we’re eating, weight of things we’re eating; it very often surprises us. So, it’s good to get some hard numbers on what we’re putting into our bodies and it usually makes us think a little bit more about what we’re going to reach for from the fridge.
Host: As we wrap up, Dr. McDaniel, what sort of treatments are available from Obesity Medicine Providers at BayCare? Speak about just give a broad overview of whether it’s medically supervised or bariatrics or exercise programs. Just give us a broad overview.
Dr. McDaniel: So, there are a number of treatment modalities available. In some cases, all patients will need is to discuss different dietary and exercise changes. Other times, patients may want to consider a variety of medications that are available or even surgery in which case Obesity Medicine providers or Bariatric Providers within BayCare would be able to help those patients out.
Host: Well thank you so much. It’s really great information and just so important. Thank you for clearing up some information on fad diets for us today. That concludes this episode of BayCare HealthChat. To learn more about BayCare’s Primary Care Services, please visit our website at www.baycare.org for more information and to get connected with one of our providers. Please also remember to subscribe, rate and review this podcast and all the other BayCare podcasts. I’m Melanie Cole.
Fad Diets: Do They Work
Melanie Cole (Host): Welcome. I’m Melanie Cole and today, we’re discussing fad diets. Joining me is Dr. Brian McDaniel. He’s a Physician in Family Medicine and Obesity Medicine at BayCare. Dr. McDaniel, it’s a pleasure to have you on. What a great topic. So important. Because so many people are misled, they see so much in the media and late night TV. Before we head into this great topic, you are Obesity Medicine Board Certified. For the listeners, what does that mean?
Brian McDaniel, MD, MPH (Guest): Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, so Obesity Medicine is a relatively new subspecialty of medicine that doctors can receive extra training in, and it focuses on treating obesity as well as the complications of obesity.
Host: So, then let’s talk about fad diets. Is there a difference, Dr. McDaniel, between eating healthy and eating to lose weight?
Dr. McDaniel: Yeah in a lot of cases there are. And a lot of times you’ll see in different ads or in news articles what they’re really talking about is what we would call fad diets, short term changes where they advertise at least that you can lose a lot of weight in a short period of time with relatively little effort. And they’re usually trying to sell you a book or a product and, in some cases, the diets are so unbalanced that they can be potentially detrimental to your health because you are cutting out entire food groups.
Host: Well let’s clear the air right now - is there one magic pill, magic book, magic fad diet that will work to make people lose weight?
Dr. McDaniel: So, certainly there are sales people that would have you believe that they figured out the one little trick that no one else has figured out but that’s not backed up by any sort of research or medical evidence. So, it’s kind of a personal thing so everyone has their own kind of culinary cultural backgrounds and tastes and everybody’s health is a little bit different. So, there’s not one perfect diet for everybody. What works for one person is going to be different than what works for somebody else. And the research is pretty consistent that there’s not one diet that works better than the others. Now certainly if you kind of cherry pick out one study here, there, some people try to make an argument for one over the other. But when we take a step back, and look at all of the medical research, there really isn’t any convincing evidence that one is better than the other.
Host: Well thank you for that. So, let’s talk about some examples of fad diets. I mean we’ve heard about low carb, no carb, Atkins, the diets that deliver food to your house. There are so many on the market. Tell us a little bit about some examples of the fad diets and why or why not that you think that they hold some merit.
Dr. McDaniel: So, there’s an endless list of these fad diets. There’s a new one just about every day. On the extreme end, there’s one where like all you eat is cookies or grapefruit or you only drink juice. Or on the lesser extent, there are some diets that just try to cut out carbs or fat. Other times they may kind of tout the effects of so called super foods like certain berries or green tea. But for the most part, they kind of have the same fundamental flaws. They tend to be very restrictive and tend to be things you can’t keep up long term.
Host: So, let’s think about the ones first that people have heard so much about is these no carb ones, the Atkins-style, high fat, very high protein and some of these diets and it amazes me as an exercise physiologist that some of these diets really tell you that even vegetables which are carbohydrates like carrots and tomatoes are not necessarily great for you because of their sugar content. However, carrots and tomatoes are so good for you. Speak about how those things interact and confuse people.
Dr. McDaniel: Yeah. It’s very confusing at the very least. You are hearing all these different messages and one day they’re telling you the news is touting that fats and I mean you have to cut out fats and then the next day they are on to something new. So it can be very frustrating to patients. Because they’re not sure what to believe or what not to believe. And there’s a lot of mixed messages and there’s a lot of biased opinions out there. A lot of the people who are talking on these subjects are trying to at least grab your attention with the new story if not trying to sell you on something. But yeah, in particular, any diet that tells you like fruits and vegetables aren’t going to be good for you; I would be skeptical of those and anything on the extreme end where you are trying to completely cut out food groups like that I also would not recommend. Because that’s not going to be something that you can keep up long term and you want to hit the different food groups and have a balanced diet to make sure that you are hitting all your vitamins and nutrients as well.
Host: What does that look like, a balanced diet? So you’re saying that carbs are not the enemy and maybe certain ones are, maybe white products are or starchy or obviously very processed high sugar foods. Tell us which ones really look like a balanced diet. What should our plate look like?
Dr. McDaniel: Yeah, so certainly there are people out there who would have you believe that sugar is the enemy or fat is the enemy and I think that’s overly simplified. On the one hand, there’s not a particular nutrient that’s worse than all the others. And when you try to completely cut out food groups, that’s (A) potentially very unbalanced, not getting you the right nutrients and (B) it’s going to be very hard to keep that diet up. So, when I’m talking to patients about nutrition recommendations, we want to focus on more subtle changes not drastic things where you cut out a whole bunch of stuff or very restrictive diets. We want to more focus on subtle changes that you can keep up for long periods of time and really think of it more of a shift in your perspective on nutrition that you can hopefully keep up for your lifetime rather than something that you’re just going to do for a number of weeks or months. This really needs to be a long term change.
And I try to tell patients that you don’t necessarily need to completely cut out whatever is your favorite pleasure food. A balanced diet can have the occasional piece of cake at the birthday party and things like that. But it’s all in moderation. So, it’s really the amounts of those things that can become troubling when they’re kind of out of whack.
Host: One question I’ve gotten over the years, Dr. McDaniel, do you want to use – to diet, to lose weight, portion control or bigger portions of foods that are nondamaging? Like a big salad versus portion control of a quarter of a hamburger or a piece of steak and a tiny piece of a baked potato. Are you a portion control person which takes a lot more willpower or larger amounts of really nondamaging foods?
Dr. McDaniel: So, a little bit of both can certainly be helpful. So, when you are going to splurge and have like a burger or something, having half of that burger is going to be a big step up from having the full one certainly. But there’s plenty of foods out there like salads which are going to fill you up sooner and are having lower calorie densities that can make it not as apparent to your stomach and your GI system that you are cutting back on calories. So, having a big salad like that can be an easy way to cut calories but also not be starving immediately after.
Host: How much weight should people try to lose? What is a realistic goal? I know it depends on how much weight they have to lose but how much weight should you look to weekly, monthly, how can we be realistic?
Dr. McDaniel: So yeah, setting realistic expectations and goals is really key to success here. And this is where the fad diets often kind of lead people astray. They make you think that you can lose 20, 50, 100 pounds in a couple of weeks or something. And that’s not realistic or healthy even if you could really do that. It’s important to note that you don’t have to be a supermodel or have six pack abs to be healthy. In most cases, losing just five percent of your body weight starts to bring your blood pressure down, your cholesterol down, your blood sugars down. Can help with things like joint pains and arthritis. So, that’s typically where I set patients as their first goal, about five percent of their body weight.
And in some cases, we need to set another goal after that and after that if they are on the heavier side, but we want to do things in baby steps and not have some kind of insurmountable number that’s going to get people discouraged when they are not making enough progress there. As far as the rate of weight loss, what I recommend is for people to aim to lose about a pound a week. That’s certainly not easy but it’s doable. It’s reachable. And it’s sustainable over a period of time. And when we look at the calories of that so that’s an average of about one pound of weight loss per week comes out to roughly speaking about a 500 calorie deficit compared to normal. So, if you are stable at your current diet, you count how many calories you are eating and if you cut about 500 off of that per day, roughly, you’ll lose about a pound a week.
Host: Are you a fan of journaling? Writing down to keep track of what we’re eating because it can be very easy to mindlessly put food in our mouth and then not realize how many calories we’ve built up during the day.
Dr. McDaniel: Absolutely. There’s some good evidence to show that people who track things like their food intake and their weight have a little bit better weight loss success there. So, there’s a number of different apps out there, printed hardcopy journals where you can track your weight and track all your calories. And I think that can be really helpful and when we really take the time to kind of count up the amount of things we’re eating, weight of things we’re eating; it very often surprises us. So, it’s good to get some hard numbers on what we’re putting into our bodies and it usually makes us think a little bit more about what we’re going to reach for from the fridge.
Host: As we wrap up, Dr. McDaniel, what sort of treatments are available from Obesity Medicine Providers at BayCare? Speak about just give a broad overview of whether it’s medically supervised or bariatrics or exercise programs. Just give us a broad overview.
Dr. McDaniel: So, there are a number of treatment modalities available. In some cases, all patients will need is to discuss different dietary and exercise changes. Other times, patients may want to consider a variety of medications that are available or even surgery in which case Obesity Medicine providers or Bariatric Providers within BayCare would be able to help those patients out.
Host: Well thank you so much. It’s really great information and just so important. Thank you for clearing up some information on fad diets for us today. That concludes this episode of BayCare HealthChat. To learn more about BayCare’s Primary Care Services, please visit our website at www.baycare.org for more information and to get connected with one of our providers. Please also remember to subscribe, rate and review this podcast and all the other BayCare podcasts. I’m Melanie Cole.