Skip To Main
LEVEL 1 FOOD: NUTRITION BASICS
LESSON 1

What’s Wrong with the Standard American Diet?

Prefer to listen? Check out the audio recording of this lesson.

¿Prefieres español? Escucha esta lección en español aquí.

For decades, we’ve been told that the key to a healthy diet is our ability to say no, and that when we restrict our calories, we can shrink our waistlines. However, this fundamentally ignores the sabotaging effect of the Standard American Diet (fittingly, called “SAD” for short). 

Today, the SAD is filled with ultra-processed foods that are calorie-dense, low in fiber, and extremely high in added sugar. These “foods” (or highly processed substances) have long shelf lives, are easy to transport, and are cheap to produce, making them ubiquitous on store shelves. 

And while they’re literally engineered by the food industry to be tempting and tasty, the bad news for your biology is that not only do many of them have harmful additives, but almost all of their nutrients are destroyed during their production, which involves refining their molecular structure (more on that below). Yet despite these poor marks when it comes to health, they make up 58% of the calories and 89% of the added sugar in the average American diet. 

Unfortunately, not only do these foods have a major impact on our waistlines, but researchers are also concerned that when eaten over time, they may kill more people prematurely than smoking. In addition to leading to obesity and diabetes, these foods are thought to contribute to dementia, mental illness, and certain types of cancer.

Why are processed foods so harmful?

In order to fully understand what’s wrong with the SAD, it helps to know what happens to food once it enters the body. Whenever you eat or drink something, the carbohydrates it contains are digested and broken down into glucose, the simplest form of sugar. Commonly referred to as “blood sugar,” glucose signals the pancreas to release the hormone insulin. 

Imagine each of your cells contains a locked door; insulin is the key that will open that lock so that glucose can be stored safely and used for energy when needed. 

This finely tuned system can easily be thrown out of balance. The simpler a food’s molecular structure is, the more quickly it can be converted to glucose. We call these fast-digesting carbohydrates and they can flood your system with glucose.

The more glucose that enters the bloodstream at one time, the more insulin the pancreas has to produce to get that glucose into your cells. This overproduction of insulin triggers your fat, muscle, and liver cells to store more calories than you normally would. 

That leaves you without calories to burn as fuel; your energy quickly crashes; and your body responds with more hunger signals, more eating, and (you guessed it) more weight gain. 

The tie-in to long-term health

Another big problem with this vicious cycle of fast-digesting carbohydrates is that, over time, insulin increases both the number and the size of fat cells. Even though some fat is an essential part of all of our bodies, as fat cells grow past a critical threshold, they become unhealthy and release distress signals (through inflammatory factors) that start to affect the body as a whole. 

In addition, you may remember us talking about visceral fat in Lesson 3 of the Fundamentals class. This fat—found in your abdomen and around your organs—has a particularly toxic profile. It produces hormones and molecular messengers that affect everything from immunity to inflammation and creates a set-up for many disease pathways like hypertension and heart disease. 

Lastly, chronically elevated insulin levels can lead to insulin resistance, a condition that can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and weight gain. 

A brief overview of our food program

There is a solution (you knew there had to be). Calibrate is designed to help you eat the food best suited for your biology. This means shifting toward choices that convert to glucose more slowly so you can rewire your system and improve your metabolic health. 

Importantly, Calibrate isn’t a diet. Rather, it’s a sustainable approach to eating with an emphasis on healthful and nourishing foods. This means no depriving yourself, counting calories, or gathering points. It’s more simple and true to your biology than that. 

Throughout your time with Calbrate, you’ll gain a strong understanding of which foods should comprise the bulk of your diet, which foods you should eat in moderation, and which foods you should eat sparingly. Every step of the way, you’ll be the one in control instead of riding the rollercoaster of blood sugar swings, hunger, and cravings.

Your goal for this class is to begin limiting your intake of highly processed foods and tracking your progress as you go. In the tracking portion of the Calibrate app, we call these “red foods.” You’ll learn more about them in the next lesson. 

We’ll cover the tracking component in the next lesson, but to help set you up for success, let’s dig into some ways to determine if a food may sabotage your metabolic health. Here’s an overview of what to look out for and why:

  • Watch out for added sugar. There’s no nutritional need or benefit to added sugar, yet the average American typically eats about 82 grams per day. Standard American guidelines set limits at 24 grams of sugar per day for women and no more than 36 grams per day for men—so there’s a LOT of room for improvement! The best food choices have less than 5 grams of added sugar per serving. A quick rule of thumb for recognizing when a food is way off-base is if it contains more than 10 grams of added sugar per serving. (A typical can of soda, for the record, contains about 39 grams. Flavored yogurt is another big culprit, with many brands hovering around 26 grams.) 
  • Refined grains (like white flour)—found in white bread and many packaged foods like cakes, crackers, and cookies—are highly processed. Processing grains removes the plant kernel and with it, most of the nutrients, such as fiber and protein. This leads to quick conversion to glucose and spikes in blood sugar that can (over time) increase your risk for type 2 diabetes.  
  • “Whole grains” include the plant kernel and do offer nutritional value including fiber, vitamins, and minerals. “Intact whole grains” are best, as they retain most of the plant kernel, while “processed whole grains” only retain part of it. As you look at labels, keep in mind that “whole wheat” is the same as “whole grain” (the whole grains are just all wheat). Importantly, however, while “multigrain” may sound healthy, it actually just means that the food contains more than one type of grain (and those grains can be whole or refined, so always read the label carefully). 
  • Manufacturers list ingredients from most abundant to least. In other words, the first ingredient is what they used the most of. If the first three ingredients contain a type of refined grain (white flour), added sugar (including high fructose corn syrup, cane juice, dextrose, rice syrup, and sucrose), or hydrogenated oil, then avoid this food. Likewise, if “trans fat” is anywhere on the list. 
  • Another easy rule of thumb is to avoid anything with ingredients that you don’t recognize or couldn’t buy separately in a store. The more ingredients like this there are, the worse the food probably is for you. To learn more about label reading, click over to our Label Reading Primer (where you’ll also find a version of this list of bulleted tips). 
  • Finally, stay away from anything fried (especially “deep fried”). Fried foods often contain trans fats, which are harmful for your health and can increase your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

Turning this information into foods to avoid (“red foods”)

Now that we’ve provided some context around how to assess foods, here’s a shortlist of some of the more common items you might have in your house that you’ll want to avoid. (For a comprehensive list, click here.)

If you’re eager to get going on something, you can go through your pantry and toss these or label them “red.” But that’s entirely optional. You’ll have plenty of time to learn more about red foods and to make the right changes for you as the program progresses.

FREEZER

  • Frozen fruit or vegetables with added sugar (you’ll see this in the ingredient list)
  • Frozen pie crust
  • Frozen entrees containing rice, pasta or bread (ie pizza)
  • Ice cream, sorbet, frozen sweets

FRIDGE

  • Baked goods, bread, tortillas, canned biscuit dough
  • Juice or sugar-sweetened beverages (containing sugar or artificial sweetener such as diet drinks, sweetened iced tea, lemonade, sports drinks, punch, vitamin water)
  • Flavored yogurt or milk (unflavored is fine)
  • Processed meats 

PANTRY

  • Sauces or condiments with more than 5g added sugar per serving
  • Canned beans or canned fruits with added sugars
  • White rice, white pasta, white flour, bread crumbs
  • Potato chips, rice cakes, granola bars, fruit snacks, pretzels
  • Candy, cookies, cake mixes

And finally, a preview of what to add

If you've already received your Welcome Kit, you may have already seen some material on the Calibrate Food Triangle. Over the course of your Metabolic Reset, the Calibrate Food Triangle will be your guide for building a better diet for your biology and metabolic health. 

We’re dedicating all of the next lesson to talking about the triangle, but if you want to get a jumpstart on some fun foods to try before then, we’ve worked closely with Calibrate Food Experts to develop a Calibrate-approved shopping list. 

As you read that list, keep in mind that none of the items on this list are required for the program, and the links we’ve shared just represent creative ways you can start to explore this new eating plan. There are countless other foods for every palate and price point that work with Calibrate, and you’ll learn more about them as the program continues. 

Lastly, if you’re adhering to a gluten-free or vegan diet, this is also a good time to take a look at our Gluten-Free and Vegan Guide (spoiler: Calibrate works really well with both).