Max Heinritz > Posts

What I am made of

It took me until my early twenties to appreciate the literal meaning of the expression “you are what you eat.” I had previously interpreted it metaphorically, along the lines of other structurally similar aphorisms like “you are the average of your five closest friends” or “you are your habits.” But my body is, in fact, built from the molecules I’ve consumed as food. I am what I eat.

Journey

Looking back, starting adulthood as a big tech employee likely delayed my maturation in this regard. Monday through Friday I ate three delicious hot meals per day at the office. On the weekends, social plans often dictated food, and when they didn’t, Taqueria Cancun super burritos filled the void. Yum. I’m grateful for those times.

Only during COVID lockdown did I start to purchase all the food I ate. This led to more intentionality and a period of experimentation. First with veganism, then instant pot, intermittent fasting, farm-to-freezer meat, Huel, the Wahl’s protocol, paleo generally, continuous blood glucose monitoring, and more. Turns out it’s fairly easy to be precise about what you eat when you never socialize in person.

As the world reopened, I have gradually relaxed into eating habits that I find satisfy my goals of health, convenience, affordability, deliciousness, variety, and morality.

Wahl’s Protocol

When targeting multiple goals, I find it useful to bound the solution space by thinking in extremes. Optimizing only health, what would be the best possible diet? For the last five years or so, I’ve held fairly steady in my belief that The Wahl’s Protocol is the optimal for me, and though my adherence is far from perfect, I continue to treat it as my north star.

The Wahl’s Protocol is a diet and lifestyle described by Dr. Terry Wahls based on her recovery from debilitating multiple sclerosis. Her story is interesting but a bit long so I won’t share all the details here. You can watch her TED talk and there’s a book, cookbook, and documentary.

The diet is described as “nutrient-dense paleo” – foods available to hunter gathers before agriculture with the most nutrients per calorie. I find her reasoning to be intuitively compelling, and more importantly, I feel healthiest when I strictly adhere the level-two version of the protocol:

Do eat:

Do not eat:

This is a very restrictive diet. I don’t follow it that closely, especially the “do not eat” section. I eat most of those foods regularly. But I continue to consider any departure from this list to be a sacrifice of my “health” goal for some other goal such as “convenience” or “deliciousness.”

Eat to live vs live to eat

I approach food on two tracks: “eat to live” mode and “live to eat” mode. The Wahl’s Protocol characterizes the former. Delicious pizza from Uncle Jerry’s characterizes the latter. I do both.

Eat-to-live mode is useful a baseline for my recurring habits: meal prepping for lunch, what I buy each week at the grocery store, etc. Here I optimize for health while keeping things sustainable from the perspective of the other goals.

Live-to-eat mode is appropriate when out with friends and family, when traveling, at nice restaurants, when a coworker bakes a cake, etc. Here I try to eat in moderation, but really there are no hard rules.

Super veggie

In defiance of the Wahl’s Protocol, a few years ago I started to meal prep a variation of Brian Johnson’s super veggie for lunch: lentils, broccoli, cauliflower, ginger, garlic, mushrooms, lime juice, apple cider vinegar, oil olive, cumin.

Most of the ingredients are approved on the Wahl’s Protocol. The big exception is lentils. They are an agricultural product. Still, I find that I feel fairly good eating them, they are inexpensive, delicious, and morally unambiguous.

Veganism and morality

I was vegan during 2020. Though I now consume animal products, I continue to find the arguments in favor of veganism compelling, especially with respect to animal rights. My mind was first opened to these possibilities by the post Is Eating Meat A Net Harm?.

I believe most agriculturally useful animals experience suffering. So when eating I ask: is/was the life of the animal whose product I’m consuming preferable to non-existence, and by what degree?

(The practical alternative to not eating animal products is non-existence of the relevant animals. If everyone ate vegan, we would not allocate resources at scale to the propagation of livestock. There would be billions fewer agricultural animal lives lived.)

I also believe that the vast majority of animal products – not just meat but also milk and eggs – come from factory farming environments where non-existence is almost certainly preferable to life. Cows seem to have it better than other animals in industrial settings because they spend time in pasture.

Bearing all this in mind, consuming cheap animal products feels icky and immoral to me. When I’m at the grocery store and see the cheapest cartons of eggs, I feel a bit grossed out. On the one hand I’m happy to see that people have access to low-cost animal protein, and on the other hand aware that the price is subsidized by the suffering of other sentient beings.

So where it doesn’t require much sacrifice on my part, I try to eat in a way that reduces suffering per calorie. Some examples:

But at restaurants, if the best options on the menu are meat, I usually go for it despite the moral negative that the meat almost certainly came a factory farming environment. Multiple goals, tradeoffs…

Wild animals as nutrient harvesters

I use a mental model to motivate my preference for non-farmed animals such as wild-caught Alaskan salmon. In this model, my body needs certain hard-to-acquire compounds out there in the universe, and the animals are little robots either scavenging or producing them. Iodine, zinc, selenium, magnesium, copper, omega 3s they scavenge. Vitamin D, heme iron, B12 are produced lower down the food chain.

Organic vs non-organic

I try to eat organic where it matters and am less selective where it’s not as important, per the EWG Shopper’s Guide. Always organic: berries, apples, bell peppers, leafy greens, green beans, celery, potatoes. Don’t need to be organic: avocados, onions, sweet potato, watermelon, mushrooms, asparagus. This is fortunate because ALDI doesn’t have organic versions of all of these.

Smoothies

Most days I drink a smoothie. The ingredients are almond milk, a ton of frozen greens, pea protein, collagen powder, greens powder, and sometimes frozen broccoli sprouts. I use Nutribullet to blend it all up. For a while I consumed AG1 but I’ve come to prefer Evolved Greens for its added ingredients and affordability.

Grocery staples

Whole Foods

ALDI

Trader Joe’s

Powders