Dwayne Johnson, while preparing for the role of Hercules, ate a "bunch" of egg whites, filet mignon, chicken, fish, oatmeal, broccoli, asparagus, baked potato, cream of rice, salad, and "complex carbs" every day.
Similarly, Henry Cavill, while preparing for any of his Superman roles, would wake up with a protein/berry shake, followed a little later with a ham omelet. After he worked out, he had a post-workout shake. Lunch was chicken and white rice with curry sauce (for the flavor). The third meal was the same, but with brown rice instead of white.
Meal four was four ounces of beef with sweet potato fries because he's not a "huge fan" of ordinary sweet potatoes. The last meal was a pre-bed protein shake.
Of course, both diets come with a huge asterisk. Those diets, while limited in diversity, were temporary, merely a means to an end, the end in this case being the achievement of superhero shreddedness and buffitude.
One has to assume that Johnson and Cavill went back to a normal or semi-normal diet after the films wrapped up, at least until they prepared for their next film. Even so, you wonder, at least a little, what the health effects of eating that kind of diet every day for long periods of time would be.
We'll never know, but we've all met bodybuilders/athletes who ate that way for long periods of time, but let's let them digest for a minute while we look at another person who eats the same food every day.
Enter Donald A. Gorske, a placeholder in the Guinness Book of World Records for having eaten an average of two Big Macs a day (almost always washed down with Coca-Cola) and little else for 50 years. That's roughly 36,000 Big Macs.
Gorske claims to have no known health issues. He's 6 foot 2 inches tall and weighs 185 pounds. As of 2011 (the last time he went to see a doctor), his total cholesterol was 156 mg/dl, well below the national average of 208 mg/dl.
Gorske has to be an anomaly, right? Otherwise, our whole world doesn't make sense. We'd all be like the Woody Allen character in "Sleeper" who wakes up to a future where cigarettes and cream pies are healthy.
Yeah, I'm sure Gorske is a unicorn of sorts, and Hercules' and Superman's movie-role diets, while lacking in diversity, would still result in far better long-term health outcomes than the diets of the average American, Gorske's case notwithstanding.
But let's compare the pros and cons of eating the same foods every day and see if the advantages of one outweigh those of the other.
The rest is here:
The Pros and Cons of Diet Diversity - T NATION
