Are you guilty of ‘diet disconnect’?

Could there be a better study to bolster the belief that each meal you eat affects more than your body weight?

Researchers at Saint Louis University in Missouri found four men and seven women who were fit but not fanatical about it and had them eat a certain way for four days. They then had the 11 run on a treadmill as if they were in a 5 km race — the distance of many of the most popular Lehigh Valley running races — and recorded the times.

After allowing the 11 to resume eating and working out as they normally do for at least nine days, the researchers had them eat another way for four days and then do another 5 km on the treadmill.

This time, the group ran 6 percent slower, and the researchers can be reasonably certain the slow down came from the different way they were chowing down. After all, the recorded heart rates for both efforts on the treadmill were essentially the same.

Additionally, the 11 reported to be just as tired after the second effort as the first.

The diet that adversely affected the running isn’t a diet in the sense that there’s a book about it and an expert advocating it; it’s simply a way of eating “characterized by an overconsumption ... of refined sugars, salts, and saturated fat” we’ve come to call the Western diet — and the way too many Americans eat. And the fact that eating this way for only four days slowed the runners should mean a good deal to you — even if you could not care less about improving the quality of your workouts.

While it may be a bit more difficult to measure, a diet that hurts athletic endurance and performance over such a short term has to hurt all sorts of other “performances” during the rest of your day.

Wouldn’t you rather feel as if you’re bounding up the two flights of stairs that lead to your 3:30 meeting rather than trudging up them? Wouldn’t you prefer wanting to take a walk after supper rather than a nap?

While these answers are obvious, something isn’t: whether the previously mentioned study actually provides the best proof that each meal that you eat actually does influence your health.

Instead, that evidence may have been uncovered in a study done at the University of British Columbia in Okanagon, Canada and published last month in the journal Nutrients on the ketogenic diet. Like the Atkins diet, the keto diet reduces carbohydrate consumption to usually no more than 10 percent of the daily total calories.

Now whether or not the keto diet really is a healthy way to eat is not up for debate here. What eating this way established is how a “cheat day,” a popular once-a-week practice in many diets that allows the dieter to eat whatever, could be dangerous.

Many follow the keto diet to lose weight; others with type 2 diabetes employ it to regulate blood sugar levels. When the nine healthy young men recruited for this study took a “cheat day” after seven days on the ketogenic diet, however, their blood sugar levels skyrocketed.

But something even more troubling transpired. Along with the anticipated inflammation in the blood vessels, the researchers found indicators that actual damage had been done to the blood vessels — damage significant enough to make it seem as if the subjects suffered from poor cardiovascular health.

After only one meal. In really young and really healthy males.

And what the researchers fear — and what seems to logically follow — is that even more damage would occur in the blood vessels of overweight and diabetic people when they interrupt the keto diet and probably other similar diets with a “cheat day.”

In short, you now know of two recent studies that suggest every meal you eat either helps or hurts your health. A number of prior studies have also supported this view.

So take a moment to answer the question posed in today’s title: Are you guilty of “diet disconnect”? In other words, do you find ways to justify eating less-than-healthy stuff?

If so, you are feeding yourself something besides that less-than-healthy food. A lie.

Now the hoped-for end result of this article is not to transform you into the nutritional Nazi many of you probably see me to be. It’s not to have you abstain from ever eating anything that could be seen as being even remotely unhealthy.

It’s simply to make you aware of the potential consequence of a single meal.

And while I do believe that a single fat-filled meal can cause a heart attack in someone primed for one, I also feel it’s a rarity.

The bigger danger lies in how one cheat day a week creates a gradual relaxation of your diet on the other days to the point that the diet hurts rather than helps your health.