Nutrition "science" caught again perpetuating findings based in assumption and hitting the data until it fits, not solid research? Oh no, nobody could've expected that... also "scientists who are on a crusade to reduce our salt consumption to near zero". Like pope Urban II always said, no better place to do sound research than on a crusade.
Salt increases intravascular osmolarity, which increases water retention to correct the osmolarity. This is freshman inorganic chemistry. There's plenty of biomedical science behind renal pathophysiology and the link between salt and blood pressure is as close to an if-then statement as there is in medicine. We use all sorts of drugs and methods to play with this central mechanism and can observe the effects in real time at the bedside.
It's not "science". It's science, as in, emperically demonstrated, over and over, billions of times, every time, science.
That said, healthy people manage their osmolarity and blood pressure through other renal mechanisms. The people who run up against this salt-blood pressure issue are generally medically fragile, older people who have outrun all their other compensation mechanisms. The question here is more about the cost-benefit of pushing this particular public health message. The vast majority of healthy people don't benefit, and the sick people get the word from their physicians anyway.
Yeah, a lot of people have no idea about this "homeostasis" thing, which is how you get to stupid things like "foods matched to your blood type" or "alkaline diet"
> The vast majority of healthy people don't benefit
If there's indeed no benefit, then the message is actively harmful, because it causes people who follow it to suffer (from bad-tasting food, in this case).
And of course, once they learn that they've essentially been lied to, they'll learn to ignore all "X is healthy/unhealthy for you" messages, which is probably a good thing given how many of them turn out to be wrong. (And if salt does not cause problems for most people, telling them that they need to eat less of it is wrong).
>If there's indeed no benefit, then the message is actively harmful, because it causes people who follow it to suffer (from bad-tasting food, in this case).
Well, the food doesn't end up tasting bad because they replace salt with sugar...
But doesn't this same principle apply to everything you eat? Too much vitamin A, too much sugar, too many preservatives, too much caffeine, etc... Some things are detrimental to the body, and are not food, some things are food, but are only detrimental at large quantities. (what isn't?)
But, your argument seems like a evasion of the truth, salt is actually food. (unless you want to argue that salt is not food, then your argument would not really apply in the same way)
If you are going to claim "too much salt" = "salt is bad", "because science", then don't you have to argue how bad water is as well (in the same manner), because the renal system also gets rid of excess water too...
Of course, but potassium is mainly intracellular (a much larger fraction of the body's water) so it would be quite difficult to cause the same problems. Hyperkalemia definitely has its own problems though.
"Salt has effect X" is not what's in the article, is not the recommendation widely circulated ("reduce our salt consumption to near zero", "salt is bad for health and should be avoided as much as possible" etc.) and thus not what I wrote about. You're building a straw-man. As straw-men go, you're technically correct in what you write, but miss that I didn't argue against the facts you laid out.
Is it really that surprising to anyone that salt isn't damaging? Salt makes your nerves work. You need those to think and move.
I remember learning in a run-of-the-mill high school biology class that the electrolyte differential in nerve cells <insert handwaving> creates the electric pulse to make signals. I'm having trouble remembering the details, but I remember that it was basically "If you don't have enough salt, your nerves stop working and you die. If you have too much salt, your cells retain too much water and you die."
Well functioning kidneys will handle moderate excess sodium with no issues. Remember hackers, population statistics and outcome studies help with diagnostics but do not have to tell you how to treat your specific body. It's in one's best interest to know your unique makeup: kidney function, liver function, IQ, testosterone levels, neurotransmitter levels, genetic fingerprint via 123AndMe or other, etc.
Stats are only decent guides from an expected value metric if you consider yourself equally probable in the population distribution. But you aren't, you can find out all the above priors with some work..a pain in the ass but well worth it considering the time that health issues can take from you in the future. So take some time to do some mental psychometrics and physical biometrics on yourself. It's always worth it to be better able to see which science applies to you even when the science is results from totally uniform population.
Hasn't that been known for a long time. The strong anti-Salt attitude was scientifically challenged for a long time but the knowledge is very slow to spread.
We have known that salt is a vital part of the diet since pre-history. The problem is the modern diet, (Western, Eastern, or other) is rich in rich foods, and essentially all land animals evolved to favor salt, by taste rewards, geography, or whatever other genetic conditioning. Salt was scarce. Now it's not. And the access to salt induces direct salt consumption, which can be lethal to a brittle hypertensive, but also encourages more food consumption in general because it makes almost any food more delicious.
The amount of salt consumed per capital has NOT increased in the last 50 years, it's stayed remarkably consistent even as packaged food has increased in saltiness. That suggests access to salt does NOT induce a direct salt consumption, it suggests humans regulate their salt consumption based on their biological needs.
Salt in itself may not be bad. But salt makes food taste better, which tends to make people eat more, which causes people to gain weight. And being overweight brings with it health issues.
It's the second order effects that you need to be aware of when asking if something is "good" or "bad".
Hear hear. Also I'd bet that a given quantity of salt sprinked on french fries raises the blood pressure more than the same amount dissolved in a glass of water accompanying unsalted fries. Wonder if anyone has tested this (or similar)?
Figure of speech :-) Yet I know from experience that visceral pleasures apparently make my heart beat faster, and that salt-water rinses for toothache are fairly unpleasant.
I stopped eating potato chips by switching to salty pretzels. I don’t feel an urge to overeat pretzels, they’re low in fat, and still give me the salt-crunch I’m looking for. I also find vegan/vegetarian cooking a lot easy to accept if it’s properly seasoned. When you take something out of a food, people tend to replace it with something else because (surprise!) they like appealing food. Take out fat, add in sugar, and that’s no good. Take out salt, add in fat and potassium, the fat isn’t great, and the K will screw over people with bad kidneys,
Be wary of “that one bad thing” which is then summarily replaced.
You can apply this kind of cause-and-effect relationship to literally everything. Overeating is bad. Lack of self-control is bad when it leads to overeating. But "Tasty food is a factor in overeating" does not make tasty food, salted or not, bad. Otherwise, everything is bad, even the oxygen you're breathing. You also completely remove personal responsibility and trivialize the nature of the brain's reward system by putting blame on an inanimate molecule.
My stepfather would say the same thing. Whenever I'd eat a salad, he'd look at it and say "I can't eat that shit," then he'd eat a steak that had been fried in 1" of fat, some eggs also fried in the same 1" of fat, some home made chips/fries, also fried in the same fat. French toast, to him, was bread fried in 1" of fat.
I wish I was making this up. As a teenager, my diet was horrific, usually undercooked mincemeat with chunks of bone still in it, but I did get some vegetables. Unfortunately, they were "flash boiled" - cauliflower and cabbage that were nearly raw, mashed potatoes that had uncooked and unmashed chunks in it. I used to heap pepper and sauce (ketchup) on everything, so I couldn't taste a thing.
In the event he did eat something that resembled a salad, it was a heavily curried coleslaw, with heavily curried grated carrot, and heavily curried eggs.
When his doctor ordered him on a low fat and low cholesterol diet, he realized that the suggested margarine had less of the bad stuff in it so he could put more on his white bread, usually as thick as a half dozen playing cards.
When he grabbed the salt shaker, you knew he was going to die from a heart attack or a stroke - and he did. Without a word of exaggeration, he would shake salt over his food for half a minute or more. He always had a bottle of Coke beside him, too. He'd drink a couple of 1.5 liter bottles a day in summer.
As an aside, it was almost a decade after I left home before I re-discovered the idea of meals for pleasure. I'd been trained to stuff terrible food in my mouth for so long that I never bothered to taste anything. These days, I'd rather have some fresh-sliced tomato, leek in a white sauce, side dish of tortellini with a drizzle of olive oil over it, and some steamed mixed vegetables (corn, peas, brocolli, cauliflower) than any of the crap he ate, or forced me to eat. Unfortunately, now I'm hungry.
The article isn’t that biased either way. And it looks like many commenters haven’t read the article.
My understanding from reading the article is the lower threshold is higher than we think. There are still negative effects at what we consider high levels of salt intake.
They also mention same team who did this study published a previous study that met a lot a criticism and they apparently failed to address the criticisms.
So you should probably moderate your salt intake still.
Nutrition Science is a huge mess even though it is a core part of human health. As in, it is a total disaster. Here's something depressing to think about: if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis and resulted in countless premature deaths and major suffering over the last few decades.
Anyway, recently I wanted to look into whether or not eggs are good for you because those same Keto supporters make noise about how eggs no longer affect (bad?) cholesterol levels and therefore won't contribute to heart disease. You'd think it would be clear. Nope. It's about 50-50 split judging by various links (from seemingly reputable doctors and nutritionists). Even those docs that pay lip service to the changing attitudes towards eggs, don't know what a safe amount is and caution about eating more than X per day or week ... though not because of any specific studies, but just as a precaution. A simple question like "Can I eat 3 eggs for breakfast everyday" has no consensus answer. What the fuck.
Should we heavily invest in Quantified Self as a society? I'm sure we have the technology to make it worthwhile, but I'm not sure most people would be willing to do so due to privacy concerns.
Nutrition is, for the most part, not science at all.
Studies are not just financed by obvious interests in the result, but also they use really poor population samples with horrible falsability and repeatability issues.
The fact that we still don't have a fully functional human body model to test theories on, doesn't help either.
Model as in model organism, like fruit flies in genetics, or mice in biology. Lacking a model organism means we can’t do much in the way of experiments and that means we learn much slower.
Well, I think he/she explained rather well the reason why - and the extent to which - such a thing would be useful. That plus knowing the amount of effort expended in the rest of the field of medical research today ... it is indeed surprising that nobody has bothered to even try to produce a human body model. The feat probably wouldn't even require genetic engineering. (Then again, the amount of rote concepts in biology has steered me clear away from studying it beyond a single required high-school class, so what do I know.)
My best guess is that there must be some kind of fear, among that field's practitioners, that some stupid politicians (gah, redundancy!) would take one look at the project and throw a hissy fit or worse.
>"knowing the amount of effort expended in the rest of the field of medical research today ... it is indeed surprising that nobody has bothered to even try to produce a human body model. The feat probably wouldn't even require genetic engineering."
You seem to think that effort should translate into understanding. Nature doesn't work this way.
In my opinion, most effort in biomed has been wasted due to poorly designed studies, which is due to NHST (null hypothesis significance testing; ie, testing a null hypothesis rather than the research hypothesis), and all the BS that procedure entails.
So the real reason no one is trying to develop "a fully functional human body model" is that such a model is not even visible on the horizon for a single cell, or even sub-cellular organelle.
> Or they do exist, already. All humans are a fully functional human body model.
Not quite, but you are catching on. The rest is mostly a matter of cloning, and providing a standardized nurturing to each clone to eliminate confounding differences. (Perhaps in the far future we will be able to raise one clone, scan its brain, and overwrite the brains of each of the rest of its identical siblings with the scan results.)
For some kinds of research, it even suffices to use a creature who has a hole where humans have a brain.
... ya know, biology sounds really exciting to laymen who don't know any better.
> mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis
This seems unlikely given that mainstream nutrition science is the same in most of the western world, but the obesity levels are far more severe in the US. From what I hear from friends who have travelled to the US (from the UK), standard portion sizes can be over twice as over on your side of the pond. And it can be very difficult to travel anywhere without a car. Seems to me this might have the bigger effect.
That said nutrition science really is a mess. Hopefully we'll work it out one day :)
I think the issue stems from a holdover great depression mentality. Growing up I was taught to "clean my plate" and disciplined when I failed to do so, as wasting even a small amount of food was apparently some sort of cardinal sin despite my family being quite well off. I was also taught that eating large portions was a sign of health, an "active metabolism" (whatever the hell that is). Whenever I said I was done people would ask me if I was sure and offer me more.
I was educated enough to figure things out in adulthood, but you raise a poorly educated populace on that mentality while making the least healthy food cheap and delicious, and shocker we have an obesity epidemic. :P
That's certainly part of it, but I also think part of it is due to the economics of running a restaurant. Margins are getting thinner and thinner as people don't want to pay more for the same food (despite this being how inflation works), so one strategy is to charge more and offer larger portions.
The cost of a larger portion is minimal relative to the higher price (especially in dishes that are made in large batches anyways). So the restaurant is happy to be getting enough to cover all their costs (and hopefully a little extra), and the customer leaves happy despite paying more.
The downsides in the long-term are that (1) as time goes on and currency inflates, portion sizes get larger and (2) people get used to larger portion sizes and the same meal has less value to the customer over time.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I do believe this sort of feedback loop plays a role in obesity.
It's not something that would/should explain the difference between USA and, say, Europe - the exact same things you mention as a possible holdover from the great depression of 1920s are also observed elsewhere as a holdover from the generation experiencing food scarcity/rationing/starvation in WW2 and the aftermath of it; UK or Germany had food issues into the 1950s but it doesn't have the same effect on obesity as in USA.
As a single data point, I live in the US and I've lost ~45lbs over a year and a half by aggressively reducing my portion sizes (to the point where the average meal from a restaurant is comfortably two meals for me), significantly reducing my excess sugar and sweetener intake, and making sure I get a few thousand steps in every day (probably like 5-6k on average). I don't follow a particular diet, I try to make my own meals, and I don't sweat it if I want to have a cookie or slice of cake every once in a while, and it's been really working for me.
This was prompted by an annual checkup with my doctor. I was 265lbs (6'0" tall) at 23 and had a number of issues related to my weight, including high cholesterol and an inflamed liver. My last annual checkup, I was down I think 30-35lbs and everything they tested was back in the normal range. So yeah, portion sizes are important.
2. Sugar. So much sugar. Specifically, corn syrup. The agricultural lobby has successfully obtained so much in the way of subsidies that corn syrup is actually cheaper than cane sugar. It's in everything. Even bread has sugar of some sort added. You know there's a problem when bread brands place advertisements on the packaging that it "contains no corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup".
Well, there's the problem that most of the effects are pretty small - most of the really dramatic effects have already been discovered. So it's not a matter of "People who eat X every day develop intestinal lesions and die within 18 months", it's more like "People who eat X every day have a lifetime increase in the incidence of toe cancer from .016 to .02".
Combine that with the fact that these effects take years or decades to show themselves, it makes for an area of science with very few hard answers.
> if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis and resulted in countless premature deaths and major suffering over the last few decades.
I am kind of under the impression that this is generally accepted, at least partially, by pretty much everyone these days, not just Keto people.
As in, the move to remove fats entirely and replace them with carbs is considered today to have been a bad idea, even if no one quite agrees just how bad or just what a better idea is.
But eating carbs was certainly emphasized, eg search Google for food pyramids from the 1970s, their "eat most"categories are usually vegetables and carbs.
Oh, if that's your point, then you may very well be right. (I thought you meant it wasn't the recommendation).
I think that the recommendations either were based on science, or at least weren't really disputed until about 10-15 years ago. Then again, what I think I know about this mostly comes from hearing people talk about the issue, e.g. in interviews, forums, etc. But I haven't really read any of the source material on this (either modern-day or older) so I really have no idea if it's at all true.
> if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis
Mainstream nutrition fads clearly were. A big part of of those fads were about lay generalization of what science supported for very specific diseases as general advice. Another big part was commercial propaganda from food vendors.
I found the article hard to read with the constant switch from very assertive summaries and very nuanced quotes, so I might be missing something. Is it actually finding the opposite ?
For instance:
> Our findings indicate that inaccurate measurement of sodium intake could be an important contributor to the paradoxical J-shaped findings reported in some cohort studies. Epidemiological studies should not associate health outcomes with unreliable estimates of sodium intake
Basically, this seems to me to argue that the error range in the methods used would be bigger than the relevant range of results discussed, so to draw any conclusion measurements need to be redone.
That would be a bit different from a denial of a specific thesis, although I am sure the researcher must have an opinion on the matter.
Coming from a hard science background, I just ignore nutrition studies altogether nowadays. The reproducibility seems even worse than psychology research. This isn't a knock on the researchers themselves — these are hard subjects to make definitive conclusions in — but we do need to at least be able to accurately quantify the uncertainty on the results. It's not acceptable to have so many studies contradicting each other, particularly when the general public is making lifestyle decisions on the basis of the nutrition findings.
Nutrition research is really hard. You want a good study, you have to take a large population, randomly assign them to two different diets, then make sure they follow those diets, for some long period of time. This is incredibly expensive.
One of the ways people have tried to get around this expense is to take a large population and ask them what they have been eating over their lives. This has two major problems that make it almost useless: People don't remember what they actually ate, only what they think they ate. And there are too many co-founding variables. Some people try to be healthy, so they make lots of changes to their lifestyle, and you can't separate out the effects from diet, exercise, stress levels, and everything else people do.
Unless you are like me and have mild kidney failure and your kidneys cant really dump much of anything easily! All parameters should be based on personal experimentation
“Of course too much is bad for you. Too much of anything is bad for you. (…) That’s what “too much” means. (…) “Too much” is precisely that quantity which is excessive. That’s what it means.”
If we are playing semantics, too little salt will kill you, sodium is vital for life.
Some studies have found that the people who have the lowest salt consumption have increased risk of death, so combined with sodium being essential for life, and no increase in the salt consumption over the last half century, I'm not confident that we should, as a population, be artificially moderating our salt intake, the evidence is just not there.
If you were to eat lets say a pound of salt (probably lethal). You probably would have to be rushed to the ER. Your body can only process things so fast and deal with changes so quickly. Obviously, a person would not eat a pound of salt in one sitting. So you body can not dump any excess salt. It can dump excess to a point.
You argument is pointless. Nobody would voluntarily consume that much salt. The same as nobody will drink sea water unless desperate. Once past the point of satiation you would have no desire for more. Hypernatremia will still be a long way off in normal healthy people.
Your claim was that, for practical purposes, it's not possible to have too much salt, as your kidneys will process any excess.
The respondent's point was that there is a threshold at which the amount of salt ingested is too much for what the body can handle.
Obviously a pound is an unrealistic extreme, but it illustrates the point: there is a threshold.
More realistically, it would not be unusual for somebody to have a daily salt intake that is a little over the threshold of what the kidneys can easily handle, and bit by bit, harm can develop, just as is the case with too much sugar, too much fat, too much alcohol, or too much of anything in any organic system.
The kidneys (in a healthy state) are able to cope with far more salt than anybody in modern civilization eats or will ever eat in a day. It's not worth talking about the limit (it's in the tens of grams, far above the <10g that majority of people consume).
Yeah, moderation, diversity too, read that processed foods having a narrow spectrum of molecules may lead to poor gut flora (or excessive selection of some families)
Seems to me that geometrical optimization based medicine is poor, we were born in and out of complexity, we feed on it.
I remember when butter was bad for you and my dad, who was great butter lover switched to a particular type of margarine that was marketed as being good for you.
Later it turned out it had the wrong sort of fats in it.
Then later again butter became OK again.
AFAIK, butter is still worse then no butter (and more calories from whole plant foods instead).
Margarine may or may not be worse than butter (I think it is worse). It is better to avoid/reduce all refined fats (oils), except maybe for a high DHA omega 3 supplement.
If you want to eat for health, look into WFPB, they have a lot of science on their side.
It was based on a misunderstanding: People need the equivalent of 6 glasses of water a day, but a large chunk of that comes in through food and drink you already have. For most, adding one or two glasses of water a day would put you up at the goal.
That said, I don't recall where the target number came from.
They need no such thing. The target number (usually quoted as 8) is pure folk mythology, there never was a study that concluded that that was the right number for some medical/biological reason. This has been in the news.
The correct number depends on individual, weather, activity level, etc. The actual medical recommendation is merely that healthy people should pay attention to their thirst and drink when thirsty, and plan ahead for exertion and desert excursions etc.
Certainly some people don't pay attention to their own thirst, but that's not to say that 6 or 8 are the correct numbers. That may be too much or too little.
I think the problem with it (as with a lot of science) is that control is very difficult. The more you want a controlled experiment, the more abstract and unrealistic you have to be. Eg. (completely made-up illustration) eggs might be good for you if you eat a lot of tomatoes, bad for you if you don't eat a lot of tomatoes, better if you eat tomatoes a couple of hours before the eggs rather than afterwards. Maybe if you have curly hair the rules are reversed... but not if it's red curly hair.
To get any consistency in results you have to control things to a point of being unrealistic, and then the results aren't very useful because nobody's real diet and genetic makeup fits with the fake abstract setting of the experiment.
Then results get simplified and abstracted even more to make easily understandable conclusions... like maybe for 78% of people cacao is good, but for 0.3% of people it doubles the risk of stroke (although this bit doesn't get studied because it wasn't in the initial hypothesis). Results are reduced to "cacao is good for you"... but you might not part of the 78%. Maybe you're in the 0.3%.
I'm not trying to say that science is useless, just that applying it isn't as simple as people like to make out (and a lot of people don't want to accept that life may not be as methodical and predictable as they want it to be). Nuance is too hard.
See the book How Not To Die. As I see it it is converging quite a bit lately. But it is hard, sure. We know so much, but how to boil it down to something we can practice (that's what WFPB seems to be about to me).
The problem with nutrition is that it's a very sensitive topic for people. Everyone wants to hear that what they eat is healthy, so "science" delivers on that demand.
For myself I decided to go with WFPB diet because pretty much everyone agrees that fruits, vegetables, greens and whole grains are good for you. There's no controversy there.
Juicing, cooking, tofu making is minimally pocessed and generally accepted in WFPB circles.
I't the point where you refine something (oil from seeds, sugar from beets) where it is against the protocol.
> Seems a bit of a misery diet to me.
I was not trying to make you happy. I stated it has a lot of science on it's side. There are some great cooking resources on how to make it taste/look/whatever great. Wanna know more about the science, see How Not To Die.
I like the interpretation of minimally processed food as something that you can fairly easy make in your own kitchen. Freshly squeezed juice is fine. Packaged juice from concentrate with added refined sugar is not.
Correct. Still juicing what you can eat WITH the fiber is better consumed as a whole. I therefor prefer juicing veggies over fruit (which I prefer to blend if not eat straight)
Surely milk is good for you, whereas American-style cheese is perhaps better avoided. It seems somewhat misguided to knock out whole food groups like that.
It seems weird to suggest that tofu is less processed than butter. I suppose if you're buying the most high-end expensive tofu it might be a bit better but from what I know of how it's made I don't find it very appealing.
I'd say it's a lot easier to make butter in your kitchen than it is tofu.
There's a really good book about the food industry called "Eat Your Heart Out" by Felicity Lawrence. I already thought tofu was a plasticky non-food but that book put me off it for life.
Eating fresh vegetables and fruits all day is glorious, not miserable. Foods like legumes, seitan, tempeh, tofu, nuts, and mushrooms are all excellent sources of protein and can even be made to taste very similar to meat. Since I stopped eating meat there are a few tastes that I'll miss like bluefin tuna, soft-shell crabs, etc. but overall it's not difficult.
I know what anthropology has said about who we homo sapiens have smaller jaws and larger craniums - we went from omnivores to omnivores who cooked meat. Higher calorie density and better nutrient profile. So our muscles for tearing through tough meat got smaller, so we could have more brain.
What this WFPB appears to be is a religion in dietary form, complete with diatribes of papers written by them. And it ignores why we have the jaws that we do, on some moral epithet that eating animals is evil and bad.
Yeah, eating plants is just so crazy, like a religion! Do you have any pets? How would you feel if I chainsawed a dog's head off right in front of you? You wouldn't start throwing out "moral epithets" about how I shouldn't be doing that, would you?
> Higher calorie density and better nutrient profile
Higher and better than what? I am a high level athlete and have no trouble meeting my nutritional requirements.
Sugar is currently very bad for you. It's really bad for your liver though I can remember a time when it was thought that fatty food was hard on the liver and that sugar wasn't.
Butter is not bad it came from the time where liver function and metabolism was not as well understood, the worst thing you can have is insulin resistance which both high carb and high protein diets can cause as they both revolve around glucose.
I would highly recommend to avoid any diet which is less than 30-40% in calories from fat.
That said the worst thing you can have is high fat and high carb since the insulin would cause your body to store all the fat and turn the extra sugar into more fat.
I think that's a bad comparison. Intuitively this might feel less healthy because you are consuming more than twice as many calories with the butter. Double check your intuition on this one. People on high fat diets tend to eat less volume as compared to those on high carb diets for a good reason. Fat is more than twice as calorie dense as compared to sugar.
1 cup of sugar = 201 g. 1 cup of Butter = 227 grams. 201/227 = a given volume of sugar is about 89% as heavy as the same volume of butter.
1 gram of sugar contains 4 calories. 1 gram of butter is about 7.2 calories (a gram of fat is 9 calories and butter is roughly 85% fat + milk solids and water). 4/7.2 = a gram of sugar contains about 56% as many calories as a gram of butter.
I see a many clear reasons to avoid/reduce any processed fat (oils, butter, etc). It is not part of what primates ate, so good chance we're not well adapted to it. It is too calorie dense. It blocks insulin. It becomes fat (carbs barely become fat), especially when combined with carbs (as is common). It often comes with cholesterol.
> Doesn't seem consistent with your logic of less refined is better.
That's why I continue to say its better to avoid both. More or less as bad as butter is still quite bad either way.
> So basically veganism.
Yeah. When applied for health reasons, it's called a plant based diet. Since you can make junk-food from plants, the WFPB word came about.
> Pretty much a non-starter for most people.
Stopping smoking is also hard. Wanne live longer/healthier? Look into WFPB. Wanne do what you always did? It is still legal, no worries as of yet.
It's about the other nutrients that come with the calories. If you eat cal dense foods you will not consume enough (micro/phyto) nutrients. Think lettuce/fruit vs oil/butter. Throw 2500 kcal of each group into cronometer.com and see for your self.
> > It becomes fat (carbs barely become fat), especially when combined with carbs (as is common).
> Untrue. If you have a calorie deficit you’ll lose weight, a surplus you’ll gain it. Whether the energy comes from fats or carbs is irrelevant.
True, but I'm talking about having a surplus. In that case very little carbs can be turned into body fat, while consumed fat is easily turned into body fat.
> Serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol are unrelated.
Some studies may show that, but many other do not. Looking at the methods they use it is clear to me which studies to trust...
Looks like nonsense to me. You can find other people saying the exact opposite. Nutritional research is unfortunately in a pretty bad state, and I don't know how it is ever going to get better.
High carb or low carb high protein diets which any low fat diet would turn into is a terrible idea in the both short and long term as they are glucose focused you want to avoid high blood sugar and high insulin levels since insulin causes your body to store fat.
Fats are not inherently bad for you, doesn’t matter if they are plant based or not.
It’s not really not true, apes have very different diets e.g. Gorillas are folivore and mostly consume leaves they can actually digest cellulose (they ferment it which is why they have a huge belly as their colon is huge), while chimps are omnivores that actually eat meat and hunt colobus monkeys, as well as consume eggs, insects, birds, nuts and honey.
Also the human genetic and epigenetic landscape is utterly different just like the difference between any other species.
And you also ignore our gut flora which is drastically different than apes in the wild (you would also not find apes with the same flora ofc, Gorillas and Chimps would have drastically different floras).
But sure eat like a gorilla around 50-60 I don’t remember if it’s lbs or kg of leaves a day but at those figures it doesn’t matter and see how long would you survive.
(just in case someone somehow would take that jest seriously, please don't eat like a Gorilla you will die, and if not you will suffer irreversible damage to your colon to the point where you quite possible wish you were dead)
I read "Western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla): This subspecies consumes parts of at least 97 plant species. About 67% of their diet is fruit, 17% is leaves, seeds and stems and 3% is termites and caterpillars."
Another type of gorilla eats more/mostly leafs.
Still gorilla eat HCLF. I'm not saying eat only leafs. I'm saying other primates eat fruit-leaves-bugs mostly (yes some chimps hunt, but given enough fruit they are not so much compelled to). And we have a quite similar GI tract. Not the same, but much more similar than comparing to cats or cows.
We are not made for processed food. We are made for HCLF. We are quite similar to other primates GI-tract wise. What do you not agree with?
Nice that you cherry pick a quote, I also suggest that you check which fruits they eat hint it’s not what you would consider fruit or be able to digest.
We do not have a similar GI tract to other primates we have a GI tract simmilar to some primates Gorillas have a closer GI tract to hippos than to humans.
Even the lowland gorilla which it eats “fruit” would say not eat a banana, in fact they destroy banana trees as they eat the leaves and the stem rather than the fruits.
Gorillas can digest about 70% of the plant cell wall material they consume they are one of the most efficient herbivores on the planet in this regard the fruits they eat at rich in cellulose not sugar or starch.
And while cellulose is carb the fermentation process turns it into fatty acids.
What little ripen fruit they eat seem to involve around maintaining fermentation not as a source of energy.
This is just plain categorically wrong. All primates DO NOT eat high carb diets. Its not both just an over generalization because each species of primate have different diets (as well as regional diets) but many of them will eat nuts, meat, berries and other things.
See dogma1138's child post to this parent as well as his other responses to cies other posts in this thread.
No offense cies but your posts here reek of soccer-mom-esque health blog level of basic research and espousing of ideas as facts.
> but many of them will eat nuts, meat, berries and other things.
Eating some "nuts, meat" does not make it HFLC. Do you know what consitutes HCLF? Well name me one type of primate that does not eat HCLF in the wild and you may correct me. But so far you have not.
> No offense cies but your posts here reek of soccer-mom-esque health blog level of basic research and espousing of ideas as facts.
No offense taken. We're just discussing here. Please provide evidence for your claim there is a not-HCLF (thus HFLC) type of ape in some location. I will fix my beliefs with proper evidence (I just could not find it).
What? You said generally this is what is true; generally, it is not true. That is all I'm saying. You're generalization is wrong on a factual level. Continuing, dogma1138 has done plenty to discuss differences between human and primate digestion and primate diets.
I'm not interested in reading back-alley nutritionist blogs to discover what HCLF is (that is basically all that came up on google, Vegan or LDS sites). You want to link to a research paper discussing it I'm happy to hear about it.
The Inuit and other Eskimos ate basically nothing but meat and fat in their traditional lifestyle. Not all primates eat high carb. The Neanderthals didn’t either. Hominids have been eating diets high in meat and fat for a really long time.
I would be very careful about assuming too much about neanderthal diets recent studies show that they cooked and boiled food even made chamomile tea and based on recent tooth plaque analysis had a diet which was fairly rich in plant based food sources.
Nearly all of them would not be on a high carb diet even the herbivore gorilla does not get its energy from carbs:
The macronutrient profile of this diet would be as follows: 2.5% energy as fat, 24.3% protein, 15.8% available carbohydrate, with potentially 57.3% of metabolizable energy from short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) derived from colonic fermentation of fiber. Gorillas would therefore obtain considerable energy through fiber fermentation.
The largest macro nutrient of nearly all apes boils down to fatty acids just through various different mechanisms.
Even the fruits they eat at very different non-domesticated ripen fruit and pith isn’t rich in sugar it’s rich in fatty acids.
No offense but what ever vegan eat like an ape BS you’ve been sold on its categorically wrong.
The biggest thing these all “diets” ignore is the actual underlying energy mechanisms which change the macronutrient landscape of the diet completely as different apes and humans have different GI and metabolic paths.
Mighty interesting article, thanks for sharing. One problem I see is that the tools for counting nutrient intake (cronometer.com in my case) base on the nutrients before fermentation. I have no idea what fermentation happens in my body (I expect nothing close to that of a gorilla, but not sure either). It would still be HCLF by "intake" (while possible/potentially being HFLC by "uptake").
The article makes a suggestion ("potentially"), and does so for one type of gorilla (the foliage eating one). How can you generalize from this to all apes? Just curious.
Humans do not have the same metabolic paths as most apes, you cannot break down cellular walls and you don't create nutritionally significant amount of fatty acids in your intestines.
The fruits you eat are also rich in fructose since they are domesticated fruits this is in stark opposite to what "fruits" wild apes consume.
I'm not generalizing it for all apes because different apes have different diets and different metabolic paths chimps do not ferment cellulose in their colon but they do eat ripen fruit in which the fatty acids develop they also eat fruit which ferments on the ground, they also eat pith all of which is rich in lipids, when you discount the fiber in the chimp diet you will see that it's also nearly 50% lipids even when accounting for plant sources only and not them sucking the skulls of small monkeys for the juicy fatty acids that make up their brains (don't go looking for that, trust me this is something you cannot unsee...).
Human physiology is very different than that apes if we go back again to the gorilla then the small intestine and colon ratios are reversed in humans the small intestine is about 50% of the overall digestive tract in gorillas the colon is 50% that is because they get most of their nutrients from secondary fermentation where human physiology is centered nearly exclusively around absorbing available nutrients in the food hence why we also cook food and why eating raw vegan or raw anything is a terrible terrible idea.
Saying that our GIs are similar to apes is true but it's like saying that our muscular and skeletal systems are similar but the differences are still night and day. Our bodies are designed to consume ready to use nutrients and more importantly pre-processed nutrients (is suggest reading "Cooking as a biological trait") and to extract as much of them as possible in the shortest time as possible, we don't spend all our day eating and we don't eat 30-40kg of food a day even those of use that weight like a gorilla. Our GI is the gasoline engine while most apes are coal powered steam engines they both still use pistons and consume some form of hydrocarbons but put one in the other and the result will not be pretty.
> Our bodies are designed to consume ready to use nutrients and more importantly pre-processed nutrients
I find it hard to believe that we are designed to do something that we have later "designed" ourselves. I see cooking as a survival strategy, by which we have grown our habitat by a lot. I look at man as a tropical being, its the only place I can survive without cloths. In the tropics there is also fruits that man can gather/eat without the use of tech. Fruits, leaves, seeds and bugs. Therefor I expect that to be our diets (see bugs there? so not dogmatically vegan here). Also when I put together a diet of said ingredients in cronometer.com it adds up to what we know about RDIs nowadays.
I'l have a look at the book you recommended, tnx for that. Much appreciated.
We are designed that way - we have the largest small intestine of all apes, and i think it's also one of the largest (ratio wise) if not the largest of all omnivore mammals.
Comparison with apes: https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/smalllarge-intest...
We didn't invent cooking there are good indications that our ancestors cooked food as early as 2m years ago, and cooking here is defined as chemical alteration limited to roasting or boiling.
In fact some animals technically "cook" as they intentionally let food undergo chemical changes and even induce it buy collecting, digging fermentation pits and even covering them with foliage to induce anaerobic fermentation.
Also the reason we are who we are and the rest of the apes are an evolutionary dead end is that we were better at exploiting our environment specifically better at extracting lipids and proteins which was beneficial for cognitive development.
How and what we eat is a the very core reason to why we are considerably more developed than the rest of our ape cibilings, and that is a very important fact to remember.
> How and what we eat is a the very core reason to why we are considerably more developed than the rest of our ape cibilings, and that is a very important fact to remember.
Thanks again. Why I agree, I also the the opposite. An sick and obese population. I see similarities with other animals that we feed (ie dogs). Humans and dogs are often in bad health at the end of our lives, while apes and wolves are doing well...
What do you think of this? BTW how did you get into this field, own interest (like me) or some formal studies?
(we're running out of replies, I may reply in some other way if you do not mind)
The population can get sick and obese and not die because we are not in the wilderness apes and wolves don’t have that great of a time they die the moment they become even remotely unfit.
For most apes in captivity the life expectancy is nearly 50% greater than those in the wild even those who are in reservations, for some it’s duble or more.
You will not find gorillas older than 30-35 years in the wild those in captivity live up to 50-60.
They are similar in the same fashion that most organs between apes and humans are similar but they are still very different in how they function and what they were designed to do, same goes for differences between all apes.
The problem with this is epidemiological. As people move from traditional high-carb (=low cost) diets to fat and protein rich western-style diets, obesity and diabetes tend to increase.
It really depends on sugar and insulin levels, high insulin is the culprit here, primarily due to an increase in high sugar intake combined with increase in fat and or protein.
Also there are many other factors like the move towards more western diets often also includes a less active lifestyle to to moving towards more modern "working/middle-class" type of jobs.
If you eat nothing than rice and some fish from time to time and work in the field all day ofc you won't have problems, if you are loading on fat and sugar or even sugar alone you will.
However fat on it's own does not make you fat on it's own, and with the diet available to most people in the west today reducing their carb intake to 30% or less will do wonders, I'm not advocating for everyone to be on a 20g carbs a day ketogenic diet but obesity is not tied to fat at all.
Don't forget that we have had populations that do not eat carbs or eat very little carbs, inuits, Chukcha etc. traditionally ate little to no carbs as carbs were rarely available, essentially all the population close to the arctic primarily consumes fat and protein and they also doing just fine.
America said cooking with lard was bad for us and all that resulted in was lard being substituted with sugar. Cos the moment you take the fat away everything is tasteless.
Yep, and there's so much salt in mass manufactured biscuits and the like I can no longer bear to eat them. Add more butter instead!
Cutting back on refined sugar really makes things taste better, lots of subtle flavour makes previously bland stuff like oats taste really nice. But the downside is being unable to stomach the excessive amounts of salt and sugar in a lot of stuff. The upside is I save a fortune on buying junk food since most of it now tastes awful.
So many confident comments in this thread. Why not make yourselves aware of the many big studies which all point in the same direction instead of just regurgitating what little pop science you are aware of?
The confidence is unreal! We're lucky to have so many experts in our midst. I hear one of them even read a book on the topic and you should read it too so that you can know the REAL correct diet that will lead to immortality.
Interestingly I think I said this before but last year had my specialist renal dietician (I was on disalysis), comment that the anti salt campaign had been well marketed but they " didn't tell you what S^%^T they use to replace salt" in lo salt foods.
During the heat wave in France this summer, messages to old persons were to drink regularly (which sometimes they forget)
So a quarter of medical consultations related to elders and heat was for a lack of salt [0]. From Google translate it’s call hyponatremia.
So as stated in other comments, moderation, may be, lack, bad idea.
I’m actually in Ireland. They seem to have taken the salt part very seriously, as everything need to be resalted (for me and my family).
But everything is over sugared.
Yep. I go on longer (60+ mile) bike rides once a week. Salt is so important on those rides, I get severe cramps without it. Especially when cycling on 100+ degree days.
Yeah, I've hiked with people on low-salt diets and they've never failed to get a hyponatremia headache that gets better when they drink some electrolyte(salt). Frankly it doesn't make any sense to me to take an intervention that's good for high blood pressure and unilaterally try to apply it to perfectly healthy people.
Sodium is essential for life, so you could say sodium prevents death.
As always, the poison is in the dose. And, as already mentioned, drinking too much water and not consuming enough sodium leads to hyponatremia. Patients are always surprised when I tell them they're sick from too much water and not enough salt.
Sodium in isolation might cause high blood pressure in certain people depending on the proportion of water and other electrolytes in their diet. Your body excretes water, sodium, and other electrolytes in proportion to maintain osmotic pressure within the cell and in the intracellular spaces. This is handled by the kidneys.
If you over-consume any one electrolyte or water compared to a baseline osmotic pressure may increase or decrease until the body compensates. This is from the article.
I'm not a doctor but I've taken some first aid classes where electrolyte and dehydration were covered in the context of hiking and backpacking. It's also possible to drain your body of electrolytes by sweating, because again the electrolytes must be present in proportion to the water and sweat contains electrolyte because the glands need the proper osmotic pressure to induct water. You may also drain electrolyte into your intestine because the body also needs the water to have the proper osmotic pressure to absorb it in the first place. This is why Oral Rehydration Salts have table and other salts in them.
The body is extremely complicated, and I'm always very suspicious when someone tells me that "X causes X" without explaining the mechanism of action or the caveats. Every body is different and the same body in different situations will require different treatments. Complex dynamical systems frequently exhibit chaotic behavior. Chaotic systems have the feature that taking the same intervention and applying it at slightly different points in the system's evolution can produce wildly different sequences of further evolution.
I hope that one day nutritional science will have advanced to the point where this is understood and expected during study design. But until that happens it's hard for me to believe many nutritional studies.
I run 70 miles per week, usually around noon each day in New England. I eat a very low sodium diet. All the sodium I get is naturally occurring in plants, and I do not seek out high-sodium vegetables like celery. I probably get around 500 mg.
I sweat like crazy. My sweat is not overly salty.
It's probably easier for me due to the volume of low-calorie density foods like starches, fruits, and vegetables. If I were eating a lot of high-fat foods like meats or oil I would likely not get enough salt.
Once you are conditioned to a low-salt, no-added-sugar, no-oil diet, your tastebuds become highly sensitized to the existing tastes of the food. Salt deadens the tastebuds.
After doing endurance exercise 80km+ bike rides each weekend, sodium and other forms of electrolytes are incredibly important. Without them I lose fluids and I get crazy leg cramps.
The issue is that salt tastes good, so people load it on their food to the point where it is unhealthy.
It's the same with sugar, there is a huge industry bashing sugar at the moment, but sugar is essential for the human body. They are bashing sugar and creating fear because alot of people (myself included at times) eat way too much sugar, because its so easy to do, but it does create adverse health effects. That doesn't mean sugar is bad, just that eating copious amounts of highly refined sugar is bad for you.
Try exercising without a healthy blood sugar level due to lack of complex sugars.
Now we have this keto industry where people think twice about eating fruit due to it being high in sugar, FRUIT for god sake.
I agree with everything you say, except the second to last paragraph. My endurance increased immensely by switching to keto, due to no longer using glucose as an energy source (instead, ketones).
Consuming only fats and proteins stresses the body quite heavily. Carbs are the easiest calorie source to digest, there is almost no digestion required.
Plus one can overload their body's compensatory mechanisms for acid base balance, due to the acidic ketones produced by gluconeogenesis.
Yes, humans cannot synthesize sodium but it also doesn't degrade, its only lost due to excretion. Regardless, it is an essential component of the diet, unlike sugar.
Plants (and every other known form of life) also cannot synthesize minerals.
I do HIIT in a fasted state weekly. Am I at my peak performance in said state? Maybe not, but I'm not competing and get through my workout just fine, so...
For me, endurance exercise is where I really need salt to avoid cramping. The more hours exercising, the more salt/calories I need to ingest. High intensity doesn't hit my body quite the same way.
Interesting! Did my first two day fasting this weekend and felt awesome the whole time. I broke the fast yesterday evening because I want to hit the gym today.
Do you continue the fast after HIIt or do you eat some protein after? How do you feel after such an intense workout in a fasted state?
They are eating more than just salt..the fat and carbohydrates in the chips. But yes, people will eat saltier foods more often if they are lacking in salt. There is literally a craving.
"A number of hormonal, central nervous, and behavioral systems are engaged when an animal is truly deficient in sodium, which motivates it to search for sodium salts, avidly consume them based on their salt taste, and thereby restore sodium balance" [1]
>They are eating more than just salt..the fat and carbohydrates in the chips. But yes, people will eat saltier foods more often if they are lacking in salt. There is literally a craving.
Well, yeah, I won't argue with that. I've experienced it myself during intense hangovers. But how do you get from that to "Salt really only tastes good when you need salt"? I love the taste of salt. I would never eat french fries that had no salt on them. Nor would I consider making a margarita without rimming the glass with salt.
What I meant is that cravings for sugar and salt modulate taste covariantly. Which you seem to get. None the less, salt still has am enjoyable taste inherently, before being amplified/minified.
>People tend to consume about the same amount of sodium no matter where they live, and this amount hasn’t changed much in decades. Those facts hint at the biological basis of our sodium appetite.... “Over the last five decades, salt content of commercial food in our food [in the United States] has gone up. But if you look at people’s 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, you see that the amounts of salt people consume have been constant,” he says. Irrespective of age, sex or race, between 1957 and 2003 Americans have been eating on average 3.5 grams of salt a day. “This suggests that we are somehow regulating the amount of salt we are eating,” Breslin says.... In one of Leshem’s studies, babies who had low concentrations of sodium in their blood in the first weeks of their lives grew up to be teenagers with a penchant for salt, even salt that is seemingly hidden in processed foods. “Even if you can’t taste the salt, apparently your body does. It’s working on an unconscious level to condition a preference for sodium,” Leshem explains.
> The issue is that salt tastes good, so people load it on their food to the point where it is unhealthy.
No, they don’t. If you don’t have hypertension you can have as much salt in your diet as you want. Northern Chinese food is really salty. They’re fine. Stop moralising.
If you don’t have hypertension add salt as you please.
There is no necessary carbohydrates, whereas you require some amount of fat and protein to survive. Consider humans surviving in cold area with literally no fruit except in Summer (at some extreme level: human thriving in area with no accessible plants to be directly ingested).
Fruits are not the enemy, but keep in mind their wide (mangos in Northern Europe!), year-long availability (strawberries in February!), along with their nutrition value (high in sugar) is a product of modernity.
It is misleading and completely wrong to infer from "low blood sugar levels make exercise hard" that dietary consumption of refined sugars is essential.
Given the obesity problems in the US, the low-carb/keto suggestions are effectively the same as the premature optimization/bike shedding issues with coding. If you're eating 1,000 calories too much, it doesn't matter if it's carbs or protein. Get the calories-in-calories-out balance correct, then you can start worrying about the macro nutrition afterwards. If I recall correctly, the sugar toxicity problems occur when you don't burn them.
This is opposite of the productive approach. The starting point should be "what diet can you eat that makes you feel satisfied after the appropriate amount of calories for your body/lifestyle".
The proportion of carbs in the diet seems to have a huge effect on appetite for many people. For them, eating fewer carbs means they are satisfied after fewer calories, so they eat less and lose weight.
If nutrition research was scientific they would have figured this out before a couple authors and random people with blogs did.
Veggies and fruit are carbs. I replaced pasta and white rice with oatmeal, cabbage and apples. All of above are all carbs. Not all carbs are equal. I feel fully satisfied with less calories now. I can eat 4 cups of rice in one sitting without realizing it, but not 4 apples. Saying replace pasta with eggs and bacon is not better than suggesting more veggies and fruits.
Regarding the approach, I found it easiest to know my goal weight has a maintenance calories of 2,100 calories - an objective, hard number. Hit that, then adjust diet for the very subjective goal of being feeling satisfied after that. I can't imagine an effective public health policy based on subjective "do you feel full?"
1) You seem to think you are disagreeing with me, but I never said everyone was the same. I said the point is to find a diet where you feel satisfied without consuming too many calories. Some people might love sugar too much and need to cut down on something else (eg fat) instead, or they simply need to exercise more via getting a different job, etc.
2) Pretty sure pasta and white rice will have a higher density of carbs than eg cabbage and apples. From a random site (feel free to find a better source) in grams of carbs per cup of food:
oatmeal = 29.3 g
cabbage = 5.2 g
apples = 17.3 g
rice = 44.5 g
pasta = 42.8 g
3) "I can't imaging an effective public health policy based on subjective "do you feel full?". I don't see what the problem would be, but whatever. These nutritional public health policies have all been awful, no one should be listening to them anyway.
i usually drink a glass of water with a little bit of table salt. it's more isotonic and therefore more refreshing. the benefit is even more sensible when i do sports. fewer or no muscle spasms/jittering because the minerals of the salt improve nerve signaling.
I know that when I try to follow the recommended amount of added salt I get sick in 2 or 3 days. The total sodium one is impossible (one can eat more than it in fresh fruits!), so I never even tried.
You talk about moderation, but there has been a large lack of moderation on the part of health professionals for recommending untested practices.
A bit tangential, but if you do manage to cut on sugar... It completely transforms your palette. After a few weeks (or maybe months?) you can try an American candy-bar or soda and the sweetness is pretty overwhelming. I was addicted to soda growing up, and after quitting (or rather, greatly reducing), it completely blew my mind how many new flavors I was experiencing.
One piece of advice: if you want candy with lower levels of sweetness, I'd suggest giving Japanese candies a try.
We can certainly agree that the if the time spent reading dietary advice and nutrition articles with clickbaity headlines was spent on exercise instead, we'd all be better off.
just eat a bit of everything. a healthy balanced diet of fat, sugar, salt, or whatever it is that people says is bad for you, is still way better than someone just eating one thing every day.
I understand the first thing emergency people do in the hospital is to give us a saline (salt) solution. If salt is so bad for us, why are we given a bag of salt water?
There are different qualities of salt. Some contain additives, sea salt contains plastic particles. I eat plenty of salt, as much as I feel like; but it's all mineral salt without additives.
Nutrition + human bodies are systems which are too complex to reason about effects. From a Design-of-Experiments perspective, it's practically untractable.
Whenever I hear discussion of whether we should defer to the judgement of scientists, I always want to ask, which field of science do you mean? In some, like physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, geology, there is still much to be learned but what we have so far is pretty solid. You don't hear about the basics (matter is made of atoms, species emerge from natural selection, plate tectonics) getting overturned.
Then, there are other fields, like economics and nutrition, where the basic fundamentals of the field are a pile of mud. It is much like medicine in the era of balancing the four humours. In the meantime, we need to fund research, but not listen to any of the recommendations of the experts, until they achieve a basic level of understanding of their subject (which clearly hasn't happened yet).
I'd love to read a book on the subject. What did it take for various scientific fields to become truly mature? Are their key ways to measure how far along we are?
Concrete, predictive theories would be great but I get that we're far from them in fields like nutrition short of, like, scurvy I guess? I wonder how much of this is due to the natural variation among individuals and how much is just because of ethical limits on scientific inquiry. Not that I'm advocating for human experiments but one has to wonder what we could discover.
> It does appear that some people think that I denied scientific character to the historical sciences, such as palaeontology, or the history of the evolution of life on Earth. This is a mistake, and I here wish to affirm that these and other historical sciences have in my opinion scientific character; their hypotheses can in many cases be tested. [Popper, 1981]
Certain things like 'carbon dating' are certainly scientific, and can be falsified. Evolution itself is the best historical explanation we have, but hard to set up an experiment to disprove.
I personally think 'falsifiability" is particularly useful in separating a soft 'fact' like Freud's theory of the id, and the Oedipus Complex from something like say, the theory of gravity.
Agreed, it is useful, certainly. But it's not to be wielded without subtlety: notably in your quote the use of 'imo' and 'in many cases'. Anyway, apologies for the terseness. My gripe is just when it is used as a magic omnibullet in discussions about 'what is science?'.
They are all cargo cult sciences. Fields dominated by theories entirely unproven because they are practically unprovable. Those theories remain even after they are often demonstratably wrong. Look up replication crisis.
I don't buy your premise, but supposing I did, what alternative do you propose? The purpose of social science is to understand human society. Do you have some concept of a way to do that which you feel would be more clearly accurate or scientific than what's currently done?
Bear in mind that the 'hard' sciences use theories which are partially or wholly incorrect, too; we still use Newtonian physics in many cases because they're easier to use as a model, even if they don't capture everything.
That they don't call themselves science. Maybe call themselves studies and that they put more effort into what they call experiments.
> we still use Newtonian physics in many cases because they're easier to use as a model, even if they don't capture everything.
This is frankly a terrible example. Because it does not tell the whole story does not mean it is incorrect. There is no unifying theory of sociology either.
I believe there are a wide variety of methods used in social science. Are you specifically referring to small experiments conducted with undergrads in a classroom? Or do you have other targets in mind?
> That they don't call themselves science. Maybe call themselves studies and that they put more effort into what they call experiments.
I'm sorry, let me clarify: My question is not "what would you do with what we have now?", rather, it's "assuming we throw all of what we have now out, how would you do it in a way you consider to be science?" My assertion is that disregarding all our progress up until now in these fields on the grounds that they have not yet reached the level of maturity of physics or other hard sciences is unfair and will create a self-fulfilling cycle whereby we never gain any actual progress in these fields.
> This is frankly a terrible example. Because it does not tell the whole story does not mean it is incorrect. There is no unifying theory of sociology either.
Except that's exactly my point. Sociology doesn't tell the whole story, but your assertion that everything that comes out of it is tainted isn't right, either. You're comparing relatively nascent fields to relatively well-developed ones and expecting them to be exactly the same in terms of replicability, reliability and applicability, generally. That's unfair, and totally disregards history.
If we regressed even further, to before Newton, to the ancient Greeks or Romans or Egyptians, sure, they got a lot wrong - most things. But everything is a building block. I think that we are just now beginning to make real progress in fields like psychology, sociology, etc. You can call them "baby sciences," if you'd like, or invent whatever other word or term you prefer, but it doesn't change what they are, and it doesn't make them not worth proceeding with.
Further, we can't say that because some sciences progress quickly (e. g. computer science), all sciences should be expected to do so. As many in this thread have pointed out, good social science is harder to find and harder to do than good computer science. Progress will therefore be slower. It doesn't make said progress unimportant or impossible.
Can you elaborate on the 'pile of mud' fundamentals of economics? I've always been inclined to agree, but then I consider my biases in this regard, but also my own field, psychology, and pause.
If you subdivide 'science' into various fields, psychology is definitely on much shakier grounds than has often ben assumed. But if you subdivide 'psychology', the picture isn't as clear. I'd say marketing and the broader field of persuasion/propaganda, or something like group dynamics, has a much firmer basis in reality than, say, psychopathology or evolutionary psychology.
I'm very curious if people who are well-versed in economics can make similar distinctions, because I find it hard to believe it's 'all' mud.
People are very prejudiced against economics because economists don't predict well and have contradictory policy recommendations, but the basis of economics is quite solid.
(My favorite illustration: if there were no underlying laws to economics, then dictators would just issue edicts about currency and markets which would then just plain work rather than causing havoc -- and yet dictators very much suffer side effects of their dictates.)
This is very similar to weather prediction, which in some geographical areas is very untrustworthy, but not because its scientific foundation is lacking.
Psychology has subareas that are very rigorous and evidence based, but also major foundational areas that remain essentially speculative/opinion-based (what is mind/consciousness/free will?)
Evolutionary psychology is again firmly rooted, but is most famous for its speculative and unproven areas.
Marketing and persuasion/propaganda have subareas that incorporate statistics and/or psychology and/or sociology etc., but are not themselves actually sciences at all, so that's very much apples and oranges.
Really, I got downvoted for something where every word was inarguably true in the sense of objective fact not opinion, and informative about half a dozen subjects?
This place is as bad as reddit and slashdot. I haven't returned here very often over the years; this kind of experience makes one feel unwelcome.
I find a lot of the problems is people seem to have a job dealing with correlation not being causation. Maybe there's a correlation between salt and heart attacks but perhaps that's because the high salt folk eat a lot of junk food and its the junk food and lifestyle that's not the problem rather than the salt. You need further evidence to figure what's going on with any certainty but you almost never see an article saying that.
The fields of nutrition and economics do have the basics worked out. But the basics aren't things like "is eating too much salt bad for you?" The basics are about nutrient metabolism and the human body is a very complicated (/complex) system. The basics don't necessarily have to be "actionable", and they don't necessarily need to say how the system comes together as a whole. For instance, in your example of evolutionary biology, there is a lot of debate about whether natural selection or neutral evolution is the primary driver behind species diversity. We know that both exist and both happen, but we don't know how they came together to create the species diversity we observe.
Another aspect of this is that there are certain fields (namely economics and nutrition) where the popular press over-exaggerates every single paper as a groundbreaking discovery because it gets clicks. The media tries to present the idea that scientists as a whole have come to a brand new conclusion which should change the way everyone behaves, when in reality it's just a few people in a windowless room reporting on some observations they found and speculating on what those observations might mean.
It is amazing how persistently common the 'oven logic' silliness is with medicine despite the fact that laypeople should really know better by now let alone scientists. If adequate doses of Vitamin C are good for you then megadoses must prevent cancer! Oh wait they actually increase your risk of cancer. Biological systems aren't that simple - otherwise we'd already see great results from the outliers and we don't.
It brings to mind the irony of trial lawyers becoming addicted to huge lawsuits thanks to the tobacco industry. Despite the obvious merits and misconduct of the defendants making it justified it seems to have had a harmful side effect of causing many lawyers to start looking for 'the next tobacco' case with no care to the underlying merit.
Was this study funded directly or indirectly (through a bunch of shell research organizations / industry bodies) ?
What sustained the costs of the study?
Without knowing the funding situation, what's the point debating about this study?
Skeptical me wonders if this was funded by industry that has been affected badly by sodium horror stories, and subtly plugs in potassium as a healthier alternative.
230 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadIt's not "science". It's science, as in, emperically demonstrated, over and over, billions of times, every time, science.
That said, healthy people manage their osmolarity and blood pressure through other renal mechanisms. The people who run up against this salt-blood pressure issue are generally medically fragile, older people who have outrun all their other compensation mechanisms. The question here is more about the cost-benefit of pushing this particular public health message. The vast majority of healthy people don't benefit, and the sick people get the word from their physicians anyway.
If there's indeed no benefit, then the message is actively harmful, because it causes people who follow it to suffer (from bad-tasting food, in this case).
And of course, once they learn that they've essentially been lied to, they'll learn to ignore all "X is healthy/unhealthy for you" messages, which is probably a good thing given how many of them turn out to be wrong. (And if salt does not cause problems for most people, telling them that they need to eat less of it is wrong).
Well, the food doesn't end up tasting bad because they replace salt with sugar...
But, your argument seems like a evasion of the truth, salt is actually food. (unless you want to argue that salt is not food, then your argument would not really apply in the same way)
If you are going to claim "too much salt" = "salt is bad", "because science", then don't you have to argue how bad water is as well (in the same manner), because the renal system also gets rid of excess water too...
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16614865/ns/us_news-life/t/woman-d...
I remember learning in a run-of-the-mill high school biology class that the electrolyte differential in nerve cells <insert handwaving> creates the electric pulse to make signals. I'm having trouble remembering the details, but I remember that it was basically "If you don't have enough salt, your nerves stop working and you die. If you have too much salt, your cells retain too much water and you die."
Stats are only decent guides from an expected value metric if you consider yourself equally probable in the population distribution. But you aren't, you can find out all the above priors with some work..a pain in the ass but well worth it considering the time that health issues can take from you in the future. So take some time to do some mental psychometrics and physical biometrics on yourself. It's always worth it to be better able to see which science applies to you even when the science is results from totally uniform population.
It's the second order effects that you need to be aware of when asking if something is "good" or "bad".
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17746708
Be wary of “that one bad thing” which is then summarily replaced.
My stepfather would say the same thing. Whenever I'd eat a salad, he'd look at it and say "I can't eat that shit," then he'd eat a steak that had been fried in 1" of fat, some eggs also fried in the same 1" of fat, some home made chips/fries, also fried in the same fat. French toast, to him, was bread fried in 1" of fat.
I wish I was making this up. As a teenager, my diet was horrific, usually undercooked mincemeat with chunks of bone still in it, but I did get some vegetables. Unfortunately, they were "flash boiled" - cauliflower and cabbage that were nearly raw, mashed potatoes that had uncooked and unmashed chunks in it. I used to heap pepper and sauce (ketchup) on everything, so I couldn't taste a thing.
In the event he did eat something that resembled a salad, it was a heavily curried coleslaw, with heavily curried grated carrot, and heavily curried eggs.
When his doctor ordered him on a low fat and low cholesterol diet, he realized that the suggested margarine had less of the bad stuff in it so he could put more on his white bread, usually as thick as a half dozen playing cards.
When he grabbed the salt shaker, you knew he was going to die from a heart attack or a stroke - and he did. Without a word of exaggeration, he would shake salt over his food for half a minute or more. He always had a bottle of Coke beside him, too. He'd drink a couple of 1.5 liter bottles a day in summer.
As an aside, it was almost a decade after I left home before I re-discovered the idea of meals for pleasure. I'd been trained to stuff terrible food in my mouth for so long that I never bothered to taste anything. These days, I'd rather have some fresh-sliced tomato, leek in a white sauce, side dish of tortellini with a drizzle of olive oil over it, and some steamed mixed vegetables (corn, peas, brocolli, cauliflower) than any of the crap he ate, or forced me to eat. Unfortunately, now I'm hungry.
I basically stopped reading "science says that X is good/bad for your health" articles. At most I get entertaining value from them.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180622012101.h...
My understanding from reading the article is the lower threshold is higher than we think. There are still negative effects at what we consider high levels of salt intake.
They also mention same team who did this study published a previous study that met a lot a criticism and they apparently failed to address the criticisms.
So you should probably moderate your salt intake still.
Anyway, recently I wanted to look into whether or not eggs are good for you because those same Keto supporters make noise about how eggs no longer affect (bad?) cholesterol levels and therefore won't contribute to heart disease. You'd think it would be clear. Nope. It's about 50-50 split judging by various links (from seemingly reputable doctors and nutritionists). Even those docs that pay lip service to the changing attitudes towards eggs, don't know what a safe amount is and caution about eating more than X per day or week ... though not because of any specific studies, but just as a precaution. A simple question like "Can I eat 3 eggs for breakfast everyday" has no consensus answer. What the fuck.
Should we heavily invest in Quantified Self as a society? I'm sure we have the technology to make it worthwhile, but I'm not sure most people would be willing to do so due to privacy concerns.
Studies are not just financed by obvious interests in the result, but also they use really poor population samples with horrible falsability and repeatability issues.
The fact that we still don't have a fully functional human body model to test theories on, doesn't help either.
What does this mean?
My best guess is that there must be some kind of fear, among that field's practitioners, that some stupid politicians (gah, redundancy!) would take one look at the project and throw a hissy fit or worse.
You seem to think that effort should translate into understanding. Nature doesn't work this way.
In my opinion, most effort in biomed has been wasted due to poorly designed studies, which is due to NHST (null hypothesis significance testing; ie, testing a null hypothesis rather than the research hypothesis), and all the BS that procedure entails.
So the real reason no one is trying to develop "a fully functional human body model" is that such a model is not even visible on the horizon for a single cell, or even sub-cellular organelle.
Or they do exist, already. All humans are a fully functional human body model.
Not quite, but you are catching on. The rest is mostly a matter of cloning, and providing a standardized nurturing to each clone to eliminate confounding differences. (Perhaps in the far future we will be able to raise one clone, scan its brain, and overwrite the brains of each of the rest of its identical siblings with the scan results.)
For some kinds of research, it even suffices to use a creature who has a hole where humans have a brain.
... ya know, biology sounds really exciting to laymen who don't know any better.
This seems unlikely given that mainstream nutrition science is the same in most of the western world, but the obesity levels are far more severe in the US. From what I hear from friends who have travelled to the US (from the UK), standard portion sizes can be over twice as over on your side of the pond. And it can be very difficult to travel anywhere without a car. Seems to me this might have the bigger effect.
That said nutrition science really is a mess. Hopefully we'll work it out one day :)
I was educated enough to figure things out in adulthood, but you raise a poorly educated populace on that mentality while making the least healthy food cheap and delicious, and shocker we have an obesity epidemic. :P
The cost of a larger portion is minimal relative to the higher price (especially in dishes that are made in large batches anyways). So the restaurant is happy to be getting enough to cover all their costs (and hopefully a little extra), and the customer leaves happy despite paying more.
The downsides in the long-term are that (1) as time goes on and currency inflates, portion sizes get larger and (2) people get used to larger portion sizes and the same meal has less value to the customer over time.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I do believe this sort of feedback loop plays a role in obesity.
This was prompted by an annual checkup with my doctor. I was 265lbs (6'0" tall) at 23 and had a number of issues related to my weight, including high cholesterol and an inflamed liver. My last annual checkup, I was down I think 30-35lbs and everything they tested was back in the normal range. So yeah, portion sizes are important.
2. Sugar. So much sugar. Specifically, corn syrup. The agricultural lobby has successfully obtained so much in the way of subsidies that corn syrup is actually cheaper than cane sugar. It's in everything. Even bread has sugar of some sort added. You know there's a problem when bread brands place advertisements on the packaging that it "contains no corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup".
Combine that with the fact that these effects take years or decades to show themselves, it makes for an area of science with very few hard answers.
I am kind of under the impression that this is generally accepted, at least partially, by pretty much everyone these days, not just Keto people.
As in, the move to remove fats entirely and replace them with carbs is considered today to have been a bad idea, even if no one quite agrees just how bad or just what a better idea is.
Is that not more-or-less consensus today?
The move to reduce fats may or may not have been backed by “mainstream nutrition science”, but replacing them with carbs never was.
But eating carbs was certainly emphasized, eg search Google for food pyramids from the 1970s, their "eat most"categories are usually vegetables and carbs.
There's a difference between “the science was wrong” and “government recommendations served an interest group without being well grounded in science.”
I think that the recommendations either were based on science, or at least weren't really disputed until about 10-15 years ago. Then again, what I think I know about this mostly comes from hearing people talk about the issue, e.g. in interviews, forums, etc. But I haven't really read any of the source material on this (either modern-day or older) so I really have no idea if it's at all true.
Mainstream nutrition fads clearly were. A big part of of those fads were about lay generalization of what science supported for very specific diseases as general advice. Another big part was commercial propaganda from food vendors.
For instance:
> Our findings indicate that inaccurate measurement of sodium intake could be an important contributor to the paradoxical J-shaped findings reported in some cohort studies. Epidemiological studies should not associate health outcomes with unreliable estimates of sodium intake
Basically, this seems to me to argue that the error range in the methods used would be bigger than the relevant range of results discussed, so to draw any conclusion measurements need to be redone.
That would be a bit different from a denial of a specific thesis, although I am sure the researcher must have an opinion on the matter.
One of the ways people have tried to get around this expense is to take a large population and ask them what they have been eating over their lives. This has two major problems that make it almost useless: People don't remember what they actually ate, only what they think they ate. And there are too many co-founding variables. Some people try to be healthy, so they make lots of changes to their lifestyle, and you can't separate out the effects from diet, exercise, stress levels, and everything else people do.
In what way? Your kidneys dump any excess salt your body doesn't need. The long standing 20th century salt alarmism has no basis in reality.
> In what way?
“Of course too much is bad for you. Too much of anything is bad for you. (…) That’s what “too much” means. (…) “Too much” is precisely that quantity which is excessive. That’s what it means.”
From https://youtu.be/XewVicFzRxw?t=2m44s
Some studies have found that the people who have the lowest salt consumption have increased risk of death, so combined with sodium being essential for life, and no increase in the salt consumption over the last half century, I'm not confident that we should, as a population, be artificially moderating our salt intake, the evidence is just not there.
The respondent's point was that there is a threshold at which the amount of salt ingested is too much for what the body can handle.
Obviously a pound is an unrealistic extreme, but it illustrates the point: there is a threshold.
More realistically, it would not be unusual for somebody to have a daily salt intake that is a little over the threshold of what the kidneys can easily handle, and bit by bit, harm can develop, just as is the case with too much sugar, too much fat, too much alcohol, or too much of anything in any organic system.
Seems to me that geometrical optimization based medicine is poor, we were born in and out of complexity, we feed on it.
Margarine may or may not be worse than butter (I think it is worse). It is better to avoid/reduce all refined fats (oils), except maybe for a high DHA omega 3 supplement.
If you want to eat for health, look into WFPB, they have a lot of science on their side.
That said, I don't recall where the target number came from.
The correct number depends on individual, weather, activity level, etc. The actual medical recommendation is merely that healthy people should pay attention to their thirst and drink when thirsty, and plan ahead for exertion and desert excursions etc.
Certainly some people don't pay attention to their own thirst, but that's not to say that 6 or 8 are the correct numbers. That may be too much or too little.
To get any consistency in results you have to control things to a point of being unrealistic, and then the results aren't very useful because nobody's real diet and genetic makeup fits with the fake abstract setting of the experiment.
Then results get simplified and abstracted even more to make easily understandable conclusions... like maybe for 78% of people cacao is good, but for 0.3% of people it doubles the risk of stroke (although this bit doesn't get studied because it wasn't in the initial hypothesis). Results are reduced to "cacao is good for you"... but you might not part of the 78%. Maybe you're in the 0.3%.
I'm not trying to say that science is useless, just that applying it isn't as simple as people like to make out (and a lot of people don't want to accept that life may not be as methodical and predictable as they want it to be). Nuance is too hard.
For myself I decided to go with WFPB diet because pretty much everyone agrees that fruits, vegetables, greens and whole grains are good for you. There's no controversy there.
Basically without more good science on the subject, we are all just mostly guessing.
I't the point where you refine something (oil from seeds, sugar from beets) where it is against the protocol.
> Seems a bit of a misery diet to me.
I was not trying to make you happy. I stated it has a lot of science on it's side. There are some great cooking resources on how to make it taste/look/whatever great. Wanna know more about the science, see How Not To Die.
I'd say it's a lot easier to make butter in your kitchen than it is tofu.
There's a really good book about the food industry called "Eat Your Heart Out" by Felicity Lawrence. I already thought tofu was a plasticky non-food but that book put me off it for life.
You need a cow in your kitchen to make butter!
Tofu got some haters. But as far as I know, it is bad for health (if not contaminated with pollutants).
You talk about "appealing" and "off putting". I try to keep the discussion on healthy vs not.
What this WFPB appears to be is a religion in dietary form, complete with diatribes of papers written by them. And it ignores why we have the jaws that we do, on some moral epithet that eating animals is evil and bad.
I'll pass.
> Higher calorie density and better nutrient profile
Higher and better than what? I am a high level athlete and have no trouble meeting my nutritional requirements.
I would highly recommend to avoid any diet which is less than 30-40% in calories from fat.
That said the worst thing you can have is high fat and high carb since the insulin would cause your body to store all the fat and turn the extra sugar into more fat.
Our GI tract is very similar to that of primates. I think it is best to eat like they do: HCLF.
> That said the worst thing you can have is high fat and high carb
100% agree.
> the insulin would cause your body to store all the fat and turn the extra sugar into more fat.
Nope. The extra glucose with spike in your blood (as the fay blocks your insulin on the cells), glucose is only converted to fat a tiny bit.
Gorillas nearly only eat leaves while chips are omnivores that hunt even monkeys and even practice cannibalism.
Glucose will turn into triglycerides and be stored into fat but more importantly what insulin does is instruct your fat cells to store energy.
1 cup of sugar = 201 g. 1 cup of Butter = 227 grams. 201/227 = a given volume of sugar is about 89% as heavy as the same volume of butter.
1 gram of sugar contains 4 calories. 1 gram of butter is about 7.2 calories (a gram of fat is 9 calories and butter is roughly 85% fat + milk solids and water). 4/7.2 = a gram of sugar contains about 56% as many calories as a gram of butter.
4 tbps of sugar = 50 grams = 200 calories
4 tbps of butter = 56.8 grams = 408 calories
But that's HCLF me :)
Many would dispute this if you're alluding to it being heavy in saturated fat which there's heavy dispute over.
> Margarine may or may not be worse than butter (I think it is worse).
Doesn't seem consistent with your logic of less refined is better.
> If you want to eat for health, look into WFPB, they have a lot of science on their side.
So basically veganism. Pretty much a non-starter for most people.
> Doesn't seem consistent with your logic of less refined is better.
That's why I continue to say its better to avoid both. More or less as bad as butter is still quite bad either way.
> So basically veganism.
Yeah. When applied for health reasons, it's called a plant based diet. Since you can make junk-food from plants, the WFPB word came about.
> Pretty much a non-starter for most people.
Stopping smoking is also hard. Wanne live longer/healthier? Look into WFPB. Wanne do what you always did? It is still legal, no worries as of yet.
It’s animal fat. It gets broken down into glycerides.
> It is too calorie dense.
If you need fewer calories eat less.
> It blocks insulin.
Insulin is part of glucose metabolism. Dietary fat does not effect it.
> It becomes fat (carbs barely become fat), especially when combined with carbs (as is common).
Untrue. If you have a calorie deficit you’ll lose weight, a surplus you’ll gain it. Whether the energy comes from fats or carbs is irrelevant.
> It often comes with cholesterol.
Serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol are unrelated.
It's about the other nutrients that come with the calories. If you eat cal dense foods you will not consume enough (micro/phyto) nutrients. Think lettuce/fruit vs oil/butter. Throw 2500 kcal of each group into cronometer.com and see for your self.
> It blocks insulin.
On the cell, so cell become insulin resistant:
> It blocks insulin.
https://youtu.be/fRZduVxlP_U
> > It becomes fat (carbs barely become fat), especially when combined with carbs (as is common).
> Untrue. If you have a calorie deficit you’ll lose weight, a surplus you’ll gain it. Whether the energy comes from fats or carbs is irrelevant.
True, but I'm talking about having a surplus. In that case very little carbs can be turned into body fat, while consumed fat is easily turned into body fat.
> Serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol are unrelated.
Some studies may show that, but many other do not. Looking at the methods they use it is clear to me which studies to trust...
How does that make it healthy?
Here you go. I hope it helps someone, because I took a bit karmic penalty on HN spreading what I think is proven truth. (still worth it for me)
Fats are not inherently bad for you, doesn’t matter if they are plant based or not.
It is fat that blocks insulin on yr cells. No (or little) fat and you can absorb your carbs as nature intended.
> Fats are not inherently bad for you, doesn’t matter if they are plant based or not.
I agree. It is the refined fats that are bad.
Also the human genetic and epigenetic landscape is utterly different just like the difference between any other species. And you also ignore our gut flora which is drastically different than apes in the wild (you would also not find apes with the same flora ofc, Gorillas and Chimps would have drastically different floras).
But sure eat like a gorilla around 50-60 I don’t remember if it’s lbs or kg of leaves a day but at those figures it doesn’t matter and see how long would you survive.
(just in case someone somehow would take that jest seriously, please don't eat like a Gorilla you will die, and if not you will suffer irreversible damage to your colon to the point where you quite possible wish you were dead)
I read "Western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla): This subspecies consumes parts of at least 97 plant species. About 67% of their diet is fruit, 17% is leaves, seeds and stems and 3% is termites and caterpillars."
Another type of gorilla eats more/mostly leafs.
Still gorilla eat HCLF. I'm not saying eat only leafs. I'm saying other primates eat fruit-leaves-bugs mostly (yes some chimps hunt, but given enough fruit they are not so much compelled to). And we have a quite similar GI tract. Not the same, but much more similar than comparing to cats or cows.
We are not made for processed food. We are made for HCLF. We are quite similar to other primates GI-tract wise. What do you not agree with?
We do not have a similar GI tract to other primates we have a GI tract simmilar to some primates Gorillas have a closer GI tract to hippos than to humans.
Even the lowland gorilla which it eats “fruit” would say not eat a banana, in fact they destroy banana trees as they eat the leaves and the stem rather than the fruits.
Gorillas can digest about 70% of the plant cell wall material they consume they are one of the most efficient herbivores on the planet in this regard the fruits they eat at rich in cellulose not sugar or starch.
And while cellulose is carb the fermentation process turns it into fatty acids.
What little ripen fruit they eat seem to involve around maintaining fermentation not as a source of energy.
See dogma1138's child post to this parent as well as his other responses to cies other posts in this thread.
No offense cies but your posts here reek of soccer-mom-esque health blog level of basic research and espousing of ideas as facts.
Eating some "nuts, meat" does not make it HFLC. Do you know what consitutes HCLF? Well name me one type of primate that does not eat HCLF in the wild and you may correct me. But so far you have not.
> No offense cies but your posts here reek of soccer-mom-esque health blog level of basic research and espousing of ideas as facts.
No offense taken. We're just discussing here. Please provide evidence for your claim there is a not-HCLF (thus HFLC) type of ape in some location. I will fix my beliefs with proper evidence (I just could not find it).
I'm not interested in reading back-alley nutritionist blogs to discover what HCLF is (that is basically all that came up on google, Vegan or LDS sites). You want to link to a research paper discussing it I'm happy to hear about it.
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/2/486.full
The not "other" primates. They humans using tech to survive in harsh conditions.
> The Neanderthals didn’t either. Hominids [...]
They dead! And hard to study as sibling poster shows.
Name one wild ape in one location not on HCLF please. I will change my understanding given proper evidence.
The macronutrient profile of this diet would be as follows: 2.5% energy as fat, 24.3% protein, 15.8% available carbohydrate, with potentially 57.3% of metabolizable energy from short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) derived from colonic fermentation of fiber. Gorillas would therefore obtain considerable energy through fiber fermentation.
The largest macro nutrient of nearly all apes boils down to fatty acids just through various different mechanisms.
Even the fruits they eat at very different non-domesticated ripen fruit and pith isn’t rich in sugar it’s rich in fatty acids.
https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/127/10/2000/4722347
No offense but what ever vegan eat like an ape BS you’ve been sold on its categorically wrong.
The biggest thing these all “diets” ignore is the actual underlying energy mechanisms which change the macronutrient landscape of the diet completely as different apes and humans have different GI and metabolic paths.
The article makes a suggestion ("potentially"), and does so for one type of gorilla (the foliage eating one). How can you generalize from this to all apes? Just curious.
The fruits you eat are also rich in fructose since they are domesticated fruits this is in stark opposite to what "fruits" wild apes consume.
I'm not generalizing it for all apes because different apes have different diets and different metabolic paths chimps do not ferment cellulose in their colon but they do eat ripen fruit in which the fatty acids develop they also eat fruit which ferments on the ground, they also eat pith all of which is rich in lipids, when you discount the fiber in the chimp diet you will see that it's also nearly 50% lipids even when accounting for plant sources only and not them sucking the skulls of small monkeys for the juicy fatty acids that make up their brains (don't go looking for that, trust me this is something you cannot unsee...).
Human physiology is very different than that apes if we go back again to the gorilla then the small intestine and colon ratios are reversed in humans the small intestine is about 50% of the overall digestive tract in gorillas the colon is 50% that is because they get most of their nutrients from secondary fermentation where human physiology is centered nearly exclusively around absorbing available nutrients in the food hence why we also cook food and why eating raw vegan or raw anything is a terrible terrible idea.
Saying that our GIs are similar to apes is true but it's like saying that our muscular and skeletal systems are similar but the differences are still night and day. Our bodies are designed to consume ready to use nutrients and more importantly pre-processed nutrients (is suggest reading "Cooking as a biological trait") and to extract as much of them as possible in the shortest time as possible, we don't spend all our day eating and we don't eat 30-40kg of food a day even those of use that weight like a gorilla. Our GI is the gasoline engine while most apes are coal powered steam engines they both still use pistons and consume some form of hydrocarbons but put one in the other and the result will not be pretty.
I find it hard to believe that we are designed to do something that we have later "designed" ourselves. I see cooking as a survival strategy, by which we have grown our habitat by a lot. I look at man as a tropical being, its the only place I can survive without cloths. In the tropics there is also fruits that man can gather/eat without the use of tech. Fruits, leaves, seeds and bugs. Therefor I expect that to be our diets (see bugs there? so not dogmatically vegan here). Also when I put together a diet of said ingredients in cronometer.com it adds up to what we know about RDIs nowadays.
I'l have a look at the book you recommended, tnx for that. Much appreciated.
Comparison with apes: https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/smalllarge-intest... We didn't invent cooking there are good indications that our ancestors cooked food as early as 2m years ago, and cooking here is defined as chemical alteration limited to roasting or boiling.
In fact some animals technically "cook" as they intentionally let food undergo chemical changes and even induce it buy collecting, digging fermentation pits and even covering them with foliage to induce anaerobic fermentation.
Also the reason we are who we are and the rest of the apes are an evolutionary dead end is that we were better at exploiting our environment specifically better at extracting lipids and proteins which was beneficial for cognitive development.
How and what we eat is a the very core reason to why we are considerably more developed than the rest of our ape cibilings, and that is a very important fact to remember.
Thanks again. Why I agree, I also the the opposite. An sick and obese population. I see similarities with other animals that we feed (ie dogs). Humans and dogs are often in bad health at the end of our lives, while apes and wolves are doing well...
What do you think of this? BTW how did you get into this field, own interest (like me) or some formal studies?
(we're running out of replies, I may reply in some other way if you do not mind)
For most apes in captivity the life expectancy is nearly 50% greater than those in the wild even those who are in reservations, for some it’s duble or more.
You will not find gorillas older than 30-35 years in the wild those in captivity live up to 50-60.
I never said they were the same, I say they are similar. A quote from the article you provided (thanks again for that):
"Anatomically, the digestive tracts of humans and great apes are very similar (Stevens and Hume 1995)"
Also there are many other factors like the move towards more western diets often also includes a less active lifestyle to to moving towards more modern "working/middle-class" type of jobs.
If you eat nothing than rice and some fish from time to time and work in the field all day ofc you won't have problems, if you are loading on fat and sugar or even sugar alone you will.
However fat on it's own does not make you fat on it's own, and with the diet available to most people in the west today reducing their carb intake to 30% or less will do wonders, I'm not advocating for everyone to be on a 20g carbs a day ketogenic diet but obesity is not tied to fat at all.
Don't forget that we have had populations that do not eat carbs or eat very little carbs, inuits, Chukcha etc. traditionally ate little to no carbs as carbs were rarely available, essentially all the population close to the arctic primarily consumes fat and protein and they also doing just fine.
Cutting back on refined sugar really makes things taste better, lots of subtle flavour makes previously bland stuff like oats taste really nice. But the downside is being unable to stomach the excessive amounts of salt and sugar in a lot of stuff. The upside is I save a fortune on buying junk food since most of it now tastes awful.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...
So a quarter of medical consultations related to elders and heat was for a lack of salt [0]. From Google translate it’s call hyponatremia.
So as stated in other comments, moderation, may be, lack, bad idea.
I’m actually in Ireland. They seem to have taken the salt part very seriously, as everything need to be resalted (for me and my family). But everything is over sugared.
[0] https://www.nouvelobs.com/societe/20180806.OBS0591/canicule-... (in French)
Edit : typos
They did that with fat too and look where we are.
As always, the poison is in the dose. And, as already mentioned, drinking too much water and not consuming enough sodium leads to hyponatremia. Patients are always surprised when I tell them they're sick from too much water and not enough salt.
If you over-consume any one electrolyte or water compared to a baseline osmotic pressure may increase or decrease until the body compensates. This is from the article.
I'm not a doctor but I've taken some first aid classes where electrolyte and dehydration were covered in the context of hiking and backpacking. It's also possible to drain your body of electrolytes by sweating, because again the electrolytes must be present in proportion to the water and sweat contains electrolyte because the glands need the proper osmotic pressure to induct water. You may also drain electrolyte into your intestine because the body also needs the water to have the proper osmotic pressure to absorb it in the first place. This is why Oral Rehydration Salts have table and other salts in them.
The body is extremely complicated, and I'm always very suspicious when someone tells me that "X causes X" without explaining the mechanism of action or the caveats. Every body is different and the same body in different situations will require different treatments. Complex dynamical systems frequently exhibit chaotic behavior. Chaotic systems have the feature that taking the same intervention and applying it at slightly different points in the system's evolution can produce wildly different sequences of further evolution.
I hope that one day nutritional science will have advanced to the point where this is understood and expected during study design. But until that happens it's hard for me to believe many nutritional studies.
I sweat like crazy. My sweat is not overly salty.
It's probably easier for me due to the volume of low-calorie density foods like starches, fruits, and vegetables. If I were eating a lot of high-fat foods like meats or oil I would likely not get enough salt.
Once you are conditioned to a low-salt, no-added-sugar, no-oil diet, your tastebuds become highly sensitized to the existing tastes of the food. Salt deadens the tastebuds.
The issue is that salt tastes good, so people load it on their food to the point where it is unhealthy.
It's the same with sugar, there is a huge industry bashing sugar at the moment, but sugar is essential for the human body. They are bashing sugar and creating fear because alot of people (myself included at times) eat way too much sugar, because its so easy to do, but it does create adverse health effects. That doesn't mean sugar is bad, just that eating copious amounts of highly refined sugar is bad for you.
Try exercising without a healthy blood sugar level due to lack of complex sugars.
Now we have this keto industry where people think twice about eating fruit due to it being high in sugar, FRUIT for god sake.
Sugar is not essential to the diet, the body can make it from fat and protein. Ie, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis
However, afaik, you cannot live without fat or protein in your diet.
>"Try exercising without a healthy blood sugar level due to lack of complex sugars."
You assume "healthy blood sugar level" must be related to "amount of sugar in diet". Not true, your body can adapt to different diets.
Plus one can overload their body's compensatory mechanisms for acid base balance, due to the acidic ketones produced by gluconeogenesis.
Its a terrible idea to do no carbs long term.
My body can rearrange the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to make simple sugars from fats and proteins.
Unless the body can do nuclear fusion, one cannot synthesize sodium. Last I checked, we humans (or any animals) cannot.
Plants (and every other known form of life) also cannot synthesize minerals.
Just an anecdote, YMMV
Do you continue the fast after HIIt or do you eat some protein after? How do you feel after such an intense workout in a fasted state?
So people who scarf down potato chips by the bag are low on salt?
"A number of hormonal, central nervous, and behavioral systems are engaged when an animal is truly deficient in sodium, which motivates it to search for sodium salts, avidly consume them based on their salt taste, and thereby restore sodium balance" [1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2491403/
Well, yeah, I won't argue with that. I've experienced it myself during intense hangovers. But how do you get from that to "Salt really only tastes good when you need salt"? I love the taste of salt. I would never eat french fries that had no salt on them. Nor would I consider making a margarita without rimming the glass with salt.
Uh, yeah, I think a five year old would get that. Things that one craves taste quite good when they finally hit one's taste buds.
But this:
> Salt really only tastes good when you need salt.
Logically implies that when a person does not need salt, salt does not taste good to that person.
Do you have a reference that supports any of this? It runs counter to all of my observations.
I do crave it often though, especially when I exercise more or don't eat much for longer time periods. I also drink a lot of water.
https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/multiproduct/lp8XRTS.ht...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/we-ea...
>People tend to consume about the same amount of sodium no matter where they live, and this amount hasn’t changed much in decades. Those facts hint at the biological basis of our sodium appetite.... “Over the last five decades, salt content of commercial food in our food [in the United States] has gone up. But if you look at people’s 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, you see that the amounts of salt people consume have been constant,” he says. Irrespective of age, sex or race, between 1957 and 2003 Americans have been eating on average 3.5 grams of salt a day. “This suggests that we are somehow regulating the amount of salt we are eating,” Breslin says.... In one of Leshem’s studies, babies who had low concentrations of sodium in their blood in the first weeks of their lives grew up to be teenagers with a penchant for salt, even salt that is seemingly hidden in processed foods. “Even if you can’t taste the salt, apparently your body does. It’s working on an unconscious level to condition a preference for sodium,” Leshem explains.
No, they don’t. If you don’t have hypertension you can have as much salt in your diet as you want. Northern Chinese food is really salty. They’re fine. Stop moralising.
If you don’t have hypertension add salt as you please.
There is no necessary carbohydrates, whereas you require some amount of fat and protein to survive. Consider humans surviving in cold area with literally no fruit except in Summer (at some extreme level: human thriving in area with no accessible plants to be directly ingested).
Fruits are not the enemy, but keep in mind their wide (mangos in Northern Europe!), year-long availability (strawberries in February!), along with their nutrition value (high in sugar) is a product of modernity.
The proportion of carbs in the diet seems to have a huge effect on appetite for many people. For them, eating fewer carbs means they are satisfied after fewer calories, so they eat less and lose weight.
If nutrition research was scientific they would have figured this out before a couple authors and random people with blogs did.
Regarding the approach, I found it easiest to know my goal weight has a maintenance calories of 2,100 calories - an objective, hard number. Hit that, then adjust diet for the very subjective goal of being feeling satisfied after that. I can't imagine an effective public health policy based on subjective "do you feel full?"
2) Pretty sure pasta and white rice will have a higher density of carbs than eg cabbage and apples. From a random site (feel free to find a better source) in grams of carbs per cup of food:
3) "I can't imaging an effective public health policy based on subjective "do you feel full?". I don't see what the problem would be, but whatever. These nutritional public health policies have all been awful, no one should be listening to them anyway.Refs:
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/breakfast-cereals/1600/2
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable...
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/...
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices/...
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/...
You talk about moderation, but there has been a large lack of moderation on the part of health professionals for recommending untested practices.
One piece of advice: if you want candy with lower levels of sweetness, I'd suggest giving Japanese candies a try.
Don't exaggerate with anything: sugar, salt, alcohol, have them in moderation, like exercise and you'll be fine.
Also a must: stop reading nutrition science.
And more importantly, who paid to have the other x studies buried that found a different result?
Then, there are other fields, like economics and nutrition, where the basic fundamentals of the field are a pile of mud. It is much like medicine in the era of balancing the four humours. In the meantime, we need to fund research, but not listen to any of the recommendations of the experts, until they achieve a basic level of understanding of their subject (which clearly hasn't happened yet).
Concrete, predictive theories would be great but I get that we're far from them in fields like nutrition short of, like, scurvy I guess? I wonder how much of this is due to the natural variation among individuals and how much is just because of ethical limits on scientific inquiry. Not that I'm advocating for human experiments but one has to wonder what we could discover.
Practically all social sciences are suspect and really have no business calling themselves sciences.
Certain things like 'carbon dating' are certainly scientific, and can be falsified. Evolution itself is the best historical explanation we have, but hard to set up an experiment to disprove.
I personally think 'falsifiability" is particularly useful in separating a soft 'fact' like Freud's theory of the id, and the Oedipus Complex from something like say, the theory of gravity.
Bear in mind that the 'hard' sciences use theories which are partially or wholly incorrect, too; we still use Newtonian physics in many cases because they're easier to use as a model, even if they don't capture everything.
That they don't call themselves science. Maybe call themselves studies and that they put more effort into what they call experiments.
> we still use Newtonian physics in many cases because they're easier to use as a model, even if they don't capture everything.
This is frankly a terrible example. Because it does not tell the whole story does not mean it is incorrect. There is no unifying theory of sociology either.
No I'm talking about the entire field of social science being dominated by complete nonsense.
See the following documentary:
https://imgur.com/gallery/7EPPT
I'm sorry, let me clarify: My question is not "what would you do with what we have now?", rather, it's "assuming we throw all of what we have now out, how would you do it in a way you consider to be science?" My assertion is that disregarding all our progress up until now in these fields on the grounds that they have not yet reached the level of maturity of physics or other hard sciences is unfair and will create a self-fulfilling cycle whereby we never gain any actual progress in these fields.
> This is frankly a terrible example. Because it does not tell the whole story does not mean it is incorrect. There is no unifying theory of sociology either.
Except that's exactly my point. Sociology doesn't tell the whole story, but your assertion that everything that comes out of it is tainted isn't right, either. You're comparing relatively nascent fields to relatively well-developed ones and expecting them to be exactly the same in terms of replicability, reliability and applicability, generally. That's unfair, and totally disregards history.
If we regressed even further, to before Newton, to the ancient Greeks or Romans or Egyptians, sure, they got a lot wrong - most things. But everything is a building block. I think that we are just now beginning to make real progress in fields like psychology, sociology, etc. You can call them "baby sciences," if you'd like, or invent whatever other word or term you prefer, but it doesn't change what they are, and it doesn't make them not worth proceeding with.
Further, we can't say that because some sciences progress quickly (e. g. computer science), all sciences should be expected to do so. As many in this thread have pointed out, good social science is harder to find and harder to do than good computer science. Progress will therefore be slower. It doesn't make said progress unimportant or impossible.
If you subdivide 'science' into various fields, psychology is definitely on much shakier grounds than has often ben assumed. But if you subdivide 'psychology', the picture isn't as clear. I'd say marketing and the broader field of persuasion/propaganda, or something like group dynamics, has a much firmer basis in reality than, say, psychopathology or evolutionary psychology.
I'm very curious if people who are well-versed in economics can make similar distinctions, because I find it hard to believe it's 'all' mud.
(My favorite illustration: if there were no underlying laws to economics, then dictators would just issue edicts about currency and markets which would then just plain work rather than causing havoc -- and yet dictators very much suffer side effects of their dictates.)
This is very similar to weather prediction, which in some geographical areas is very untrustworthy, but not because its scientific foundation is lacking.
Psychology has subareas that are very rigorous and evidence based, but also major foundational areas that remain essentially speculative/opinion-based (what is mind/consciousness/free will?)
Evolutionary psychology is again firmly rooted, but is most famous for its speculative and unproven areas.
Marketing and persuasion/propaganda have subareas that incorporate statistics and/or psychology and/or sociology etc., but are not themselves actually sciences at all, so that's very much apples and oranges.
This place is as bad as reddit and slashdot. I haven't returned here very often over the years; this kind of experience makes one feel unwelcome.
That's one reason the site guidelines ask you not to complain about getting downvoted; by the time most people read the complaint, it's obsolete.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's incredibly dismissive of these fields. I can't speak much to nutrition, but economics is not a "pile of mud", definitely not its fundamentals.
Do you have any reason to think that it is other than (kind-of-literally) mud-slinging?
Another aspect of this is that there are certain fields (namely economics and nutrition) where the popular press over-exaggerates every single paper as a groundbreaking discovery because it gets clicks. The media tries to present the idea that scientists as a whole have come to a brand new conclusion which should change the way everyone behaves, when in reality it's just a few people in a windowless room reporting on some observations they found and speculating on what those observations might mean.
It brings to mind the irony of trial lawyers becoming addicted to huge lawsuits thanks to the tobacco industry. Despite the obvious merits and misconduct of the defendants making it justified it seems to have had a harmful side effect of causing many lawyers to start looking for 'the next tobacco' case with no care to the underlying merit.
What sustained the costs of the study?
Without knowing the funding situation, what's the point debating about this study?
Skeptical me wonders if this was funded by industry that has been affected badly by sodium horror stories, and subtly plugs in potassium as a healthier alternative.