On one hand, I’m glad ketobros at least raised enough awareness about keto in general that my GP doesn’t think I’m talking in tongues anymore and many doctors in my country actually accept that low carb or keto can be used for diabetes management.
On the other hand, there exists evidence that hardcore keto just for weight loss doesn’t outperform non-ketogenic low carb, and you can even lose weight successfully on low fat, but these things are BIG whichever you choose:
1) lose all ultraprocessed and junk food, regardless of macros
The results from low fat and low carb groups are approximately the same in long term outcomes, as long as both groups stop consuming junk food.
2) fix your sleep hygiene ASAP
3) get movement during the day
4) stop eating before evening
About 3): my N=1 confirms that brisk walking even for 30 minutes does wonders to my blood glucose levels. There are also studies that confirm that long walks do lots of good and that it’s not just me. Hitting the gym is optional, and you can invent reasons to spend an hour a day or two walking.
I’m positive that keto should be more for those who find it improving their mental state and diabetes; general population, not so much.
The difference is on keto it is hard to gain weight (I struggle a little for muscle gain with lifting weights) and on normal-carbs it is hard to lose weight.
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> On the other hand, there exists evidence that hardcore keto just for weight loss doesn’t outperform non-ketogenic low carb
> I’m positive that keto should be more for those who find it improving their mental state and diabetes; general population, not so much.
Good luck in practice though! Good luck being a doctor or a personal trainer and telling that to your patients/clients (just eat a small ice-cream bro! just suffer through it).
Not everybody is a body builder (they do the gain/cut thing).
> Hitting the gym is optional
This should not be optional. Unless you train in your job or something.
>2) fix your sleep hygiene ASAP
This and your other points should be unrelated to the diet.
> About 3): my N=1 confirms
Depends how "good" you want to feel and if you want to experiment with even better.
Feel free to N=1 on yourself by fixing everything first, and only then, try a very-high-fat keto diet (~80% fat). You might be wrong on this one (many people are, meaning starting keto when they're already done everything else).
My doctor and nutritionist actually told me I need to get more calories from fat. I switched to keto but was getting way too many calories from protein. I was (and still sort of am) struggling to get healthy sources of fat that fit into the rest of my diet and don't waste carbs on food I don't really want to eat. getting most of your calories from fat is actually ridiculously hard for me. Its way easier to me to eat steak and cabbage and broccolli and tomatoes forever. Apparently thats not a good diet though. Wasting carbs to eat fat rich foods like avocado or dairy fat like butter/cream/cheese hurts my soul.
> getting most of your calories from fat is actually ridiculously hard for me.
You can ask your doctor or you can search online in a keto forum.
Things that have personally worked for me:
1. pour a lot of olive oil (say 10 tablespoons) on salads. After eating the salad I just drink the olive oil.
2. Get MCT oil during the day in tea spoons.
3. (best/cheapest for me and I currently do) Get beef fat trimmings and fry/air-fry/slow-cook them (see https://www.instagram.com/p/CrhH9CBo1mC/ for that and other high fat carnivore recipes)
eating oil is pretty gross. I'll have to look into the beef fat thing. I started having coffee with cream and eating some eggs and avocado everyday but it seems there aren't that many sources of fat that aren't pure oil/fat that don't otherwise come with avocado.
1. eat only egg yolks (i'm actually alergic to egg whites)
2. Eat the foods with most carbs before gym. This way you can utilise some carbs for gym and you'll still keep high levels of ketones (see /r/ketogains protocol)
3. See the instagram account I linked.
4. See what they do for epilepsy (hint: they kinda drink oil because they need 90%)
The beef fat trimmings are still kinda oil, just in nicer form and nicer taste. Literally eat 0.5kg-1kg of beef fat trimmings a day (they get 1/4 size after cooking)
> Not everybody is a body builder (they do the gain/cut thing).
Neither am I. I do modest workouts so I don’t lose muscle on keto, but it’s mostly to manage type 2 diabetes and lose body fat (which, again, is to manage the diabetes and maybe get some of my insulin sensitivity back).
> > 2) fix your sleep hygiene ASAP
> This and your other points should be unrelated to the diet.
But turns out, they are. The human organism is a complex thing, and it turns out that if your circadian clock and eating habits are out of sync, you’re royally screwed. Sleep is not an afterthought, it kinda all starts with it.
- 30 minute walk (or some exercise) after every meal. My mantra; if you're giving yourself fuel you need to use it.
Otherwise it just stays in the bloodstream causing problems.
- No processed carbs.
- Limit fried fats.
- No eating for 2-3 hours before bedtime.
The way I feel is night and day than before I started this healthy lifestyle.
It's probably a lot easier to quit carbs than fat. Most people just don't know that fat is a (healthy) option.
Though, as you said, happily that is changing.
(Edit to say, speaking as a certified ketobro, I don't think you should do keto all the time, forever. A break day or two every few weeks, and stretches of healthy mixed-diet eating, in my experience, gets you the same benefits)
> It's probably a lot easier to quit carbs than fat. Most people just don't know that fat is a (healthy) option.
Not just healthy, but essential. You need a certain amount of fats for your sex hormones to actually work, so unless you want to stop menstruating/not interested in having erections, keep eating healthy fats.
The "low fat" foods which just replace fat with sugar are the worst for me. I hate that they are advertising it as being "more healthy" when it's clearly not. I finally got my wife to switch away from Miracle Whip and just eat real mayo. There is sugar, especially HFCS, in so much stuff that shouldn't have it.
With HFCS instead of bona fide glucose sugar, you also risk getting NAFLD later in life. Liver’s capacity to process fructose appears to be lower than glucose.
regular can sugar is almost entirely SUCROSE which your body breaks down into glucose and fructose. its not dumping a bunch of fructose into your body.
furthermore, we have sensors in our body to inhibit sugar craving in the presence of glucose or sucrose. we have no such sensor for fructose. so even if you did have 50% pure fructose in cane sugar, you would drink less real sugar coke because you'd feel satisfied after drinking a much smaller amount than those HFCS abominations.
Sudden jump off keto may cause inflammatory damage to the endothelium of your blood vessels, and while in that one study, effects had been “transient”, I wouldn’t risk cheat days without a very gradual reintroduction of carbs, and surely not repeated cheat days. (My personal fat diabetic ass says it had a lifetime of carbs, though, so that’s not happening for me until at least 20 kg later.)
I know it’s just one study, but I would rather be safe than sorry until we know more. Case in point: the study subjects were all young and healthy, and most people who really need to go very low carb are not.
Thanks for the link, I think there is something to it. I have personally experienced, on multiple occasions, getting rather sick if I eat anything very sugary while on keto.
So a 'cheat day' should probably be more like eating some wholegrain bread, lentils, some raw fruit of choice, or stuff like that. If you're on keto, that will almost feel like eating candy anyway :)
Yes. I'd add a couple of items I have found to be important...
5) Limit consumption of (mostly) omega-6 polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Use virgin olive oil (mostly monounsaturated) and saturated fats (butter, ghee, coconut oil, even lard) instead. The exception is: try to get as much omega-3 as possible.
6) Eat foods with high and diverse micronutrient content or use supplements. It's really easy to be slightly deficient in some essential micronutrients. Especially magnesium, which is really important and deficiency is really common.
Nuts and seafoods are good for both of these, but supplementation may be advisable. As for the fats, evidence continues to accumulate that contrary to "official" public health advise for the last 60 years or so, saturated fats are NOT harmful to cardiovascular health, certainly much less so than highly processed polyunsaturated fats (and almost all of them are processed in some way or other, because naturally they are hard to extract and spoil rapidly). Also saturated fats stand up much better to high heat, whereas polyunsaturated fats will always produce some trans-fats during pan or deep frying.
I tried keto (to the extend it was possible without sacrificing every social event) and found that it ruined my cognitive ability. This is known as the "keto flu" and it made me sluggish, tired and gave me headaches. I just wasn't able to function properly. Naturally I am not condoning high carbohydrates diets, but I a variated diet with slight deviations based on personal preferences (and seasonality). I do tend to avoid to many carbohydrates and eat more green, fruit, meat and dairy products.
Funnily I am not although it's one of the purported benefits of fasting which I have done quite often.
On the other hand, I feel far less slugglish when I cut sugar. So fed, but less sugar (perhaps up to a point, not sure about ketones given the brain prefers sugars apparently)
Another thing that helps since I don't drink coffee anymore is eating veal liver for energy levels.
It's like an espresso shot, perhaps even better. Quick internet search showed me that it wasn't just an impression.
> Funnily I am not although it's one of the purported benefits of fasting which I have done quite often.
Maybe/probably you just have carb withdrawal and can't feel the effects ?
My personal example is do keto. Stay some time in it so no carb withdrawal. Then try fasting on top. I see the difference, and is just like increasing fat ratio, so it's probably higher ketones in blood stream (too lazy to measure them during the day though).
Here's my anecdotal experience with fasting and training (lifting).
Something like 12 years ago I started fasting and training based on some of the regimes olympic marathon runners were putting out there at the time. I went 24 hours without food and did a set of leg workouts. Within minutes of leaving the gym I developed a fever and a pain in my back. When I checked myself into the emergency room I was expecting to hear that my appendix burst but had a serious conversation with the ER doctor about a giant tumor that they found in my retroperitoneal cavity. Wild shit.
Years later I found out that studies have shown that fasting causes "Autophagy". .."Autophagy allows your body to break down and reuse old cell parts so your cells can operate more efficiently. It’s a natural cleaning out process that begins when your cells are stressed or deprived of nutrients. Researchers are studying autophagy’s role in potentially preventing and fighting disease."
I'm of the opinion that had I not have fasted and did an intense workout I would have never have caught this stage II\III cancer in time. The malignant tumor's in that part of the body leave no physical symptoms. The next stop would have been the lungs and the brain...Take that for what it's worth.
Wow what a discovery. Scary stuff! I hope you're doing better. When I was lifting heavy, I was always fasted. I of course heard all the things about pre-workout nutrition and all of that. But I feel nauseous when working out with food in my stomach, so working out fasted just became normal for me. I loved my post workout peanut butter and banana protein smoothie though.
slightly hungry is the worst it's like your guts are missing something and unhappy guts means unhappy brain, but fasting at least 6h after a large & satietive meal is ideal. Fasting is not hunger, it's just a different source of energy, less powerful, but still efficient and constant
From what I understand from TFA this study was merely observational in nature and did not involve any blind randomized interventions of eating habits to probe the effect on insulin resistance and cognitive capabilities. Yet another correlation-not-causation study in a field already littered with conflicting data....
I think this is a good time to point out the title of the study seems to be "Chronic refined carbohydrate consumption measured by glycemic load and variation in cognitive performance in healthy people", which is quite different than the title in a news article. I recommend always treating news reporting of science with a healthy level of skepticism, not driven from the assumption that the news will lie, but driven from the assumption that the news isn't written by scientists who understand the technicalities of scientific writing nor the existing body knowledge about the specific topic.
I agree it's not technically lying, but it's definitely something bad when people who know they don't know enough about something still write about it.
Since they mentioned processed foods, I think this could be mainly referring to ultra processed foods, where there is now a plethora of evidence that such foods contribute to poor health outcomes.
We're talking about organic food vs in-organic food. Who do you think defines organic and what's healthy food for long-term consumption? A lot of people , including the FDA...
Although not unthinkable, more likely, consider the effect of mental health, socioeconomic background, momentary stress levels, education level, etc that can influence both eating habits and cognitive abilities...
I'm not saying their hypothesis isn't plausible, their data just doesn't get us an inch closer to confirming it...
Not necessarily. “Smart” people could be having very similar perceptions around being healthy whereas “dumb” people maybe don’t agree or don’t care or have a less homogeneous mind set. In other words, even if there is a causal relationship it could be reversed or not even have anything to do with being dumb or smart but around a third factor. Not to mention that this article isn’t about organic but about processed carbs. Also it says nothing about whether this is a long-term effect developmentally or just that it suppresses it temporarily and you bounce back to normal otherwise.
Right, it could be that 'high-educated' people have been raised to snack on health food, say cucumber, while low-educated people were not and snack on whatever.
Then you would find that eating health food correlates with high-education. The correlation is real: if you see someone snacking cucumber, he is likely highly educated. It doesn't mean that eating more cucumber will make you smart though.
Interesting analysis. I drink hot water with Manuka honey. It makes me sleepy. Although I have to say that this experiment is somewhat inconclusive IMO. Insufficient data to make such hard claims. These tests should be done in conjunction with other parts of the world to see the true comparison and the observation. Sometimes, people in stress tend to eat more.
A sudden blood glucose spike can do that. Source: Being a type 1 diabetic. Drawing conclusions from just eating/drinking is however a bit optimistic since many variables are at play.
honey is not as beneficial as whole raw fruits, because thy lack the most important thing - that bees can't carry or even need - but that primates guts love and need: fiber
For so called "rationalists" they sure seem to love bringing up this frankly moronic idea that "processing" is the same whether it's a factory with bleach and other chemicals or a person at home dicing fruits. Is it because the leader of the movement is a fat slob?
This article is the opposite of Science and experimentation (experimenting diets on oneself)
Maybe you're just sarcastic with calling it processed sugar because of dicing (and omitting apple's fiber, vitamins, amino-acids, minerals, enzymes and more)?
"Croissant diet" Croissant is actually the least nutritive food possible https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7498104/, You'd get issues eating that. I actually experimented something similar (white bread almost only for 2 years), started to have mental issues
Saturated fat is not specially an issue (it would maybe have prevented mental issues in my case, brain needs fat, croissant richer in sat fat than white bread, but I dislike butter), I don't know how you derived from processed sugar to saturated fat, many natural food contain small amount of saturated fat
I've been on keto for over a decade and I feel like it keeps me mentally sharp. If I accidentally get carbs I feel very sluggish and like I can't think straight
Looking at Fig. 2 of the original study [1], I can't see any significant effect of the studied variables (RGL1, RGL2, RGL3, E1, E2, and E3). Am I missing something, or is the standard for significance insanely low in this field?
> Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing. After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.
I think the problem is it is unethical to do the kinds of experiments necessary to come up with any certain facts in the field of nutrition.
At a minimum, you would need to force people to eat a certain diet, with no option to sneak in a few snacks while the researchers aren't watching.
And you probably need to do this for a whole generation (ie. from birth until death) to really get good data to prove that diet X leads to better outcomes than diet Y.
Something I have always wondered: many people get most/all their nutrition from an institutional cafeteria (college campus, military base, arguably tech company). Why couldn’t they consent to experimentation on what it serves them?
Leaving out the "birth to death" part, metabolic ward studies aren't unethical or unheard of, they're just terribly expensive and tend to be short in duration because they are so onerous.
But they certainly have some advantages over, say, studies based on food frequency questionnaires.
> Physics has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything physicist have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing. After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed —the basic elements of particles— is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.
Your counterpoint is demonstrably wrong. We landed men on the moon as a direct result of our understanding of physics, to say nothing of bridges built, supersonic planes flown, the fluid mechanics that underpin popelines, dams, etc.
You'll love this study. They select 50 common ingredient from cookbooks, and looked studies about them. 40 of them caused cancer, but often times conflicting studies were also found. They conclude:
Associations with cancer risk or benefits have been claimed for most food ingredients. Many single studies highlight implausibly large effects, even though evidence is weak. Effect sizes shrink in meta-analyses.
Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review; Jonathan D Schoenfeld 1, John P A Ioannidis. 10.3945/ajcn.112.047142
Yes, because getting older is associated with cancer. If you don't eat, you don't get older (paradoxically calorie restriction is associated with longevity).
I’m not sure it’s really paradoxical. Consuming and metabolizing food creates oxidative stress, and caloric restriction slows down your metabolism. As much as 21.4% over just two weeks [1], sometimes permanently [2]. Which is also why dieting fails the vast majority of people people, as they experience it as a plateau [3].
Eating less reduces your need for food ('adaptive thermogenesis'), and hence total oxidative stress load. This almost certainly reduces your risk of cancer and also more than likely slows aging. [4]
This entire article reads like someone only understand the field by reading clickbait headlines about nutrition (“Eggs are good for you now”) and then assumes the scientists and journalists are one and the same.
It also sets up a lot of straw man arguments that rationalists are likely to come up with but that you would hear from actual science, such as the idea that they’re searching for a rationally perfect diet.
I don’t know what’s going on with that site but it’s not really a good resource. Identifying some areas where the science isn’t clear or where observations has changed and then trying to use that to dismiss an entire field is a classic anti-science trope used by people who prefer to feel superior to scientists and to downplay science. It’s most commonly used on topics like climate science or anti-vaccine research.
There is a growing trend that when research doesn't hold up (especially in regards to its significance/magnitude/importance), we resort to blaming the journalists who printed the article hyping it. That is seen on here constantly.
Only if one looks any deeper they find that the journalists printed the summary provided by the researchers. That they accurately captured the message the researchers were pushing. Researchers want eyeballs, and they want the funding that comes with attention, along with the personal prestige, and this has proven incredibly corrupting. Add that a pretty good percentage of nutrition research is funded by parties with deeply conflicted interests.
In any case, the site is largely accurate. The nutrition field has made extraordinarily little progress. Right now, in 2023, pretty much the only solid nutrition conclusion is "don't eat too much. Eat a variety". Almost everything else does not stand any scrutiny at all. It seems entirely valid to dismiss the nutrition field given the past forty years.
It's actually interesting watching a subreddit like /r/nutrition. The place could as easily be people discussing their healing crystals and chakras. That's where we're at right now.
What is your point? Are you suggesting that they are not to blame? They certainly write the articles. They may even be a part of juicing up the headline sufficiently to become a perfect clickbait.
Only few months ago, an article was written about recovering in 'no work' spaces, which happened to include cars. Fortune title? Scientists say car is your meditation spot ( I am paraphrasing a little since I am quoting from memory ).
When they're literally quoting almost verbatim the claims of the researchers, no they aren't to blame. And the vast majority of the time you see an article with some breathless claim, it is capturing the essence of the research summary, or the press release put out by the university or think tank.
See, journalists like their jobs to be easy. They generally aren't spinning whole wool. As Graham's The Submarine describes, often they're basically reprinting something sent to them with minor wording changes.
That's my point. And my point was amply clear in my original post. Blaming the journalists is often nonsensical sophistry. A hail mary to try to recover some semblance from busted research, as if it's the messenger who is to blame. The worst part is that the blame the journalist people create a vacuum in which even worse sources of information grow.
Not sure the vaguely remembered, poorly communicated anecdote (which I can find zero references for) supports your point.
I feel vaguely attacked. See article[1]. Original title that you can still see in search engines, because it was only changed after pushback:
>>You need to detach and 'psychologically recover' from work, professors say. The solution: commuting<<
What I appear to be getting from your post is: 'No one is to blame. No one could be held liable for their actions. It is all sophistry.'
Which is funny, because I am willing to agree the system has perverse incentives to mess with things at numerous checkpoints, but you cannot realistically claim this, because researchers ( and indeed all humans ) like their jobs easy as well.
That Fortune article was written by the authors of the study itself that they're quoting. The "study" itself was that some people find commutes meditative. I personally do. I'd rather work from home, but it's possible for both things to be true.
I am quite specifically hanging the blame on researchers who are perpetrating junk science. Most observation / survey based science is junk science. Most "study of studies" research is junk science. It's lazy science to get media attention, and the more salacious or contrarian the outcome, the more appealing it is for some subset of researchers.
This isn't an attack on science or scientists in the whole, clearly. But when you see some breathless article exclaiming that eating an olive pit twice weekly makes you live twenty years longer, blaming the columnists seems foolish. In almost every case they're simply repeating the claims of bad science.
<< Most observation / survey based science is junk science. Most "study of studies" research is junk science.
I am not automatically disagreeing, but that is a pretty strong claim. I am relatively certain that a well chosen survey participants ( that are not mturk or local body of students unless actually applicable to the study ) could make for a decent study. I can't really opine of observation, but on the surface it strikes me as a very strong claim as well.
<< But when you see some breathless article exclaiming that eating an olive pit twice weekly makes you live twenty years longer, blaming the columnists seems foolish. In almost every case they're simply repeating the claims of bad science.
And this is where it gets tricky. Do editors/publishers merely parrot it or add media cycle friendly spin on it?
<< I am quite specifically hanging the blame on researchers who are perpetrating junk science.
I think I am willing to mostly agree with that statement in a sense that they ultimately responsible.
That said, it is hard for me to believe that editors/publishers would publish it if standards were a tad higher and not chasing attention.
> There is a growing trend that when research doesn't hold up (especially in regards to its significance/magnitude/importance), we resort to blaming the journalists who printed the article hyping it. That is seen on here constantly.
The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies based on some past anecdotes.
It's the exact same trick used by climate science deniers who go back and cherry pick some old studies where the conclusion changed: Pick some old studies where the conclusion changed, announce that science is fallible, then dismiss the entire field.
It's ridiculous logic to anyone who understands how science works, but it's very appealing to people who like to be contrarian.
"The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies"
If they're observational or survey based studies, they should be dismissed generally, or at least given incredibly little attention. Even worse they're usually 2nd order "I took some terrible observational studies, put them in a pile, and now I have a study of studies" bit of bunk that is a bit like CDOs: Just layer the junk and pretend it has value all together. We have decades of doing this now to have learned that it is extremely low value, and simply repeating the same pattern again with new biases and assumptions is not going to improve the situation.
Nutritional studies are really, really hard, short of creating concentration camps and assigning diets to sections for decades.
If you were studying physics by doing a survey on what people's opinion of gravity is or what their recollection of their acceleration rates for the past year, you'd probably not have great results.
It's essentially making a scientific field responsible for delivering what people want from it. What people want from it is a collection of one weird tricks. They want good news. They want to hear that it's okay to eat as many donuts as you want, as long as you don't eat red meat, or that it's okay to eat red meat as long as you drink red wine, or that two kale smoothies per week will keep you "clean" of the "toxins" that cause overweight, depression, and shame about your work rival's kid going to a better college than yours.
We've looked for those answers, and they don't exist. But the media has to deliver them anyway, so they do, and they cherry-pick and misinterpret studies to do so. Some attention-hungry researchers cater to them, and a lot of doctors with more ambition than shame try to get rich selling books and supplements.
We're not limited by our nutritional knowledge anyway. When it comes to eating and health, we have much bigger problems to solve than the current nutritional unknowns. Most individual members of society suffer from ignorance and false beliefs that are way, way worse than the uncertainties and false results in nutritional science, and most people feel psychologically incapable of acting on what they think they know anyway. Any forces trying to educate and empower people are massively outgunned by shamelessly unprincipled hucksters filling the air with whatever noise they can sell on one hand and blatantly evil food industry marketing on the other.
Nutrition science doesn't deserve credit yet. Maybe if they hadn't spent decades putting "heart healthy low fat" on food made entirely out of sugar and telling parents the optimal kid breakfast was a bowl of cereal and orange juice.
US nutrition advice is basically just a contest in how many carbs you can eat.
> If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.
I disagree. What seems simple enough may actually be the last piece to be figured out. We don't have as much knowledge about the fundamental blocks, atoms, as we would like, but that has seldom stopped us from building sophisticated applications using it. If anything, us not figuring out could only be an indication of how inherently complex nature can be.
> What seems simple enough may actually be the last piece to be figured out.
In the early days of AI, before the winter, people thought that getting computers to play chess would be hard but walking or recognizing faces would be easy. Turns out that difficulty is often not where we expect, except for a general tendency for more complex more macro-level things to be harder. Even then there are exceptions, but nutrition has not shown any signs of being one.
Yeah - I struggle to do so, but I’m pretty sure if you stay away from processed foods and carbs, eat plant based vegan ~85% of the time, full omnivore the other ~15% (again excluding processed sugars, carbs etc.) that’s the model
My understanding for the confusion with nutrition studies are all the lies - industry-funded one-sided "findings" in favor of the industry.
Why do you think there is any confusion about the overall health effects of eating meat, eggs, and dairy? With $ billions at stake - of course they find unethical ways to find some statistical anomaly to make their products good along some narrow dimension - and then have their money-funded media stories amplifying the lies.
I strongly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/ - a non-profit focusing on finding the signal through the noise.
I disagree. nutritionfacts.org is a biased site that has been created by a vegan doctor who built his entire career on paid speaking about vegan pseudoscience. Several of the claims made by him have been debunked by independent sources.
Feel free to Google additional examples, there are plenty. The link below only analyzes a single video by Dr. Greger and finds it riddled with errors, mistakes and what I would consider outright lies. Many of the studies quoted as "evidence" are either flawed, incomplete, or simply misrepresented by Greger to fit his prefered narrative. I'm actually a believer in plant based diets but this guy is a modern day snake oil salesman.
Think it through - would a billion dollar industry have resources to pay people to run illegitimate studies to create sham findings in their favor? Is there a counter-balancing force with the same amount of financial backing?
Meat consumption has reliably been found to have bad effects on health.
I'm not saying your wrong, but I think you should take a step back and consider how this sounds to someone who doesn't share your opinion.
You're pretty much saying that, as long as you ignore the studies which you consider to be illegitimate, then the outcome of the science is clear.
The fact of the matter is that research showing that eating meat has a negative impact on health also suffers from conflicts of interest. Now, those conflicts of interest come from many researchers compassion for animals - and there's a big moral difference between that and conflicts of interest which come from the greed of the meat industry. But from a scientific perspective, it's not legitimate to simply dismiss one side and accept the other.
This feels like more of the "BOTH SIDES!" dilemma that's plagued politics and journalism for the past decade. Frankly, I don't understand how one distinguishes this from good ol' fashioned nihilism. If we're treating potential "compassion for animals" as a conflict of interest, there's not a study in history that could be completely free of conflict of interest.
Not everything has to be a both sides equivocation . Degree and severity matter. "Compassion for animals" and "receiving funding from a party with a vested interest in the outcome" are not equivalent conflicts of interest.
I think they're very different conflicts of interest from an ethical perspective. It is morally reprehensible to try to skew scientific results for greed. It is (in my view) not so morally reprehensible to try to skew scientific results because you want to stop animals from getting hurt.
But from the scientific perspective, there is a specific factual question: what are the effects of meat consumption on human health? Nutrition research is super finicky. Even absent any conflict of interest, it's unclear that nutrition results are trustworthy. So I don't think it's fair to throw out every study which says meat is healthy and just focus on the studies that say meat is unhealthy.
Fair enough. And I agree. It's not ok to toss out any study that says meat is healthy. But it _is_ fair to be deeply suspicious if it was funded by a financially interested party. And, for what it's worth, this should apply to avocado studies funded by Avocados From Mexico, orange juice studies funded by Tropicana, banana studies by Chiquita, etc.
Come on, they are both equally morally reprehensible as they erode trust in science and lead us towards darkness. Ends doesn't justify the means, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is basic level stuff.
If they deliberately skewed their results to fit their narrative, yes: that's obviously reprehensible.
That's not what we're talking about, however. We're talking about what level of suspicion is appropriate in various scenarios. It's unlikely we can _know_ if results were purposefully sabotaged or not. We have to make some best guess. Interested parties funding studies is deeply suspicious, and should be treated with a hefty dose of skepticism. Hand waving that "maybe the researchers were motivated by empathy?!" is not at all equivalent. That is a incredibly low bar that, itself, undermines trust in science, as one could trivially make up similar excuses to distrust virtually any study ever conducted. Oh, researchers found declining sources of fresh water year over year? Biased. They probably just like cheap drinking water. Better ignore it. An Aquafina-backed study shows the opposite. That study is biased, too. But they're both equally morally reprehensible.
Wheat [1], Corn [2], Sugar [3], Fruit [4], etc. Are all multi-billion dollar industries as well. Are you equally skeptical of studies demonstrating the health effects of fruits and vegetables?
There are tons of them. Just as a quick example, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2019.1... this is a study who's funding came from the Produce for Better Health Foundation, which is a non-profit with the specific goal of increasing fruit and vegetable consumption. It's executive committee and financial partners are all produce industry execs and companies. They cite 422 references and if you go through them you'll find that many of them are funded by similar industry groups or directly from major produce companies.
I think today's money isn't even the problem and it is worse than just today's lies, but all the way to the underlying foundations at the bottom of nutrition "science". So much of the foundational work was done by the "scientists" at Wellville, a religious cult with weird business practices and business interests and some wild lack of scientific ethics (despite their "morality" as a religious cult), and some of the only replication studies of note were done by German scientists in the 1930s/1940s whose political motivations are all naturally suspect today.
I feel like it is beyond the "replication crisis" of any other science when your replication crisis involves potential war crimes. (p-hacking looks so quaint in comparison.)
If any other science had that sort of foundation and its replication problems that entire science would likely have been thrown out by now. A lot of people still think that there must be some sort of baby in all that extremely tainted bathwater and are afraid to throw it out.
(I have come to believe that nutrition science has become the last bastion of Phlogiston Theory in any of the sciences, and that is more damaging than people realize.)
> the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved.
Anyone who makes this statement and doesn't understand that this ratio depends on personal behavior is a flat out absolute idiot and shouldn't make any public facing statements. No way to sugar coat it.
This is regardless of whether nutritionists made any progress.
Additionally, there are different types of fats, carbs, and proteins, and many different sources of them. So, any general advice on an "optimal ratio", even for a given persons activity level and metabolism, is not likely to hold up for variations on the types and sources of macronutrients.
It can tell us what not to eat. Thanks to nutrition I know drinking a can of soda everyday will probably give me diabetes. Everyone knows too much of anything is bad, what nutrition has done is better approximate how much exactly of different types of foods is too much.
I get the point you're trying to make - but the above itself such a pat counterargument. If we can even call it that. A combination of extreme hyperbole an straw-man attack, basically, laced with seductively sweet soundbites. Even worse than the standards of the field you're attacking.
I don't think that it's possible to seperate diet from exercise meaningfully enough for most people.
The optimal diet for someone who is completely sedentary is going to be completely different to the optimal diet for someone who gets a reasonable amount of exercise, and it's not going to be a flat multiplier.
The protein needs of an athlete are completely different. Simple carbohydrates are processed differently if eaten prior to heavy exercise. That's just the basic stuff.
The best advice I've read is to just eat and move like a mature adult.
That doesn't necessarily mean never having a sweet or a beer, but it does mean prioritising full real meals over stuff like donuts, cakes, 50g sugar "coffee" drinks etc.
this is pretty much on point, and this is why fasting and IF and reducing carbs increasing fat intake (without sugar) has been the main course action for most people concerned for their health.
The general scientific consensus on optimal nutrition is not perfect, and does change, but most major nutritional recommendations have remained unchanged for decades.
#1 is credibly debated. 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 come from cellular and molecular biology, not nutritional science.
Nutritional science is roughly concerned with the question, "what constitutes a healthy diet?", and it has failed to produce even partial answers at every turn.
The obvious counter-example comes from the intermittent fasting literature, wherein adipose tissue loss occurs even when the net calories consumed in the IF diet are higher than in the ordinary diet.
Another vastly replicated result you can find quite easily: low-glycemic-index diets and ketogenic diets can produce weight loss despite caloric excess.
And lastly, a reasoning from first principles reveals a prima facie credible flaw in the caloric balance hypothesis: the body is not a closed system, ergo the law of conservation of energy does not apply. More vulgarly: you can do things like "work up an appetite" or "shit excess food".
Google Scholar is positively littered with relevant literature, so I'm somewhat surprised by your skepticism. Good key words to enter are: "carbohydrate-insulin model" vs "energy balance model". The carbohydrate-insulin model is also credibly debated, of course, but the question of whether this is the right alternative is distinct from the question of whether the energy-balance model is correct.
In no specific order, here is a pair of completely arbitrary papers, intended only to show that relevant papers can be found with minimal effort:
I'm not objecting to the energy-balance model, which may well be correct in an important way. I am merely pointing out that nutritional science has not managed to reach consensus on this fundamental issue.
>These have all have nutritional studies.
The nutritional studies did not produce these initial findings. Without pointing to specific papers, it's hard to be very precise, but I would be willing to bet that these are either dietary studies building off of biological first principles, or replication-checks in broader studies. Both are totally fair practices, but can't be considered as an indication that nutritional science is a fruitful field.
I find myself really sleepy after lunch and I'm trying to trace the problem by experimenting with my diet. But when I'm no longer able to function I reach for a ridiculous donut or similar and get the problem solved.
(Yes, I might have narcolepsy, possibly induced by night-time medication that's still hanging around; I take morning modafinil at fairly high dosages and try to take breaks to interrupt the tolerance process. I'm also experimenting with yerba mate, but the overall effect of that seems more suited for late-night social situations than getting amped for work.)
Unless you are talking about a scale beyond what I understand from your comment, just take a 20 minute nap? That is perfectly acceptable, and considered the smarter way to deal with afternoon doldrums, in much of the world.
Look into "reactive hypoglycemia" You could also get a c peptide test and a1c at the same time. While your a1c may be normal range, c peptide can tell you if you are having to overproduce insulin to keep your a1c normal. c peptide from what i read is like an a1c but for insulin. you may have hyperinsulinemia. just a suggestion
Go into any autoimmune or chronic illness forum on Reddit or Facebook and you’ll find countless people that resolved or improved symptoms, including brain fog, by changing diet.
Getting rid of most carbs and other inflammatory foods is the general theme of some diets.
Not only is that purely anecdotal, but it's also subject to survivorship bias and the placebo effect. The idea that carbs are somehow bad is ridiculous just from a purely biological POV of how the human body works. Glucose is an important fuel source for anaerobic energy generation. Try doing endurance exercise without any carbs, and you are going to have a really bad time.
> Try doing endurance exercise without any carbs, and you are going to have a really bad time.
I prefer to only do my endurance exercises in a fasted state, anywhere between 12-24 hours. The only thing i ingest is some salt, magnesium and potassium and water. I have no problem and I feel great. 30 minutes on the bike with resistence turned up or jogging 2-3 miles. Ketones burn cleaner than glucose with less reactive byproducts. There is a study on pubmed that found when the brain has the choice between glucose and ketones in the bloodstream it chooses ketones. You don't need dietary carbs, your body can make its own glucose from proteins if it needs. There's plenty of research on this.
Change is unreasonably effective at getting differences. I'm personally of the opinion that cutting sugar is a good idea. That said, I can't discount that anyone that crests the motivational hump to make a change, is also as likely to push through in other ways, as well.
One example would be any flour, when they pulverize grains into a fine powder it completely changes the glycemic index/load. Another example could be a whole apple vs apple juice, where they remove the matrix of fiber or flesh of the apple into a liquid that is almost purely sugar and water.
This is a really bad takeaway from this article. Differentiation between processed and unprocessed is actually really easy if you haven't had your brain melted by rationalists. Even from the article you linked we get:
"I think the most likely dietary change I make is to try to avoid foods with soybean, corn, or safflower oil, since this is probably a good stand-in for “foods processed enough that they count as processed foods and you should avoid them”
None of these articles give a concrete example of what a "processed food" is. They say "sugary snacks" are processed. So if I bake a cake with whole wheat flour and a little sugar and eggs, is this processed? Or like "processed foods are high in carbohydrates." So should I stay away from all bread? What is the actual carbohydrate count in a piece of bread that would be considered processed? They say stay away from frozen food, which is processed, but they say to eat fish. A lot of fish is sold frozen. Is this fish processed?
You're getting too hung up on "processed" stop eating shit food made in gigantic factories with ingredients you can't pronounce or explain their inclusion. That's it, it's literally that easy
I am talking about the article. I don't eat any factory made food. I am just wondering what is considered bad food by these researchers.
And besides food can be manipulated in not just factories. I know a lot of small places that cure meat and this is considered processed food, as it is high in salt and preservative.
Food is considered processed if it is not in its natural state. Some minimal processing is okay because sometimes things can't be eaten in their natural state. The more something is processed, generally the less healthy it is.
So if you eat white flour, but supplement it with fiber and vitamins, this is ok? What exactly causes the inflammation? Is it the fast conversion of carbs to sugar? If so, can this not be slowed down with other things to get a balance?
If you want to know how to eat, just ask someone whose job or hobby it is to compete in the fitness category of your choosing.
For example, if you want to know how to maximize muscle growth through eating, ask a competition level bodybuilder. Yes, they'll be on gear, but they'll still be able to tell you how you should eat and with the proper ratios to maximize muscle growth. They'll also be able to tell you how to eat cleanly because cutting weight is part of their competitive training cycle.
Likewise, if you want to know how to eat healthy, ask a fitness model. They make their money by looking good for cameras and will want to maximize that through their diet.
These folks aren't looking for fads, they've already learned, implemented, and lived what actually works from others who were also competitive in these fields.
This is what I was thinking while reading the poisonous replies in the other top comment. “Nutrition still does not know what we should and should not to eat”… well what is your goal? Too much doubt is being cast on an entire body of knowledge as if elite athletes do not exist and as if nutritionists have not developed tried and tested ways to optimize performance towards a specific sport.
great advice! so many people decide "I'm going to lose weight" but then dont' bother to educate themselves in the slightest. Im in the middle of my own weight loss journey. After two failed attempts in the past, I researched for a full week on youtube finding the best exercise and nutrition gurus and seeing what the commonalities between them were. after that I put together a diet and exercise plan based on my goals. 2 months in and I'm at the weight I was at when I was 14 years old. On top of that, I'm able to do 5 pullups in a row and squat 250 lbs (which I could definitely not do when I was 14).
education is key to any endevour and knowing who to get yoru advice from is the first critical step.
> The findings reveal that if the participants had a habit of eating a lot of processed carbs, especially during snack times, their performance in cognitive tests dropped off.
False. They found that when people's cognitive ability was starting to wane, they were more inclined to reach for processed carbs.
The novelty here is in misrepresenting that correlation as being causal in the reverse direction, in the absence of any real evidence to support this.
While the article talks about PROCESSED carbohydrates, the study talks about REFINED carbohydrates. What are these and how the impact differs from unprocessed or unrefined carbohydrates?
183 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadThe easiest to fix is DBT2, can use virtahealth.com for a prescription paid by insurance.
The other harder problems are serious mental illnesses, but only small trials are going on, see https://metabolicmind.org/
On the other hand, there exists evidence that hardcore keto just for weight loss doesn’t outperform non-ketogenic low carb, and you can even lose weight successfully on low fat, but these things are BIG whichever you choose:
1) lose all ultraprocessed and junk food, regardless of macros
The results from low fat and low carb groups are approximately the same in long term outcomes, as long as both groups stop consuming junk food.
2) fix your sleep hygiene ASAP
3) get movement during the day
4) stop eating before evening
About 3): my N=1 confirms that brisk walking even for 30 minutes does wonders to my blood glucose levels. There are also studies that confirm that long walks do lots of good and that it’s not just me. Hitting the gym is optional, and you can invent reasons to spend an hour a day or two walking.
I’m positive that keto should be more for those who find it improving their mental state and diabetes; general population, not so much.
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> On the other hand, there exists evidence that hardcore keto just for weight loss doesn’t outperform non-ketogenic low carb > I’m positive that keto should be more for those who find it improving their mental state and diabetes; general population, not so much.
Good luck in practice though! Good luck being a doctor or a personal trainer and telling that to your patients/clients (just eat a small ice-cream bro! just suffer through it).
Not everybody is a body builder (they do the gain/cut thing).
> Hitting the gym is optional
This should not be optional. Unless you train in your job or something.
>2) fix your sleep hygiene ASAP
This and your other points should be unrelated to the diet.
> About 3): my N=1 confirms
Depends how "good" you want to feel and if you want to experiment with even better.
Feel free to N=1 on yourself by fixing everything first, and only then, try a very-high-fat keto diet (~80% fat). You might be wrong on this one (many people are, meaning starting keto when they're already done everything else).
You can ask your doctor or you can search online in a keto forum.
Things that have personally worked for me:
1. pour a lot of olive oil (say 10 tablespoons) on salads. After eating the salad I just drink the olive oil.
2. Get MCT oil during the day in tea spoons.
3. (best/cheapest for me and I currently do) Get beef fat trimmings and fry/air-fry/slow-cook them (see https://www.instagram.com/p/CrhH9CBo1mC/ for that and other high fat carnivore recipes)
It is. But you hopefully get used to it?
Other examples:
1. eat only egg yolks (i'm actually alergic to egg whites)
2. Eat the foods with most carbs before gym. This way you can utilise some carbs for gym and you'll still keep high levels of ketones (see /r/ketogains protocol)
3. See the instagram account I linked.
4. See what they do for epilepsy (hint: they kinda drink oil because they need 90%)
The beef fat trimmings are still kinda oil, just in nicer form and nicer taste. Literally eat 0.5kg-1kg of beef fat trimmings a day (they get 1/4 size after cooking)
Neither am I. I do modest workouts so I don’t lose muscle on keto, but it’s mostly to manage type 2 diabetes and lose body fat (which, again, is to manage the diabetes and maybe get some of my insulin sensitivity back).
> > 2) fix your sleep hygiene ASAP
> This and your other points should be unrelated to the diet.
But turns out, they are. The human organism is a complex thing, and it turns out that if your circadian clock and eating habits are out of sync, you’re royally screwed. Sleep is not an afterthought, it kinda all starts with it.
- 30 minute walk (or some exercise) after every meal. My mantra; if you're giving yourself fuel you need to use it. Otherwise it just stays in the bloodstream causing problems.
- No processed carbs.
- Limit fried fats.
- No eating for 2-3 hours before bedtime.
The way I feel is night and day than before I started this healthy lifestyle.
Though, as you said, happily that is changing.
(Edit to say, speaking as a certified ketobro, I don't think you should do keto all the time, forever. A break day or two every few weeks, and stretches of healthy mixed-diet eating, in my experience, gets you the same benefits)
Not just healthy, but essential. You need a certain amount of fats for your sex hormones to actually work, so unless you want to stop menstruating/not interested in having erections, keep eating healthy fats.
furthermore, we have sensors in our body to inhibit sugar craving in the presence of glucose or sucrose. we have no such sensor for fructose. so even if you did have 50% pure fructose in cane sugar, you would drink less real sugar coke because you'd feel satisfied after drinking a much smaller amount than those HFCS abominations.
Sudden jump off keto may cause inflammatory damage to the endothelium of your blood vessels, and while in that one study, effects had been “transient”, I wouldn’t risk cheat days without a very gradual reintroduction of carbs, and surely not repeated cheat days. (My personal fat diabetic ass says it had a lifetime of carbs, though, so that’s not happening for me until at least 20 kg later.)
I know it’s just one study, but I would rather be safe than sorry until we know more. Case in point: the study subjects were all young and healthy, and most people who really need to go very low carb are not.
So a 'cheat day' should probably be more like eating some wholegrain bread, lentils, some raw fruit of choice, or stuff like that. If you're on keto, that will almost feel like eating candy anyway :)
5) Limit consumption of (mostly) omega-6 polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Use virgin olive oil (mostly monounsaturated) and saturated fats (butter, ghee, coconut oil, even lard) instead. The exception is: try to get as much omega-3 as possible.
6) Eat foods with high and diverse micronutrient content or use supplements. It's really easy to be slightly deficient in some essential micronutrients. Especially magnesium, which is really important and deficiency is really common.
Nuts and seafoods are good for both of these, but supplementation may be advisable. As for the fats, evidence continues to accumulate that contrary to "official" public health advise for the last 60 years or so, saturated fats are NOT harmful to cardiovascular health, certainly much less so than highly processed polyunsaturated fats (and almost all of them are processed in some way or other, because naturally they are hard to extract and spoil rapidly). Also saturated fats stand up much better to high heat, whereas polyunsaturated fats will always produce some trans-fats during pan or deep frying.
Here's a study on the affects of nitrate's improving brain performance in older adults. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3018552/
Ketosis has had the opposite effect for me and I've never been able to balance the keto-flu with my normal day-to-day activities. I feel like garbage.
It's pretty easy to fix the flu. How long did it last for you?
Why not? I eat proportionally an immense amount of cards. I also do long distance endurance events. No cards = no go.
On the other hand, I feel far less slugglish when I cut sugar. So fed, but less sugar (perhaps up to a point, not sure about ketones given the brain prefers sugars apparently)
Another thing that helps since I don't drink coffee anymore is eating veal liver for energy levels.
It's like an espresso shot, perhaps even better. Quick internet search showed me that it wasn't just an impression.
Maybe/probably you just have carb withdrawal and can't feel the effects ?
My personal example is do keto. Stay some time in it so no carb withdrawal. Then try fasting on top. I see the difference, and is just like increasing fat ratio, so it's probably higher ketones in blood stream (too lazy to measure them during the day though).
Something like 12 years ago I started fasting and training based on some of the regimes olympic marathon runners were putting out there at the time. I went 24 hours without food and did a set of leg workouts. Within minutes of leaving the gym I developed a fever and a pain in my back. When I checked myself into the emergency room I was expecting to hear that my appendix burst but had a serious conversation with the ER doctor about a giant tumor that they found in my retroperitoneal cavity. Wild shit.
Years later I found out that studies have shown that fasting causes "Autophagy". .."Autophagy allows your body to break down and reuse old cell parts so your cells can operate more efficiently. It’s a natural cleaning out process that begins when your cells are stressed or deprived of nutrients. Researchers are studying autophagy’s role in potentially preventing and fighting disease."
I'm of the opinion that had I not have fasted and did an intense workout I would have never have caught this stage II\III cancer in time. The malignant tumor's in that part of the body leave no physical symptoms. The next stop would have been the lungs and the brain...Take that for what it's worth.
Study link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
I'm not saying their hypothesis isn't plausible, their data just doesn't get us an inch closer to confirming it...
Then you would find that eating health food correlates with high-education. The correlation is real: if you see someone snacking cucumber, he is likely highly educated. It doesn't mean that eating more cucumber will make you smart though.
A sudden blood glucose spike can do that. Source: Being a type 1 diabetic. Drawing conclusions from just eating/drinking is however a bit optimistic since many variables are at play.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-...
Maybe you're just sarcastic with calling it processed sugar because of dicing (and omitting apple's fiber, vitamins, amino-acids, minerals, enzymes and more)?
"Croissant diet" Croissant is actually the least nutritive food possible https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7498104/, You'd get issues eating that. I actually experimented something similar (white bread almost only for 2 years), started to have mental issues
Saturated fat is not specially an issue (it would maybe have prevented mental issues in my case, brain needs fat, croissant richer in sat fat than white bread, but I dislike butter), I don't know how you derived from processed sugar to saturated fat, many natural food contain small amount of saturated fat
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188692...
here's a counterpoint:
> Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing. After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.
https://metarationality.com/nutrition
At a minimum, you would need to force people to eat a certain diet, with no option to sneak in a few snacks while the researchers aren't watching.
And you probably need to do this for a whole generation (ie. from birth until death) to really get good data to prove that diet X leads to better outcomes than diet Y.
Large-scale high-quality research on humans isn't possible.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/records-found-in-...
But they certainly have some advantages over, say, studies based on food frequency questionnaires.
A very generic counterpoint.
Nutritional science has no such trophies
Associations with cancer risk or benefits have been claimed for most food ingredients. Many single studies highlight implausibly large effects, even though evidence is weak. Effect sizes shrink in meta-analyses.
Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review; Jonathan D Schoenfeld 1, John P A Ioannidis. 10.3945/ajcn.112.047142
Eating less reduces your need for food ('adaptive thermogenesis'), and hence total oxidative stress load. This almost certainly reduces your risk of cancer and also more than likely slows aging. [4]
[1] https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1958.1...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27136388/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5927356/
This entire article reads like someone only understand the field by reading clickbait headlines about nutrition (“Eggs are good for you now”) and then assumes the scientists and journalists are one and the same.
It also sets up a lot of straw man arguments that rationalists are likely to come up with but that you would hear from actual science, such as the idea that they’re searching for a rationally perfect diet.
I don’t know what’s going on with that site but it’s not really a good resource. Identifying some areas where the science isn’t clear or where observations has changed and then trying to use that to dismiss an entire field is a classic anti-science trope used by people who prefer to feel superior to scientists and to downplay science. It’s most commonly used on topics like climate science or anti-vaccine research.
Only if one looks any deeper they find that the journalists printed the summary provided by the researchers. That they accurately captured the message the researchers were pushing. Researchers want eyeballs, and they want the funding that comes with attention, along with the personal prestige, and this has proven incredibly corrupting. Add that a pretty good percentage of nutrition research is funded by parties with deeply conflicted interests.
In any case, the site is largely accurate. The nutrition field has made extraordinarily little progress. Right now, in 2023, pretty much the only solid nutrition conclusion is "don't eat too much. Eat a variety". Almost everything else does not stand any scrutiny at all. It seems entirely valid to dismiss the nutrition field given the past forty years.
It's actually interesting watching a subreddit like /r/nutrition. The place could as easily be people discussing their healing crystals and chakras. That's where we're at right now.
What is your point? Are you suggesting that they are not to blame? They certainly write the articles. They may even be a part of juicing up the headline sufficiently to become a perfect clickbait.
Only few months ago, an article was written about recovering in 'no work' spaces, which happened to include cars. Fortune title? Scientists say car is your meditation spot ( I am paraphrasing a little since I am quoting from memory ).
When they're literally quoting almost verbatim the claims of the researchers, no they aren't to blame. And the vast majority of the time you see an article with some breathless claim, it is capturing the essence of the research summary, or the press release put out by the university or think tank.
See, journalists like their jobs to be easy. They generally aren't spinning whole wool. As Graham's The Submarine describes, often they're basically reprinting something sent to them with minor wording changes.
That's my point. And my point was amply clear in my original post. Blaming the journalists is often nonsensical sophistry. A hail mary to try to recover some semblance from busted research, as if it's the messenger who is to blame. The worst part is that the blame the journalist people create a vacuum in which even worse sources of information grow.
Not sure the vaguely remembered, poorly communicated anecdote (which I can find zero references for) supports your point.
You do have a point.
I feel vaguely attacked. See article[1]. Original title that you can still see in search engines, because it was only changed after pushback:
>>You need to detach and 'psychologically recover' from work, professors say. The solution: commuting<<
What I appear to be getting from your post is: 'No one is to blame. No one could be held liable for their actions. It is all sophistry.'
Which is funny, because I am willing to agree the system has perverse incentives to mess with things at numerous checkpoints, but you cannot realistically claim this, because researchers ( and indeed all humans ) like their jobs easy as well.
[1]https://fortune.com/2023/02/02/remote-work-why-do-i-miss-com...
I am quite specifically hanging the blame on researchers who are perpetrating junk science. Most observation / survey based science is junk science. Most "study of studies" research is junk science. It's lazy science to get media attention, and the more salacious or contrarian the outcome, the more appealing it is for some subset of researchers.
This isn't an attack on science or scientists in the whole, clearly. But when you see some breathless article exclaiming that eating an olive pit twice weekly makes you live twenty years longer, blaming the columnists seems foolish. In almost every case they're simply repeating the claims of bad science.
I am not automatically disagreeing, but that is a pretty strong claim. I am relatively certain that a well chosen survey participants ( that are not mturk or local body of students unless actually applicable to the study ) could make for a decent study. I can't really opine of observation, but on the surface it strikes me as a very strong claim as well.
<< But when you see some breathless article exclaiming that eating an olive pit twice weekly makes you live twenty years longer, blaming the columnists seems foolish. In almost every case they're simply repeating the claims of bad science.
And this is where it gets tricky. Do editors/publishers merely parrot it or add media cycle friendly spin on it?
<< I am quite specifically hanging the blame on researchers who are perpetrating junk science.
I think I am willing to mostly agree with that statement in a sense that they ultimately responsible.
That said, it is hard for me to believe that editors/publishers would publish it if standards were a tad higher and not chasing attention.
The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies based on some past anecdotes.
It's the exact same trick used by climate science deniers who go back and cherry pick some old studies where the conclusion changed: Pick some old studies where the conclusion changed, announce that science is fallible, then dismiss the entire field.
It's ridiculous logic to anyone who understands how science works, but it's very appealing to people who like to be contrarian.
If they're observational or survey based studies, they should be dismissed generally, or at least given incredibly little attention. Even worse they're usually 2nd order "I took some terrible observational studies, put them in a pile, and now I have a study of studies" bit of bunk that is a bit like CDOs: Just layer the junk and pretend it has value all together. We have decades of doing this now to have learned that it is extremely low value, and simply repeating the same pattern again with new biases and assumptions is not going to improve the situation.
Nutritional studies are really, really hard, short of creating concentration camps and assigning diets to sections for decades.
If you were studying physics by doing a survey on what people's opinion of gravity is or what their recollection of their acceleration rates for the past year, you'd probably not have great results.
We've looked for those answers, and they don't exist. But the media has to deliver them anyway, so they do, and they cherry-pick and misinterpret studies to do so. Some attention-hungry researchers cater to them, and a lot of doctors with more ambition than shame try to get rich selling books and supplements.
We're not limited by our nutritional knowledge anyway. When it comes to eating and health, we have much bigger problems to solve than the current nutritional unknowns. Most individual members of society suffer from ignorance and false beliefs that are way, way worse than the uncertainties and false results in nutritional science, and most people feel psychologically incapable of acting on what they think they know anyway. Any forces trying to educate and empower people are massively outgunned by shamelessly unprincipled hucksters filling the air with whatever noise they can sell on one hand and blatantly evil food industry marketing on the other.
US nutrition advice is basically just a contest in how many carbs you can eat.
I disagree. What seems simple enough may actually be the last piece to be figured out. We don't have as much knowledge about the fundamental blocks, atoms, as we would like, but that has seldom stopped us from building sophisticated applications using it. If anything, us not figuring out could only be an indication of how inherently complex nature can be.
In the early days of AI, before the winter, people thought that getting computers to play chess would be hard but walking or recognizing faces would be easy. Turns out that difficulty is often not where we expect, except for a general tendency for more complex more macro-level things to be harder. Even then there are exceptions, but nutrition has not shown any signs of being one.
You can spot them in the comment section being upset about the page on how probability theory doesn't actually let you replace all human thoughts.
I think the basic Michael Pollen formulation, which is "Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants" has held up pretty well.
Why do you think there is any confusion about the overall health effects of eating meat, eggs, and dairy? With $ billions at stake - of course they find unethical ways to find some statistical anomaly to make their products good along some narrow dimension - and then have their money-funded media stories amplifying the lies.
I strongly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/ - a non-profit focusing on finding the signal through the noise.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illnes...
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/nutritionfacts-org/
Because I have genuinely no idea whether you think that meat, eggs, and dairy have positive or negative overall health effects.
Meat consumption has reliably been found to have bad effects on health.
You're pretty much saying that, as long as you ignore the studies which you consider to be illegitimate, then the outcome of the science is clear.
The fact of the matter is that research showing that eating meat has a negative impact on health also suffers from conflicts of interest. Now, those conflicts of interest come from many researchers compassion for animals - and there's a big moral difference between that and conflicts of interest which come from the greed of the meat industry. But from a scientific perspective, it's not legitimate to simply dismiss one side and accept the other.
Not everything has to be a both sides equivocation . Degree and severity matter. "Compassion for animals" and "receiving funding from a party with a vested interest in the outcome" are not equivalent conflicts of interest.
But from the scientific perspective, there is a specific factual question: what are the effects of meat consumption on human health? Nutrition research is super finicky. Even absent any conflict of interest, it's unclear that nutrition results are trustworthy. So I don't think it's fair to throw out every study which says meat is healthy and just focus on the studies that say meat is unhealthy.
Person A sees someone torturing a dog and kills them out of indignation.
Person B is a hitman-for-hire who doesn't know who he's killed or why.
Are person A and B really morally equivalent?
That's not what we're talking about, however. We're talking about what level of suspicion is appropriate in various scenarios. It's unlikely we can _know_ if results were purposefully sabotaged or not. We have to make some best guess. Interested parties funding studies is deeply suspicious, and should be treated with a hefty dose of skepticism. Hand waving that "maybe the researchers were motivated by empathy?!" is not at all equivalent. That is a incredibly low bar that, itself, undermines trust in science, as one could trivially make up similar excuses to distrust virtually any study ever conducted. Oh, researchers found declining sources of fresh water year over year? Biased. They probably just like cheap drinking water. Better ignore it. An Aquafina-backed study shows the opposite. That study is biased, too. But they're both equally morally reprehensible.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190362/total-us-wheat-pr... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1167209/leading-global-c... [3] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/05/12/266748.... [4] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/food/fruits-nuts/fresh-...
[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/food/vegetables/fresh-v...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/misunders...
I feel like it is beyond the "replication crisis" of any other science when your replication crisis involves potential war crimes. (p-hacking looks so quaint in comparison.)
If any other science had that sort of foundation and its replication problems that entire science would likely have been thrown out by now. A lot of people still think that there must be some sort of baby in all that extremely tainted bathwater and are afraid to throw it out.
(I have come to believe that nutrition science has become the last bastion of Phlogiston Theory in any of the sciences, and that is more damaging than people realize.)
Anyone who makes this statement and doesn't understand that this ratio depends on personal behavior is a flat out absolute idiot and shouldn't make any public facing statements. No way to sugar coat it.
This is regardless of whether nutritionists made any progress.
Nutrition is the smaller field about about what to eat, but it still can't say what to eat!
The optimal diet for someone who is completely sedentary is going to be completely different to the optimal diet for someone who gets a reasonable amount of exercise, and it's not going to be a flat multiplier.
The protein needs of an athlete are completely different. Simple carbohydrates are processed differently if eaten prior to heavy exercise. That's just the basic stuff.
The best advice I've read is to just eat and move like a mature adult.
That doesn't necessarily mean never having a sweet or a beer, but it does mean prioritising full real meals over stuff like donuts, cakes, 50g sugar "coffee" drinks etc.
Nutrition facts that have been known for 20+ years:
1. Increased calorie consumption causes weight gain.
2. Diabetics are unable to properly metabolize carbohydrates without insulin.
3. Fat is necessary to hormone production.
4. Protein is necessary to create or maintain muscle mass.
5. Carbohydrates with high glycemic index cause fluctuations in blood sugar and energy levels.
6. Fiber promotes bowel regularity.
7. People with Celiac diseases have an autoimmune response to gluten, a protein found in grains.
8. Iron is necessary to cognition, motor development, and energy levels.
9. Vitamin A promotes eyesight.
10. Calcium is necessary for bone strength.
11. Vitamin D promotes Calcium absorption.
Not a comprehensive list, just what I could think of off the top of my head.
Nutritional science is roughly concerned with the question, "what constitutes a healthy diet?", and it has failed to produce even partial answers at every turn.
Please cite your source.
Just one source of many: https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3580 (2015)
(I was concerned you'd say that's so obvious it doesn't count, not the opposite...)
> 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 come from cellular and molecular biology, not nutritional science.
These have all have nutritional studies.
For example, #7 dates back to the late 19th century, decades before molecular biology.
Another vastly replicated result you can find quite easily: low-glycemic-index diets and ketogenic diets can produce weight loss despite caloric excess.
And lastly, a reasoning from first principles reveals a prima facie credible flaw in the caloric balance hypothesis: the body is not a closed system, ergo the law of conservation of energy does not apply. More vulgarly: you can do things like "work up an appetite" or "shit excess food".
Google Scholar is positively littered with relevant literature, so I'm somewhat surprised by your skepticism. Good key words to enter are: "carbohydrate-insulin model" vs "energy balance model". The carbohydrate-insulin model is also credibly debated, of course, but the question of whether this is the right alternative is distinct from the question of whether the energy-balance model is correct.
In no specific order, here is a pair of completely arbitrary papers, intended only to show that relevant papers can be found with minimal effort:
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002604...
- https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/115/5/1243/6522166
I'm not objecting to the energy-balance model, which may well be correct in an important way. I am merely pointing out that nutritional science has not managed to reach consensus on this fundamental issue.
>These have all have nutritional studies.
The nutritional studies did not produce these initial findings. Without pointing to specific papers, it's hard to be very precise, but I would be willing to bet that these are either dietary studies building off of biological first principles, or replication-checks in broader studies. Both are totally fair practices, but can't be considered as an indication that nutritional science is a fruitful field.
If you run 20 more miles every day and eat 100 more calories, I suspect you won't gain weight.
The banality of your arguments speaks for itself.
Why do you think that said optimal ratio even a thing? We are omnivores evolutioned to be able to survive on any type of food.
(Yes, I might have narcolepsy, possibly induced by night-time medication that's still hanging around; I take morning modafinil at fairly high dosages and try to take breaks to interrupt the tolerance process. I'm also experimenting with yerba mate, but the overall effect of that seems more suited for late-night social situations than getting amped for work.)
Getting rid of most carbs and other inflammatory foods is the general theme of some diets.
AIP diet in particular.
I prefer to only do my endurance exercises in a fasted state, anywhere between 12-24 hours. The only thing i ingest is some salt, magnesium and potassium and water. I have no problem and I feel great. 30 minutes on the bike with resistence turned up or jogging 2-3 miles. Ketones burn cleaner than glucose with less reactive byproducts. There is a study on pubmed that found when the brain has the choice between glucose and ketones in the bloodstream it chooses ketones. You don't need dietary carbs, your body can make its own glucose from proteins if it needs. There's plenty of research on this.
(not a nutritionist)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-...
"I think the most likely dietary change I make is to try to avoid foods with soybean, corn, or safflower oil, since this is probably a good stand-in for “foods processed enough that they count as processed foods and you should avoid them”
And besides food can be manipulated in not just factories. I know a lot of small places that cure meat and this is considered processed food, as it is high in salt and preservative.
Examples:
* White flour has the the germ and bran removed, leaving on the endosperm.
* Table sugar has everything filtered out from cane/beat except for the pure carbohydrate.
* Fruit juice has the fleshy parted removed, leaving only the liquid juice.
Obviously:
1. It's a spectrum. Some foods are more processed than others.
2. It's a heuristic to promote good nutrition. Processed doesn't necessarily mean bad, but 4/5 times it facilitates poor nutrition and/or overeating.
For example, if you want to know how to maximize muscle growth through eating, ask a competition level bodybuilder. Yes, they'll be on gear, but they'll still be able to tell you how you should eat and with the proper ratios to maximize muscle growth. They'll also be able to tell you how to eat cleanly because cutting weight is part of their competitive training cycle.
Likewise, if you want to know how to eat healthy, ask a fitness model. They make their money by looking good for cameras and will want to maximize that through their diet.
These folks aren't looking for fads, they've already learned, implemented, and lived what actually works from others who were also competitive in these fields.
education is key to any endevour and knowing who to get yoru advice from is the first critical step.
False. They found that when people's cognitive ability was starting to wane, they were more inclined to reach for processed carbs.
The novelty here is in misrepresenting that correlation as being causal in the reverse direction, in the absence of any real evidence to support this.