8 ms·

Without any disrespect to the author, why don't we all just start thinking for ourselves when it comes to our health, rather than being told contradictory infor

Without any disrespect to the author, why don't we all just start thinking for ourselves when it comes to our health, rather than being told contradictory information every 3 years by mainstream media? One minute it's best to eat ice cream for breakfast; the next minute we shouldn't eat any carbs at all; then we should start drinking red wine every day; then more water; then less water, etc. It's as if we're just a big experiment or some sort of inside joke to the mainstream media.

happyscrappy 11y ago
That is the beauty of science, no matter what I want to do I can find some study supporting it!
- ska 11y ago
  You often can, but they are not fungible.
atomical 11y ago
The idea that you shouldn't eat any carbs is put out there by quacks like Peter Attia. There is plenty of evidence to suggest a plant-based diet high in carbohydrate is the best for health.
- meowface 11y ago
  Health aside, some people report cutting carbs entirely or almost entirely helps them lose weight. As for whether it's "healthy", who really knows, but it appears to be statistically significant when it comes to weight.
  - apl 11y ago
    A simple explanation for this: cutting carbs is tricky and requires a lot of careful planning etc., increasing the likelihood that people actually stay under their maintenance caloric intake. It doesn't really matter how you do it. As long as your expenditure is larger than your intake, you'll lose weight. In any case, your point doesn't say anything about the healthiness of carbohydrates.
    - atomical 11y ago
      Yes, but what about high LDL and heart disease risk with high fat diets? The paleo and keto folks completely dismiss this.
    - mindcrime 11y ago
      In any case, your point doesn't say anything about the healthiness of carbohydrates. There's evidence (sorry, I don't have the citations in front of me) to link carbohydrate intake to increased triglycerides, higher HDL, and more inflamation - pretty much the opposite of "healthy". OTOH, there's reason to think that a low carb, high fat, moderate protein diet may improve lipid profiles, and reduce the risk of heart disease. Now, I can't say with certainty that a low carb, high fat, moderate protein diet is better (or worse) than a high carb, low fat diet, or a high protein diet, etc. And I think part of the problem is simply that when you talk about human health and the connection between health and diet, there are just too many variables, and it's hard to control for them all. Hence the fact that you can find research endorsing a number of different diets, which appear diametrically opposed to each other.
      - atomical 11y ago
        http://nutritionfacts.org/?s=cholesterol http://nutritionfacts.org/?s=cholesterol A high fat diet increases HDL. If a person is overweight their HDL may drop if they experience weight loss, but it will not drop as much as someone who is on a plant-based diet. About 75% of the people who die from coronary artery disease have what is considered optimal cholesterol. Your cholesterol has to be much lower than what is considered optimal to lower your risk. http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/cholesterol-and-heart-disease http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/cholesterol-and-hea... "On July 21, 1990, The Lancet published the findings of Dean Ornish, M.D., who demonstrated that heart disease can actually be reversed without medicines.13 Until then, most doctors were not even attempting to reverse heart disease, even though it was, as it is now, the most common cause of death. Most believed that the plaques of cholesterol and other substances that clog the arteries to the heart would not go away. The traditional way to remove them was to wait until they became severe enough to warrant a bypass or angioplasty. At the University of California in San Francisco, Dr. Ornish tested the theory that a more potent diet, along with other lifestyle changes, might actually reverse heart disease. He selected patients who had plaques that were clearly visible on angiograms and split the patients into two groups. Half were referred to a control group in which they received the standard care that doctors prescribe for heart patients. The other half began a vegetarian diet in which less than 10 percent of calories were contributed by fat. They were also asked to begin a program of modest exercise and learned to manage stress through a variety of simple techniques. Of course, smoking was not permitted. Dr. Ornish’s patients started to feel better almost immediately, and continued to improve over the course of the year. They had previously been struggling with the crushing chest pain of heart disease, but “most of them became essentially pain-free,” Dr. Ornish said, “even though they were doing more activities, going back to work, and doing things that they hadn’t been able to do, in some cases, for years.”"
- belorn 11y ago
  best health for whom? There is a lot of variance in metabolism between people, and even more ways the body can react to different diets. There are people whose digestion track that are too efficient and those that are too inefficient, and a high carbohydrate diet will have a radical different impact for each of those. Even for everyone else with a healthy metabolism we must ask what effect if any a high carbohydrate diet does and if there is any correlation in that group for improved health or not.
  - atomical 11y ago
    Best health in terms of cancer and diabetes risk. Longevity is the goal. Check out nutritionfacts.org.
arpa 11y ago
Well you shouldn't let mainstream media think for you ever and not only for matters regarding your health.
- pdpi 11y ago
  You can just remove "mainstream" from that post. It's of course fine to defer to experts on matters you know nothing about, but you really shouldn't let other people do your thinking for you at all, ever.
dekhn 11y ago
Are we all experts who are capable of thinking for ourselves ("thinking for ourselves" seems to equal: inspecting the primary literature, or review literature, and coming to a conclusion)? No, we're not. Thinking for yourself is untenable- we need scientists who are experts in analyzing data to provide specific suggestions, and disseminate those in the media. Unfortunately, there is little consequence to reporting false conclusions, or inaccurate health data, so I don't see any change forthcoming.
- mdpopescu 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you realize that the same thing can be said about religion? You don't know enough about it - definitely not as much as the people who specialize in it - so you should listen to your priest on the subject. Or politics: just pick a party and follow its lead, politics is a complex subject and you can't know as much as the professionals.
  - andrepd 11y ago
    It definitely is so. What authority do I have to talk about economics or law? Shouldn't I leave that to the people who do know what they are talking about? Kind of a central problem in democracy, if you think about it.
  - dubya 11y ago
    Protestants, at least, have the idea of the "priesthood of all believers", meaning roughly that each person can have authority in doctrinal matters. So you should listen to your priest, but you don't have to accept that he's correct if God is telling you something different. Thus the billion different protestant denominations.
    - zaphar 11y ago
      Protestants if you go back to their roots actually expected you to become an expert in scripture in order to recognize when your "priest" is wrong. But they didn't promote anything goes. It's more that you should learn and be able to apply scripture correctly. This didn't prevent the proliferation of denominations because of course different people would interpret a piece of scripture differently and get really worked up about it.
toyg 11y ago
At the end of the day, the average not-athlete person who just wants to stay healthy should just remember that magic word: "moderation". Everything is good as long as you don't have too much of it, and for the basic necessities (water), just follow what your body tells you instead of ignoring/suppressing it. You won't get fat because you've had 7 glasses of water rather than $MAGIC_NUMBER$, so there is no point in obsessing about these. If you are an athlete, of course, things are different; but in that case you should probably talk to professionals, not blindly trust mainstream magazines.
- knodi123 11y ago
  Of course, this advice should only be followed in moderation; for instance, there's no healthy amount of trans-fats.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Yeah, but eating a few grams once in a blue moon won't kill you. It's not Polonium.
  - gambiting 11y ago
    Just like there's no "healthy" amount of carbonated soda either, but having an occasional glass of coke won't have any result on your health whatsoever. That's also moderation.
    - exodust 11y ago
      There's definitely a negative effect on your health from one glass of coke. Small, but still an effect. For starters you're exceeding the recommended daily intake of added sugar with one can of coke. No big deal, but if your liver could talk, it wouldn't be happy. Your blood pressure rises, again no big deal, but still not good. The only good thing is the water in the coke.
- makmanalp 11y ago
  I mostly agree with this point of view, with the small caveat that what constitutes moderate is not always obvious - I remember coming to the US for the first time and being in awe as to how large portions were, for example.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
TallGuyShort 11y ago
There was an article a few months ago, I think on HN, with a headline to the effect of "Scientists link <some chemical> to <some mental health issue>". Clicking through a few links to get to a more authoritative source, and it sounded more like "Our results show a correlation with a larger uncertainty than we'd like to see, and this contradicts a similar study done previously". People need to understand the statistical nature of these studies and what conclusions that should be drawing. IMO an understanding of correlation vs. causation, factors, levels and control groups, etc. should be part of any decent education (i.e. well before college). We can't expect mainstream media to help of it's own accord.
belorn 11y ago
It does look like that the near future will have more individualized health advice rather than generic one-line suggestions regarding nutritions and diets. The problem looks from my personal point of view that we are lacking measuring tools which can help identify what status the body is in and how it reacts to changes, and from there having the medical expertise to understand the whole picture.
paulojreis 11y ago
The problem here is your reliance on mainstream media for this kind of information. It's a sad state of affairs, I know, but you simply cannot trust mainstream media for this. If a compound that - per chance - exists in beer is discovered to influence lipolysis in vitro , then mainstream media will tell you to drink a beer to get lean. And it's not only mainstream media fault; universities and research centres PR departments will probably report it in the same way, under the disguise of "making it friendly to the average Joe". This doesn't mean, however, that you should strictly "think for yourself". Of course, you're not supposed to follow everything blindly, but if you're not an health expert (or even if you are!), It's better to trust authoritative sources and your physicians.
- sdoering 11y ago
  > but you simply cannot trust mainstream media for this. Can you trust them for any real information? In my eyes mainstream media is there to tell stories. Oftentimes bedtime stories for sheepwalkers. But the truth (TM) - well whatever that may be, I do not see it in media. At least not very often. Regarding the "trust your physician"-part: I would even take their advice with a very big grain of salt. At least looking at my own experience and the experiences of my significant other in this regard. (And I know, anecdotes not evidence.)
  - paulojreis 11y ago
    > Regarding the "trust your physician"-part: I would even take their advice with a very big grain of salt. At least looking at my own experience and the experiences of my significant other in this regard. (And I know, anecdotes not evidence.) Thing is... "which" grain of salt? Physicians fail frequently, but what's the alternative? I wouldn't know what to question, and on which basis. I could read about it on the web, but why would I trust a strangers report instead of a flawed, but at least "certified", physician?
    - sdoering 11y ago
      Well you could try to, step by step, experiment with different diets and regularly have a look at your fitness-level, your blood work, your weight, the composition of your body (%of water/fat/and so on). Before that you could read a lot. Some studies, some literature. A lot will be on the strange to the bullshit-level. But the self-experimenting part will teach you, what is good for your body and what not. For example one of the problems we face in this field seems to me, that we do know so little about the bacteria (and so on), we have in our intestines. There is quite an active field of research and a lot is happening there. Maybe some day we will know more, coming from this part of science. Untill then, living with a significant other who had to listen to her body for 15+ years, I for example learned, that reducing my intake of carbohydrates (and esp. sugar and wheat) helps a lot in reducing my weight, while the reduction of fat does not help that much (Every time closely watching my caloric intake). But I would not recommend doing exactly this to everybody - it is something, that subjectively, anecdotally works for me.
CJefferson 11y ago
How do we "think for ourselves"? Come up with independant reasoning? Lots of things are highly non-obvious. Vitamins weren't discovered until the 20th century. Many baby's lives are improved by their mothers taking folic acid. I would never guess how few calories there are in things like raspberries or strawberries without having been told about it. Certainly there is lots of terrible health advice, and it's a major issue, telling people to "only read good advice" seems like the worst advice I've ever heard -- obviously we would all only read the good advice if we knew what that was!
- koonsolo 11y ago
  I think most of it is actually obvious. Healthy foods: vegetables, fruits, fish, non processed meat. Unhealthy foods: candy, soda, deserts, alcohol, lots of butter, ... . The biggest issue for most people is not that they don't know the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods. The problem is to eat the healty foods and stay away from the unhealty ones, which is quite a challenge.
  - jasode 11y ago
    >I think most of it is actually obvious. I somewhat disagree. It may be "obvious" to well-informed HN readers. However, I don't think food nutrition is obvious to a significant portion of the population. Proof of this is how the food industry advertises and labels their products to take advantage of buyers' ignorance: -- orange juice with labels saying that it's "fortified with extra vitamins and calcium". (Many people will associate oj with positive connotations of "fruit", and the vitamin supplement is a bonus. Result: unsophisticated buyers think of oj as "healthy" when it's really concentrated sugar water that will contribute to obesity and tooth decay.) -- lean cuisine "low-fat" microwave dinners with a "heart healthy" icon on the box. (Naive buyers see the "low fat" as a signal for "healthy" but don't realize that manufacturers have to amplify the taste by adding lots of salt. The heavy carbs in those meals are also controversial.) -- granola bars and "energy" bars. (The packaging has pictures of active hikers, bicycle riders, mountain climbers, etc. Some granola bars even prominently feature "fiber" as a benefit. The ignorant don't realize that these snacks are really glorified "candy bars" with clever marketing to lessen the guilt trip of eating a stick of sugar.) -- fat free yogurt. (They took out the fat but now the yogurt has lots of sugar, which is another form of calories, which most people won't burn off, which then gets stored as fat anyway.) -- photographs of celebrities with milk mustaches shown on billboards and magazine ads and associated slogans like "milk does a body good!". (Those ads are promoted by the dairy industry and it's questionable whether it's healthy for adults to drink milk.) -- USDA food pyramid. (The uneducated don't realize that the USDA (and hence the chart) is influenced and manipulated by the meat & dairy industries. Because the nutrition advice is officially published by the government and plastered all over school walls, it feels authoritative. Naive consumers don't realize that if the food pyramid was designed by nutritionists not financially linked to meat & dairy, they would place vegetables as highest priority.) For the consumers that get exposed to nutrition information in a passive way, they really don't know the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods. There's so much misinformation and manipulation that the American consumer is less knowledgeable about what's healthy than the African bushmen eating wild berries and hunting antelope.
mpclark 11y ago
It's not a joke to the media, but fundamentally their job is to report new things. Not to take a view on the things, or check them for truthiness or flawed methodology -- just to report them. (Your choice of media will determine how much extra value in terms of checking, discrimination etc is added to the news you see reported) But they like telling you to forget what you know and take on board $newfact because it is easy copy (scientists say so!) and it gets pageviews/sells papers.
andrepd 11y ago
We shouldn't think for ourselves about our health (I wouldn't prescribe myself medicine, after all), nor should we listen to what mainstream media has to say. I thought it was common knowledge that for people actually interested in staying healthy the best thing to do is ignore the fads publicized on media. Just listen to your doctor, or research medical papers yourself.
TheCraiggers 11y ago
Mainstream media? Sure, I agree. But listening to reports on actual science, I disagree. Saying that people should "start thinking for themselves" is disingenuous I believe. For one, this is how we get shit like faith healing, homeopathy, healing crystals and so on. "Normal" people don't have the resources to test a hypothesis, nor the time in most cases. Say you have cancer. What's better? Thinking for yourself and eating a naked mole rat every day for dinner because "they don't get cancer"? Or read some reports and research that apply to your case, and go to a doctor armed with some extra information that will help you both make an informed decision about a treatment? The problem lies entirely at the feet of the media. Lack of scientific training and a desire to create interesting, attention-grabbing headlines makes for situations exactly what you're complaining about. But this is no reason to eschew science. Science is doing what it does: conducting studies that only test for the smallest amount of variables as possible. It'll be a long time before science will be able to perfectly say "a human of type foo must live exactly like this to achieve maximum potential in life". This is a huge ever-changing puzzle, and while we might have the edges built (my grandma taught me you always put the edges together first) we don't even have all the pieces out of the box. Science finds a piece with a tiny flower on it and the media happily exclaims the puzzle is a picture of a garden.
- jazzyk 11y ago
  "The problem lies entirely at the feet of the media." No, not entirely. You assume scientists are objective and have no agenda. A lot of research is "sponsored" by corporate interests. The first paragraph one should read in a research report is the "source of funding" disclosure, then adjust for bias (or ignore entirely).
  - michaeltoth 11y ago
    Scientists are also incentivized by the publishing system to find noteworthy results, which often leads to finding evidence where there is none, especially in fields like nutrition where the signal to noise ratio is so low
    - 11y ago
cellularmitosis 11y ago
This complaint of "Why can't these scientists make up their minds?" is addressed well in the book "The China Study" ("Forks Over Knives" was the movie sequel to this book). Before you are two conflicting research papers. One says eggs are bad, the other that they are good. One paper came from The American Poultry Society, and the other from The Poultry Research Institute (those are made up names for the sake of argument). One of those organizations is full of industry shills, and the other is actually doing legitimate research. Every few years, they release papers which contradict the another, in an endless arms race. The problem which the consumer is faced with is: which is which?
- cellularmitosis 11y ago
  I should mention that a modern antidote to this are the efforts of people like Dr. Rhonda Patrick (http://www.foundmyfitness.com/ http://www.foundmyfitness.com/), who is on a mission to read research papers and distill them into digestible form for the public. Her appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast are all excellent (also available on youtube).
  - atomical 11y ago
    Why is she interviewing Tim Ferris? Is this good science or popular fad science? Dr. Michael Greger does this at http://nutritionfacts.org/ http://nutritionfacts.org/.
afarrell 11y ago
The problem is that ad-based revenue has an incentive to: 1) Publish whenever there is a single study. 2) Be overly dramatic in either direction. What we need is for a Bayesian-oriented medical doctor to spend a bunch of time keeping up to date on the literature, especially meta-analysis of multiple randomized controlled trials and then give that information to us with appropriate context. Luckily, this exists: A YouTube channel called Healthcare Triage: https://m.youtube.com/#/user/thehealthcaretriage https://m.youtube.com/#/user/thehealthcaretriage EDIT (thanks mmorris!) https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage A psychiatry (among other things) blogger called Slate Star Codex: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-help-if-youre-depressed/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-h... The former depends on donations through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/healthcaretriage?ty=h https://www.patreon.com/healthcaretriage?ty=h
- mmorris 11y ago
  The YouTube link to Healthcare Triage didn't work for me on desktop. For convenience, here's what did work: https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage
discordianfish 11y ago
I think we should stop overthinking food. I think this is one of the single biggest problem we have regarding our health. I'd argue that as long as someone has no eating disorder (lucky you), eat whatever you want whenever you want and I'm pretty sure you'll be fine. The problem is rather that almost everyone seems to have some kind of eating disorder. If you can't stop eating or hate to eat (because of time, because of your self image or whatever), that's a different problem then the question what's healthy and what not. Eating healthy won't fix the eating disorder. But thinking too much about what you are suppose to eat, when you are suppose to eat and how much makes it arguably much more likely to develop a eating disorder.
sliverstorm 11y ago
Because a lot of this stuff is hard to figure out with a sample size of one? In the case of water, I don't know of anybody who has ever advocated drinking very small amounts of water; the dispute is over how much is enough. It's just a tricky bar to set. Not because we disagree on the benefits of good hydration, but because daily water needs are extremely variable and the color of your urine is about the only practical way to measure hydration. It's also both simple & valuable to hydrate. At least for me, nothing has made a bigger difference in my condition.

happyscrappy 11y ago

That is the beauty of science, no matter what I want to do I can find some study supporting it!

ska 11y ago
You often can, but they are not fungible.

atomical 11y ago

The idea that you shouldn't eat any carbs is put out there by quacks like Peter Attia. There is plenty of evidence to suggest a plant-based diet high in carbohydrate is the best for health.

meowface 11y ago
Health aside, some people report cutting carbs entirely or almost entirely helps them lose weight. As for whether it's "healthy", who really knows, but it appears to be statistically significant when it comes to weight.
- apl 11y ago
  A simple explanation for this: cutting carbs is tricky and requires a lot of careful planning etc., increasing the likelihood that people actually stay under their maintenance caloric intake. It doesn't really matter how you do it. As long as your expenditure is larger than your intake, you'll lose weight. In any case, your point doesn't say anything about the healthiness of carbohydrates.
  - atomical 11y ago
    Yes, but what about high LDL and heart disease risk with high fat diets? The paleo and keto folks completely dismiss this.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    In any case, your point doesn't say anything about the healthiness of carbohydrates. There's evidence (sorry, I don't have the citations in front of me) to link carbohydrate intake to increased triglycerides, higher HDL, and more inflamation - pretty much the opposite of "healthy". OTOH, there's reason to think that a low carb, high fat, moderate protein diet may improve lipid profiles, and reduce the risk of heart disease. Now, I can't say with certainty that a low carb, high fat, moderate protein diet is better (or worse) than a high carb, low fat diet, or a high protein diet, etc. And I think part of the problem is simply that when you talk about human health and the connection between health and diet, there are just too many variables, and it's hard to control for them all. Hence the fact that you can find research endorsing a number of different diets, which appear diametrically opposed to each other.
    - atomical 11y ago
      http://nutritionfacts.org/?s=cholesterol http://nutritionfacts.org/?s=cholesterol A high fat diet increases HDL. If a person is overweight their HDL may drop if they experience weight loss, but it will not drop as much as someone who is on a plant-based diet. About 75% of the people who die from coronary artery disease have what is considered optimal cholesterol. Your cholesterol has to be much lower than what is considered optimal to lower your risk. http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/cholesterol-and-heart-disease http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/cholesterol-and-hea... "On July 21, 1990, The Lancet published the findings of Dean Ornish, M.D., who demonstrated that heart disease can actually be reversed without medicines.13 Until then, most doctors were not even attempting to reverse heart disease, even though it was, as it is now, the most common cause of death. Most believed that the plaques of cholesterol and other substances that clog the arteries to the heart would not go away. The traditional way to remove them was to wait until they became severe enough to warrant a bypass or angioplasty. At the University of California in San Francisco, Dr. Ornish tested the theory that a more potent diet, along with other lifestyle changes, might actually reverse heart disease. He selected patients who had plaques that were clearly visible on angiograms and split the patients into two groups. Half were referred to a control group in which they received the standard care that doctors prescribe for heart patients. The other half began a vegetarian diet in which less than 10 percent of calories were contributed by fat. They were also asked to begin a program of modest exercise and learned to manage stress through a variety of simple techniques. Of course, smoking was not permitted. Dr. Ornish’s patients started to feel better almost immediately, and continued to improve over the course of the year. They had previously been struggling with the crushing chest pain of heart disease, but “most of them became essentially pain-free,” Dr. Ornish said, “even though they were doing more activities, going back to work, and doing things that they hadn’t been able to do, in some cases, for years.”"
belorn 11y ago
best health for whom? There is a lot of variance in metabolism between people, and even more ways the body can react to different diets. There are people whose digestion track that are too efficient and those that are too inefficient, and a high carbohydrate diet will have a radical different impact for each of those. Even for everyone else with a healthy metabolism we must ask what effect if any a high carbohydrate diet does and if there is any correlation in that group for improved health or not.
- atomical 11y ago
  Best health in terms of cancer and diabetes risk. Longevity is the goal. Check out nutritionfacts.org.

arpa 11y ago

Well you shouldn't let mainstream media think for you ever and not only for matters regarding your health.

pdpi 11y ago
You can just remove "mainstream" from that post. It's of course fine to defer to experts on matters you know nothing about, but you really shouldn't let other people do your thinking for you at all, ever.

dekhn 11y ago

Are we all experts who are capable of thinking for ourselves ("thinking for ourselves" seems to equal: inspecting the primary literature, or review literature, and coming to a conclusion)? No, we're not. Thinking for yourself is untenable- we need scientists who are experts in analyzing data to provide specific suggestions, and disseminate those in the media. Unfortunately, there is little consequence to reporting false conclusions, or inaccurate health data, so I don't see any change forthcoming.

mdpopescu 11y ago
Out of curiosity, do you realize that the same thing can be said about religion? You don't know enough about it - definitely not as much as the people who specialize in it - so you should listen to your priest on the subject. Or politics: just pick a party and follow its lead, politics is a complex subject and you can't know as much as the professionals.
- andrepd 11y ago
  It definitely is so. What authority do I have to talk about economics or law? Shouldn't I leave that to the people who do know what they are talking about? Kind of a central problem in democracy, if you think about it.
- dubya 11y ago
  Protestants, at least, have the idea of the "priesthood of all believers", meaning roughly that each person can have authority in doctrinal matters. So you should listen to your priest, but you don't have to accept that he's correct if God is telling you something different. Thus the billion different protestant denominations.
  - zaphar 11y ago
    Protestants if you go back to their roots actually expected you to become an expert in scripture in order to recognize when your "priest" is wrong. But they didn't promote anything goes. It's more that you should learn and be able to apply scripture correctly. This didn't prevent the proliferation of denominations because of course different people would interpret a piece of scripture differently and get really worked up about it.

toyg 11y ago

At the end of the day, the average not-athlete person who just wants to stay healthy should just remember that magic word: "moderation". Everything is good as long as you don't have too much of it, and for the basic necessities (water), just follow what your body tells you instead of ignoring/suppressing it. You won't get fat because you've had 7 glasses of water rather than $MAGIC_NUMBER$, so there is no point in obsessing about these. If you are an athlete, of course, things are different; but in that case you should probably talk to professionals, not blindly trust mainstream magazines.

knodi123 11y ago
Of course, this advice should only be followed in moderation; for instance, there's no healthy amount of trans-fats.
- toyg 11y ago
  Yeah, but eating a few grams once in a blue moon won't kill you. It's not Polonium.
- gambiting 11y ago
  Just like there's no "healthy" amount of carbonated soda either, but having an occasional glass of coke won't have any result on your health whatsoever. That's also moderation.
  - exodust 11y ago
    There's definitely a negative effect on your health from one glass of coke. Small, but still an effect. For starters you're exceeding the recommended daily intake of added sugar with one can of coke. No big deal, but if your liver could talk, it wouldn't be happy. Your blood pressure rises, again no big deal, but still not good. The only good thing is the water in the coke.
makmanalp 11y ago
I mostly agree with this point of view, with the small caveat that what constitutes moderate is not always obvious - I remember coming to the US for the first time and being in awe as to how large portions were, for example.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

TallGuyShort 11y ago

There was an article a few months ago, I think on HN, with a headline to the effect of "Scientists link <some chemical> to <some mental health issue>". Clicking through a few links to get to a more authoritative source, and it sounded more like "Our results show a correlation with a larger uncertainty than we'd like to see, and this contradicts a similar study done previously". People need to understand the statistical nature of these studies and what conclusions that should be drawing. IMO an understanding of correlation vs. causation, factors, levels and control groups, etc. should be part of any decent education (i.e. well before college). We can't expect mainstream media to help of it's own accord.

belorn 11y ago

It does look like that the near future will have more individualized health advice rather than generic one-line suggestions regarding nutritions and diets. The problem looks from my personal point of view that we are lacking measuring tools which can help identify what status the body is in and how it reacts to changes, and from there having the medical expertise to understand the whole picture.

paulojreis 11y ago

The problem here is your reliance on mainstream media for this kind of information. It's a sad state of affairs, I know, but you simply cannot trust mainstream media for this. If a compound that - per chance - exists in beer is discovered to influence lipolysis in vitro , then mainstream media will tell you to drink a beer to get lean. And it's not only mainstream media fault; universities and research centres PR departments will probably report it in the same way, under the disguise of "making it friendly to the average Joe". This doesn't mean, however, that you should strictly "think for yourself". Of course, you're not supposed to follow everything blindly, but if you're not an health expert (or even if you are!), It's better to trust authoritative sources and your physicians.

sdoering 11y ago
> but you simply cannot trust mainstream media for this. Can you trust them for any real information? In my eyes mainstream media is there to tell stories. Oftentimes bedtime stories for sheepwalkers. But the truth (TM) - well whatever that may be, I do not see it in media. At least not very often. Regarding the "trust your physician"-part: I would even take their advice with a very big grain of salt. At least looking at my own experience and the experiences of my significant other in this regard. (And I know, anecdotes not evidence.)
- paulojreis 11y ago
  > Regarding the "trust your physician"-part: I would even take their advice with a very big grain of salt. At least looking at my own experience and the experiences of my significant other in this regard. (And I know, anecdotes not evidence.) Thing is... "which" grain of salt? Physicians fail frequently, but what's the alternative? I wouldn't know what to question, and on which basis. I could read about it on the web, but why would I trust a strangers report instead of a flawed, but at least "certified", physician?
  - sdoering 11y ago
    Well you could try to, step by step, experiment with different diets and regularly have a look at your fitness-level, your blood work, your weight, the composition of your body (%of water/fat/and so on). Before that you could read a lot. Some studies, some literature. A lot will be on the strange to the bullshit-level. But the self-experimenting part will teach you, what is good for your body and what not. For example one of the problems we face in this field seems to me, that we do know so little about the bacteria (and so on), we have in our intestines. There is quite an active field of research and a lot is happening there. Maybe some day we will know more, coming from this part of science. Untill then, living with a significant other who had to listen to her body for 15+ years, I for example learned, that reducing my intake of carbohydrates (and esp. sugar and wheat) helps a lot in reducing my weight, while the reduction of fat does not help that much (Every time closely watching my caloric intake). But I would not recommend doing exactly this to everybody - it is something, that subjectively, anecdotally works for me.

CJefferson 11y ago

How do we "think for ourselves"? Come up with independant reasoning? Lots of things are highly non-obvious. Vitamins weren't discovered until the 20th century. Many baby's lives are improved by their mothers taking folic acid. I would never guess how few calories there are in things like raspberries or strawberries without having been told about it. Certainly there is lots of terrible health advice, and it's a major issue, telling people to "only read good advice" seems like the worst advice I've ever heard -- obviously we would all only read the good advice if we knew what that was!

koonsolo 11y ago
I think most of it is actually obvious. Healthy foods: vegetables, fruits, fish, non processed meat. Unhealthy foods: candy, soda, deserts, alcohol, lots of butter, ... . The biggest issue for most people is not that they don't know the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods. The problem is to eat the healty foods and stay away from the unhealty ones, which is quite a challenge.
- jasode 11y ago
  >I think most of it is actually obvious. I somewhat disagree. It may be "obvious" to well-informed HN readers. However, I don't think food nutrition is obvious to a significant portion of the population. Proof of this is how the food industry advertises and labels their products to take advantage of buyers' ignorance: -- orange juice with labels saying that it's "fortified with extra vitamins and calcium". (Many people will associate oj with positive connotations of "fruit", and the vitamin supplement is a bonus. Result: unsophisticated buyers think of oj as "healthy" when it's really concentrated sugar water that will contribute to obesity and tooth decay.) -- lean cuisine "low-fat" microwave dinners with a "heart healthy" icon on the box. (Naive buyers see the "low fat" as a signal for "healthy" but don't realize that manufacturers have to amplify the taste by adding lots of salt. The heavy carbs in those meals are also controversial.) -- granola bars and "energy" bars. (The packaging has pictures of active hikers, bicycle riders, mountain climbers, etc. Some granola bars even prominently feature "fiber" as a benefit. The ignorant don't realize that these snacks are really glorified "candy bars" with clever marketing to lessen the guilt trip of eating a stick of sugar.) -- fat free yogurt. (They took out the fat but now the yogurt has lots of sugar, which is another form of calories, which most people won't burn off, which then gets stored as fat anyway.) -- photographs of celebrities with milk mustaches shown on billboards and magazine ads and associated slogans like "milk does a body good!". (Those ads are promoted by the dairy industry and it's questionable whether it's healthy for adults to drink milk.) -- USDA food pyramid. (The uneducated don't realize that the USDA (and hence the chart) is influenced and manipulated by the meat & dairy industries. Because the nutrition advice is officially published by the government and plastered all over school walls, it feels authoritative. Naive consumers don't realize that if the food pyramid was designed by nutritionists not financially linked to meat & dairy, they would place vegetables as highest priority.) For the consumers that get exposed to nutrition information in a passive way, they really don't know the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods. There's so much misinformation and manipulation that the American consumer is less knowledgeable about what's healthy than the African bushmen eating wild berries and hunting antelope.

mpclark 11y ago

It's not a joke to the media, but fundamentally their job is to report new things. Not to take a view on the things, or check them for truthiness or flawed methodology -- just to report them. (Your choice of media will determine how much extra value in terms of checking, discrimination etc is added to the news you see reported) But they like telling you to forget what you know and take on board $newfact because it is easy copy (scientists say so!) and it gets pageviews/sells papers.

andrepd 11y ago

We shouldn't think for ourselves about our health (I wouldn't prescribe myself medicine, after all), nor should we listen to what mainstream media has to say. I thought it was common knowledge that for people actually interested in staying healthy the best thing to do is ignore the fads publicized on media. Just listen to your doctor, or research medical papers yourself.

TheCraiggers 11y ago

Mainstream media? Sure, I agree. But listening to reports on actual science, I disagree. Saying that people should "start thinking for themselves" is disingenuous I believe. For one, this is how we get shit like faith healing, homeopathy, healing crystals and so on. "Normal" people don't have the resources to test a hypothesis, nor the time in most cases. Say you have cancer. What's better? Thinking for yourself and eating a naked mole rat every day for dinner because "they don't get cancer"? Or read some reports and research that apply to your case, and go to a doctor armed with some extra information that will help you both make an informed decision about a treatment? The problem lies entirely at the feet of the media. Lack of scientific training and a desire to create interesting, attention-grabbing headlines makes for situations exactly what you're complaining about. But this is no reason to eschew science. Science is doing what it does: conducting studies that only test for the smallest amount of variables as possible. It'll be a long time before science will be able to perfectly say "a human of type foo must live exactly like this to achieve maximum potential in life". This is a huge ever-changing puzzle, and while we might have the edges built (my grandma taught me you always put the edges together first) we don't even have all the pieces out of the box. Science finds a piece with a tiny flower on it and the media happily exclaims the puzzle is a picture of a garden.

jazzyk 11y ago
"The problem lies entirely at the feet of the media." No, not entirely. You assume scientists are objective and have no agenda. A lot of research is "sponsored" by corporate interests. The first paragraph one should read in a research report is the "source of funding" disclosure, then adjust for bias (or ignore entirely).
- michaeltoth 11y ago
  Scientists are also incentivized by the publishing system to find noteworthy results, which often leads to finding evidence where there is none, especially in fields like nutrition where the signal to noise ratio is so low
  - 11y ago

cellularmitosis 11y ago

This complaint of "Why can't these scientists make up their minds?" is addressed well in the book "The China Study" ("Forks Over Knives" was the movie sequel to this book). Before you are two conflicting research papers. One says eggs are bad, the other that they are good. One paper came from The American Poultry Society, and the other from The Poultry Research Institute (those are made up names for the sake of argument). One of those organizations is full of industry shills, and the other is actually doing legitimate research. Every few years, they release papers which contradict the another, in an endless arms race. The problem which the consumer is faced with is: which is which?

cellularmitosis 11y ago
I should mention that a modern antidote to this are the efforts of people like Dr. Rhonda Patrick (http://www.foundmyfitness.com/ http://www.foundmyfitness.com/), who is on a mission to read research papers and distill them into digestible form for the public. Her appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast are all excellent (also available on youtube).
- atomical 11y ago
  Why is she interviewing Tim Ferris? Is this good science or popular fad science? Dr. Michael Greger does this at http://nutritionfacts.org/ http://nutritionfacts.org/.

afarrell 11y ago

The problem is that ad-based revenue has an incentive to: 1) Publish whenever there is a single study. 2) Be overly dramatic in either direction. What we need is for a Bayesian-oriented medical doctor to spend a bunch of time keeping up to date on the literature, especially meta-analysis of multiple randomized controlled trials and then give that information to us with appropriate context. Luckily, this exists: A YouTube channel called Healthcare Triage: https://m.youtube.com/#/user/thehealthcaretriage https://m.youtube.com/#/user/thehealthcaretriage EDIT (thanks mmorris!) https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage A psychiatry (among other things) blogger called Slate Star Codex: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-help-if-youre-depressed/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-h... The former depends on donations through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/healthcaretriage?ty=h https://www.patreon.com/healthcaretriage?ty=h

mmorris 11y ago
The YouTube link to Healthcare Triage didn't work for me on desktop. For convenience, here's what did work: https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage

discordianfish 11y ago

I think we should stop overthinking food. I think this is one of the single biggest problem we have regarding our health. I'd argue that as long as someone has no eating disorder (lucky you), eat whatever you want whenever you want and I'm pretty sure you'll be fine. The problem is rather that almost everyone seems to have some kind of eating disorder. If you can't stop eating or hate to eat (because of time, because of your self image or whatever), that's a different problem then the question what's healthy and what not. Eating healthy won't fix the eating disorder. But thinking too much about what you are suppose to eat, when you are suppose to eat and how much makes it arguably much more likely to develop a eating disorder.

sliverstorm 11y ago

Because a lot of this stuff is hard to figure out with a sample size of one? In the case of water, I don't know of anybody who has ever advocated drinking very small amounts of water; the dispute is over how much is enough. It's just a tricky bar to set. Not because we disagree on the benefits of good hydration, but because daily water needs are extremely variable and the color of your urine is about the only practical way to measure hydration. It's also both simple & valuable to hydrate. At least for me, nothing has made a bigger difference in my condition.