8 ms·

I'm waiting for the day that nutricionists find out that there are different kinds of people with different nutritional needs. Imposing rules on the population

I'm waiting for the day that nutricionists find out that there are different kinds of people with different nutritional needs. Imposing rules on the population on a weak scientific basis harms the people, science and the government in the process. Currently the best way to consume food is to avoid addictive and highly processed food products and then trust your gut with the rest. Eat what you like and avoid what causes problems. Use salt to taste, most likely it won't kill you - else we would have found out already.

patatino 11y ago
I tried to inform myself about nutrition but at this point I have still no idea what is best. Right now I'm following your advice, avoid highly processed food and otherwise listen to my body.
- tgb29 11y ago
  Same here. I recently cut sugar and bread products and I experienced random dizziness. I was eating plenty of fruit and I was eating natural sugars. I decided to experiment one day; had 4 donuts, bread and butter, and my body felt better. Now the plan is to avoid processed, avoid preservatives, and move towards more natural and organic. I went to the doctor and they said don't wait more than 3-4 hours between meals.
  - kefka 11y ago
    My wife and I have this very problem. Prior to my diabetes assessment, things like NoodleTown and pasta places would fill her right up. Me? I'd be gnawing my hand off if I went there, because I'd be hungrier 20 mins later than had I not gone there at all. But now with diagnosed T2 diabetes, that makes sense. I process carbs very badly, and spirals into a "process carbs into fat quickly, and get hungrier, all the while jack blood sugar". Of course, high fat and high protein diet has went very well for me. I'm not hungry like I used to be, I've lost 40 lbs since the start, and I just feel better.
  - jimrandomh 11y ago
    > I went to the doctor and they said don't wait more than 3-4 hours between meals. This is utterly crazy. If you couldn't go more than 3-4 hours between meals without experiencing dizziness, something about your diet was seriously wrong. If you felt better after experimentally eating something different, then eating that was almost certainly healthier. Yes, even if it was donuts. Don't let cultural beliefs about food override your direct observations!
    - tgb29 11y ago
      My problem has been that if I stand up to quickly, I have a moment of dizziness. There are many variables; blood pressure, blood sugar, nervous system, altitude etc. The more aware I am of my diet and how nutrition affects my body, I find the more sensitive I become to changes. I cut coffee, bread, sugar, and beef/pork. I would eat very nutritious meals, and my energy levels and body felt amazing, but the stand up and be dizzy became more common. Was I going through withdrawal? Is my body to accustomed to eating these foods? Should my theory be, "sugar and bread is ok as long as I eat other nutritious meals?" I'm not sure, I'm still experimenting, and I'm utilizing the final month of my insurance with my parents to figure this out.
      - jsprogrammer 11y ago
        The safest technique might be to slowly titrate to lower doses of sugar and caffeine instead of going cold turkey, particularly if you have a long history of sugar and caffeine use. You will probably also need to wait a few weeks from your original baseline before assessing the impact of your new diet. Synapses and more will need to adjust to their new environment.
      - nommm-nommm 11y ago
        What you are describing is orthostatic hypotension and is somewhat common in otherwise healthy people. Though it can be a sign of some medical coditions so getting it checked out is advisable, perhaps get a second opinion? (If your blood pressure is on the low side raising it will likely help, but obviously consult with a doctor)
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    >I went to the doctor and they said don't wait more than 3-4 hours between meals. Do you have a medical condition that requires you to continously eat? If not this advice is suspect at best. Do the people who advise this wake up in the middle of the night to eat? Of course everyone is different so experement and listen to your body. Mine strongly prefers going long periods of time between meals.
    - tgb29 11y ago
      No medical condition found yet and the doctors so far say I'm healthy and overthinking. My theory is that my central nervous system is weak, but I haven't proven this and I haven't found a doctor who believes me. Could be a medical condition, a diet issue, could be a mind issue - anxiety/depression, or it could be that from training as an endurance athlete, and now that I've stopped running my body is having trouble adapting. I read some research with 4 groups: male endurance trained, female endurance trained, male not trained, female no trained. After tests , male endurance trained had a heart pattern change and the other 3 subjects didn't have the same change. From 14-23 I trained at higher levels for distance running and now I do light walking. I consider myself to be an active thinker, meaning that my mind is always contemplating some topic. Does my brain burn more calories than Expected and does it need certain nutrition to maintain health? The diZiness is a miscommunication between the heart and the brain. I don't know..I've had dark chocolate and granola trail mix near me between meals the last 2 days and I've had no dizziness.
cimbal 11y ago
Well said. The size relations of inner organs for example vary betweeen people as far as i know. That is a big hint, althought it's not a proof in itself. I want to add to that the nutritional needs within each person vary drastically during different times of year (or times of stress, even down to times of day). Athletes know this, for example, it is common to exhibit significant drops in performance during a year of training (recurring every year). Now combine these simple observations with the way nutritional studies are done and you know why it looks as if we have no clue.
- itchyouch 11y ago
  I've observed that a lot of diets tend to have similar effects on the populations that adopt them. People speak about feeling better on Paleo. Body builders/lifters optimize macronutrient intakes for muscle gain with similar results. There's also wide consensus on how certain micronutrient deficiencies cause certain conditions. e.g. Vitamin C deficiency leads to Scurvy. Vitamin A deficiency leads to night-time blindness, etc. I would hypothesize that most arguments about nutrition revolve around observational discrepancies between the micro & macro levels. At the micro (individual) perspective, it feels like everyone has custom nutritional needs (which in a sense, they do), but when looking at larger trends, generally, consistent patterns emerge. One of salient points that are made about nutrition by Dr. Terry Wahls is that it is fundamentally chemistry. If an individual hits some type of limiting reagent, the body will adapt in the absence of it until it can not and certain ailments occur. The problem with a lot of nutritional studies is similar to the problems in a company faces. There is some type of prescription to adhere to at the micro-level without taking into context the larger picture. CxO's, if you get at least 5000IUs of DevOps per day, you'll get better performance! Consuming 100mg of Agile development makes you more agile! 1 gram of purpose/mission-driven team-building per week helps with the bad customer service ailment. While there may some truth to those statements, they are also absurd without properly being incorporated into a larger context. Anyway, one of the interesting tidbits I read was the recommendation to increase salt & potassium intake when adopting a ketogenic (high-fat) diet, to prevent/alleviate headaches & fatigue during the ketosis transitional period. One can see that the advice is probably rooted in some chemistry. Nutritional studies would probably have much better results if the populations could be subjected to a strict meal plan to control for other factors.
anotheryou 11y ago
wait no longer :) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119143445.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119143445.h...
- cimbal 11y ago
  I would have never thought when reading about this over ten years ago [1], that the striking argument hasn't had bigger effects on the way these topics are discussed. And i'm sure the basics have been known for ages. One more thing: it's also true for many types of medicine. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-Solution-Guide-Your-Metabolic/dp/1556434375 http://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-Solution-Guide-Your-Metaboli... don't have that book handy so i can find the original source
rsync 11y ago
"Currently the best way to consume food is to avoid addictive and highly processed food products and then trust your gut with the rest." Allow me to suggest a further path forward that is superior to "trusting your gut": Establish a regular, very high output exercise regime - incorporating both long duration aerobic/cardio and relatively intense resistance training. Under such a regimen, you will notice what food does to you because you're pushing your physical state out to the edges. You will need to eat densely nutritious food and you will notice when you don't. It's quite striking. An analogy: nobody notices a bad tank of gas, or slightly wrong octane in their toyota minivan. You do notice a bad tank of gas, or slightly wrong octane in a race car. Become a racecar and you won't need to guess about food anymore.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  This is true and an angle I have not thought about before (though I have first hand experienced it). As an example I don't think good quality non-factory-farmed red meat is bad for a person, despite a fair amount of research on both sides of the topic. But since switching from couch me to exercise-a-holic me.. My relationship with red meat has changed. Had a grass fed burger Monday for the first time in a while, was up all night. Did not agree with me so much. On the other hand, 1 beer or whatever amount of salt I consume seems to have no impact on me the next morning - happy to hope out of bed at 7 and go run. Humans are not racecars so not sure I buy the analogy as given.. I wonder what the real reason for this is? Maybe a better broscience guess is that so much of your energy is devoted to repairing "damage" you did the to body during the day, your body has less spare energy to devote to processing crap.
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  Meh. When I was an athlete I had a horrible diet which consisted of mostly boxed pasta and I ate junk food every day. Didn't hurt my athletic ability noticeably. I try hard to watch what I eat now.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    How old were you on the junkfood diet? As I got older I literally cannot sleep at night if I eat crap. As a teenager it did not matter.
ocean3 11y ago
"Use salt to taste, most likely it won't kill you" - but salt has been used for centuries right. Has there been a change? As an Indian not adding salt is unthinkable.
- chadgeidel 11y ago
  I think the change has been in volume. In the US at least much of the food you take off the shelves (especially of the "microwave dinner" variety) have large amounts of sodium. I know this is an extreme example, but take a look at the sodium content in those popular "ramen noodle bowls" (styrofoam cup, not in a bag). That's more than 100% of your RDA of sodium right there. They do not taste overly salty IMHO.
  - berntb 11y ago
    In Scandinavia, salt used to be one of the main ways of preserving food. Salted fish with too little little salt resulted in the discovery of surströmming, one of the culinary delights of humanity. Even today, salt candy is popular (yes, salt); it is one of the things I miss as an expatriate. So I should have the genes to handle salt -- just need a way to import my salt liquorice...
noxToken 11y ago
> Currently the best way to consume food is to avoid addictive and highly processed food products I assume by highly processed, you mean foods altered in such that they are now high in fats, salt, sugars or some combination thereof. I ask, because the term processed gets thrown around (in my experience) for highly preserved foods like canned meat to flash frozen frozen vegetables in the freezer aisle. The former is obviously worse for you. Taking in high amounts of sugars, bad fats, and possibly salt is detrimental. However, referring to green beans that were grown, picked, flash frozen and delivered as a processed food is somewhat misleading. Flash freezing is altering the food from its natural state. Thus, a frozen vegetable is technically a processed food. The connotative definition, however, implies that more than freezing has happened.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  Freezing is a form of processing, but it is a very light processing. Take some Oats off the ground. Cool unprocessed. Mill it a tiny bit to help it cook more easily into steel cut oats. Minimally processed. Grind it down into instant oatmeal - Heavily processes. Add some chemicals and put in a test tube to turn into some weird kind of artificial sweetener? Highly processed. I try to go as low on the chain as possible, without killing myself. I don't enjoy eating oats right off the ground, or boiled as is (unsure if we can even digest raw oats, never tried). Steel cut I do enjoy - so I stop there. So back to fruit. If you can get fresh fruit great. If not, frozen is pretty close. If you have to revert to fruit rollups? Probably went too far. * There is a debate that frozen fruits can actually be better than frush fruit, as fresh fruit is picked unripe and ripened in a truck - whereas frozen fruit can be picked when fully ripe. In this case, the slightly processed fruit may end up being better than the unprocessed fruit. Overall though this is the exception, for 99% of food - the more you do to it the more you lose.
  - blacksmith_tb 11y ago
    This seems like a fairly extreme interpretation of 'processing' - I haven't seen anything that suggests there's a nutritional difference between steel cut, rolled, or quick oats. Human beings have 'processed' their foods along these lines for more than 10,000 years, as opposed to say, making Twinkies.
AndrewDucker 11y ago
They already have: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35193414 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35193414
clock_tower 11y ago
> I'm waiting for the day that nutricionists find out that there are different kinds of people with different nutritional needs. The nutritionist side of public health evolved to deal with questions where this isn't true. Everyone needs vitamin A to avoid beriberi and vitamin C to avoid scurvy; no one benefits from polluted milk or polluted water; that sort of thing. Now, the big problems have been solved, and nutritionists are trying to treat semi-ideopathic diseases of affluence as if they were the immense, obvious dietary scourges of a hundred years ago... This is true of the whole field of public health, to an extent. Cholera and yellow fever are under control, smallpox is all but extinct, polio is on its last legs, and now we're trying to use the tools that defeated those diseases to fight drug addiction, lifestyle-induced diseases, diseases of aging, and STDs. At least things aren't as bad now as they were. Traditional public-health approaches look nonsensical when used against 20th-century issues, but they did a wonderful job against 19th-century ones.
Shorel 11y ago
Nutritionists will never find out that, because it's not their job. They simply recite memorized mantra. However, some scientists have been creating a mathematical model that should be able to predict the best diet for a particular person, given that the microbes in said person's guts are analysed first. You can read about it here: http://www.sciencealert.com/your-gut-bacteria-determines-which-diets-will-actually-make-you-lose-weight http://www.sciencealert.com/your-gut-bacteria-determines-whi...
Mz 11y ago
I'm waiting for the day that nutricionists find out that there are different kinds of people with different nutritional needs. I wish more people were so wise. I have a salt wasting condition. Lack of salt was very much killing me -- though the answer was not merely more salt, but better quality salt, a detail that routinely gets me the deer-in-the-headlights look from people who respond with "But isn't salt just salt??"

patatino 11y ago

I tried to inform myself about nutrition but at this point I have still no idea what is best. Right now I'm following your advice, avoid highly processed food and otherwise listen to my body.

tgb29 11y ago
Same here. I recently cut sugar and bread products and I experienced random dizziness. I was eating plenty of fruit and I was eating natural sugars. I decided to experiment one day; had 4 donuts, bread and butter, and my body felt better. Now the plan is to avoid processed, avoid preservatives, and move towards more natural and organic. I went to the doctor and they said don't wait more than 3-4 hours between meals.
- kefka 11y ago
  My wife and I have this very problem. Prior to my diabetes assessment, things like NoodleTown and pasta places would fill her right up. Me? I'd be gnawing my hand off if I went there, because I'd be hungrier 20 mins later than had I not gone there at all. But now with diagnosed T2 diabetes, that makes sense. I process carbs very badly, and spirals into a "process carbs into fat quickly, and get hungrier, all the while jack blood sugar". Of course, high fat and high protein diet has went very well for me. I'm not hungry like I used to be, I've lost 40 lbs since the start, and I just feel better.
- jimrandomh 11y ago
  > I went to the doctor and they said don't wait more than 3-4 hours between meals. This is utterly crazy. If you couldn't go more than 3-4 hours between meals without experiencing dizziness, something about your diet was seriously wrong. If you felt better after experimentally eating something different, then eating that was almost certainly healthier. Yes, even if it was donuts. Don't let cultural beliefs about food override your direct observations!
  - tgb29 11y ago
    My problem has been that if I stand up to quickly, I have a moment of dizziness. There are many variables; blood pressure, blood sugar, nervous system, altitude etc. The more aware I am of my diet and how nutrition affects my body, I find the more sensitive I become to changes. I cut coffee, bread, sugar, and beef/pork. I would eat very nutritious meals, and my energy levels and body felt amazing, but the stand up and be dizzy became more common. Was I going through withdrawal? Is my body to accustomed to eating these foods? Should my theory be, "sugar and bread is ok as long as I eat other nutritious meals?" I'm not sure, I'm still experimenting, and I'm utilizing the final month of my insurance with my parents to figure this out.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      The safest technique might be to slowly titrate to lower doses of sugar and caffeine instead of going cold turkey, particularly if you have a long history of sugar and caffeine use. You will probably also need to wait a few weeks from your original baseline before assessing the impact of your new diet. Synapses and more will need to adjust to their new environment.
    - nommm-nommm 11y ago
      What you are describing is orthostatic hypotension and is somewhat common in otherwise healthy people. Though it can be a sign of some medical coditions so getting it checked out is advisable, perhaps get a second opinion? (If your blood pressure is on the low side raising it will likely help, but obviously consult with a doctor)
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  >I went to the doctor and they said don't wait more than 3-4 hours between meals. Do you have a medical condition that requires you to continously eat? If not this advice is suspect at best. Do the people who advise this wake up in the middle of the night to eat? Of course everyone is different so experement and listen to your body. Mine strongly prefers going long periods of time between meals.
  - tgb29 11y ago
    No medical condition found yet and the doctors so far say I'm healthy and overthinking. My theory is that my central nervous system is weak, but I haven't proven this and I haven't found a doctor who believes me. Could be a medical condition, a diet issue, could be a mind issue - anxiety/depression, or it could be that from training as an endurance athlete, and now that I've stopped running my body is having trouble adapting. I read some research with 4 groups: male endurance trained, female endurance trained, male not trained, female no trained. After tests , male endurance trained had a heart pattern change and the other 3 subjects didn't have the same change. From 14-23 I trained at higher levels for distance running and now I do light walking. I consider myself to be an active thinker, meaning that my mind is always contemplating some topic. Does my brain burn more calories than Expected and does it need certain nutrition to maintain health? The diZiness is a miscommunication between the heart and the brain. I don't know..I've had dark chocolate and granola trail mix near me between meals the last 2 days and I've had no dizziness.

cimbal 11y ago

Well said. The size relations of inner organs for example vary betweeen people as far as i know. That is a big hint, althought it's not a proof in itself. I want to add to that the nutritional needs within each person vary drastically during different times of year (or times of stress, even down to times of day). Athletes know this, for example, it is common to exhibit significant drops in performance during a year of training (recurring every year). Now combine these simple observations with the way nutritional studies are done and you know why it looks as if we have no clue.

itchyouch 11y ago
I've observed that a lot of diets tend to have similar effects on the populations that adopt them. People speak about feeling better on Paleo. Body builders/lifters optimize macronutrient intakes for muscle gain with similar results. There's also wide consensus on how certain micronutrient deficiencies cause certain conditions. e.g. Vitamin C deficiency leads to Scurvy. Vitamin A deficiency leads to night-time blindness, etc. I would hypothesize that most arguments about nutrition revolve around observational discrepancies between the micro & macro levels. At the micro (individual) perspective, it feels like everyone has custom nutritional needs (which in a sense, they do), but when looking at larger trends, generally, consistent patterns emerge. One of salient points that are made about nutrition by Dr. Terry Wahls is that it is fundamentally chemistry. If an individual hits some type of limiting reagent, the body will adapt in the absence of it until it can not and certain ailments occur. The problem with a lot of nutritional studies is similar to the problems in a company faces. There is some type of prescription to adhere to at the micro-level without taking into context the larger picture. CxO's, if you get at least 5000IUs of DevOps per day, you'll get better performance! Consuming 100mg of Agile development makes you more agile! 1 gram of purpose/mission-driven team-building per week helps with the bad customer service ailment. While there may some truth to those statements, they are also absurd without properly being incorporated into a larger context. Anyway, one of the interesting tidbits I read was the recommendation to increase salt & potassium intake when adopting a ketogenic (high-fat) diet, to prevent/alleviate headaches & fatigue during the ketosis transitional period. One can see that the advice is probably rooted in some chemistry. Nutritional studies would probably have much better results if the populations could be subjected to a strict meal plan to control for other factors.

anotheryou 11y ago

wait no longer :) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119143445.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119143445.h...

cimbal 11y ago
I would have never thought when reading about this over ten years ago [1], that the striking argument hasn't had bigger effects on the way these topics are discussed. And i'm sure the basics have been known for ages. One more thing: it's also true for many types of medicine. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-Solution-Guide-Your-Metabolic/dp/1556434375 http://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-Solution-Guide-Your-Metaboli... don't have that book handy so i can find the original source

rsync 11y ago

"Currently the best way to consume food is to avoid addictive and highly processed food products and then trust your gut with the rest." Allow me to suggest a further path forward that is superior to "trusting your gut": Establish a regular, very high output exercise regime - incorporating both long duration aerobic/cardio and relatively intense resistance training. Under such a regimen, you will notice what food does to you because you're pushing your physical state out to the edges. You will need to eat densely nutritious food and you will notice when you don't. It's quite striking. An analogy: nobody notices a bad tank of gas, or slightly wrong octane in their toyota minivan. You do notice a bad tank of gas, or slightly wrong octane in a race car. Become a racecar and you won't need to guess about food anymore.

brianwawok 11y ago
This is true and an angle I have not thought about before (though I have first hand experienced it). As an example I don't think good quality non-factory-farmed red meat is bad for a person, despite a fair amount of research on both sides of the topic. But since switching from couch me to exercise-a-holic me.. My relationship with red meat has changed. Had a grass fed burger Monday for the first time in a while, was up all night. Did not agree with me so much. On the other hand, 1 beer or whatever amount of salt I consume seems to have no impact on me the next morning - happy to hope out of bed at 7 and go run. Humans are not racecars so not sure I buy the analogy as given.. I wonder what the real reason for this is? Maybe a better broscience guess is that so much of your energy is devoted to repairing "damage" you did the to body during the day, your body has less spare energy to devote to processing crap.
nommm-nommm 11y ago
Meh. When I was an athlete I had a horrible diet which consisted of mostly boxed pasta and I ate junk food every day. Didn't hurt my athletic ability noticeably. I try hard to watch what I eat now.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  How old were you on the junkfood diet? As I got older I literally cannot sleep at night if I eat crap. As a teenager it did not matter.

ocean3 11y ago

"Use salt to taste, most likely it won't kill you" - but salt has been used for centuries right. Has there been a change? As an Indian not adding salt is unthinkable.

chadgeidel 11y ago
I think the change has been in volume. In the US at least much of the food you take off the shelves (especially of the "microwave dinner" variety) have large amounts of sodium. I know this is an extreme example, but take a look at the sodium content in those popular "ramen noodle bowls" (styrofoam cup, not in a bag). That's more than 100% of your RDA of sodium right there. They do not taste overly salty IMHO.
- berntb 11y ago
  In Scandinavia, salt used to be one of the main ways of preserving food. Salted fish with too little little salt resulted in the discovery of surströmming, one of the culinary delights of humanity. Even today, salt candy is popular (yes, salt); it is one of the things I miss as an expatriate. So I should have the genes to handle salt -- just need a way to import my salt liquorice...

noxToken 11y ago

> Currently the best way to consume food is to avoid addictive and highly processed food products I assume by highly processed, you mean foods altered in such that they are now high in fats, salt, sugars or some combination thereof. I ask, because the term processed gets thrown around (in my experience) for highly preserved foods like canned meat to flash frozen frozen vegetables in the freezer aisle. The former is obviously worse for you. Taking in high amounts of sugars, bad fats, and possibly salt is detrimental. However, referring to green beans that were grown, picked, flash frozen and delivered as a processed food is somewhat misleading. Flash freezing is altering the food from its natural state. Thus, a frozen vegetable is technically a processed food. The connotative definition, however, implies that more than freezing has happened.

brianwawok 11y ago
Freezing is a form of processing, but it is a very light processing. Take some Oats off the ground. Cool unprocessed. Mill it a tiny bit to help it cook more easily into steel cut oats. Minimally processed. Grind it down into instant oatmeal - Heavily processes. Add some chemicals and put in a test tube to turn into some weird kind of artificial sweetener? Highly processed. I try to go as low on the chain as possible, without killing myself. I don't enjoy eating oats right off the ground, or boiled as is (unsure if we can even digest raw oats, never tried). Steel cut I do enjoy - so I stop there. So back to fruit. If you can get fresh fruit great. If not, frozen is pretty close. If you have to revert to fruit rollups? Probably went too far. * There is a debate that frozen fruits can actually be better than frush fruit, as fresh fruit is picked unripe and ripened in a truck - whereas frozen fruit can be picked when fully ripe. In this case, the slightly processed fruit may end up being better than the unprocessed fruit. Overall though this is the exception, for 99% of food - the more you do to it the more you lose.
- blacksmith_tb 11y ago
  This seems like a fairly extreme interpretation of 'processing' - I haven't seen anything that suggests there's a nutritional difference between steel cut, rolled, or quick oats. Human beings have 'processed' their foods along these lines for more than 10,000 years, as opposed to say, making Twinkies.

AndrewDucker 11y ago

They already have: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35193414 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35193414

clock_tower 11y ago

> I'm waiting for the day that nutricionists find out that there are different kinds of people with different nutritional needs. The nutritionist side of public health evolved to deal with questions where this isn't true. Everyone needs vitamin A to avoid beriberi and vitamin C to avoid scurvy; no one benefits from polluted milk or polluted water; that sort of thing. Now, the big problems have been solved, and nutritionists are trying to treat semi-ideopathic diseases of affluence as if they were the immense, obvious dietary scourges of a hundred years ago... This is true of the whole field of public health, to an extent. Cholera and yellow fever are under control, smallpox is all but extinct, polio is on its last legs, and now we're trying to use the tools that defeated those diseases to fight drug addiction, lifestyle-induced diseases, diseases of aging, and STDs. At least things aren't as bad now as they were. Traditional public-health approaches look nonsensical when used against 20th-century issues, but they did a wonderful job against 19th-century ones.

Shorel 11y ago

Nutritionists will never find out that, because it's not their job. They simply recite memorized mantra. However, some scientists have been creating a mathematical model that should be able to predict the best diet for a particular person, given that the microbes in said person's guts are analysed first. You can read about it here: http://www.sciencealert.com/your-gut-bacteria-determines-which-diets-will-actually-make-you-lose-weight http://www.sciencealert.com/your-gut-bacteria-determines-whi...

Mz 11y ago

I'm waiting for the day that nutricionists find out that there are different kinds of people with different nutritional needs. I wish more people were so wise. I have a salt wasting condition. Lack of salt was very much killing me -- though the answer was not merely more salt, but better quality salt, a detail that routinely gets me the deer-in-the-headlights look from people who respond with "But isn't salt just salt??"