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>If man made it, don't eat it That's way too simple. It's a kind of naturalistic fallacy as applied to food. If you think your produce area is where you shoul

>If man made it, don't eat it That's way too simple. It's a kind of naturalistic fallacy as applied to food. If you think your produce area is where you should be getting your calories (not disagreeing), it fails the "if man made it, don't eat it" test spectacularly. Basically everything you see there has been shaped by man. A (stunning) example: one species of plant, brassica oleracea, has been selectively (i.e., artificially) bred to produce a wide range of different cultivars including, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts, and more. NONE of these produce items are "natural." Getting back to the linked article a bit, if you think fructose is bad, you should know it is very natural. Obviously it occurs in fruits and honey has more fructose than refined sugar and about the same as high fructose corn syrup. (As a side note, I'm of the opinion we should be engineering foods to make them better for us. We as a species have been doing similar things to our food for thousands of years.)

wutbrodo 11y ago
It's simple because it's a heuristic. I'm pretty comfortable with my nutrition, but when friends ask me to summarize it it's very difficult for me because I've spent an unholy amount of time researching it. Things like Pollan's famous quote or "avoid man-made things" are targeted at the 99% of people who aren't as obsessive about it as I was at one pt, but still very much want to eat healthy. It has its false positives and negatives obviously, but it has a pretty great trade off between correctness and complexity. If you consider it as a heuristic instead of taking it literally, your objection about artificial selection of produce is also more or less irrelevant. Man had a hand in shaping those plants' current genome, but if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making (most of) them. It's still easy to distinguish from, say, donuts and still useful as a heuristic.
- torgoguys 11y ago
  I replied to a sibling with what I meant to reply to yours. See there. One quick thing I would add is, "NO" nature would not keep making them. It is only our direct action that props up these artificially selected species (q.v., hybrids that require us to actively produce them, or your favorite variety of apple which is a clone of some great-grandparent tree or the fact that these crops would not compete well with other plants because we've selected them for their food production, not overall hardiness. They'd be out competed. They put too much of their energy into producing stuff that doesn't optimally help produce a new generation, and thus require our tending). Your statement is a bit like saying "if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making sheep." Probably not (at least medium term). Sheep generally require our protection to avoid being killed. It probably wouldn't take long for a predator species to take hold in a given area and kill them all.
  - rhinoceraptor 11y ago
    But you would agree that there's a qualitative difference between a Snicker's bar and a banana, right? Sure, the banana is a selectively bred, sterile monocrop but the candy is made of 20 ingredients, resembling nothing found in nature in composition and nutrition.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > It's simple because it's a heuristic. Simplistic heuristics have failed hard before in nutrition, so why do we keep repeating the new ones? The only one that makes any sense is "Eat food, not too much, and mostly fruit and veg".
  - ScottBurson 11y ago
    > The only one that makes any sense is "Eat food, not too much, and mostly fruit and veg". Michael Pollan, who promoted (and possibly introduced) that slogan in his book In Defense of Food, goes on to explain that "Eat food" means more specifically "don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" (p. 148). In short, he agrees exactly with Jack Lalanne: avoid processed foods.
55555 11y ago
Leonroy may believe, as i do, that consuming fructose is less/not bad when its in a natural dose and taken with its natural cofactors. Fruit normally contains fiber too.
- leonroy 11y ago
  Great documentary called Fed Up: http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/home http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/home It basically posits that ALL sugar, from fructose, to organic brown sugar to high fructose corn syrup is broken down to the same basic molecule: glucose. Even white rice, potatoes and bread break down similarly. It was sobering viewing and highly recommended. The 5:2 diet proponents also suggest the same thing from their research - that natural sugars are no better than unnatural sugars (at least according to the doc).
jawilson2 11y ago
> it fails the "if man made it, don't eat it" test spectacularly. Basically everything you see there has been shaped by man. A (stunning) example: one species of plant, brassica oleracea, has been selectively (i.e., artificially) bred to produce a wide range of different cultivars including, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts, and more. NONE of these produce items are "natural." You're overthinking this. "Is this food packaged and processed with preservatives, a list of 40 ingredients, and has a shelf life of 6 months to 5 years? Then I'm not buying it. Is it meat or product? It's ok." This is referring pretty specifically to Franken-foods, not GMOs (which I too think are a great idea, and essentially optimizing our agricultural practices over the last 20,000-whatever years).
- torgoguys 11y ago
  I'm not overthinking it. I gave that as an example of people not thinking about food. The heuristic, even applied as you would prefer, is a poor one. I don't buy into the philosophy at all. Quick example, my mother-in-law (who is into all kinds of weird "food woo" (she's a drink-raw-milk-only, avoid-adrenal-stressing-foods, etc. kind of person) once handed me a some sort of baked good--a bread perhaps--and mentioned, "It has no preservatives." My quick, honest, reply was "bummer." She had meant to "no preservatives" as being a good thing, as lots of folks do. The thing is, preservatives are a GOOD thing (well, unless you're preserving your food with something known to be harmful). It means less food waste, and that you're less likely to be unknowingly eating (mildly) spoiled food. We have made missteps in our advancement in the production of food, and we as a whole don't eat as healthy of food as we should, but on the whole, modern agricultural practices are a good thing, as are some modern processing of food that people don't like because it's not "natural." I'm swayed by the preponderance of quality evidence on this, not anecdotes, intuition, and studies that represent noise in the data due to known problems with the generation of data.
  - leonroy 11y ago
    I think some folk here are misinterpreting my original post (perhaps I wasn't clear enough). Neither I, nor I imagine Jack Lalanne were advocating we return to hunter gatherer foraging. Whilst Jack Lalanne's quote 'if man made it don't eat it' is simplistic it's basically saying go for the steak or the bag of salad leaves rather than the corn dog and powdered mash potato. This isn't about 'weird' foods like raw milk, or taking things to the nth-degree. It's just common sense advice that humans seldom make a food healthier by tinkering with it. As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best. Does that mean I'm not gonna pepper my cod fillet, of course not. But I sure as heck am not going to buy a pre-battered pack of frozen 'fish fingers' given the choice!
specialist 11y ago
Would "unprocessed food" stuffs mollify you? He's speaking, giving useful actionable advice, to a broad audience. But, please, continue to pedant. Sucrose = glucose + fructose. Glucose good, fructose bad. Fiber in fruit prevents uptake of fructose. Which is why orange is okay, orange juice bad. A pretty good example of Lalanne's messaging.
- torgoguys 11y ago
  >Would "unprocessed food" stuffs mollify you? No. See sibling responses. I'm not being pedantic, I'm trying to point out natural != good. Processing != bad either. Cooking is processing, and is a good thing, most of the time. I mentioned preservatives in a sibling reply, again generally a good thing. For example, the "no preservatives" crowd often have been very selective in the data they've looked at. That's all. Question assumptions about what's is and isn't bad for you. (And there is plenty of refinement and such that isn't good for you--don't get me wrong).
slacka 11y ago
>If man made it, don't eat it I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate". Or avoid the middle of the supermarket as much as possible. Simply eating more fat and less sugar/carbs, I have lost 10+ pounds and feel much better. These nutrition fads have done more harm than good. My mother switched from butter to Crisco when I was a kid, then she banned salt from the house, and bought (high sugare, low fat) snack wells for us. All based on poor/pseudo science. The diabetes and obesity are modern problems caused by a diet that our bodies haven't evolved to handle.
- leonroy 11y ago
  > I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate". Or avoid the middle of the supermarket as much as possible. I like that! I had some friends over for a small dinner party a few weeks back. One of them was helping me in the kitchen butter some sour dough bread. Mid-way through she stopped agog just staring. I looked to where her eyes were staring and realized she was shocked at how much butter I was smearing on each slice of bread. I'm active and believe in eating a lot of natural fats, but I realized that even young adults subscribe to the demonization of saturated fat. (I might also be a little too inclined to eat butter and coconut oil - so moderation - as always is important if we're to not alienate everybody).
- hammock 11y ago
  >I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate" Unfortunately that's not always possible as we have selectively bred over time for appearance, size and/or sugar content in our fruits, vegetables and even meat at the expense of macro- and micronutrients. We have also begun overly sanitizing our foods, pasteurizing everything and adding antibiotics to the detriment out our gut microbiome. In many cases the food our great grandmas ate doesn't exist anymore.
  - rwmj 11y ago
    My grandma (and probably my great grandma, I've no idea) grew most of the food she ate.
- 11y ago
debacle 11y ago
I see the "if you think fructose" is bad trope a lot, and I think it's dangerous. In a natural environment, the only real sources of fructose are either fiber-heavy (most fruits) or somewhat rare (honey, berries). Fructose is bad. It's certainly something that should be eaten in moderation. Your food is not being engineered to be better for you. It's being engineered to be cheaper and easier to produce and sell. There are trade-offs.
- leshow 11y ago
  Fructose is not bad, no food is inherently bad. It's all a matter of degrees. If you consume 10 cans of coke a day, and you're over your maintenance caloric intake by 1000 calories daily. guess what? you'll get fat and probably not be healthy. if you overconsume sweet potatoes by 1000 calories over your maintenance intake daily. guess what? you'll get fat and probably not be healthy.
  - nibs 11y ago
    Fructose is actually bad but that isn't the whole story. Fructose is only bad when consumed at a poor ratio relative to glucose. If you are eating 1:1 fructose/glucose, you can properly digest and use the energy from both. If you are too skewed towards fructose, it is less likely your small intestine will successfully digest the fructose, and it will make it to your large intestine and cause IBS, inflammation, hormonal disruption, etc. Reference low FODMAP diet and frustose malabsorbtion if you want to read into it.
  - belovedeagle 11y ago
    The article points out that there's no solid evidence suggesting a strong correlation between caloric intake and obesity.
- CuriouslyC 11y ago
  Fructose is NOT inherently bad. When liver glycogen stores are depleted, fructose has no negative health effects. The problem is when you are eating in a calorie surplus, and the only way for the liver to deal with that fructose is via de-novo lipogenesis.
xlm1717 11y ago
>If man made it, don't eat it Yeah it does come across as too simple. I've heard a variation of it, also attributed to Lalane, that says, "If it comes in a wrapper, don't eat it." The idea is that if it's in a wrapper, it has preservatives added, and also sugar added to make it taste good. In any case, it seems people love attributing quotes to Lalane!
- mikeash 11y ago
  Meat is usually wrapped. Some places wrap fruit and vegetables. I think people trying to give nutritional advice should just list the actual categories of food they're referring to, rather than trying to get cute. If you want to say "eat unprocessed fruit, vegetables, and meat, and avoid the rest" then just say that. To me, whenever I see somebody trying to get clever with their wording, it just comes off as moralizing. It feels like either "you should know this man-made stuff is bad for you, you idiot" or "I'm better than you because my food is 'natural.'"
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
I'm just not so sure we're smarter than nature when it comes to what is best for our bodies.
whitie 11y ago
Naturalistic fallacy does not apply to food (it only has only ever been formally applied in moral philosophy) The idea that more natural foods are generally healthier than less natural foods is based mainly on inductive reasoning, eg. breast milk vs baby formula, grass fed cattle vs grain and animal protien fed cattle, vitamins in plants vs vitamins in tablets, animal welfare limits vs antibiotics and growth stimulants etc
dsyph3r 11y ago
Fructose is not bad when its delivered with fiber. When you eat fruit, you are getting mostly fiber with a small portion of sugar. When you are eating refined sugars such as high fructose corn syrup you are getting very little or no fiber. The lack of fiber allows the sugar to be absorbed extremely quickly, which overloads your liver.

wutbrodo 11y ago

It's simple because it's a heuristic. I'm pretty comfortable with my nutrition, but when friends ask me to summarize it it's very difficult for me because I've spent an unholy amount of time researching it. Things like Pollan's famous quote or "avoid man-made things" are targeted at the 99% of people who aren't as obsessive about it as I was at one pt, but still very much want to eat healthy. It has its false positives and negatives obviously, but it has a pretty great trade off between correctness and complexity. If you consider it as a heuristic instead of taking it literally, your objection about artificial selection of produce is also more or less irrelevant. Man had a hand in shaping those plants' current genome, but if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making (most of) them. It's still easy to distinguish from, say, donuts and still useful as a heuristic.

torgoguys 11y ago
I replied to a sibling with what I meant to reply to yours. See there. One quick thing I would add is, "NO" nature would not keep making them. It is only our direct action that props up these artificially selected species (q.v., hybrids that require us to actively produce them, or your favorite variety of apple which is a clone of some great-grandparent tree or the fact that these crops would not compete well with other plants because we've selected them for their food production, not overall hardiness. They'd be out competed. They put too much of their energy into producing stuff that doesn't optimally help produce a new generation, and thus require our tending). Your statement is a bit like saying "if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making sheep." Probably not (at least medium term). Sheep generally require our protection to avoid being killed. It probably wouldn't take long for a predator species to take hold in a given area and kill them all.
- rhinoceraptor 11y ago
  But you would agree that there's a qualitative difference between a Snicker's bar and a banana, right? Sure, the banana is a selectively bred, sterile monocrop but the candy is made of 20 ingredients, resembling nothing found in nature in composition and nutrition.
DanBC 11y ago
> It's simple because it's a heuristic. Simplistic heuristics have failed hard before in nutrition, so why do we keep repeating the new ones? The only one that makes any sense is "Eat food, not too much, and mostly fruit and veg".
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  > The only one that makes any sense is "Eat food, not too much, and mostly fruit and veg". Michael Pollan, who promoted (and possibly introduced) that slogan in his book In Defense of Food, goes on to explain that "Eat food" means more specifically "don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" (p. 148). In short, he agrees exactly with Jack Lalanne: avoid processed foods.

55555 11y ago

Leonroy may believe, as i do, that consuming fructose is less/not bad when its in a natural dose and taken with its natural cofactors. Fruit normally contains fiber too.

leonroy 11y ago
Great documentary called Fed Up: http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/home http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/home It basically posits that ALL sugar, from fructose, to organic brown sugar to high fructose corn syrup is broken down to the same basic molecule: glucose. Even white rice, potatoes and bread break down similarly. It was sobering viewing and highly recommended. The 5:2 diet proponents also suggest the same thing from their research - that natural sugars are no better than unnatural sugars (at least according to the doc).

jawilson2 11y ago

> it fails the "if man made it, don't eat it" test spectacularly. Basically everything you see there has been shaped by man. A (stunning) example: one species of plant, brassica oleracea, has been selectively (i.e., artificially) bred to produce a wide range of different cultivars including, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts, and more. NONE of these produce items are "natural." You're overthinking this. "Is this food packaged and processed with preservatives, a list of 40 ingredients, and has a shelf life of 6 months to 5 years? Then I'm not buying it. Is it meat or product? It's ok." This is referring pretty specifically to Franken-foods, not GMOs (which I too think are a great idea, and essentially optimizing our agricultural practices over the last 20,000-whatever years).

torgoguys 11y ago
I'm not overthinking it. I gave that as an example of people not thinking about food. The heuristic, even applied as you would prefer, is a poor one. I don't buy into the philosophy at all. Quick example, my mother-in-law (who is into all kinds of weird "food woo" (she's a drink-raw-milk-only, avoid-adrenal-stressing-foods, etc. kind of person) once handed me a some sort of baked good--a bread perhaps--and mentioned, "It has no preservatives." My quick, honest, reply was "bummer." She had meant to "no preservatives" as being a good thing, as lots of folks do. The thing is, preservatives are a GOOD thing (well, unless you're preserving your food with something known to be harmful). It means less food waste, and that you're less likely to be unknowingly eating (mildly) spoiled food. We have made missteps in our advancement in the production of food, and we as a whole don't eat as healthy of food as we should, but on the whole, modern agricultural practices are a good thing, as are some modern processing of food that people don't like because it's not "natural." I'm swayed by the preponderance of quality evidence on this, not anecdotes, intuition, and studies that represent noise in the data due to known problems with the generation of data.
- leonroy 11y ago
  I think some folk here are misinterpreting my original post (perhaps I wasn't clear enough). Neither I, nor I imagine Jack Lalanne were advocating we return to hunter gatherer foraging. Whilst Jack Lalanne's quote 'if man made it don't eat it' is simplistic it's basically saying go for the steak or the bag of salad leaves rather than the corn dog and powdered mash potato. This isn't about 'weird' foods like raw milk, or taking things to the nth-degree. It's just common sense advice that humans seldom make a food healthier by tinkering with it. As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best. Does that mean I'm not gonna pepper my cod fillet, of course not. But I sure as heck am not going to buy a pre-battered pack of frozen 'fish fingers' given the choice!

specialist 11y ago

Would "unprocessed food" stuffs mollify you? He's speaking, giving useful actionable advice, to a broad audience. But, please, continue to pedant. Sucrose = glucose + fructose. Glucose good, fructose bad. Fiber in fruit prevents uptake of fructose. Which is why orange is okay, orange juice bad. A pretty good example of Lalanne's messaging.

torgoguys 11y ago
>Would "unprocessed food" stuffs mollify you? No. See sibling responses. I'm not being pedantic, I'm trying to point out natural != good. Processing != bad either. Cooking is processing, and is a good thing, most of the time. I mentioned preservatives in a sibling reply, again generally a good thing. For example, the "no preservatives" crowd often have been very selective in the data they've looked at. That's all. Question assumptions about what's is and isn't bad for you. (And there is plenty of refinement and such that isn't good for you--don't get me wrong).

slacka 11y ago

>If man made it, don't eat it I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate". Or avoid the middle of the supermarket as much as possible. Simply eating more fat and less sugar/carbs, I have lost 10+ pounds and feel much better. These nutrition fads have done more harm than good. My mother switched from butter to Crisco when I was a kid, then she banned salt from the house, and bought (high sugare, low fat) snack wells for us. All based on poor/pseudo science. The diabetes and obesity are modern problems caused by a diet that our bodies haven't evolved to handle.

leonroy 11y ago
> I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate". Or avoid the middle of the supermarket as much as possible. I like that! I had some friends over for a small dinner party a few weeks back. One of them was helping me in the kitchen butter some sour dough bread. Mid-way through she stopped agog just staring. I looked to where her eyes were staring and realized she was shocked at how much butter I was smearing on each slice of bread. I'm active and believe in eating a lot of natural fats, but I realized that even young adults subscribe to the demonization of saturated fat. (I might also be a little too inclined to eat butter and coconut oil - so moderation - as always is important if we're to not alienate everybody).
hammock 11y ago
>I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate" Unfortunately that's not always possible as we have selectively bred over time for appearance, size and/or sugar content in our fruits, vegetables and even meat at the expense of macro- and micronutrients. We have also begun overly sanitizing our foods, pasteurizing everything and adding antibiotics to the detriment out our gut microbiome. In many cases the food our great grandmas ate doesn't exist anymore.
- rwmj 11y ago
  My grandma (and probably my great grandma, I've no idea) grew most of the food she ate.
11y ago

debacle 11y ago

I see the "if you think fructose" is bad trope a lot, and I think it's dangerous. In a natural environment, the only real sources of fructose are either fiber-heavy (most fruits) or somewhat rare (honey, berries). Fructose is bad. It's certainly something that should be eaten in moderation. Your food is not being engineered to be better for you. It's being engineered to be cheaper and easier to produce and sell. There are trade-offs.

leshow 11y ago
Fructose is not bad, no food is inherently bad. It's all a matter of degrees. If you consume 10 cans of coke a day, and you're over your maintenance caloric intake by 1000 calories daily. guess what? you'll get fat and probably not be healthy. if you overconsume sweet potatoes by 1000 calories over your maintenance intake daily. guess what? you'll get fat and probably not be healthy.
- nibs 11y ago
  Fructose is actually bad but that isn't the whole story. Fructose is only bad when consumed at a poor ratio relative to glucose. If you are eating 1:1 fructose/glucose, you can properly digest and use the energy from both. If you are too skewed towards fructose, it is less likely your small intestine will successfully digest the fructose, and it will make it to your large intestine and cause IBS, inflammation, hormonal disruption, etc. Reference low FODMAP diet and frustose malabsorbtion if you want to read into it.
- belovedeagle 11y ago
  The article points out that there's no solid evidence suggesting a strong correlation between caloric intake and obesity.
CuriouslyC 11y ago
Fructose is NOT inherently bad. When liver glycogen stores are depleted, fructose has no negative health effects. The problem is when you are eating in a calorie surplus, and the only way for the liver to deal with that fructose is via de-novo lipogenesis.

xlm1717 11y ago

>If man made it, don't eat it Yeah it does come across as too simple. I've heard a variation of it, also attributed to Lalane, that says, "If it comes in a wrapper, don't eat it." The idea is that if it's in a wrapper, it has preservatives added, and also sugar added to make it taste good. In any case, it seems people love attributing quotes to Lalane!

mikeash 11y ago
Meat is usually wrapped. Some places wrap fruit and vegetables. I think people trying to give nutritional advice should just list the actual categories of food they're referring to, rather than trying to get cute. If you want to say "eat unprocessed fruit, vegetables, and meat, and avoid the rest" then just say that. To me, whenever I see somebody trying to get clever with their wording, it just comes off as moralizing. It feels like either "you should know this man-made stuff is bad for you, you idiot" or "I'm better than you because my food is 'natural.'"

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

I'm just not so sure we're smarter than nature when it comes to what is best for our bodies.

whitie 11y ago

Naturalistic fallacy does not apply to food (it only has only ever been formally applied in moral philosophy) The idea that more natural foods are generally healthier than less natural foods is based mainly on inductive reasoning, eg. breast milk vs baby formula, grass fed cattle vs grain and animal protien fed cattle, vitamins in plants vs vitamins in tablets, animal welfare limits vs antibiotics and growth stimulants etc

dsyph3r 11y ago

Fructose is not bad when its delivered with fiber. When you eat fruit, you are getting mostly fiber with a small portion of sugar. When you are eating refined sugars such as high fructose corn syrup you are getting very little or no fiber. The lack of fiber allows the sugar to be absorbed extremely quickly, which overloads your liver.