16 ms·

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

214 points by mishkovski 10y ago

wyager 10y ago
Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy". Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a useful dietary recommendation.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  "Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. In the 50 years between now and your hypothetical in which nutrition is "solved", advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt.
  - wyager 10y ago
    > "Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. > science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. > advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt Much of the advice in the article is too specific and based on weak evidence. For example, the suggestion not to eat much meat; there are huge amounts of research suggesting that eating mostly meat is a very good approach. I'm not going to claim this is true, because as I said, it's actually pretty weak evidence, but there's certainly no good justification to authoritatively claim the opposite.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      > Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. Is this possible in the field of diet, considering the long timespan needed for experimentation, the numerous contributing factors, and the fact that study participants are very often not telling the truth?
    - wutbrodo 10y ago
      > I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. Attacking writers (to no disagreement from me) is a pretty odd response to a defense of science's role in society. Science coverage is garbage, but that has approximately nothing to do with your point, nor my response to it. > No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. Oh for the love of God, this is a masterpiece of pedantry. You're mistaking "I assume everyone here is intelligent enough to understand what I'm getting at despite my lack of precision in a brief three-sentence comment" for "I don't understand what I'm talking about". Just because you don't fit the former statement doesn't mean I fit the latter.
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    > In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. I think it's a pretty important concept for people to keep in mind that if you're not verifying your guesses with experimentation, you're fundamentally not doing science.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      Unless the general public is doing it for you. People vastly underestimate how thorough some enthusiast communities are.
    - didibus 10y ago
      I disagree. Doing science involves a mix of observation and experimentation. A lot of diet recommendations often do both. They've observed eating habits of healthy people over less healthy people, and then they've experimented by having a bunch of people try the diet, and after some years, they've observed again what was the effects. Some diets don't do that. They're sometimes based on a type of "that makes sense" intuition, like, our ancestors used to eat mostly meat, so we should eat like them. Or, this substance is known to absorb toxins, so obviously eating it will clear your bloodstream of them. These I admit aren't scientific. Though often those intuitive catch phrases are thrown on top of scientific dietary ideas as a way to convince people to it and sell a bunch of books and products.
- cup 10y ago
  Medicine, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing treatments, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about how each and every person should be treated, except for fairly straightforward things like "cut out a tumour". Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a new, synthetic digestive tract. --------- To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science or don't think the science is moving fast enough for your liking isn't helpful. Science is science. We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too.
  - wyager 10y ago
    > To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science What makes you think A) that's my motivation or B) I don't understand the science? I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm well-versed in statistics and hypothesis testing, so I am at least equipped to make general observations about the predictive power of the field. > or don't think the science is moving fast enough When did I ever say anything to that effect? The hard biological sciences are moving extremely quickly, and soon nutrition will be subsumed into computational chemistry like the rest. > Science is science. And some fields of science have very low predictive power, like current nutrition. Do you really put psychology on the same ground as particle physics? > We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too. This is pretty much exactly what I'm saying about nutritionists, but for some reason you appear to be mad at me about it.
    - thanks4it 10y ago
      Statistics is full of p hacking bullshit. You can mislead and lie with stats and stull sound intelligent. You being a case in point. It's funny you mention psychology, they don't accept p-value assholes in their journals any longer. You have a hammer and see nails. Foolish little fuck you are.
  - 10y ago
- pierrec 10y ago
  Sure, nutrition is littered with crackpot theories, voluntarily misleading research funded by corporations, smoke and mirrors, and so on. And if you only look at stuff that hits the news, then yes, things will change drastically every few years, probably forever. That's because people like sensationalism. However, there are reasonable diets that don't make the news, for example the "Mediterranean Diet". While it doesn't come with any extraordinary claims, it seems to have endured with a good reputation from the onset (it was invented in the 70s and first gained popularity in the 90s) (also note that this article awkwardly mentions it in a way that seems to ignore most studies on it, but that's not the point). Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is.
  - wyager 10y ago
    > for example the "Mediterranean Diet". The irony here is delicious. You've gotten sucked into yet another evidence-free fad diet, but you're lecturing me on only listening to fad diets. And no, it's not a matter of "only looking at stuff that hits the news"; the FDA and FNS, which should be following strong scientific principles, change their dietary recommendations and rules all the time, without particularly strong evidence for doing so. > Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is. Do you make this claim based on strong evidence, or does this just sound like good Common Sense (tm) to you?
    - novia 10y ago
      The Mediterranean diet has been linked to longer lifespans. http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6674 http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6674 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15452459 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15452459
      - wyager 10y ago
        > The Mediterranean diet has been linked to longer lifespans Did you read anything I wrote? Every single fad diet in the world has multiple scientific papers showing how great it is. (p = 0.05. Nevermind that there were 1000 research projects about this fad diet that didn't get published because they didn't reject the null hypothesis, so who cares. Nevermind that nutrition scientists don't practice good behavior to mitigate the effect of the base rate fallacy on popular subjects.) Almost no scientific fields practice enough discipline to have very high predictive power. Particle physics mitigates base-rate failures by having an extremely high confidence requirement (5 sigma). Even with absolute best practices, it's sometimes not enough. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... Nutrition science is nowhere near best practices.
- gibbitz 10y ago
  I'm 42 and this is what the USDA has been saying all along with their food pyramids and four food groups and what have you. I think as a whole, nutritionists have always been on the same page, but those selling diets keep changing their opinions. Sure, there has been flip-flopping recently on fats and sugars, but the edict "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" doesn't concern itself with those. I can't recall anyone ever promoting a diet with less vegetables (even the Atkins fad diet known for it's meat and dairy included vegetables) and make sure to overeat at every meal and I highly doubt either of those will ever be considered a good idea (provided the vegetables aren't tainted by radiation or chemicals or the diet's authors aren't overly politicizing GMO or some other arbitrary thing about production). Fad diets are all about selling supplements and books and are indeed snake oil. The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff and that's what this article is really about.
  - wyager 10y ago
    > I'm 42 and this is what the USDA has been saying all along with their food pyramids and four food groups and what have you. You are not remembering correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guid... > I think as a whole, nutritionists have always been on the same page, No, they certainly haven't. "Best practices" change all the time. This happened quite recently; http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/06/15/2015-dietary-guidelines.aspx http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/06/1... > but the edict "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" doesn't concern itself with those It also contradicts the recently popularized "keto" diet, which has roughly as much evidence behind it as any other popular dietary recommendation (i.e. not much). Really the only things we can say authoritatively is "if you miss out on certain nutrients, you get sick". Beyond that, we're not really very sure. > The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff Your mistake is in thinking that there's a definitive difference. Almost ever piece of nutritional research available today has an extremely low predictive power. Where you draw the wheat/chaff line is more or less arbitrary. Even what should, ideally, be the most staunchly scientific food-related organizations, the FDA and FNS, change the recommendations all the time because they're not actually using hard science.
- dualogy 10y ago
  > except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy". Even that's a myth, funnily enough. You don't need ascorbic acid per se, you just need.. ascorbate. With the acid we can synthesize the ascorbate our cells can work with. But we can also eat it directly pre-formed by other herbivores, contained in medium-rare meats or not-cremated-for-hours livers, or soft-boiled egg yolks etc.
FajitaNachos 10y ago
The first time I saw this quote was at our local Mod Market which has become our goto for a quick, healthyish meal. I wish there were more chains that shared a similar philosophy.
- atomical 10y ago
  Looks like a lot of processed meat and cheese to me.
ericdykstra 10y ago
This is a great article, and should be widely read beyond that piece of succinct eating advice. For example, this is a great paragraph: > In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so that a creature’s senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks ripe; that’s one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food has been designed expressly to deceive its senses — with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners. In fact, I recently read a book, The Dorito Effect which goes into this in much, much more detail, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. I bought it thinking it would be a light read, based on the title and cover, but it was more engaging, better researched, and more informative than I expected.
theparanoid 10y ago
Gary Taubes "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" [1] is worth reading. Previously he wrote about bad science. [1] https://nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html https://nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-bee...
- Illotus 10y ago
  Not much benefit in reading old stuff like that. Some of it has been validated, some not. Insulin as the great cause for fat gain hasn't really panned out. On the other hand now we've had some large studies that give an inkling that eating a lot of fat can be healthy for the heart and on the other hand replacing saturated fats with carbs(instead of unsaturated fats) is basically status quo.
umberway 10y ago
Nutrition, medicine, psychology are beset by empiricism: trying to find facts without having theories to support them. Journalists then make hay with the results, hinting at conclusions and advice for the public, using the authority of Science, but really bringing it into disrepute. An awful lot of research money has been wasted in this way and of course much of the work is not reproducible.
- charlieflowers 10y ago
  >> Nutrition, medicine, psychology are beset by empiricism: trying to find facts without having theories to support them. Really? Seems to me there are a ton of theories but precious few facts. Atkins, low carb, high carb, gluten free, etc. Theories everywhere. But science simply cannot tell us what foods to eat and what to avoid. It's very frustrating to me how limited our knowledge of the human body is.
  - umberway 10y ago
    The 'facts' that I referred to are the results of correlation studies as published in science journals. The diets you mention are mainstream fads. You're right, though, it is frustrating! My personal opinion is that it is the way we use food for pleasure and comfort that it is to blame. We are literally getting high on what we eat, which is deleterious for health if performed without break for long periods. But there's no obvious way for a scientist to address this idea at present; it would be considered too subjective and thus ignored by the majority.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      fad - an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities; a craze. synonyms: craze, vogue, trend, fashion, mode, enthusiasm, passion, obsession, mania, rage, compulsion, fixation, fetish, fancy, whim, fascination "when I was a kid, no fad was more apparent than the coonskin cap" I disagree calling all diets fads, just because the theories haven't been definitely proven or disproven, if they are accurate at making predictions it suggests there's something to the theory does it not?
ENTP 10y ago
When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.
- deleted 10y ago
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- Freestyler_3 10y ago
  I can eat anything and wont gain weight. It really seems like there is too much diversity in how we handle food inside our body. The best diet is to try some things(experiment) and do whatever works best, not what feels best. Too many of these diets read like they are the most fun thing to do in the world. Also a lot of people have the tendency to get their goal and then stop the diet only to gain weight again (then dismiss the diet because it didn't work) And this gain shows how people can work differently inside. Some will not gain back the weight after a diet, others would need to diet for life.
  - wruza 10y ago
    This worked for me too, I could eat any amounts of anything and weight even less than normal. Then I realized (well, my gastroenterologist did) that my liver had a pretty common pathology all that time and it started to make harm. We quickly fixed that and now I have to choose what to eat, because gaining, say, 5kg in one week is a no-brainer now. This is the story of one specific issue with a human body, that has tens if not hundreds of them.
    - Freestyler_3 10y ago
      Its surprising how fast things can change. If it ever changes for me I know ill have it hard because I eat a lot of snacks and delicious sandwiches.
  - sametmax 10y ago
problems 10y ago
Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like "avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" and a lot of "avoid processed anything". While I'm sure there's some arguable benefits to these things, I think it's paranoid or stupid to dismiss something just for being "processed". What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more processed necessitates any loss. Maybe I just have no sense for quality, but I've tried paying double for "organic" products and similar - only to be repeatedly disappointed with products that taste worse or equal and spoil quicker - I'll never buy them again, it just doesn't make sense to pay more for it.
- aaron695 10y ago
  Although I totally agree, per the op article > but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed. It might be an ok rule of thumb. Highly processed food can of course be good for you, but mostly isn't. It's bad science but a working stereotype. Organic is of course a marketing gimmick and as per the article > you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
- markatkinson 10y ago
  Yes I am inclined to agree. There are a few lines in what I read that shoot up red flags (I only read the first 25% and last 10%). However I agree with the overall advice. I read somewhere that its best to avoid any food that is sold in packaging. I try to stick to that within reason.
  - schiffern 10y ago
    Pollen gave a fascinating interview on Democracy Now! talking about how food companies began cleverly gaming the metrics, marketing smaller numbers of ingredients and real sugar (yes, sugar!) as though they were health claims. His new advice? "Don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised." https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_author_michael_pollans_new https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_aut...
reflexive 10y ago
Pollan's famous "maxim" manages to be condescending, unhelpful and inaccurate - all at the same time. Eat food: duh Not too much: again, thanks? Mostly plants: Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet. Pollan is the prototypical Bay-Area insufferable foodie. His documentary was a cringe-fest of pseudo-spiritual fawning. Rene Girard talks about how food has become a new status symbol as people compete for bragging rights about how good they eat; Pollan is their patron saint.
- proteinbased 10y ago
  Depends on your interpretation of plants. Legumes do contain a fair share of protein.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    But they don't contain a lot of the fats/acids that come from meat that are hard for the body to synthesize/metabolize. I'm not saying only eat meat/fish, but there's more than just protein.
    - proteinbased 10y ago
      I did not claim that legumes are some kind of wonder food with the ideal balance of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Of course you need to eat different kinds of vegetables/fruit/plants. As for fats, nuts are a good choice. But you can also buy all kinds of oils, if you are afraid that an all vegetable diet will leave you with too little of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetable_oils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetable_oils
- tinbucket 10y ago
  Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet. You jump pretty readily to a conclusion that isn't in what's said. "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us. You can eat nothing but potatoes, which are filled with starch, but a diet filled with plants is much more likely to involve a rich variety of very healthy foods. Some of these foods would be things like spinach, kale, carrots, beetroot, beans, sweet potatoes, blueberries, apples, bananas, strawberries, buckwheat, avocados, courgettes, onions and peppers. There's definitely starch and sugars in these, but you'd be hard pressed to eat them to anything like a toxic degree. To get them to a toxic degree, you'd need to eat processed food in quantity, which isn't what the maxim, which is undoubtably glib, is suggesting you do. I agree with your comment about food being used as yet another status symbol, and I generally find that a particularly unpleasant and tiresome way to treat something as essential as eating. I'd disagree that Pollan is the patron saint of foodies, though. He's perhaps the patron saint of plant-eating, slightly ascetic or vegan foodies. He's certainly not the patron saint of the paleo or keto crowd, both of which are very vocal and often produce very obnoxious members of the "food as status symbol" group. Out of interest, what would you recommend as a good, healthful diet? As you can probably guess from my reply, I think Pollan's maxim, which is certainly glib, offers a good working basis for a healthy diet.
sebleon 10y ago
"When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?" Ha, I'd love to hear what the soylent folks would say about this passage.
- dualogy 10y ago
  > today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important What a joke, the only thing that's known for sure about "polyphenols" (and practically all non-vitamin "antioxidants", that was the previous hype) is that a healthy human body rapidly excretes them, as well it should. The rest is hype, speculation, and the everlasting quest for the next "superfood".. Carotenoids, okay, anything that's in egg yolks gets my stamp of approval. Of course the much-loved beta-carotin is drastically useless and pales in comparison to any source of (nonsynthetic) preformed Vitamin A from non-carnivore sources.. (and who the heck eats carnivores!)
  - to3m 10y ago
    Carnivore meat you can eat: cat, crocodile, alligator. I'm sure there are others. Not very common in the west - if nothing else, herbivores and omnivores are easier to factory farm - but people do eat them. What about fish? Tuna, salmon, shark - they all eat meat.
    - dualogy 10y ago
      My bad, I meant mostly the carnivore livers but failed to spell this out properly
    - igravious 10y ago
      Come on. Who eats cats? Dogs yes, but cats? Crocodile and alligator I can imagine that that's a thing.
edem 10y ago
To skip the boring wall of text scroll to the end and read the 9 points of advice (if you are interested).
unknown_apostle 10y ago
For those interested: Nassim Taleb extends this kind of epistemological conservatism to other complex domains, such as economics, finance, religion and psychology. "You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear."
- rhelsing 10y ago
  Can you post a link to some of his work where he discusses those topics?
unknown_apostle 10y ago
Tangentially related, to the fans of Fidel Castro: there's an interesting line of thinking that Cubans became healthy not because of Cuba's phenomenal health care system, but because they had to simplify their diet considerably in the wake of the Soviet Union's implosion. They had to eat homegrown veggies because they had no other choice.
mishkovski 10y ago
I like the simplicity of the approach presented in this essay. >And at the end of it all, the answer to the question "Can we say what diet is best for health?" and by health, we mean longevity, vitality, weight control. All the good stuff that we all want. The answer is absolutely no, if what we mean is a very specific, prescriptive — my diet can beat your diet. So, you know, can we say whether the best Mediterranean diet is better than the best vegan diet or that’s better than the best paleo diet for human health? The answer is no. If what we mean, though, by "Can we say what diet is best for health?" is a basic theme of optimal living. Then the answer is a categorical yes. It’s incredibly clear from incredibly voluminous, incredibly consistent literature all around the world, diverse populations, diverse methods, observational epidemiology where you just watch and see what happens. Intervention trials where you assign people to diets. Randomized control trials and real-world experience with large populations like The Blue Zones. And frankly Michael Pollan pretty much nailed this one. Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. That really captures the essence of all of the world’s diets that are associated with good health outcomes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8C1W1Iefk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8C1W1Iefk
totally 10y ago
I remember reading this in the Sunday Magazine when it was first published. It has really stood up to the test of time.
garyrichardson 10y ago
I read this book in 2007 when it came out and loosely followed its advice. It changed my life. I dropped 30 pounds, 2 shirt sizes and several inches off of my waist. His "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." mantra is about the easiest diet to follow in the real world.

214 points by mishkovski 10y ago

Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy". Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a useful dietary recommendation.

wutbrodo 10y ago
"Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. In the 50 years between now and your hypothetical in which nutrition is "solved", advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt.
- wyager 10y ago
  > "Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. > science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. > advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt Much of the advice in the article is too specific and based on weak evidence. For example, the suggestion not to eat much meat; there are huge amounts of research suggesting that eating mostly meat is a very good approach. I'm not going to claim this is true, because as I said, it's actually pretty weak evidence, but there's certainly no good justification to authoritatively claim the opposite.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    > Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. Is this possible in the field of diet, considering the long timespan needed for experimentation, the numerous contributing factors, and the fact that study participants are very often not telling the truth?
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    > I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. Attacking writers (to no disagreement from me) is a pretty odd response to a defense of science's role in society. Science coverage is garbage, but that has approximately nothing to do with your point, nor my response to it. > No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. Oh for the love of God, this is a masterpiece of pedantry. You're mistaking "I assume everyone here is intelligent enough to understand what I'm getting at despite my lack of precision in a brief three-sentence comment" for "I don't understand what I'm talking about". Just because you don't fit the former statement doesn't mean I fit the latter.
- wallace_f 10y ago
  > In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. I think it's a pretty important concept for people to keep in mind that if you're not verifying your guesses with experimentation, you're fundamentally not doing science.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    Unless the general public is doing it for you. People vastly underestimate how thorough some enthusiast communities are.
  - didibus 10y ago
    I disagree. Doing science involves a mix of observation and experimentation. A lot of diet recommendations often do both. They've observed eating habits of healthy people over less healthy people, and then they've experimented by having a bunch of people try the diet, and after some years, they've observed again what was the effects. Some diets don't do that. They're sometimes based on a type of "that makes sense" intuition, like, our ancestors used to eat mostly meat, so we should eat like them. Or, this substance is known to absorb toxins, so obviously eating it will clear your bloodstream of them. These I admit aren't scientific. Though often those intuitive catch phrases are thrown on top of scientific dietary ideas as a way to convince people to it and sell a bunch of books and products.
cup 10y ago
Medicine, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing treatments, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about how each and every person should be treated, except for fairly straightforward things like "cut out a tumour". Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a new, synthetic digestive tract. --------- To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science or don't think the science is moving fast enough for your liking isn't helpful. Science is science. We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too.
- wyager 10y ago
  > To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science What makes you think A) that's my motivation or B) I don't understand the science? I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm well-versed in statistics and hypothesis testing, so I am at least equipped to make general observations about the predictive power of the field. > or don't think the science is moving fast enough When did I ever say anything to that effect? The hard biological sciences are moving extremely quickly, and soon nutrition will be subsumed into computational chemistry like the rest. > Science is science. And some fields of science have very low predictive power, like current nutrition. Do you really put psychology on the same ground as particle physics? > We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too. This is pretty much exactly what I'm saying about nutritionists, but for some reason you appear to be mad at me about it.
  - thanks4it 10y ago
    Statistics is full of p hacking bullshit. You can mislead and lie with stats and stull sound intelligent. You being a case in point. It's funny you mention psychology, they don't accept p-value assholes in their journals any longer. You have a hammer and see nails. Foolish little fuck you are.
- 10y ago
pierrec 10y ago
Sure, nutrition is littered with crackpot theories, voluntarily misleading research funded by corporations, smoke and mirrors, and so on. And if you only look at stuff that hits the news, then yes, things will change drastically every few years, probably forever. That's because people like sensationalism. However, there are reasonable diets that don't make the news, for example the "Mediterranean Diet". While it doesn't come with any extraordinary claims, it seems to have endured with a good reputation from the onset (it was invented in the 70s and first gained popularity in the 90s) (also note that this article awkwardly mentions it in a way that seems to ignore most studies on it, but that's not the point). Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is.
- wyager 10y ago
  > for example the "Mediterranean Diet". The irony here is delicious. You've gotten sucked into yet another evidence-free fad diet, but you're lecturing me on only listening to fad diets. And no, it's not a matter of "only looking at stuff that hits the news"; the FDA and FNS, which should be following strong scientific principles, change their dietary recommendations and rules all the time, without particularly strong evidence for doing so. > Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is. Do you make this claim based on strong evidence, or does this just sound like good Common Sense (tm) to you?
  - novia 10y ago
    The Mediterranean diet has been linked to longer lifespans. http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6674 http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6674 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15452459 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15452459
    - wyager 10y ago
      > The Mediterranean diet has been linked to longer lifespans Did you read anything I wrote? Every single fad diet in the world has multiple scientific papers showing how great it is. (p = 0.05. Nevermind that there were 1000 research projects about this fad diet that didn't get published because they didn't reject the null hypothesis, so who cares. Nevermind that nutrition scientists don't practice good behavior to mitigate the effect of the base rate fallacy on popular subjects.) Almost no scientific fields practice enough discipline to have very high predictive power. Particle physics mitigates base-rate failures by having an extremely high confidence requirement (5 sigma). Even with absolute best practices, it's sometimes not enough. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... Nutrition science is nowhere near best practices.
gibbitz 10y ago
I'm 42 and this is what the USDA has been saying all along with their food pyramids and four food groups and what have you. I think as a whole, nutritionists have always been on the same page, but those selling diets keep changing their opinions. Sure, there has been flip-flopping recently on fats and sugars, but the edict "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" doesn't concern itself with those. I can't recall anyone ever promoting a diet with less vegetables (even the Atkins fad diet known for it's meat and dairy included vegetables) and make sure to overeat at every meal and I highly doubt either of those will ever be considered a good idea (provided the vegetables aren't tainted by radiation or chemicals or the diet's authors aren't overly politicizing GMO or some other arbitrary thing about production). Fad diets are all about selling supplements and books and are indeed snake oil. The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff and that's what this article is really about.
- wyager 10y ago
  > I'm 42 and this is what the USDA has been saying all along with their food pyramids and four food groups and what have you. You are not remembering correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guid... > I think as a whole, nutritionists have always been on the same page, No, they certainly haven't. "Best practices" change all the time. This happened quite recently; http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/06/15/2015-dietary-guidelines.aspx http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/06/1... > but the edict "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" doesn't concern itself with those It also contradicts the recently popularized "keto" diet, which has roughly as much evidence behind it as any other popular dietary recommendation (i.e. not much). Really the only things we can say authoritatively is "if you miss out on certain nutrients, you get sick". Beyond that, we're not really very sure. > The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff Your mistake is in thinking that there's a definitive difference. Almost ever piece of nutritional research available today has an extremely low predictive power. Where you draw the wheat/chaff line is more or less arbitrary. Even what should, ideally, be the most staunchly scientific food-related organizations, the FDA and FNS, change the recommendations all the time because they're not actually using hard science.
dualogy 10y ago
> except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy". Even that's a myth, funnily enough. You don't need ascorbic acid per se, you just need.. ascorbate. With the acid we can synthesize the ascorbate our cells can work with. But we can also eat it directly pre-formed by other herbivores, contained in medium-rare meats or not-cremated-for-hours livers, or soft-boiled egg yolks etc.

FajitaNachos 10y ago

The first time I saw this quote was at our local Mod Market which has become our goto for a quick, healthyish meal. I wish there were more chains that shared a similar philosophy.

atomical 10y ago
Looks like a lot of processed meat and cheese to me.

ericdykstra 10y ago

This is a great article, and should be widely read beyond that piece of succinct eating advice. For example, this is a great paragraph: > In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so that a creature’s senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks ripe; that’s one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food has been designed expressly to deceive its senses — with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners. In fact, I recently read a book, The Dorito Effect which goes into this in much, much more detail, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. I bought it thinking it would be a light read, based on the title and cover, but it was more engaging, better researched, and more informative than I expected.

theparanoid 10y ago

Gary Taubes "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" [1] is worth reading. Previously he wrote about bad science. [1] https://nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html https://nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-bee...

Illotus 10y ago
Not much benefit in reading old stuff like that. Some of it has been validated, some not. Insulin as the great cause for fat gain hasn't really panned out. On the other hand now we've had some large studies that give an inkling that eating a lot of fat can be healthy for the heart and on the other hand replacing saturated fats with carbs(instead of unsaturated fats) is basically status quo.

umberway 10y ago

Nutrition, medicine, psychology are beset by empiricism: trying to find facts without having theories to support them. Journalists then make hay with the results, hinting at conclusions and advice for the public, using the authority of Science, but really bringing it into disrepute. An awful lot of research money has been wasted in this way and of course much of the work is not reproducible.

charlieflowers 10y ago
>> Nutrition, medicine, psychology are beset by empiricism: trying to find facts without having theories to support them. Really? Seems to me there are a ton of theories but precious few facts. Atkins, low carb, high carb, gluten free, etc. Theories everywhere. But science simply cannot tell us what foods to eat and what to avoid. It's very frustrating to me how limited our knowledge of the human body is.
- umberway 10y ago
  The 'facts' that I referred to are the results of correlation studies as published in science journals. The diets you mention are mainstream fads. You're right, though, it is frustrating! My personal opinion is that it is the way we use food for pleasure and comfort that it is to blame. We are literally getting high on what we eat, which is deleterious for health if performed without break for long periods. But there's no obvious way for a scientist to address this idea at present; it would be considered too subjective and thus ignored by the majority.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    fad - an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities; a craze. synonyms: craze, vogue, trend, fashion, mode, enthusiasm, passion, obsession, mania, rage, compulsion, fixation, fetish, fancy, whim, fascination "when I was a kid, no fad was more apparent than the coonskin cap" I disagree calling all diets fads, just because the theories haven't been definitely proven or disproven, if they are accurate at making predictions it suggests there's something to the theory does it not?

ENTP 10y ago

When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.

deleted 10y ago
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Freestyler_3 10y ago
I can eat anything and wont gain weight. It really seems like there is too much diversity in how we handle food inside our body. The best diet is to try some things(experiment) and do whatever works best, not what feels best. Too many of these diets read like they are the most fun thing to do in the world. Also a lot of people have the tendency to get their goal and then stop the diet only to gain weight again (then dismiss the diet because it didn't work) And this gain shows how people can work differently inside. Some will not gain back the weight after a diet, others would need to diet for life.
- wruza 10y ago
  This worked for me too, I could eat any amounts of anything and weight even less than normal. Then I realized (well, my gastroenterologist did) that my liver had a pretty common pathology all that time and it started to make harm. We quickly fixed that and now I have to choose what to eat, because gaining, say, 5kg in one week is a no-brainer now. This is the story of one specific issue with a human body, that has tens if not hundreds of them.
  - Freestyler_3 10y ago
    Its surprising how fast things can change. If it ever changes for me I know ill have it hard because I eat a lot of snacks and delicious sandwiches.
- sametmax 10y ago

problems 10y ago

Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like "avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" and a lot of "avoid processed anything". While I'm sure there's some arguable benefits to these things, I think it's paranoid or stupid to dismiss something just for being "processed". What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more processed necessitates any loss. Maybe I just have no sense for quality, but I've tried paying double for "organic" products and similar - only to be repeatedly disappointed with products that taste worse or equal and spoil quicker - I'll never buy them again, it just doesn't make sense to pay more for it.

aaron695 10y ago
Although I totally agree, per the op article > but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed. It might be an ok rule of thumb. Highly processed food can of course be good for you, but mostly isn't. It's bad science but a working stereotype. Organic is of course a marketing gimmick and as per the article > you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
markatkinson 10y ago
Yes I am inclined to agree. There are a few lines in what I read that shoot up red flags (I only read the first 25% and last 10%). However I agree with the overall advice. I read somewhere that its best to avoid any food that is sold in packaging. I try to stick to that within reason.
- schiffern 10y ago
  Pollen gave a fascinating interview on Democracy Now! talking about how food companies began cleverly gaming the metrics, marketing smaller numbers of ingredients and real sugar (yes, sugar!) as though they were health claims. His new advice? "Don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised." https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_author_michael_pollans_new https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_aut...

reflexive 10y ago

Pollan's famous "maxim" manages to be condescending, unhelpful and inaccurate - all at the same time. Eat food: duh Not too much: again, thanks? Mostly plants: Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet. Pollan is the prototypical Bay-Area insufferable foodie. His documentary was a cringe-fest of pseudo-spiritual fawning. Rene Girard talks about how food has become a new status symbol as people compete for bragging rights about how good they eat; Pollan is their patron saint.

proteinbased 10y ago
Depends on your interpretation of plants. Legumes do contain a fair share of protein.
- tracker1 10y ago
  But they don't contain a lot of the fats/acids that come from meat that are hard for the body to synthesize/metabolize. I'm not saying only eat meat/fish, but there's more than just protein.
  - proteinbased 10y ago
    I did not claim that legumes are some kind of wonder food with the ideal balance of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Of course you need to eat different kinds of vegetables/fruit/plants. As for fats, nuts are a good choice. But you can also buy all kinds of oils, if you are afraid that an all vegetable diet will leave you with too little of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetable_oils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetable_oils
tinbucket 10y ago
Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet. You jump pretty readily to a conclusion that isn't in what's said. "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us. You can eat nothing but potatoes, which are filled with starch, but a diet filled with plants is much more likely to involve a rich variety of very healthy foods. Some of these foods would be things like spinach, kale, carrots, beetroot, beans, sweet potatoes, blueberries, apples, bananas, strawberries, buckwheat, avocados, courgettes, onions and peppers. There's definitely starch and sugars in these, but you'd be hard pressed to eat them to anything like a toxic degree. To get them to a toxic degree, you'd need to eat processed food in quantity, which isn't what the maxim, which is undoubtably glib, is suggesting you do. I agree with your comment about food being used as yet another status symbol, and I generally find that a particularly unpleasant and tiresome way to treat something as essential as eating. I'd disagree that Pollan is the patron saint of foodies, though. He's perhaps the patron saint of plant-eating, slightly ascetic or vegan foodies. He's certainly not the patron saint of the paleo or keto crowd, both of which are very vocal and often produce very obnoxious members of the "food as status symbol" group. Out of interest, what would you recommend as a good, healthful diet? As you can probably guess from my reply, I think Pollan's maxim, which is certainly glib, offers a good working basis for a healthy diet.

sebleon 10y ago

"When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?" Ha, I'd love to hear what the soylent folks would say about this passage.

dualogy 10y ago
> today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important What a joke, the only thing that's known for sure about "polyphenols" (and practically all non-vitamin "antioxidants", that was the previous hype) is that a healthy human body rapidly excretes them, as well it should. The rest is hype, speculation, and the everlasting quest for the next "superfood".. Carotenoids, okay, anything that's in egg yolks gets my stamp of approval. Of course the much-loved beta-carotin is drastically useless and pales in comparison to any source of (nonsynthetic) preformed Vitamin A from non-carnivore sources.. (and who the heck eats carnivores!)
- to3m 10y ago
  Carnivore meat you can eat: cat, crocodile, alligator. I'm sure there are others. Not very common in the west - if nothing else, herbivores and omnivores are easier to factory farm - but people do eat them. What about fish? Tuna, salmon, shark - they all eat meat.
  - dualogy 10y ago
    My bad, I meant mostly the carnivore livers but failed to spell this out properly
  - igravious 10y ago
    Come on. Who eats cats? Dogs yes, but cats? Crocodile and alligator I can imagine that that's a thing.

edem 10y ago

To skip the boring wall of text scroll to the end and read the 9 points of advice (if you are interested).

unknown_apostle 10y ago

For those interested: Nassim Taleb extends this kind of epistemological conservatism to other complex domains, such as economics, finance, religion and psychology. "You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear."

rhelsing 10y ago
Can you post a link to some of his work where he discusses those topics?

unknown_apostle 10y ago

Tangentially related, to the fans of Fidel Castro: there's an interesting line of thinking that Cubans became healthy not because of Cuba's phenomenal health care system, but because they had to simplify their diet considerably in the wake of the Soviet Union's implosion. They had to eat homegrown veggies because they had no other choice.

mishkovski 10y ago

I like the simplicity of the approach presented in this essay. >And at the end of it all, the answer to the question "Can we say what diet is best for health?" and by health, we mean longevity, vitality, weight control. All the good stuff that we all want. The answer is absolutely no, if what we mean is a very specific, prescriptive — my diet can beat your diet. So, you know, can we say whether the best Mediterranean diet is better than the best vegan diet or that’s better than the best paleo diet for human health? The answer is no. If what we mean, though, by "Can we say what diet is best for health?" is a basic theme of optimal living. Then the answer is a categorical yes. It’s incredibly clear from incredibly voluminous, incredibly consistent literature all around the world, diverse populations, diverse methods, observational epidemiology where you just watch and see what happens. Intervention trials where you assign people to diets. Randomized control trials and real-world experience with large populations like The Blue Zones. And frankly Michael Pollan pretty much nailed this one. Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. That really captures the essence of all of the world’s diets that are associated with good health outcomes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8C1W1Iefk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8C1W1Iefk

totally 10y ago

I remember reading this in the Sunday Magazine when it was first published. It has really stood up to the test of time.

garyrichardson 10y ago

I read this book in 2007 when it came out and loosely followed its advice. It changed my life. I dropped 30 pounds, 2 shirt sizes and several inches off of my waist. His "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." mantra is about the easiest diet to follow in the real world.