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The author Michael Pollan summed it up fairly well with "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." When in doubt, try to think what humans evolved to do and to p

The author Michael Pollan summed it up fairly well with "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." When in doubt, try to think what humans evolved to do and to process, and try to mimic that. For nutrition, did we evolve with enormous servings of fast food, donuts, and spend millions of years eating highly refined highly concentrated packaged garbage packed full of preservatives, chemicals, and mystery substances, all consumed in absurd quantities? Or did we evolve to eat a diverse range of plants with occasional proteins and meats? For health and exercise, did we spend millions of years sitting around watching TV and being screen sloths? Or did we spend millions of years walking dozens of miles every day, with near constant physical activity in some form or another? As for studies and raw data, NIH pubmed https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/, NHS, EU, all have interesting raw largely non-opinionated information to scan through.

stevefeinstein 9y ago
You could argue that evolution will adapt to processed white food as a dietary staple. I dare say the diabetes and heart disease epidemic is the start of natural selection weeding out the genes less tolerant of high carb, high fat diets.
- notadoc 9y ago
  Sure, give in a few million years and I am sure we will be optimized for packaged donuts.
gmiller123456 9y ago
> When in doubt, try to think what humans evolved to do and to process, and try to mimic that. You mean die at age 30? Sorry for being sarcastic, but that's actually really horrible advice, and exactly the type of advice OP is trying to avoid. Please back up your claims with scientific evidence, not conjecture. I think part of the reason that there is so little reliable and definitive science is that people living long enough for nutrition to be a problem is a relatively new thing. Just 100 years ago the average person in the US died in their early 50's. And during that time our medical knowledge has been increasing rapidly. So it's really hard to isolate a person's diet from everything else that's changing.

stevefeinstein 9y ago

You could argue that evolution will adapt to processed white food as a dietary staple. I dare say the diabetes and heart disease epidemic is the start of natural selection weeding out the genes less tolerant of high carb, high fat diets.

notadoc 9y ago
Sure, give in a few million years and I am sure we will be optimized for packaged donuts.

gmiller123456 9y ago

> When in doubt, try to think what humans evolved to do and to process, and try to mimic that. You mean die at age 30? Sorry for being sarcastic, but that's actually really horrible advice, and exactly the type of advice OP is trying to avoid. Please back up your claims with scientific evidence, not conjecture. I think part of the reason that there is so little reliable and definitive science is that people living long enough for nutrition to be a problem is a relatively new thing. Just 100 years ago the average person in the US died in their early 50's. And during that time our medical knowledge has been increasing rapidly. So it's really hard to isolate a person's diet from everything else that's changing.