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There is no merit to that approach... it's potentially harmful. You wouldn't notice the affects of a diet that is devoid of iron for several weeks... you espec

by ceedan 9y ago

There is no merit to that approach... it's potentially harmful. You wouldn't notice the affects of a diet that is devoid of iron for several weeks... you especially wouldn't notice the affects after individual meals. Once you become iron deficient and anemic, you'll start "feeling good" from sugary foods and stimulants that offset the exhaustion from low red blood cells. You wouldn't even feel better from eating iron rich meals until about a week. There's a similar story for every other vitamin.

contravariant 9y ago
Surely there's at least some merit to staying away from food that makes you feel 'strange' immediately after eating it?
- ovao 9y ago
  That unfortunately only goes so far as to help you avoid (or recognize) food poisoning, and not much more.
  - contravariant 9y ago
    Well, I think it also prevents sugar crashes, caffeine spikes and a whole lot of other minor or possibly severe problems. It doesn't automatically create a good diet, but it's better than nothing. And at least we can both agree that it's effective, which is more than you can say for some of the nutrition advice out there. Unless there is a case where feeling weird is actually a good thing, but I can only come up with fairly extreme examples where that would be the case, which comes closer to medicine than nutrition.
    - ovao 9y ago
      A good point about sugar. Sugar’s interesting, though, in that it produces a kind of euphoria before it results in the feeling of crashing (usually moderately long afterward). For that reason it can be difficult to correlate the feeling of crashing with the consumption of sugar, but relatively easy to correlate sugar with the good feeling. Off-hand I can’t think of any food that produces an immediate and significant bad feeling unless it’s rotten, spoiled or otherwise intolerable.
maxander 9y ago
There is almost a 0% chance that the GP, as (presumably) an educated and well-fed citizen of a first-world country, has a serious vitamin deficiency. That's not the failure case that he's avoiding. My guess would be that that "weird feeling," in most cases, is a sugar rush from eating something with a high glycemic index; do that a lot [1] and it puts pressure on your liver and kidneys and otherwise causes non-optimal results. Not as serious as an iron deficiency, certainly, but worth paying attention to. [1] Most people do. White bread has a high glycemic index.

by ceedan 9y ago

contravariant 9y ago

Surely there's at least some merit to staying away from food that makes you feel 'strange' immediately after eating it?

ovao 9y ago
That unfortunately only goes so far as to help you avoid (or recognize) food poisoning, and not much more.
- contravariant 9y ago
  Well, I think it also prevents sugar crashes, caffeine spikes and a whole lot of other minor or possibly severe problems. It doesn't automatically create a good diet, but it's better than nothing. And at least we can both agree that it's effective, which is more than you can say for some of the nutrition advice out there. Unless there is a case where feeling weird is actually a good thing, but I can only come up with fairly extreme examples where that would be the case, which comes closer to medicine than nutrition.
  - ovao 9y ago
    A good point about sugar. Sugar’s interesting, though, in that it produces a kind of euphoria before it results in the feeling of crashing (usually moderately long afterward). For that reason it can be difficult to correlate the feeling of crashing with the consumption of sugar, but relatively easy to correlate sugar with the good feeling. Off-hand I can’t think of any food that produces an immediate and significant bad feeling unless it’s rotten, spoiled or otherwise intolerable.

maxander 9y ago

There is almost a 0% chance that the GP, as (presumably) an educated and well-fed citizen of a first-world country, has a serious vitamin deficiency. That's not the failure case that he's avoiding. My guess would be that that "weird feeling," in most cases, is a sugar rush from eating something with a high glycemic index; do that a lot [1] and it puts pressure on your liver and kidneys and otherwise causes non-optimal results. Not as serious as an iron deficiency, certainly, but worth paying attention to. [1] Most people do. White bread has a high glycemic index.