6 ms·

Does anyone believe anything these articles say anymore? About two weeks ago, two somewhat prominent doctors from Harvard Medical School got into an enormous d

Does anyone believe anything these articles say anymore? About two weeks ago, two somewhat prominent doctors from Harvard Medical School got into an enormous disagreement over whether or not coconut oil was “healthy” or “killing you”. No one knows anything under the current system. There is absolutely no way the public can reasonably believe yay or nay on any new thing about healthy living.

ChrisSD 8y ago
There hasn't been any truly new thing in healthy living in decades. Everybody knows they should exercise regularly and eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. Everything else is purely of academic interest at the moment.
- chadash 8y ago
  I'd expand those recommendations a little bit: - Exercise regularly - Eat a variety of fruits and veggies - Don't overeat, especially junk food (we can argue over which foods are good or bad for you, but a lot of our diets consist of things such as potato chips that are obviously bad for you, at least in large quantities) - Stay hydrated - Don't be too stressed
  - bosie 8y ago
    Sleep? ;)
- always_good 8y ago
  Yeah, the whole appeal of the supplement industry, exercise infomercial contraptions, and insulin regimens for T2 diabetes is that they don't require lifestyle change which is the whole challenge of being healthy.
- castlecrasher2 8y ago
  There are a few things that have been useful, though I'm not sure if they were recent but considering how we in the US were raised to eat they've helped me quite a bit: the effect of low-carb diet and intermittent fasting on insulin resistance are the two that have helped me recently.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  There have been some interesting studies on intermittent fasting. Refined sugar has been identified as a thing to avoid. We have reversed a lot of flawed studies (IE fat is bad).
always_good 8y ago
Well, the issue is that people will buy things like probiotics with the belief that it's helping them, and probiotics being universally healthy is one of the most dogmatic nutrition facts that anyone can recite. If there is controversy here, then people would likely err better by not buying extra health supplements like probiotics that may be causing harm. Same with coconut oil. I go out of my way to use it because I heard it was healthy despite it infusing everything I cook with a cheap coconut taste. If there is controversy, then I would just use other oil products. It's not like it's a debate on which way to spool your toilet roll where inaction is inconsequential.
- Nursie 8y ago
  The only 'controversy' around coconut oil is that it is very high in saturated fat - much more so than lard, beef dripping or even butter. It doesn't appear to have any mitigating health factors, as had been claimed (a lot, by a lot of people and a lot of the press), that would count against this. So it appears to be a really unhealthy fat, which should be used sparingly.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    There is still a debate about how unhealthy all unsaturated fat is - so no, they shouldn't avoid it.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      ... which is basically making Bucephalus355's point for them. There's too much confusion, too many unsubstantiated claims.
  - abecedarius 8y ago
    trans-fats are unambiguously bad for you. There's been a lot of spillover demonization of saturated fats which I don't trust at all.
  - mrfusion 8y ago
    Well it has medium chain fatty acids. Most saturated fats are long chain.
collinf 8y ago
This is so true. I used to be consume articles about healthy eating, but it after all the contradiction I have decided that I'm done reading about it all. I keep it simple with the opinion that eating protein, your veggies and drinking water will be near optimal for most humans, and anything after is just not worth the effort to optimize. 80/20, people.
- atomical 8y ago
  Reading the latest research on healthy eating isn't a path to health -- especially if the research hasn't been replicated. It's just a news article on preliminary research. Why be upset about that?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Because regular people read this bullshit uncritically, journalists write more pop articles based on that, which makes more people read it... and suddenly your mother starts calling you about pills you should/should not be taking, and your SO starts to insist on random dietary changes. Even if this stuff doesn't cause huge hurt, it definitely causes annoyance.
    - pc86 8y ago
      I can assure you that "regular people" are not reading journal articles on the latest advances in nutrition research.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        They are not (unless someone quotes one in a Facebook comments "debate"). But this is a BBC article, and regular people read that.
- drb91 8y ago
  Make sure you get some fat and carbs in there too, nutrition is nutrition. I've concluded that eating is good for your health.
nyae 8y ago
Well of course results vary from paper to paper. I'm sure we all know that science progresses as general consensus. It's important to follow larger trends, not the day to day experiments.
kalleboo 8y ago
http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com
atomical 8y ago
You could say the same thing about any discipline where professionals have opposing viewpoints. It's nothing new that there is disagreement within a discipline. Some of the topics that people are complaining about are very new. So of course there are going to be contradictory findings before it is settled. It's important to use accepted science like Cochrane collab. https://us.cochrane.org/ https://us.cochrane.org/
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "You could say the same thing about any discipline where professionals have opposing viewpoints. " I guess the problem in nutrition is that it impacts everybody's daily decisions. It doesn't make much difference to me if string theory or super symmetry works but it makes a difference to know whether I should avoid coconut oil or not.
  - atomical 8y ago
    If someone wants to experiment and be on the cutting edge they can follow the latest news stories. The stakes really aren't that high for most people. Those who follow the standard dietary advice can live a full life.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Totally agree. Follow the normal food advice and you are already 95% there.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    Sometimes theoretical physics makes a big difference in our daily lives too. For example if we live in a multiverse (quantum many worlds or inflationary) and if that implies immortality.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Tell that to... well, vast majority of people. Problem with dietary studies isn't internal disagreement - it's that every iteration gets published in pop press as if it was scientific consensus, creating fads readily exploited by marketers. It's a shitshow.
tootie 8y ago
Citation? The pro-coconut oil camp seems to be mostly based on traditional medicine claims. The science seems pretty uniformly opposed. Every study yields fresh data but it usually takes many years and a longitudinal study to get confident conclusions.
- obmelvin 8y ago
  Do you mind sharing? When I skimmed the Harvard article my take away was just that lots of fat is bad for you (duh), but there was nothing innately bad about coconut oil. Just don't delude oneself into thinking fat from coconut oil is healthy.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    I believe the "inately bad" thing about coconut oil is that it's more than 80% saturated fat (wikipedia says 82.5).
    - morsma 8y ago
      What's wrong with saturated fatty acids?
      - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
        Scientists think they cause cardiovascular disease: There are strong, consistent, and graded relationships between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol levels, and the mass occurrence of cardiovascular disease.[5] The relationships are accepted as causal.[24][25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    I think the failure is in presuming that the number of double bonds in the carbon chains of the fatty acids is the dominant factor, when clearly overall chain length and the position and orientation of the double-bonds are also significant factors. Researcher says: "saturated fat is bad for you." I ask: "Is laurin (tri-lauric acid homoglyceride) worse or better than stearin? When lipases release the fatty acids, is free lauric acid worse or better than free stearic acid? Do acetic acid and formic acid count as saturated fats in your analysis? Is there a significant metabolic difference between eating fats as mono-, di-, or triglycerides, or as non-esterified fatty acids? Does the comparison with unsaturated fats change if the fats in question are exposed to heat and oxygen prior to consumption?" Chemically, those fats are all different. Metabolically, many of them are transformed via catalytic proteins into different chemicals, with certain steps being rate-limited, or resource-competitive with other steps. But it appears as though no one really knows all that much about fat, other than you need to eat a certain quantity of fatty acids with one double bond three carbons from the terminal end (omega-3) because the human body cannot produce those by itself, and they are required for certain hormones and structures. As far as I know, coconut oil, when compared to most other common vegetable oils, has a higher fraction of saturated fatty acids in it, but those fatty acids are also significantly shorter than the fatty acids typically found in animal fats and other vegetable oils. They are different fats, and a human body digests them differently. Do they follow different metabolic chains to achieve the same result, or do they produce different results? I don't know. No research I have seen has delved that deeply into those properties of dietary fats.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
heisenbergs 8y ago
the issue is rather the quality of the articles and what we as humans in general prefer to read. we'd rather read about an extreme (this is the greatest, this is the worst) or a conflict (person a says the opposite to person b). it's basically just a symptom of decaying journalistic standards. incidentally it's often also cheaper to produce such content. there is probably an academic consensus that goes one way or the other, but our journalism has decayed enough that they don't even bother researching this.
thehnguy 8y ago
Sums up my feelings. At this point, I firmly believe that the negative physiological consequences from the stress about nutrition outweigh any benefits. Eat intelligently (I think we can agree that processed foods and sugar is less good than fresh veggies), and lower the stress.
caffed 8y ago
For those wanting some reference to the Harvard Medical School coconut oil war: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-a-harvard-professor-is-calling-coconut-oil-pure-poison/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-a-harvard-professor-is-call...
im3w1l 8y ago
For all the back and forth there are some things we do know. Get your macro- and micronutrients. Don't eat too many toxins and heavy metals. Too much sugar is bad. You'll probably be mostly fine whether you eat coconut oil or not, as long as the quantities are not completely unreasonable.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Mostly agree, but: > toxins Can you define what you mean in particular? Because half of the nonsense in the dietary space is talk about "toxins" (and "chemicals").
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Most commonly they're the defense chemicals employed by plants to discourage animals from eating them, like saponins or tannins. Sometimes they're the chemicals sprayed on plants by humans to discourage non-human animals from eating them, or non-edible plants from competing for resources. It might just be a chemical vital to the organism that coincidentially interferes with digestion of essential nutrients for other organisms, like phytic acid or oxalic acid. They might even be like capsaicin, to discourage one type of animal from eating a fruit (mammals), while a more preferred animal is completely unaffected (birds). Cassava, better known in the US as the source material for tapioca, contains chemicals that can easily decompose into poisonous HCN. If you crush the cassava, as when biting it raw, the decomposition enzyme mixes with the chemicals and produces poison. If you leach and ferment the root in water, the toxins are removed. If you grind the root into paste and let the HCN escape into the atmosphere, the toxins are removed. Without those toxins, the food is safe[r] to eat. Food is made of a lot of different chemicals, and digestion encompasses a lot of different catalyzed chemical reactions. Some chemicals will slow down, speed up, prevent, or enable reactions between other chemicals. A lot of that just gets oversimplified to "toxin" because the information has to be understandable to people who don't have a doctorate-level education in biochemistry. Because of that oversimplification, scammers can exploit the intentional vagueness and ambiguity to turn fear into money. In that case, the "toxins" are just bullshit designed to scare you into buying stuff. The easiest way to distinguish between fact and FUD is by asking the claimant to name the toxin. If they can say "cyanogenic glucosides produce cyanide poisons on maceration that interfere with the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood" it's probably a real thing. If they say "big agri-corporations spray them on all the food to keep us unhealthy, fat, and depressed" it's probably bullshit.
mogadsheu 8y ago
Agreed, it's sensationalism, both the writer and the conductor of the study. My experience in academia is that researchers rely heavily on controversy and drama to further their studies. It's part of the game they have to play to continue to receive funding or gain attention in the public eye. The author of the paper seems like he's marketing a problem that he'll try to solve in the coming years, by building a company that offers bespoke probiotic solutions based on analysis of an individual customer's microbiome. Not a bad business model honestly, it's spreadshirt for your gut. NB: I run a nutrition company and have an MS
DoreenMichele 8y ago
If you have a specific diagnosis, an awesome bullshit detector and hang out in the right circles, it is possible to make some sense of things and make informed choices that make a meaningful difference in your life. It's only nigh useless if you are some "standard issue normal human with no alterations (aka health issues)" and want generic advice about what works for everyone all the time. Then it's pretty eye-roll worthy, for what I feel are kind of obvious reasons.
kilo_bravo_3 8y ago
>There is absolutely no way the public can reasonably believe yay or nay on any new thing about healthy living. There is nothing new about healthy living. Eat plants. Drink water. Sleep well. Don't add salt to anything. Avoid sugar. Eat meat only in moderation. Fiber from beans makes you poo good. Coffee and alcohol in moderation is alright. Drinking to the point of visible external intoxication is not "in moderation". Exercise, even if only a walk in the evening. If you are overweight, eat fewer calories each day than your body needs to function. If you are underweight, eat more calories each day than your body needs to function. None of that sells books, or drives eyeballs to the latest ad-infested "Doctors say x will kill ya!" article.
- firethief 8y ago
  > Don't add salt to anything. This is a good guideline for people who are on a sad diet and get plenty of sodium from processed foods and meats, but someone following the other guidelines you list and not salting anything is likely to be more at risk of low sodium than high, depending on their personal risk factors (HBP and genetic history). (assuming the reason "avoid overly processed foods" isn't listed is that it goes without saying)
  - kazinator 8y ago
    I followed the low sodium bullshit for more than a decade and never put two and two together: that what was making me debilitatingly drowsy on rest days after multiple days of vigorous exercise was the lack of sodium. Almost exactly year ago I started adding salt to everything. Not only did the drowsiness go away, I haven't had single muscle cramp in the twelve months since.
- Severian 8y ago
  Yeah, you need some salt if you eat unprocessed food. Sorry.
- Grue3 8y ago
  I can see some problems with your diet, such as it does nothing to prevent iodine deficiency, since you don't eat (iodized) salt, drink only water and basically don't eat anything containing iodine.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
The general public can rest relatively assured that, when there is a broad consensus on some subject, with numerous studies published over the years repeatedly finding similar results, it's a good idea to follow the scientific advice (that typically follows the consensus). For example, in what regards coconut oil, it's far from just two doctors from Harvard recently saying that coconut oil is bad for you. From the wikipedia page on the vegetable fat: Due to its high levels of saturated fat, the World Health Organization, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, United States Food and Drug Administration, American Heart Association, American Dietetic Association, British National Health Service, British Nutrition Foundation, and Dietitians of Canada advise that coconut oil consumption should be limited or avoided. The same goes for various allegedly "controversial" subjects like saturated fat and heart disease, sugar, salt, etc. You can typically find advice by multiple public health organisations and multiple studies reporting findings very similar to each other, stretching back decades. Just because then a new study comes out that bucks the trend, which is immediately widely reported in the popular news as a "groundbreaking new study", or because someone (often, not an expert) writes a book that tells "the truth" about the subject, is no reason to get confused. In science always follows the consensus, as in business always follow the money.
- ilaksh 8y ago
  The history of science is of the most established and popular beliefs being he laughingstock of tomorrow.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    Really? So then we can't trust science - is that the idea?
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Yeah, I'm about considering tossing food in water. If it floats, witch (burn it!), and if it sinks, its not a witch. Cause that's about as "scientific" our nutrition analysis is. Aside not eating carbohydrates (that whole diabetes thing), I have no clue what's 'healthy' and what's not.
hesarenu 8y ago
Coconut oil is the default cooking oil for most of South India. An analysis with north India might provide good data set.

ChrisSD 8y ago

There hasn't been any truly new thing in healthy living in decades. Everybody knows they should exercise regularly and eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. Everything else is purely of academic interest at the moment.

chadash 8y ago
I'd expand those recommendations a little bit: - Exercise regularly - Eat a variety of fruits and veggies - Don't overeat, especially junk food (we can argue over which foods are good or bad for you, but a lot of our diets consist of things such as potato chips that are obviously bad for you, at least in large quantities) - Stay hydrated - Don't be too stressed
- bosie 8y ago
  Sleep? ;)
always_good 8y ago
Yeah, the whole appeal of the supplement industry, exercise infomercial contraptions, and insulin regimens for T2 diabetes is that they don't require lifestyle change which is the whole challenge of being healthy.
castlecrasher2 8y ago
There are a few things that have been useful, though I'm not sure if they were recent but considering how we in the US were raised to eat they've helped me quite a bit: the effect of low-carb diet and intermittent fasting on insulin resistance are the two that have helped me recently.
Skunkleton 8y ago
There have been some interesting studies on intermittent fasting. Refined sugar has been identified as a thing to avoid. We have reversed a lot of flawed studies (IE fat is bad).

always_good 8y ago

Well, the issue is that people will buy things like probiotics with the belief that it's helping them, and probiotics being universally healthy is one of the most dogmatic nutrition facts that anyone can recite. If there is controversy here, then people would likely err better by not buying extra health supplements like probiotics that may be causing harm. Same with coconut oil. I go out of my way to use it because I heard it was healthy despite it infusing everything I cook with a cheap coconut taste. If there is controversy, then I would just use other oil products. It's not like it's a debate on which way to spool your toilet roll where inaction is inconsequential.

Nursie 8y ago
The only 'controversy' around coconut oil is that it is very high in saturated fat - much more so than lard, beef dripping or even butter. It doesn't appear to have any mitigating health factors, as had been claimed (a lot, by a lot of people and a lot of the press), that would count against this. So it appears to be a really unhealthy fat, which should be used sparingly.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  There is still a debate about how unhealthy all unsaturated fat is - so no, they shouldn't avoid it.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    ... which is basically making Bucephalus355's point for them. There's too much confusion, too many unsubstantiated claims.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  trans-fats are unambiguously bad for you. There's been a lot of spillover demonization of saturated fats which I don't trust at all.
- mrfusion 8y ago
  Well it has medium chain fatty acids. Most saturated fats are long chain.

collinf 8y ago

This is so true. I used to be consume articles about healthy eating, but it after all the contradiction I have decided that I'm done reading about it all. I keep it simple with the opinion that eating protein, your veggies and drinking water will be near optimal for most humans, and anything after is just not worth the effort to optimize. 80/20, people.

atomical 8y ago
Reading the latest research on healthy eating isn't a path to health -- especially if the research hasn't been replicated. It's just a news article on preliminary research. Why be upset about that?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Because regular people read this bullshit uncritically, journalists write more pop articles based on that, which makes more people read it... and suddenly your mother starts calling you about pills you should/should not be taking, and your SO starts to insist on random dietary changes. Even if this stuff doesn't cause huge hurt, it definitely causes annoyance.
  - pc86 8y ago
    I can assure you that "regular people" are not reading journal articles on the latest advances in nutrition research.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      They are not (unless someone quotes one in a Facebook comments "debate"). But this is a BBC article, and regular people read that.
drb91 8y ago
Make sure you get some fat and carbs in there too, nutrition is nutrition. I've concluded that eating is good for your health.

nyae 8y ago

Well of course results vary from paper to paper. I'm sure we all know that science progresses as general consensus. It's important to follow larger trends, not the day to day experiments.

kalleboo 8y ago

http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com

atomical 8y ago

You could say the same thing about any discipline where professionals have opposing viewpoints. It's nothing new that there is disagreement within a discipline. Some of the topics that people are complaining about are very new. So of course there are going to be contradictory findings before it is settled. It's important to use accepted science like Cochrane collab. https://us.cochrane.org/ https://us.cochrane.org/

maxxxxx 8y ago
"You could say the same thing about any discipline where professionals have opposing viewpoints. " I guess the problem in nutrition is that it impacts everybody's daily decisions. It doesn't make much difference to me if string theory or super symmetry works but it makes a difference to know whether I should avoid coconut oil or not.
- atomical 8y ago
  If someone wants to experiment and be on the cutting edge they can follow the latest news stories. The stakes really aren't that high for most people. Those who follow the standard dietary advice can live a full life.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Totally agree. Follow the normal food advice and you are already 95% there.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  Sometimes theoretical physics makes a big difference in our daily lives too. For example if we live in a multiverse (quantum many worlds or inflationary) and if that implies immortality.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Tell that to... well, vast majority of people. Problem with dietary studies isn't internal disagreement - it's that every iteration gets published in pop press as if it was scientific consensus, creating fads readily exploited by marketers. It's a shitshow.

tootie 8y ago

Citation? The pro-coconut oil camp seems to be mostly based on traditional medicine claims. The science seems pretty uniformly opposed. Every study yields fresh data but it usually takes many years and a longitudinal study to get confident conclusions.

obmelvin 8y ago
Do you mind sharing? When I skimmed the Harvard article my take away was just that lots of fat is bad for you (duh), but there was nothing innately bad about coconut oil. Just don't delude oneself into thinking fat from coconut oil is healthy.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  I believe the "inately bad" thing about coconut oil is that it's more than 80% saturated fat (wikipedia says 82.5).
  - morsma 8y ago
    What's wrong with saturated fatty acids?
    - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      Scientists think they cause cardiovascular disease: There are strong, consistent, and graded relationships between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol levels, and the mass occurrence of cardiovascular disease.[5] The relationships are accepted as causal.[24][25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  I think the failure is in presuming that the number of double bonds in the carbon chains of the fatty acids is the dominant factor, when clearly overall chain length and the position and orientation of the double-bonds are also significant factors. Researcher says: "saturated fat is bad for you." I ask: "Is laurin (tri-lauric acid homoglyceride) worse or better than stearin? When lipases release the fatty acids, is free lauric acid worse or better than free stearic acid? Do acetic acid and formic acid count as saturated fats in your analysis? Is there a significant metabolic difference between eating fats as mono-, di-, or triglycerides, or as non-esterified fatty acids? Does the comparison with unsaturated fats change if the fats in question are exposed to heat and oxygen prior to consumption?" Chemically, those fats are all different. Metabolically, many of them are transformed via catalytic proteins into different chemicals, with certain steps being rate-limited, or resource-competitive with other steps. But it appears as though no one really knows all that much about fat, other than you need to eat a certain quantity of fatty acids with one double bond three carbons from the terminal end (omega-3) because the human body cannot produce those by itself, and they are required for certain hormones and structures. As far as I know, coconut oil, when compared to most other common vegetable oils, has a higher fraction of saturated fatty acids in it, but those fatty acids are also significantly shorter than the fatty acids typically found in animal fats and other vegetable oils. They are different fats, and a human body digests them differently. Do they follow different metabolic chains to achieve the same result, or do they produce different results? I don't know. No research I have seen has delved that deeply into those properties of dietary fats.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

heisenbergs 8y ago

the issue is rather the quality of the articles and what we as humans in general prefer to read. we'd rather read about an extreme (this is the greatest, this is the worst) or a conflict (person a says the opposite to person b). it's basically just a symptom of decaying journalistic standards. incidentally it's often also cheaper to produce such content. there is probably an academic consensus that goes one way or the other, but our journalism has decayed enough that they don't even bother researching this.

thehnguy 8y ago

Sums up my feelings. At this point, I firmly believe that the negative physiological consequences from the stress about nutrition outweigh any benefits. Eat intelligently (I think we can agree that processed foods and sugar is less good than fresh veggies), and lower the stress.

caffed 8y ago

For those wanting some reference to the Harvard Medical School coconut oil war: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-a-harvard-professor-is-calling-coconut-oil-pure-poison/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-a-harvard-professor-is-call...

im3w1l 8y ago

For all the back and forth there are some things we do know. Get your macro- and micronutrients. Don't eat too many toxins and heavy metals. Too much sugar is bad. You'll probably be mostly fine whether you eat coconut oil or not, as long as the quantities are not completely unreasonable.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Mostly agree, but: > toxins Can you define what you mean in particular? Because half of the nonsense in the dietary space is talk about "toxins" (and "chemicals").
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Most commonly they're the defense chemicals employed by plants to discourage animals from eating them, like saponins or tannins. Sometimes they're the chemicals sprayed on plants by humans to discourage non-human animals from eating them, or non-edible plants from competing for resources. It might just be a chemical vital to the organism that coincidentially interferes with digestion of essential nutrients for other organisms, like phytic acid or oxalic acid. They might even be like capsaicin, to discourage one type of animal from eating a fruit (mammals), while a more preferred animal is completely unaffected (birds). Cassava, better known in the US as the source material for tapioca, contains chemicals that can easily decompose into poisonous HCN. If you crush the cassava, as when biting it raw, the decomposition enzyme mixes with the chemicals and produces poison. If you leach and ferment the root in water, the toxins are removed. If you grind the root into paste and let the HCN escape into the atmosphere, the toxins are removed. Without those toxins, the food is safe[r] to eat. Food is made of a lot of different chemicals, and digestion encompasses a lot of different catalyzed chemical reactions. Some chemicals will slow down, speed up, prevent, or enable reactions between other chemicals. A lot of that just gets oversimplified to "toxin" because the information has to be understandable to people who don't have a doctorate-level education in biochemistry. Because of that oversimplification, scammers can exploit the intentional vagueness and ambiguity to turn fear into money. In that case, the "toxins" are just bullshit designed to scare you into buying stuff. The easiest way to distinguish between fact and FUD is by asking the claimant to name the toxin. If they can say "cyanogenic glucosides produce cyanide poisons on maceration that interfere with the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood" it's probably a real thing. If they say "big agri-corporations spray them on all the food to keep us unhealthy, fat, and depressed" it's probably bullshit.

mogadsheu 8y ago

Agreed, it's sensationalism, both the writer and the conductor of the study. My experience in academia is that researchers rely heavily on controversy and drama to further their studies. It's part of the game they have to play to continue to receive funding or gain attention in the public eye. The author of the paper seems like he's marketing a problem that he'll try to solve in the coming years, by building a company that offers bespoke probiotic solutions based on analysis of an individual customer's microbiome. Not a bad business model honestly, it's spreadshirt for your gut. NB: I run a nutrition company and have an MS

DoreenMichele 8y ago

If you have a specific diagnosis, an awesome bullshit detector and hang out in the right circles, it is possible to make some sense of things and make informed choices that make a meaningful difference in your life. It's only nigh useless if you are some "standard issue normal human with no alterations (aka health issues)" and want generic advice about what works for everyone all the time. Then it's pretty eye-roll worthy, for what I feel are kind of obvious reasons.

kilo_bravo_3 8y ago

>There is absolutely no way the public can reasonably believe yay or nay on any new thing about healthy living. There is nothing new about healthy living. Eat plants. Drink water. Sleep well. Don't add salt to anything. Avoid sugar. Eat meat only in moderation. Fiber from beans makes you poo good. Coffee and alcohol in moderation is alright. Drinking to the point of visible external intoxication is not "in moderation". Exercise, even if only a walk in the evening. If you are overweight, eat fewer calories each day than your body needs to function. If you are underweight, eat more calories each day than your body needs to function. None of that sells books, or drives eyeballs to the latest ad-infested "Doctors say x will kill ya!" article.

firethief 8y ago
> Don't add salt to anything. This is a good guideline for people who are on a sad diet and get plenty of sodium from processed foods and meats, but someone following the other guidelines you list and not salting anything is likely to be more at risk of low sodium than high, depending on their personal risk factors (HBP and genetic history). (assuming the reason "avoid overly processed foods" isn't listed is that it goes without saying)
- kazinator 8y ago
  I followed the low sodium bullshit for more than a decade and never put two and two together: that what was making me debilitatingly drowsy on rest days after multiple days of vigorous exercise was the lack of sodium. Almost exactly year ago I started adding salt to everything. Not only did the drowsiness go away, I haven't had single muscle cramp in the twelve months since.
Severian 8y ago
Yeah, you need some salt if you eat unprocessed food. Sorry.
Grue3 8y ago
I can see some problems with your diet, such as it does nothing to prevent iodine deficiency, since you don't eat (iodized) salt, drink only water and basically don't eat anything containing iodine.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

The general public can rest relatively assured that, when there is a broad consensus on some subject, with numerous studies published over the years repeatedly finding similar results, it's a good idea to follow the scientific advice (that typically follows the consensus). For example, in what regards coconut oil, it's far from just two doctors from Harvard recently saying that coconut oil is bad for you. From the wikipedia page on the vegetable fat: Due to its high levels of saturated fat, the World Health Organization, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, United States Food and Drug Administration, American Heart Association, American Dietetic Association, British National Health Service, British Nutrition Foundation, and Dietitians of Canada advise that coconut oil consumption should be limited or avoided. The same goes for various allegedly "controversial" subjects like saturated fat and heart disease, sugar, salt, etc. You can typically find advice by multiple public health organisations and multiple studies reporting findings very similar to each other, stretching back decades. Just because then a new study comes out that bucks the trend, which is immediately widely reported in the popular news as a "groundbreaking new study", or because someone (often, not an expert) writes a book that tells "the truth" about the subject, is no reason to get confused. In science always follows the consensus, as in business always follow the money.

ilaksh 8y ago
The history of science is of the most established and popular beliefs being he laughingstock of tomorrow.
- deleted 8y ago
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- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  Really? So then we can't trust science - is that the idea?

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

Yeah, I'm about considering tossing food in water. If it floats, witch (burn it!), and if it sinks, its not a witch. Cause that's about as "scientific" our nutrition analysis is. Aside not eating carbohydrates (that whole diabetes thing), I have no clue what's 'healthy' and what's not.

hesarenu 8y ago

Coconut oil is the default cooking oil for most of South India. An analysis with north India might provide good data set.