11 ms·

Personal health is a hugely frustrating topic. It is obviously important, but it seems like the knowledge in the space is constantly contradicted and plagued by

Personal health is a hugely frustrating topic. It is obviously important, but it seems like the knowledge in the space is constantly contradicted and plagued by bad science. Are eggs bad for you? How about fat? Should I be vegan? Or is meat fine too? What about artificial sweeteners? How much should I exercise? What kind of exercises are important for long term health? Is a standing desk beneficial? All of these questions have multiple contradictory answers. Why are these questions so hard to answer?

21 8y ago
Look for some very fit celebrities who made millions through their looks. Do what they do.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  No problem. I will hire a personal nutritionist, get a magic hormone cocktail, spend more time then I have at the gym, and travel back in time and edit my parents DNA.
  - lj3 8y ago
    Don't forget a blood boy. You gotta have a blood boy.
- lisper 8y ago
  It's hard to imagine worse advice. Looking good by societal standards and being healthy are probably anti-correlated.
  - keithwhor 8y ago
    I agree with what you said, if what you meant by "worse" is "better" and by "anti-correlated" you actually meant "correlated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
    - jdbernard 8y ago
      Except we're no longer in an environment that exerts the same actual selective pressures. This leads to an unhealthy excess, just like it does with many of the other natural urges like the preference for highly processed, high-calorie, sugar-dense foods.
      - keithwhor 8y ago
        Aha, but that's not true. We're an in environment that exerts more real and perceived selective pressures than ever before, and influenced by orders of magnitude more people than we were even a hundred years ago. Health and fitness, physically, are indicators that (A) somebody has time to invest in their wellbeing, (B) actively invests that time (C) is more likely to survive illness, injury, etc. (D) is more likely to be successful due to social implications halo effect, yadda yadda. I'm not going to argue that there aren't maladaptive traits related to health and beauty that pop up all over the place: physical ones like eating disorders, behavioral ones like narcissism. But, "train regularly -- three to five times a week -- plus eat a high-protein low-processed sugar diet, like celebrities do when they're training for roles" is nowhere close to unhealthy excess. A lot of people just find it very difficult to do.
        lisper 8y ago
        The thing you're missing is that evolution selects for reproductive fitness of genes. That is a very different quality metric than individual well-being.
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
        "Evolution selects for" sounds a lot more planned than it is. Reality: Fitness primarily means "these genes survived the winnowing process." It's a little more complicated in that, for example, you see more mutations of genes (at least in germs) in high stress environments. But genes don't sit around asking each other how we are going to take over the world like little DNA movie criminal masterminds. Instead, the ones that don't die the most "win."
- Fricken 8y ago
  They hire personal trainers, bust their ass for six months to look good in a scene, and a year later they're on the cover of the national enquirer in a bathing suit looking like shit again. That is exactly what not to do.
- nradov 8y ago
  A lot of those fit celebrities are heavily geared. It's pretty obvious if you know what to look for. They would never pass a WADA test. It will be interesting to see how many of them end up with serious long-term health problems.
TJSomething 8y ago
Because how healthy a food is can vary with gut biome and genetics, and those are hard to control for. Exercise is also big on genetics. Isolating with high confidence whether something is good or not requires large, international datasets with people who consistently report exact quantities of everything they eat and do for decades. Since the budget for that is very rare, the best we can do is to run the same study several times on different populations. Often, studies measuring the same thing will vary in methodology, which requires even more studies to control for those.
droopyEyelids 8y ago
This attitude reads as analogous to 'we need to study climate change.' Technically true, but 80+% of the subject is well understood: Mix of plant and animals favoring plants, protein and fats for nutrition, lots of fiber, carbohydrates to make up your energy needs, sugar sparingly. Stay active. worry about the smaller tricky stuff after you've mastered the basics.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  Yeah, this approach is fine for me. I have the time and money to follow it. Just like the problems posed by climate change, we need an exact understand of the problems we are presented with so that we can create good solutions to them.
trowawee 8y ago
> Why are these questions so hard to answer? At a micro level, because collecting accurate data on the best diet or the best workout system is functionally impossible and because a lot of the people who are theoretically researching these questions have a ton of conflicts of interest. At the macro level, these questions basically are answered: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Exercise regularly with a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training (i.e. lift something and run/bike/swim somewhere). The problems come when people: - get overly bogged down in super-specific details of diet and exercise - get overly invested in finding outliers to the broad guidelines - think they're going to find some magic bullet combination of these things that will let them live forever - are unable, due to personal characteristics or societal structures, to easily follow the two big guidelines All of which I get, and all of which are traps I've fallen into before. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that there are lots of ways to achieve good health, because humans are wildly adaptable creatures, and obsessing over the details is mostly a waste of time unless you're trying to perform a specific physical task at an extremely high level for an extended period of time.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  I am on board with the Michael Pollan approach, but it is still extremely unscientific. How can we be expected to survive the challenges brought on by space travel, global warming, or overpopulation if we can't answer the basic question of what the human body needs to thrive? We have to come up with a better answer than "just do/eat what you are evolutionary used to".
lhorie 8y ago
I think phrasing these things in terms of yes/no questions to specific "hacks" is part of the problem. People ask questions like "should I drink caffeine" and expect the answer to be as clear cut as if the question was "should I breathe" or "should I drink poison". Perhaps it'd more illuminating if people instead asked themselves if there's enough variety and moderation in their lifestyle: e.g. "what vegetables did I eat this week that I didn't last week", "what percentage of daily suggested intake did I consume for fats and sugar compared to other food groups this week", "what percentage of my time have I spent on aerobic (e.g. jogging) vs anaerobic (e.g. push ups) vs mental (e.g. chess) vs dexterity (e.g. knitting) vs sedentary (e.g. tv) activities this week", etc.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  What you're suggesting is, in effect, that people should keep a food journal, and an activity journal, including a breakdown of food groups, and fats and sugars by weight. That, in turn, requires research for foods that don't come with nutrition labels, tabulating the results, and studying it to see the changes over time. I suspect anyone willing to do that is probably already healthy, given the amount of effort they're willing to put in.
  - lhorie 8y ago
    It doesn't need to be scientifically rigorous. In fact, getting away from the obsession with precision is kinda the whole point. It ought to be easy for someone to realize they are having too many sodas, or playing too much video games if they think in terms of e.g. what diet/activity restrictions they might impose on hypothetical kids. Those kinds of realizations are way more actionable and way more likely to make an impact than some dubious diet "hack" It may seem borderline corny to ask people to eat their brussel sprouts and limit their gaming/tv time, but alas many don't even do that.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > It ought to be easy for someone to realize they are having too many sodas, or playing too much video games if they think in terms of e.g. what diet/activity restrictions they might impose on hypothetical kids. People often impose poorly chosen parameters on their actual children, so I'm not at all convinced that merely considering what one would impose on abstract hypothetical children will magically get people to correct answers.
smallgovt 8y ago
Running controlled experiments that can actually draw causal relationships is extremely expensive. Nobody has figured out how to structure economic incentives to motivate and fund this expensive research. You basically need to pay large swaths of ppl to change their diet/exercise for years...for the worse.
- nradov 8y ago
  The diet/exercise habits of large swaths of people are already so bad that you could hardly make them worse. The trouble lies in gathering accurate data about them (did he drink 1 or 2 bottles of Mountain Dew yesterday?), and in controlling for all the confounding factors such as genetics, environmental exposure, etc.
  - smallgovt 8y ago
    Specifically for exercise, I think there's a viscous cycle where once you become unhealthy, it becomes much harder to exercise. So, it's unclear which direction the causation runs. How can you remove this self-selection bias and prove the direction of the causal relationship without paying healthy people to not exercise?
gammateam 8y ago
And then there is the holistic practice where there is no blanket statement, but an answer for just your body Unfortunately no two holistic practictioners can articulate their method, or come to the same conclusion or repeatable conclusion No better than a fortune teller reading palms in an alley Individualized medicine has some merit, and I think we are close to being able to do that, it has the possibility to incorporate some holistic remedy, but at that point it will just be called “a prescription” and the holistic practioners will continue to be on the fringes of science and quackery
- nradov 8y ago
  I don't think individualized medicine will really bring much benefit in this area until we develop fast, cheap, minimally-invasive sensors to check blood levels of substances such as glucose, hormones, vitamins, etc. That way we'll be able to see in near real time how individual bodies react to different foods and exercises. At the upper levels of pro sports they're already sort of doing this but it requires taking frequent small blood samples (not fun), specialized test equipment, and manual analysis by experts. We won't see it at the consumer level any time soon.
vibrato 8y ago
They’re hard to answer because double blind controlled food studies on humans are impossible ethically. Our frequent animal models, mice and small primates, are not apex predators as we are. Also vegetarians have involved themselves and their bias into dietetics since the inception of the field. When you read, look at the bias and vested interest. Another huge factor is the profit margin behind processed grains. There’s a massive incentive to get people to eat durable calorie rich processed foods.
nobody271 8y ago
You're really shaking the hornets nest with that comment aren't you? lol. Well done. ...well done.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> All of these questions have multiple contradictory answers. Why are these questions so hard to answer? All of these are phrased as yes/no questions, but the answer is neither binary nor even unidimensional. Which is the problem: people want at least unidimensional value scores and preferably binary good/bad labels as the output of science on health issues, but the underlying facts don't fit that preference. So, the actual science is mangled by charlatans who sell people what they want (sometimes these are also propagandists for people with an interest in shaping belief, but a lot for time it's just people making a buck directly off selling people answers that fit the shape they are looking for, irrespective of the relationship to the facts.)

21 8y ago

Look for some very fit celebrities who made millions through their looks. Do what they do.

Skunkleton 8y ago
No problem. I will hire a personal nutritionist, get a magic hormone cocktail, spend more time then I have at the gym, and travel back in time and edit my parents DNA.
- lj3 8y ago
  Don't forget a blood boy. You gotta have a blood boy.
lisper 8y ago
It's hard to imagine worse advice. Looking good by societal standards and being healthy are probably anti-correlated.
- keithwhor 8y ago
  I agree with what you said, if what you meant by "worse" is "better" and by "anti-correlated" you actually meant "correlated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
  - jdbernard 8y ago
    Except we're no longer in an environment that exerts the same actual selective pressures. This leads to an unhealthy excess, just like it does with many of the other natural urges like the preference for highly processed, high-calorie, sugar-dense foods.
    - keithwhor 8y ago
      Aha, but that's not true. We're an in environment that exerts more real and perceived selective pressures than ever before, and influenced by orders of magnitude more people than we were even a hundred years ago. Health and fitness, physically, are indicators that (A) somebody has time to invest in their wellbeing, (B) actively invests that time (C) is more likely to survive illness, injury, etc. (D) is more likely to be successful due to social implications halo effect, yadda yadda. I'm not going to argue that there aren't maladaptive traits related to health and beauty that pop up all over the place: physical ones like eating disorders, behavioral ones like narcissism. But, "train regularly -- three to five times a week -- plus eat a high-protein low-processed sugar diet, like celebrities do when they're training for roles" is nowhere close to unhealthy excess. A lot of people just find it very difficult to do.
      - lisper 8y ago
        The thing you're missing is that evolution selects for reproductive fitness of genes. That is a very different quality metric than individual well-being.
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
        "Evolution selects for" sounds a lot more planned than it is. Reality: Fitness primarily means "these genes survived the winnowing process." It's a little more complicated in that, for example, you see more mutations of genes (at least in germs) in high stress environments. But genes don't sit around asking each other how we are going to take over the world like little DNA movie criminal masterminds. Instead, the ones that don't die the most "win."
Fricken 8y ago
They hire personal trainers, bust their ass for six months to look good in a scene, and a year later they're on the cover of the national enquirer in a bathing suit looking like shit again. That is exactly what not to do.
nradov 8y ago
A lot of those fit celebrities are heavily geared. It's pretty obvious if you know what to look for. They would never pass a WADA test. It will be interesting to see how many of them end up with serious long-term health problems.

TJSomething 8y ago

Because how healthy a food is can vary with gut biome and genetics, and those are hard to control for. Exercise is also big on genetics. Isolating with high confidence whether something is good or not requires large, international datasets with people who consistently report exact quantities of everything they eat and do for decades. Since the budget for that is very rare, the best we can do is to run the same study several times on different populations. Often, studies measuring the same thing will vary in methodology, which requires even more studies to control for those.

droopyEyelids 8y ago

This attitude reads as analogous to 'we need to study climate change.' Technically true, but 80+% of the subject is well understood: Mix of plant and animals favoring plants, protein and fats for nutrition, lots of fiber, carbohydrates to make up your energy needs, sugar sparingly. Stay active. worry about the smaller tricky stuff after you've mastered the basics.

Skunkleton 8y ago
Yeah, this approach is fine for me. I have the time and money to follow it. Just like the problems posed by climate change, we need an exact understand of the problems we are presented with so that we can create good solutions to them.

trowawee 8y ago

> Why are these questions so hard to answer? At a micro level, because collecting accurate data on the best diet or the best workout system is functionally impossible and because a lot of the people who are theoretically researching these questions have a ton of conflicts of interest. At the macro level, these questions basically are answered: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Exercise regularly with a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training (i.e. lift something and run/bike/swim somewhere). The problems come when people: - get overly bogged down in super-specific details of diet and exercise - get overly invested in finding outliers to the broad guidelines - think they're going to find some magic bullet combination of these things that will let them live forever - are unable, due to personal characteristics or societal structures, to easily follow the two big guidelines All of which I get, and all of which are traps I've fallen into before. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that there are lots of ways to achieve good health, because humans are wildly adaptable creatures, and obsessing over the details is mostly a waste of time unless you're trying to perform a specific physical task at an extremely high level for an extended period of time.

Skunkleton 8y ago
I am on board with the Michael Pollan approach, but it is still extremely unscientific. How can we be expected to survive the challenges brought on by space travel, global warming, or overpopulation if we can't answer the basic question of what the human body needs to thrive? We have to come up with a better answer than "just do/eat what you are evolutionary used to".

lhorie 8y ago

I think phrasing these things in terms of yes/no questions to specific "hacks" is part of the problem. People ask questions like "should I drink caffeine" and expect the answer to be as clear cut as if the question was "should I breathe" or "should I drink poison". Perhaps it'd more illuminating if people instead asked themselves if there's enough variety and moderation in their lifestyle: e.g. "what vegetables did I eat this week that I didn't last week", "what percentage of daily suggested intake did I consume for fats and sugar compared to other food groups this week", "what percentage of my time have I spent on aerobic (e.g. jogging) vs anaerobic (e.g. push ups) vs mental (e.g. chess) vs dexterity (e.g. knitting) vs sedentary (e.g. tv) activities this week", etc.

nitwit005 8y ago
What you're suggesting is, in effect, that people should keep a food journal, and an activity journal, including a breakdown of food groups, and fats and sugars by weight. That, in turn, requires research for foods that don't come with nutrition labels, tabulating the results, and studying it to see the changes over time. I suspect anyone willing to do that is probably already healthy, given the amount of effort they're willing to put in.
- lhorie 8y ago
  It doesn't need to be scientifically rigorous. In fact, getting away from the obsession with precision is kinda the whole point. It ought to be easy for someone to realize they are having too many sodas, or playing too much video games if they think in terms of e.g. what diet/activity restrictions they might impose on hypothetical kids. Those kinds of realizations are way more actionable and way more likely to make an impact than some dubious diet "hack" It may seem borderline corny to ask people to eat their brussel sprouts and limit their gaming/tv time, but alas many don't even do that.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > It ought to be easy for someone to realize they are having too many sodas, or playing too much video games if they think in terms of e.g. what diet/activity restrictions they might impose on hypothetical kids. People often impose poorly chosen parameters on their actual children, so I'm not at all convinced that merely considering what one would impose on abstract hypothetical children will magically get people to correct answers.

smallgovt 8y ago

Running controlled experiments that can actually draw causal relationships is extremely expensive. Nobody has figured out how to structure economic incentives to motivate and fund this expensive research. You basically need to pay large swaths of ppl to change their diet/exercise for years...for the worse.

nradov 8y ago
The diet/exercise habits of large swaths of people are already so bad that you could hardly make them worse. The trouble lies in gathering accurate data about them (did he drink 1 or 2 bottles of Mountain Dew yesterday?), and in controlling for all the confounding factors such as genetics, environmental exposure, etc.
- smallgovt 8y ago
  Specifically for exercise, I think there's a viscous cycle where once you become unhealthy, it becomes much harder to exercise. So, it's unclear which direction the causation runs. How can you remove this self-selection bias and prove the direction of the causal relationship without paying healthy people to not exercise?

gammateam 8y ago

And then there is the holistic practice where there is no blanket statement, but an answer for just your body Unfortunately no two holistic practictioners can articulate their method, or come to the same conclusion or repeatable conclusion No better than a fortune teller reading palms in an alley Individualized medicine has some merit, and I think we are close to being able to do that, it has the possibility to incorporate some holistic remedy, but at that point it will just be called “a prescription” and the holistic practioners will continue to be on the fringes of science and quackery

nradov 8y ago
I don't think individualized medicine will really bring much benefit in this area until we develop fast, cheap, minimally-invasive sensors to check blood levels of substances such as glucose, hormones, vitamins, etc. That way we'll be able to see in near real time how individual bodies react to different foods and exercises. At the upper levels of pro sports they're already sort of doing this but it requires taking frequent small blood samples (not fun), specialized test equipment, and manual analysis by experts. We won't see it at the consumer level any time soon.

vibrato 8y ago

They’re hard to answer because double blind controlled food studies on humans are impossible ethically. Our frequent animal models, mice and small primates, are not apex predators as we are. Also vegetarians have involved themselves and their bias into dietetics since the inception of the field. When you read, look at the bias and vested interest. Another huge factor is the profit margin behind processed grains. There’s a massive incentive to get people to eat durable calorie rich processed foods.

nobody271 8y ago

You're really shaking the hornets nest with that comment aren't you? lol. Well done. ...well done.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> All of these questions have multiple contradictory answers. Why are these questions so hard to answer? All of these are phrased as yes/no questions, but the answer is neither binary nor even unidimensional. Which is the problem: people want at least unidimensional value scores and preferably binary good/bad labels as the output of science on health issues, but the underlying facts don't fit that preference. So, the actual science is mangled by charlatans who sell people what they want (sometimes these are also propagandists for people with an interest in shaping belief, but a lot for time it's just people making a buck directly off selling people answers that fit the shape they are looking for, irrespective of the relationship to the facts.)