5 ms·

The whole debate about nutrition confuses me. We have all of this hyper-specific advice that sells a lifestyle, like telling people to eat kale or chia seeds o

The whole debate about nutrition confuses me. We have all of this hyper-specific advice that sells a lifestyle, like telling people to eat kale or chia seeds or whatever the new hip of the week is. Hyper-optimization for overachievers; or at least those who like to pretend. In reality, you could basically fix this situation overnight by killing off TV dinners and fast food. Yes, my pleasure centers are also tickled by a McDonalds, cause I'm an idiot just like you, we don't need it. We call it "junk food" as a sort of humorous quip. If it's actually junk (and it mostly is), then it shouldn't be on sale, because it crowds out alternatives.

thatfrenchguy 7y ago
You need people to eat real food, which means cooking, which means taking time to cook. That's antithetic to the US way of doing things, which is to work all the time and outsource everything else to someone else (I'm caricaturing a little here of course).
- esotericn 7y ago
  It doesn't necessarily mean cooking though. That's the solution right now because the market is stuck in this minima. It means no junk food. There's nothing at all stopping McDonalds or whoever from making the hotpot I just cooked up from fresh vegetables without adding 1 billion bollocks preservatives or whatever else. Scaled up the labour costs become trivial. But that's not the world we live in. I go outside and I want non-shit food and there's nothing there, so yeah, the option is eat shit or don't eat.
- smn1234 7y ago
  My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back. Where I think we've made a big cultural mistake is in food _industry_ and in franchising. In essence, food isn't as "real" when it's meant for shelf life, to always look and taste the same, and to scale for every point of presence where it's intended to be sold such that there's strong profit margins / brand recognition to be made.
  - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    > My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back. But they won't, because it's more expensive.
- jniedrauer 7y ago
  Processed food doesn't, by definition, have to be poison. We've set up this race to the bottom between competing food brands where the brand with the most sodium, fat, or high glycemic index sugar wins. The "free market" has an unfortunate tendency to select local maxima in the form of addictive substances. I don't know how to get there, but I can conceive of a reality where we could eat healthy and also not have to cook everything from scratch. It would require a shift of incentive from maximizing consumption to maximizing consumer health.
- knightofmars 7y ago
  It's not just cooking. The problem that we as Americans (and possibly other countries have) is that we don't understand our ingredients. It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients. The grams of sugar in lots of store bought "pre-made" items is shocking. As an example with the staple "PB&J" when you look at the P. One tablespoon of a popular peanut butter has 1.5g of sugar. If you get an "organic" or "natural" alternative you often see that number drop to 0.5g of sugar per tablespoon. If you've been fed the 1.5g of sugar version growing up then you're going to have a hard time accepting the 0.5g version. Bread is another area. Bread shouldn't have sugar in it unless it's a dessert bread. Yet most store bought breads have corn syrup or sugar in them. Detoxing from sugar sounds like it could be a joke. But if you cut out most sugar from your diet for a month (read ingredients and pick low or none sugar alternatives as best you can). You'll be amazed at how much sweeter items such as tomatoes, carrots, and other fresh fruits and vegetables begin to taste.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    " It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients." That's not what I would call cooking. That's "heating up".
    - knightofmars 7y ago
      Hence the quotes around the word cook. :) Even if a person is cooking, if that person isn't preparing everything from scratch it's quite possible they are using sweetened ingredients (I'm not suggesting everyone should cook only from scratch).
      - esotericn 7y ago
        I dislike the use of the term "from scratch" here because it implies something.. esoteric or special. Boiling potatoes is just cooking, there's nothing "from scratch" about it, you're not a farmer. It's more about using real ingredients rather than processed stuff. (Sure, we can talk about what you consider 'processed' - I'd say basically anything that has more than one or two constituent parts).
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
Eating healthy is pretty simple: A plant based whole foods diet will do it. The 4 major food groups are as follows: Beans, Grains, Fruits and Veggies with maybe a little bit of nuts, and meat maybe once a week.
- decoyworker 7y ago
  That's boring though and don't you know that whole grains are poison? /s For real though- the big battle is convincing people of this simple but boring fact. Limiting portion size and adding a little moderate exercise is all you need but it doesn't sell books and make the social media rounds. What is the best way to portray this to the public?
  - inetknght 7y ago
    > What is the best way to portray this to the public? Make your own fast food restaurant chain. Sell healthy full-feeling food in correctly sized portions for competitive prices. Include meats for people who mock people who eat "rabbit food". Include vegetables for people who hate meat. Good luck keeping your menu current.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  I disagree. The Mediterranean diet, one of the healthiest, and practically speaking very easy to apply, has plenty of cheese and wine for example. The scientists haven't been able to figure out all aspects of it, but it definitely works, and fortunately for us all it's not boring, there are some delicious dishes there so you can actually celebrate your diet rather than treat it as a sort of punishment like most people do.
normalhuman 7y ago
> The whole debate about nutrition confuses me. It is only confusing if one spends too much time paying attention to those who want to sell you something, or develop some sort of guru personal-brand (I vomit in my mouth a little bit when I write things like "personal brand"). Here's what most people need to know: Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources. This means no refined-anything (no added sugar, no white flour, no hydrogenated-fats, etc.) The less ingredients the better. The more you recognize the ingredients as something you could grow in nature, the better. I imagine I will be bombarded with paleo-something, keto-whatever, broscience, etc etc. You don't need any of that. Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources and you will be way ahead of the vast majority of western people in terms of having a healthy nutrition. It's boring, unsexy and it works.
- snazz 7y ago
  Unprocessed != nutritionally balanced, although it often is. The “fewer ingredients == better” people often forget that you still need to balance your diet. The “mostly from vegetable sources” part might leave you in need of more fat and protein, but this is of course depends on the person.
  - smn1234 7y ago
    non-scientific thoughts: I believe eating unprocessed food is important due to how the body breaks it down. Eating corn vs. corn flour I imagine has different effects on the body and on indicators of satiety
    - wincy 7y ago
      Ah, but eating unprocessed corn as a primary part of your diet will cause pellagra, unless you soak it in lime water. So unprocessed isn’t always best.
wang_li 7y ago
We could solve it overnight simply by acknowledging that people are free to live their lives as they choose. If we allow people to snow ski, to sky dive, to ride motor cycles without helmets, then we should allow them to eat nothing but table sugar if they so choose. Some might say that these people are driving up health care costs for the government, and my answer to that is that the government should not be paying for people's health care. It enables bad behaviors and it forces people who make good choices to subsidize people who make bad choices. Which is legitimately bullshit.
- normalhuman 7y ago
  > my answer to that is that the government should not be paying for people's health care. It enables bad behaviors and it forces people who make good choices to subsidize people who make bad choices. Which is legitimately bullshit. Bullshit. The government is not "paying for people's health care". In most of the civilized world, you pay a percentage of your income to the national health care system, and then the national health care system takes care of you if you need something. Why? Because you can be suddenly diagnosed with all sorts of diseases that could not be prevented by having "good behavior". That is puritanical bullshit to blame those who need help and compassion the most. People have life-threatening diseases because of genetic factors, environmental factors that are out of their control, receiving a cosmic radiation at the wrong moment, etc etc. Also: people get old. The older you get, the more shit starts to happen. Not having a national health care system leads to a nasty and cruel society.
  - diveandfight 7y ago
    > That is puritanical bullshit to blame those who need help and compassion the most. People have life-threatening diseases because of genetic factors, environmental factors that are out of their control, receiving a cosmic radiation at the wrong moment, etc etc. I don't see where OP is implying that individuals suffering from unfortunate accidents outside of their control are driving up health care costs. This whole discussion seems to be centered on lifestyle choices, eating large quantities of sugar, that have a significant effect on the health care costs of the population as a whole. Those are the types of decisions that have the ability to drive up health care costs. Childhood cancer or other unfortunate illnesses are statistically too infrequent to be driving up health care costs alone. As a parallel example: A family might have their house burn down due to no fault of their own, and yet the monthly premium that families pay for home insurance to cover such an event is within their means. Note: The US market actually forces this by default as no lender will underwrite your mortgage without casualty insurance.
Ensorceled 7y ago
I think this is just the media you are consuming. For the most part; health care workers, government agencies, etc. are all pushing the same message: avoid processed foods and added sugar, don't drink your calories, eat more vegetables and fruit, choose whole grains and healthy proteins. This article reads like hundreds of others I've seen over the past decade. For reference: https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/ https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/
- esotericn 7y ago
  I'm not talking about media, I'm talking about actual actions in the world. I go outside and look for food, pretty much anywhere in the Western world, and anything that actually resembles a real meal is fast food bollocks. Sugar/salt/chemical laden perfectly formed crap is pretty much everywhere and crowds out alternatives. Like, I want a bowl of mashed potatoes with some boiled chicken or whatever. Doesn't exist. The only time I've seen close is in Poland in the old milk bars. Even in say, a pub, it's hard to find a meal that isn't trying to be "fancy" or "luxurious" in some way, ends up being fatty or salty or whatever because for whatever reason people wouldn't buy home cooked stuff.
  - magashna 7y ago
    Of course not, that kind of meal won't bring in customers. You'll need to make boiled chicken at home because it's healthy yet unappetizing.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Sure, that's the state of the world now. Healthy food is incredibly difficult to source on the go. It doesn't have to be that way, though, hence my comment. As an aside - unappetizing isn't the correct word here at all - you mean that put next to a treat food it's not necessarily going to be chosen - that's very different.
      - magashna 7y ago
        I don't think you can make boiled chicken appetizing. Grilled with some spices, nearly as healthy and far more appetizing in look, smell, and taste.
zwkrt 7y ago
I think a big issue is that plant based foods are considered boring and ummarketable. You can’t upsell anyone on broccoli and carrots. People who want to “hyper optimize” are falling into a trap of marketing themselves, in a sense being told that they can’t really be healthy unless they optimize the nutrition of everything they eat. As a datapoint of one my diet consists mostly of pasta, salads, and whole vegetables, and I would consider myself to be wildly healthy by any metric upon which health could be judged. When I bring in lunches my coworkers look at me like I’m crazy because my meals seem boring, and in a real sense compared to flaming hot Cheetos and guacamole chorizo fritatas they are boring. But there is a certain zen which comes from enjoying the simple things; unfortunately this will never be a popular thing to do.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
"In reality, you could basically fix this situation overnight by killing off TV dinners and fast food. Yes, my pleasure centers are also tickled by a McDonalds, cause I'm an idiot just like you, we don't need it. " Also reduce portion sizes. But yes, most people's nutrition is so far out of whack that there is no reason to argue about details. Pretty much any change will be a huge improvement.

thatfrenchguy 7y ago

You need people to eat real food, which means cooking, which means taking time to cook. That's antithetic to the US way of doing things, which is to work all the time and outsource everything else to someone else (I'm caricaturing a little here of course).

esotericn 7y ago
It doesn't necessarily mean cooking though. That's the solution right now because the market is stuck in this minima. It means no junk food. There's nothing at all stopping McDonalds or whoever from making the hotpot I just cooked up from fresh vegetables without adding 1 billion bollocks preservatives or whatever else. Scaled up the labour costs become trivial. But that's not the world we live in. I go outside and I want non-shit food and there's nothing there, so yeah, the option is eat shit or don't eat.
smn1234 7y ago
My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back. Where I think we've made a big cultural mistake is in food _industry_ and in franchising. In essence, food isn't as "real" when it's meant for shelf life, to always look and taste the same, and to scale for every point of presence where it's intended to be sold such that there's strong profit margins / brand recognition to be made.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  > My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back. But they won't, because it's more expensive.
jniedrauer 7y ago
Processed food doesn't, by definition, have to be poison. We've set up this race to the bottom between competing food brands where the brand with the most sodium, fat, or high glycemic index sugar wins. The "free market" has an unfortunate tendency to select local maxima in the form of addictive substances. I don't know how to get there, but I can conceive of a reality where we could eat healthy and also not have to cook everything from scratch. It would require a shift of incentive from maximizing consumption to maximizing consumer health.
knightofmars 7y ago
It's not just cooking. The problem that we as Americans (and possibly other countries have) is that we don't understand our ingredients. It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients. The grams of sugar in lots of store bought "pre-made" items is shocking. As an example with the staple "PB&J" when you look at the P. One tablespoon of a popular peanut butter has 1.5g of sugar. If you get an "organic" or "natural" alternative you often see that number drop to 0.5g of sugar per tablespoon. If you've been fed the 1.5g of sugar version growing up then you're going to have a hard time accepting the 0.5g version. Bread is another area. Bread shouldn't have sugar in it unless it's a dessert bread. Yet most store bought breads have corn syrup or sugar in them. Detoxing from sugar sounds like it could be a joke. But if you cut out most sugar from your diet for a month (read ingredients and pick low or none sugar alternatives as best you can). You'll be amazed at how much sweeter items such as tomatoes, carrots, and other fresh fruits and vegetables begin to taste.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  " It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients." That's not what I would call cooking. That's "heating up".
  - knightofmars 7y ago
    Hence the quotes around the word cook. :) Even if a person is cooking, if that person isn't preparing everything from scratch it's quite possible they are using sweetened ingredients (I'm not suggesting everyone should cook only from scratch).
    - esotericn 7y ago
      I dislike the use of the term "from scratch" here because it implies something.. esoteric or special. Boiling potatoes is just cooking, there's nothing "from scratch" about it, you're not a farmer. It's more about using real ingredients rather than processed stuff. (Sure, we can talk about what you consider 'processed' - I'd say basically anything that has more than one or two constituent parts).

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

Eating healthy is pretty simple: A plant based whole foods diet will do it. The 4 major food groups are as follows: Beans, Grains, Fruits and Veggies with maybe a little bit of nuts, and meat maybe once a week.

decoyworker 7y ago
That's boring though and don't you know that whole grains are poison? /s For real though- the big battle is convincing people of this simple but boring fact. Limiting portion size and adding a little moderate exercise is all you need but it doesn't sell books and make the social media rounds. What is the best way to portray this to the public?
- inetknght 7y ago
  > What is the best way to portray this to the public? Make your own fast food restaurant chain. Sell healthy full-feeling food in correctly sized portions for competitive prices. Include meats for people who mock people who eat "rabbit food". Include vegetables for people who hate meat. Good luck keeping your menu current.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
I disagree. The Mediterranean diet, one of the healthiest, and practically speaking very easy to apply, has plenty of cheese and wine for example. The scientists haven't been able to figure out all aspects of it, but it definitely works, and fortunately for us all it's not boring, there are some delicious dishes there so you can actually celebrate your diet rather than treat it as a sort of punishment like most people do.

normalhuman 7y ago

> The whole debate about nutrition confuses me. It is only confusing if one spends too much time paying attention to those who want to sell you something, or develop some sort of guru personal-brand (I vomit in my mouth a little bit when I write things like "personal brand"). Here's what most people need to know: Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources. This means no refined-anything (no added sugar, no white flour, no hydrogenated-fats, etc.) The less ingredients the better. The more you recognize the ingredients as something you could grow in nature, the better. I imagine I will be bombarded with paleo-something, keto-whatever, broscience, etc etc. You don't need any of that. Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources and you will be way ahead of the vast majority of western people in terms of having a healthy nutrition. It's boring, unsexy and it works.

snazz 7y ago
Unprocessed != nutritionally balanced, although it often is. The “fewer ingredients == better” people often forget that you still need to balance your diet. The “mostly from vegetable sources” part might leave you in need of more fat and protein, but this is of course depends on the person.
- smn1234 7y ago
  non-scientific thoughts: I believe eating unprocessed food is important due to how the body breaks it down. Eating corn vs. corn flour I imagine has different effects on the body and on indicators of satiety
  - wincy 7y ago
    Ah, but eating unprocessed corn as a primary part of your diet will cause pellagra, unless you soak it in lime water. So unprocessed isn’t always best.

wang_li 7y ago

We could solve it overnight simply by acknowledging that people are free to live their lives as they choose. If we allow people to snow ski, to sky dive, to ride motor cycles without helmets, then we should allow them to eat nothing but table sugar if they so choose. Some might say that these people are driving up health care costs for the government, and my answer to that is that the government should not be paying for people's health care. It enables bad behaviors and it forces people who make good choices to subsidize people who make bad choices. Which is legitimately bullshit.

normalhuman 7y ago
> my answer to that is that the government should not be paying for people's health care. It enables bad behaviors and it forces people who make good choices to subsidize people who make bad choices. Which is legitimately bullshit. Bullshit. The government is not "paying for people's health care". In most of the civilized world, you pay a percentage of your income to the national health care system, and then the national health care system takes care of you if you need something. Why? Because you can be suddenly diagnosed with all sorts of diseases that could not be prevented by having "good behavior". That is puritanical bullshit to blame those who need help and compassion the most. People have life-threatening diseases because of genetic factors, environmental factors that are out of their control, receiving a cosmic radiation at the wrong moment, etc etc. Also: people get old. The older you get, the more shit starts to happen. Not having a national health care system leads to a nasty and cruel society.
- diveandfight 7y ago
  > That is puritanical bullshit to blame those who need help and compassion the most. People have life-threatening diseases because of genetic factors, environmental factors that are out of their control, receiving a cosmic radiation at the wrong moment, etc etc. I don't see where OP is implying that individuals suffering from unfortunate accidents outside of their control are driving up health care costs. This whole discussion seems to be centered on lifestyle choices, eating large quantities of sugar, that have a significant effect on the health care costs of the population as a whole. Those are the types of decisions that have the ability to drive up health care costs. Childhood cancer or other unfortunate illnesses are statistically too infrequent to be driving up health care costs alone. As a parallel example: A family might have their house burn down due to no fault of their own, and yet the monthly premium that families pay for home insurance to cover such an event is within their means. Note: The US market actually forces this by default as no lender will underwrite your mortgage without casualty insurance.

Ensorceled 7y ago

I think this is just the media you are consuming. For the most part; health care workers, government agencies, etc. are all pushing the same message: avoid processed foods and added sugar, don't drink your calories, eat more vegetables and fruit, choose whole grains and healthy proteins. This article reads like hundreds of others I've seen over the past decade. For reference: https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/ https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/

esotericn 7y ago
I'm not talking about media, I'm talking about actual actions in the world. I go outside and look for food, pretty much anywhere in the Western world, and anything that actually resembles a real meal is fast food bollocks. Sugar/salt/chemical laden perfectly formed crap is pretty much everywhere and crowds out alternatives. Like, I want a bowl of mashed potatoes with some boiled chicken or whatever. Doesn't exist. The only time I've seen close is in Poland in the old milk bars. Even in say, a pub, it's hard to find a meal that isn't trying to be "fancy" or "luxurious" in some way, ends up being fatty or salty or whatever because for whatever reason people wouldn't buy home cooked stuff.
- magashna 7y ago
  Of course not, that kind of meal won't bring in customers. You'll need to make boiled chicken at home because it's healthy yet unappetizing.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Sure, that's the state of the world now. Healthy food is incredibly difficult to source on the go. It doesn't have to be that way, though, hence my comment. As an aside - unappetizing isn't the correct word here at all - you mean that put next to a treat food it's not necessarily going to be chosen - that's very different.
    - magashna 7y ago
      I don't think you can make boiled chicken appetizing. Grilled with some spices, nearly as healthy and far more appetizing in look, smell, and taste.

zwkrt 7y ago

I think a big issue is that plant based foods are considered boring and ummarketable. You can’t upsell anyone on broccoli and carrots. People who want to “hyper optimize” are falling into a trap of marketing themselves, in a sense being told that they can’t really be healthy unless they optimize the nutrition of everything they eat. As a datapoint of one my diet consists mostly of pasta, salads, and whole vegetables, and I would consider myself to be wildly healthy by any metric upon which health could be judged. When I bring in lunches my coworkers look at me like I’m crazy because my meals seem boring, and in a real sense compared to flaming hot Cheetos and guacamole chorizo fritatas they are boring. But there is a certain zen which comes from enjoying the simple things; unfortunately this will never be a popular thing to do.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

"In reality, you could basically fix this situation overnight by killing off TV dinners and fast food. Yes, my pleasure centers are also tickled by a McDonalds, cause I'm an idiot just like you, we don't need it. " Also reduce portion sizes. But yes, most people's nutrition is so far out of whack that there is no reason to argue about details. Pretty much any change will be a huge improvement.