4 ms·

Isn't that literally impossible, because there are so many different things that a subset of people need to avoid eating? e.g., if you have a nut allergy, your

by ipsi 5y ago

Isn't that literally impossible, because there are so many different things that a subset of people need to avoid eating? e.g., if you have a nut allergy, your healthy diet can't include nuts; if you're lactose-intolerant your healthy diet shouldn't include lactose; if you have coeliac disease, your healthy diet can't include gluten; if you have IBS your healthy diet shouldn't include anything that triggers it (which is different per person); if you have diabetes (type 1 or 2) your healthy diet can't include sugar; etc., etc. And god forbid you have 2 or more dietary issues... Plus different activity levels make different diets healthy - if you're a professional athlete needing 6,000+ calories per day, "healthy" for you is very different to healthy for me, who sits at their desk all day. This isn't even accounting for personal preferences like being vegan, or religious restrictions.

Spivak 5y ago
I think you're misunderstanding the claim. It's name a healthy diet. A single one. A diet which followed to the letter for the time span its prescribed will not cause any health problems traceable back to it. Make whatever assumptions about the hypothetical person you need and assume that they follow the diet for only as long as those assumptions hold.
- danaris 5y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding the response. There is no "healthy diet" that is universally applicable. Go back and look at the list of different possible restrictions in the parent post. Then add the fact that many people are allergic to all kinds of different things. Then add to that the fact that people of different ethnic backgrounds are adapted to do better with different balances of nutrients. Any "hypothetical person" such as you describe would, fundamentally and inevitably, "normalize" one specific type of person and "other" everyone else. Claiming that "this is a healthy diet" in such a way would be grossly irresponsible, even if you then went on to list the features of a person it is "healthy" for. Finally, even if you wanted to make such a description, the whole point of this thread is that we do not have a scientifically-rigorous-enough idea of what it would be to be able to do so with a high degree of certainty, even for a clearly-defined set of parameters for who would be eating it.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I didn’t ask for it to be universally applicable, or even broadly applicable. Or even applicable to more than the person the question imagines. I asked if we have enough information to know one single example of a healthy diet for one imaginary person who you are allowed to assume has no complicating factors. Because if we can’t answer this much much simpler problem then we have no hope of giving nutritional advice to a population that is as varied as you describe.

by ipsi 5y ago

Spivak 5y ago

I think you're misunderstanding the claim. It's name a healthy diet. A single one. A diet which followed to the letter for the time span its prescribed will not cause any health problems traceable back to it. Make whatever assumptions about the hypothetical person you need and assume that they follow the diet for only as long as those assumptions hold.

danaris 5y ago
I think you're misunderstanding the response. There is no "healthy diet" that is universally applicable. Go back and look at the list of different possible restrictions in the parent post. Then add the fact that many people are allergic to all kinds of different things. Then add to that the fact that people of different ethnic backgrounds are adapted to do better with different balances of nutrients. Any "hypothetical person" such as you describe would, fundamentally and inevitably, "normalize" one specific type of person and "other" everyone else. Claiming that "this is a healthy diet" in such a way would be grossly irresponsible, even if you then went on to list the features of a person it is "healthy" for. Finally, even if you wanted to make such a description, the whole point of this thread is that we do not have a scientifically-rigorous-enough idea of what it would be to be able to do so with a high degree of certainty, even for a clearly-defined set of parameters for who would be eating it.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I didn’t ask for it to be universally applicable, or even broadly applicable. Or even applicable to more than the person the question imagines. I asked if we have enough information to know one single example of a healthy diet for one imaginary person who you are allowed to assume has no complicating factors. Because if we can’t answer this much much simpler problem then we have no hope of giving nutritional advice to a population that is as varied as you describe.