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If the advice comes with a story about how such and such was similar to the diets of ancestors, it's probably unscientific to the point of parody. A wide varie
by robbedpeter 4y ago
If the advice comes with a story about how such and such was similar to the diets of ancestors, it's probably unscientific to the point of parody.
A wide variety in your diet prevents potential harms from chronic exposure - if you eat the same things over long periods you can accumulate unintended adulterants. Your particular genetics might result in chronic inflammation from an otherwise innocent food item.
Diet should be approached as a game with unknowable hazards. Science is continually evolving, and the findings one week can be completely overturned the next, and so on. Your strategy in the diet game should be to imitate success, avoid harmful patterns, and seek variety consistently. One day we will have a thorough model for nutrition and genetics and we can use soylent style customized food.
Meal pacing depends on your lifestyle, what you eat, fitness, and a myriad of other factors. There will be no one size fits all answer - there are too many confounding factors to reach a sensible conclusion except at an individual level.
Someone sedentary has different requirements than an athlete who runs marathons, or a warehouse worker, librarian, or plumber. One big meal might be best for one, while munching all day could be best for another, and their colleagues might find variations more suitable to their context.
One strategy is to go through an elimination experiment- eat nothing but meat, for 2 weeks, and gradually add different foods one per week, keeping a journal of subjective effects, blood pressure, satiety, weight, bowel movements, and so on.
Following a fad diet
- robbedpeter 4y agoCan't edit. >>following a fad diet Just sets you up for disappointment. It's better to research nutrition generally and experiment methodically, building up knowledge about how you personally react to foods, and planning with that knowledge.
- inglor_cz 4y agoMaybe we should turn it around a bit. There is a huge variation in what our ancestors ate. But modern highly processed food would be alien to all of them - no tribe nor nation on the planet ever sustained themselves on a diet of salami, pizza, French fries and massively sweetened soft drinks. This is a very recent sea change in nutrition, where I would expect a lot of unknowable hazards to lie.
- Ekaros 4y agoEven agriculture itself is in evolutionary terms recent change. Some components sure like lactose tolerance, but overall new.
- inglor_cz 4y agoThere is still quite a difference between 5000 years and 25 years. Especially because in the pre-modern world, generations were much shorter than today. People would start having kids around 18.
- robbedpeter 4y ago14 or 15, often. 18 year old adults is a recent liberal human rights innovation. There's not a whole lot of difference between humans now and humans 100,000 years ago. We have better tools and culture and knowledge, but we're physically identical - swap a baby in either direction and nobody would know the difference.
- robbedpeter 4y agoModern foods actually makes variety simpler, since you can lump them all into one food category - modern food is often slight seasoning and proportion variations on the same processed ingredients, so you don't want to eat it frequently. An occasional pizza or birthday cake or soda is ok, but they're not great for daily food sources, especially with hfcs or lots of sugar.