12 ms·

The Disaster of Superstition in Nutrition

72 points by netmonk 4y ago

brutusborn 4y ago
Fantastic website. The history of nutrition claims seems to be full of failures (e.g. "butter is bad, substitute with margarine" -> "margarine is bad", "fat is bad" -> "carbs are bad"). From someone who is ignorant of Nutrition research I have always wondered if the main issue is that the best research is not communicated because it is not convenient for business or government. So although some researchers are aware that current advice is likely to be harmful, they don't have the power to change the messaging.
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  Or best research is boring and does not make for good headlines, will not sell books or get you invited to conferences and TV to talk about it.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    Even worse: fad diets and superstitions benefit certain companies (hint hint)
- NavinF 4y ago
  IMO observational studies with zero predictive power are the biggest problem. The vast majority of nutrition research that the media talks about is extremely low quality. Their conclusions depend entirely on which of many variables are controlled for.
- f1shy 4y ago
  Absolutely. Let alone salt and egg, which seem to be good or bad changing every 5 years or so :)
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    My favorite articles to see change on a regular basis: * Eggs * Chocolate * Alcohol * Wine (separate articles than alcohol) * The "superfood" of the month. * The "fat eraser" food of the month * The "perfect diet" of the year And the fact that somehow people don't seem to notice the constant trend and still take them all so seriously.
- mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  Besides industry pushes, I think it's also due to the combination of bad incentives in academia/journalism. 1. This kind of research is difficult to execute because there are too many confounding variables. You can never get clear isolatable results. There is no such thing as "good" and "bad" that applies to a large population in all contexts. This may sound like a drawback, but in a way this is great for researchers because it creates an infinite amount of studies you can run and publish, and nobody can ever tell you that you're wrong, because there is no clear answer. You'll never be out of work. If industry tells you "we need a study that shows X" there's almost certainly a way to design a study in such a way to get result X. 2. Research must be published. No matter what your results or experimental assumptions and constraints are, as a researcher you must "sell" [0] your research and present it in the best light. That's what your career is all about. Citations. Similarly, as a reporter you must write articles that attract views, so you must sensationalize research, even if the original publication was clear about its shortcomings. These perverse incentives create vicious cycles, not just in nutrition. [0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
- Eleison23 4y ago
  Industry interests typically win out over solicitude for the health and well-being of individual or collective humans. There will always be a new fad "superfood" like pomegranate or acai berry, because there is some farmer's collective that needs to pump their crop into the headlines. There will always be mass injection of bad stuff into the food chain, such as HFCS, because heavily subsidized crops produce an oversupply to be dumped. (Have you ever noticed that "corn" is never on lists of FDA allergens?) There will always be hucksters and snake-oil salesmen (the bad kind; real snake oil is known to indigenous tribes to have healing properties). Dr. Oz and infomercials will need to push supplements and "the latest research" because they have a bill of goods to sell you. My family was caught up in every fad diet throughout the 70s and 80s, and we suffered as a result. There was never any reason for us to eschew eggs and their yolks, or butter or full-fat milk. There were plenty of reasons for us to avoid drinking water with massive doses of fluoride. My father is a scientist who knows the environmental dangers of radiation, asbestos and other lab chemicals, yet he tacitly approved of the onslaught of crap which we routinely purchased from the corner grocery store.
- refurb 4y ago
  The problem is pretty clear - good data. We need to run randomized clinical trials to tell if drugs work. We’d need the same to make any definitive conclusion about the impact of diet. But the problem is unless say, cancer treatments, where an effect is obvious after months, the impact of diet can take decades to show up. Can you run randomized clinical trials for decades? Not really. So you do non-randomized, observational, retrospective studies that have so many holes in them you question the effort spent doing them. That’s why we’re in the state we are.
- janekm 4y ago
  The advice from my biology teacher in the 80s is still just as valid today (eat more fruits and vegetables and whole grains, eat less processed foods and sugar and saturated fats). See the recommendations from the AHA for example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001031 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001031 That consensus dietary recommendations change frequently is itself a myth.
firasd 4y ago
One odd aspect is that all these 'recommendations' adopted en masse (low salt, low cholesterol, low fat) are based on the goal of avoiding heart problems. I guess it makes sense as a goal but not sure it makes sense to go in reverse from that goal, using very unsound studies, to come up with these restrictive rules of thumb for everyone... like oh, just reduce the salt in this meal and you'll be okay. Indeed such approaches can be described as superstition.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also the pathways from food to blood might not be as simple as those recommendations adapt. What you eat entirely ends up in blood is enticing explanation, but probably is far from whole truth.
_0w8t 4y ago
I stopped reading the article when the author has started to write about protein. It is impossible to eat enough calories to function normally and not to get enough protein from any unprocessed food source. In fact modern focus on protein is another myth based on superstition.
- oifjsidjf 4y ago
  Really? So eating just potatoes and oats would give you enough protein for optimal development? Protein is the only macronutrient that was shown to increase child height. Fats and carbs do not seem to have an effect on child height. It's a known phenomena that when eg Japanese parents move to US their children grow taller than their Japanese peers, even though both parents are Japanese. Obviously it's hard to say if protein is the only cause in this, it could also be others. Some people "blame" growth hormones in milk, no idea if that has any merit to it. But the point is: nutrition DOES affect child height to a certain degree, not just the genes of the parents.
  - _0w8t 4y ago
    My grandmother as many other people in rural Belarus during WWII survived on eating only potatoes, cabbage and carrots during 3 years of German occupation. There were occasional fish and mushrooms, but that was very minor. Children born during that time or just before the war were not shorter than their parents. While excessive protein is well known to simulate muscle growth, there are no indications that it is good for long-term health. And one still builds muscles with just 60 gram of protein per day, it just takes longer. One gets 60 gram of protein when eating enough potatoes to get 2500 kcal.
    - laserlight 4y ago
      > survived on eating only potatoes, cabbage and carrots Surviving and thriving are very different things. Even obese people could be told to have survived, because they live long years; yet, they leave many on the table. > And one still builds muscles with just 60 gram of protein per day Only untrained individuals can do that. Most of the population with just 6 months of training will easily hit the wall with less than 10% of calories coming from protein.
santiagobasulto 4y ago
The biggest “belief-system” group to blame here are just doctors. I know this is a highly controversial opinion, but we should stop listening to doctors because they’re “doctors” and start fact-checking them. Most Drs I know have NO idea of the basics principles of statistics. They just repeat things, eg “fat is bad, a healthy diet has a base of >=50% grain”. When you ask them where they get that from, they tell you they read it while in school (in the 90s), from a book that was edited in the 70s, that took it from a study conducted in the 60s, that is just an appeal to P-hacking.
- ReptileMan 4y ago
  >The biggest “belief-system” group to blame here are just doctors. I know this is a highly controversial opinion, but we should stop listening to doctors because they’re “doctors” and start fact-checking them. That didn't go well - the way covid sceptics were treated by the Cathedral was not nice.
  - santiagobasulto 4y ago
    With Covid it was exactly this case. There was a few months that nobody knew nothing about it. Most doctors were treating COVID as any other coronavirus. At the time, I helped with some Data-related tasks to a group of researchers (Biologists, Biochemists, PhDs, etc) and I remember it clearly. A lot of uncertainty, but yet doctors had already arrived to a conclusion.
    - noobly 4y ago
      What did your data related tasks imply?
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      That's what doctors are paid to do. Unfortunately, they can't wait for the RCT's to be finished before making a decision, and so we train them well and pay them well to make decisions under uncertainty. It's rather like software engineering, but with lives/health at stake.
strken 4y ago
I've been trying to balance my diet recently by filling out all the bars in my calorie tracking app to 100%, and it's surprisingly hard to do. For instance, to get the necessary calcium I have to drink half a litre of milk, folate needs half a bag of cooked spinach (or enriched grains), vitamin e needs maybe 30 or 40 grams of sunflower seeds, vitamin c needs three or four mandarins, and so on. The first problem is that this isn't always obvious. You can't substitute all leafy greens for spinach, there aren't many good non-milk non-fish sources of calcium, not all nuts and seeds have the right amount of vitamin e. It's quite hard to balance everything even when you're tracking individual foods, and it makes for some very strange meals. The second problem is that a lot of the important nutrients are coming from foods that are otherwise calorie-dense or have other problems. Citrus fruits are sugary, milk and nuts are fatty, uncooked spinach can cause stomach trouble. It's not necessarily bad to eat calorie-dense food, but it does make things less forgiving when you're trying to eat at a calorie deficit to lose weight. It makes me wonder if maybe I had long-term deficits in some of these nutrients and just didn't know.
- jimmytidey 4y ago
  I'm open to being wrong, but it seems highly unlikely a requirement for being healthy is drinking half a litre of milk a day.
  - strken 4y ago
    I don't mean to suggest that it is. The RDI for calcium is 1000mg/day, though, and it's really difficult to hit that by accident unless you have spectacularly good eating habits. The half-litre of milk is one of the many things you could try. You could also eat 100g of poppy seeds, 5 cups of cooked lentils, or a kilogram of cooked kale. The point is that it's genuinely very hard to eat enough calcium, and that's only one of the nutrients that need to be juggled.
    - maccard 4y ago
      1000mg/day is 40% more than the NHS say [0]. (If there's multiple sources then I guess that's a great example of this article! ) The rest of your post is a little ridiculous too - instead of painting the ridiculous quantities why not talk about what a balanced intake might look like? 1 serving of regular yoghurt, a glass of a fortified juice, a leafy green with lunch and a legume with your main meal is more than even the 1000 number. > it's genuinely very hard to eat enough calcium, and that's only one of the nutrients that need to be juggled. Ive found that eating a variety of food stuff, and not hyper optimising for one nutrient goes an awfully long way towards hitting all of those goals. If you followed my suggestion above, you've likely hit your calcium, iron, vitamin A and C nutrients for the day out of ~700 calories leaving an average person 800-1200 calories leftover to burn on whatever they want to! [0] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/calcium/#:~:text=How%20much%20calcium%20do%20I,need%20from%20your%20daily%20diet https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/calcium/....
alecco 4y ago
An engineer enlightening us with his keto diet.
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  Author denounced the keto diet right there in the article. Author proposed using sound scientific research rather than superstition to analyze diet and nutrition. Maybe he’s shilling for his blog or whatever, but it didn’t seem overt. The narrative around the development of dietary guidelines bears repeating. This mythology recently killed someone I cared about, a chemist and engineer well capable of analyzing the data, but who couldn’t overcome the fear of fat and salt.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    > This mythology recently killed someone I cared about, a chemist and engineer well capable of analyzing the data, but who couldn't overcome the fear of fat and salt. Can you expand on this please? Someone I know went on the keto diet like it was a religion, and I'm concerned about their long-term health.
    - Kaibeezy 4y ago
      Sure. This was an older person, educated in the 50s, and subjected to all the “old wives tales”, scientific pronouncements and popular dietary fads of the 70s and beyond. The ones that stuck hardest were, on one hand, fears of cholesterol and sodium; on the other hand, the twisted embrace of both fruit and “sugar-free”; and on the gripping hand, the mortal fear of being fat / the holy grail of being thin. This led to “healthy” meals of barely seasoned steamed chicken breast and broccoli, with fat/sugar-free oatmeal cookies and a bowl of fruit for dessert. Which led to fairly obvious malnutrition, wasting away, lack of resilience, etc. We’d go out for Mexican or Vietnamese dinners sometimes, and it was fascinating to watch this picky eater ravage a big plate of cochinita pibil or gà nướng.
      - tpush 4y ago
        What? Chicken breast, broccoli, oatmeal cookies and fruits don't lead to anyone "wasting away", assuming he ate enough calories in total.
jcynix 4y ago
Superfoods. Marketing. Chia for example was imported as chicken food first, but producers soon realized that chickens fed with chia produced eggs with smaller yolk. So importers had seeds which they couldn't sell anymore. The solution? Let's market them as superfoods …
- netmonk 4y ago
  Same story with vegetable oil.
kimi 4y ago
I know I'm a contrarian here, but frankly I won't take health suggestions from someone who is an amateur and has never studied the field (where "studied" means at least a degree not taken from Youtube university) and never done proper peer-reviewed research. "My wife feels better" is just different superstition, not science.
- MrWB 4y ago
  The article linked was very scant on references too. A majority of his references per article are one or two papers and health websites, such as Healthline. On the satiety page [1] him and another scrape MyFitnesPal diary entries and uncritically label diaries where the intake exceeded desired calorie amounts as having low satiety, and vis versa. It somewhat ignores that people may have not logged all of their food for the day; I would have expected to see controls for that, and maybe ensuring the data was coming from regular loggers instead of incidental ones. The actual method of analysis is not well-described. Again, when claiming to be driven by data: - In the Holt paper, there are 41 people are broken down into 6 groups, so ~11 people per group - When you look at the the analysis, the SEM can correspond ~25-30% of the mean value; when you consider this to be ~11 people, when the I score for popcorn was 154 +/- 40 the veracity/reliability of the data for founding all of his arguments starts to become challenging - The Holt data uses a scale looking at six different qualitative factors of the food/eating experience and constructs a score from this and satiety perception after 2hrs and uses bread as a baseline - A lot of his graphs are missing proper labels - Many have lines where the data's source is poorly indicated - He uses nebulous terms such as satiety and hunger without it being effectively operationalised (or having a meaningful scale) - The "The Optimising Nutrition Satiety Index" graph omits most of the labels and does not provide the data - The same graph uses a linear correlation, but has a curved line and does not provide a p-value - I managed to perform a partial reconstruction through. I found their SI data [2] and hovered over a lot of data points (found 26 of them which took a fair bit of time - you can't export it) and combined that with the Holt data. My graph approximates theirs relatively well [3] - From my tentative analysis from a one tailed Pearson, I found: n=26, r=.631, r2=0.399, p<0.001, 95% CI (0.370, 1) - I'm a bit sceptical that their r2 is in fact 0.6031 when the one I found was 0.339. I wonder if they are using the r value which I found to be 0.631. - To be sympathetic and assuming the r was misstated (and my r would change with additional data), they have managed to demonstrate a moderate significant correlation with reasonable effect size, between Holt's measure and their own. - However, Holt's uses a significantly different methodology to his, and to that end I fundamentally question if they are measuring the same thing as to justify his claims, such that the correlation could be co-incidental. - I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect meaned data from ~11 people (and 41 data points) to have some form of relationship with data from 9000 (or 587187 days of entries). - A majority of the article relies on the reader to look at a graph and draw an inference (without labels or meaningful information - Interestingly the Satiety-Hunger axis is reversed on their simple diagrams compared to what the analysis uses I think that when they consider themselves to be data analysts, the analysis has to be of a high-standard. Sloppy presentation, communication, withholding of data/methodology, reliance on one or two articles to substantiate claims (often times very old articles) generally leaves a lot of room to question their findings/claims. 1 - https://optimisingnutrition.com/satiety-index/ https://optimisingnutrition.com/satiety-index/ 2 - https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/marty.kendall7139/viz/satietyvsketoscore-plantbased/satietyvsnutrivore https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/marty.kendall7139/viz... 3 - https://postimg.cc/sBbnQZ70 https://postimg.cc/sBbnQZ70
neuroma 4y ago
I do commend the use of science and data analysis that the author is advocating. There is a caveat. Most science, even when high calibre and delivering clear results, doesnt reliably predict wwhat individuals should do. It only speaks to an average across the population. Individuals have unique responses, which can vary by degree and also by direction. The gold standard is always careful experimentation on a case by case basis. This phenomena is more apparent in diet science where dissecting causation and elaborating mechanism is particularly difficult. Many studies are narrow in scope, with short duration, and applied to limited demographic types... limiting generalisability. Larger, longer studies in more natural contexts produce results that often conflict, presumably because of factors we don't fully understand. So my two cents would be to remember that results of studies are not always true for individuals, annoying as that is. If you're serious about change you'll need to experiment.
- fasthands9 4y ago
  >Individuals have unique responses, which can vary by degree and also by direction. I think the tension is that that are errors in both directions here. Sure - some people will have worse results than optimal because they followed advice meant for the "average" person when they have unique body chemistry. But on the contrary many people who think they are unique will shun advice for the "average" person and have worse results. My hunch is that more people make the second mistake than the first.
ciphol 4y ago
This article sounds like more of a cult or superstition than the "conventional wisdom" medical advice it wants to replace.
jiggywiggy 4y ago
Claims to go for data, then throws away all modern advice (which some of it should indeed be looked at critically if the data is corrcect but is based on data) and then argues for optimizing vitamins & minerals, without any backing of real data. Optimum vitamin doses, balance & requirements are poorly understood. (deficiencies are easier to understand).
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  If the shark has been jumped, it’s here: What if we have innate cravings for ALL of the essential nutrients, and what if we keep eating until we get enough of them? Hence, rather than avoiding bad things in food, the ultimate quest in the nutrition space should be to understand what foods we need to prioritise to get the nutrients we need to be satiated and thrive! That’s definitely an overreach. Here’s how I might have put it: What if we have a sense of “craving” for a broad-based and long-term level of adequate nutrients, and what if we tend to keep eating towards that general goal? [the subsequent paragraph, minus the exclamation point]
ginko 4y ago
At this point I think following a Medieval diet based on the 4 bodily humors[1] would be just as healthy if not healthier than whatever is in these days. [1] https://www.oldcook.com/en/medieval-hippocratic_dietetics https://www.oldcook.com/en/medieval-hippocratic_dietetics
archi42 4y ago
Properly researching this isn't totally new. A decade ago we had a student of "sports science" in our peer group, and his advice for goal-driven diets was invaluable for some. I sometimes feel like in the past, previous generations had a good signal-to-noise ratio; but the signal was tainted by commercial (or today I learned: religious) interests and bad scientific methods. (I'm thinking of fossils/climate and tobacco/health). For a while the quality of the signal improved, but so did the noise floor. And now we're in the situation that quality information is theoretical available for everyone (thank you internet), but (for a lay person) it became very hard to discriminate from bad (or tainted) information: Is that influencer/blogger selling me a new diet because they think it's a great idea? Are they paid/incentived to do it? Or do they actually know what they're talking about? Maybe everyone had that impression in a certain age; I'm not above that. Obviously that could be said about this article was well; but since it aligns with my belief I'm biased to think it can't be totally wrong. Now am I falling for anti-SDA/industry propaganda by someone who (maybe subconsciously) has an axe to grind (noise), or is this this well researched advice that I can follow (a clean signal)?
niemandhier 4y ago
Talks about data and nutrition. Claims Alzheimer’s is caused by nutrition.
- oifjsidjf 4y ago
  Can you prove that it's not? If you state the contrary with certanty you must present atleast some evidence that food has no effect on it. Even wiki has this info: >> Diet may be a modifiable risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease. The Mediterranean diet, and the DASH diet are both associated with less cognitive decline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease#Diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease#Diet
aitchnyu 4y ago
Tangential, but how much protein should a guy with a light running hobby consume? All the interwebs state a bare minimum of 1 g per kg but I can't hit that with traditional Indian rice diet with small fish and meat portions and extra legumes. It should also predict that strong and healthy acquaintances with similar diet should be dying.
- netmonk 4y ago
  The optimum protein intake is around 1.5 to 2.5g per kg of lean body mass. The most protein dense food is red meat. And the most complete an amino-acid panel. So basically increase your meat intake. As a carnivore myself i eat around 1kg of beef a day
  - alecco 4y ago
    [citation needed] I've only heard of such high protein diets in bodybuilding forums. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/are-you-getting-too-much-protein https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak... https://www.nutrition.org.uk/healthy-sustainable-diets/protein/?level=Health%20professional#dietaryrequirements https://www.nutrition.org.uk/healthy-sustainable-diets/prote...
    - netmonk 4y ago
      Dont ask me citation, by just providing supersitious article and reference. Not even peer-reviewed...Superb. Did you read the article on top of this thread ? Evidence that protein requirements have been significantly underestimated Rajavel Elango 1, Mohammad A Humayun, Ronald O Ball, Paul B Pencharz Affiliations expand PMID: 19841581 DOI: 10.1097/MCO.0b013e328332f9b7 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841581/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841581/ A high protein diet (3.4 g/kg/d) combined with a heavy resistance training program improves body composition in healthy trained men and women – a follow-up investigation https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-015-0100-0#:~:text=Consuming%20a%20high%20protein%20diet,diet%20has%20any%20deleterious%20effects https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-015-.... Relatively high-protein or 'low-carb' energy-restricted diets for body weight loss and body weight maintenance? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22935440/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22935440/ ...

72 points by netmonk 4y ago

Fantastic website. The history of nutrition claims seems to be full of failures (e.g. "butter is bad, substitute with margarine" -> "margarine is bad", "fat is bad" -> "carbs are bad"). From someone who is ignorant of Nutrition research I have always wondered if the main issue is that the best research is not communicated because it is not convenient for business or government. So although some researchers are aware that current advice is likely to be harmful, they don't have the power to change the messaging.

RF_Savage 4y ago
Or best research is boring and does not make for good headlines, will not sell books or get you invited to conferences and TV to talk about it.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Even worse: fad diets and superstitions benefit certain companies (hint hint)
NavinF 4y ago
IMO observational studies with zero predictive power are the biggest problem. The vast majority of nutrition research that the media talks about is extremely low quality. Their conclusions depend entirely on which of many variables are controlled for.
f1shy 4y ago
Absolutely. Let alone salt and egg, which seem to be good or bad changing every 5 years or so :)
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  My favorite articles to see change on a regular basis: * Eggs * Chocolate * Alcohol * Wine (separate articles than alcohol) * The "superfood" of the month. * The "fat eraser" food of the month * The "perfect diet" of the year And the fact that somehow people don't seem to notice the constant trend and still take them all so seriously.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
Besides industry pushes, I think it's also due to the combination of bad incentives in academia/journalism. 1. This kind of research is difficult to execute because there are too many confounding variables. You can never get clear isolatable results. There is no such thing as "good" and "bad" that applies to a large population in all contexts. This may sound like a drawback, but in a way this is great for researchers because it creates an infinite amount of studies you can run and publish, and nobody can ever tell you that you're wrong, because there is no clear answer. You'll never be out of work. If industry tells you "we need a study that shows X" there's almost certainly a way to design a study in such a way to get result X. 2. Research must be published. No matter what your results or experimental assumptions and constraints are, as a researcher you must "sell" [0] your research and present it in the best light. That's what your career is all about. Citations. Similarly, as a reporter you must write articles that attract views, so you must sensationalize research, even if the original publication was clear about its shortcomings. These perverse incentives create vicious cycles, not just in nutrition. [0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Eleison23 4y ago
Industry interests typically win out over solicitude for the health and well-being of individual or collective humans. There will always be a new fad "superfood" like pomegranate or acai berry, because there is some farmer's collective that needs to pump their crop into the headlines. There will always be mass injection of bad stuff into the food chain, such as HFCS, because heavily subsidized crops produce an oversupply to be dumped. (Have you ever noticed that "corn" is never on lists of FDA allergens?) There will always be hucksters and snake-oil salesmen (the bad kind; real snake oil is known to indigenous tribes to have healing properties). Dr. Oz and infomercials will need to push supplements and "the latest research" because they have a bill of goods to sell you. My family was caught up in every fad diet throughout the 70s and 80s, and we suffered as a result. There was never any reason for us to eschew eggs and their yolks, or butter or full-fat milk. There were plenty of reasons for us to avoid drinking water with massive doses of fluoride. My father is a scientist who knows the environmental dangers of radiation, asbestos and other lab chemicals, yet he tacitly approved of the onslaught of crap which we routinely purchased from the corner grocery store.
refurb 4y ago
The problem is pretty clear - good data. We need to run randomized clinical trials to tell if drugs work. We’d need the same to make any definitive conclusion about the impact of diet. But the problem is unless say, cancer treatments, where an effect is obvious after months, the impact of diet can take decades to show up. Can you run randomized clinical trials for decades? Not really. So you do non-randomized, observational, retrospective studies that have so many holes in them you question the effort spent doing them. That’s why we’re in the state we are.
janekm 4y ago
The advice from my biology teacher in the 80s is still just as valid today (eat more fruits and vegetables and whole grains, eat less processed foods and sugar and saturated fats). See the recommendations from the AHA for example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001031 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001031 That consensus dietary recommendations change frequently is itself a myth.

firasd 4y ago

One odd aspect is that all these 'recommendations' adopted en masse (low salt, low cholesterol, low fat) are based on the goal of avoiding heart problems. I guess it makes sense as a goal but not sure it makes sense to go in reverse from that goal, using very unsound studies, to come up with these restrictive rules of thumb for everyone... like oh, just reduce the salt in this meal and you'll be okay. Indeed such approaches can be described as superstition.

Ekaros 4y ago
Also the pathways from food to blood might not be as simple as those recommendations adapt. What you eat entirely ends up in blood is enticing explanation, but probably is far from whole truth.

_0w8t 4y ago

I stopped reading the article when the author has started to write about protein. It is impossible to eat enough calories to function normally and not to get enough protein from any unprocessed food source. In fact modern focus on protein is another myth based on superstition.

oifjsidjf 4y ago
Really? So eating just potatoes and oats would give you enough protein for optimal development? Protein is the only macronutrient that was shown to increase child height. Fats and carbs do not seem to have an effect on child height. It's a known phenomena that when eg Japanese parents move to US their children grow taller than their Japanese peers, even though both parents are Japanese. Obviously it's hard to say if protein is the only cause in this, it could also be others. Some people "blame" growth hormones in milk, no idea if that has any merit to it. But the point is: nutrition DOES affect child height to a certain degree, not just the genes of the parents.
- _0w8t 4y ago
  My grandmother as many other people in rural Belarus during WWII survived on eating only potatoes, cabbage and carrots during 3 years of German occupation. There were occasional fish and mushrooms, but that was very minor. Children born during that time or just before the war were not shorter than their parents. While excessive protein is well known to simulate muscle growth, there are no indications that it is good for long-term health. And one still builds muscles with just 60 gram of protein per day, it just takes longer. One gets 60 gram of protein when eating enough potatoes to get 2500 kcal.
  - laserlight 4y ago
    > survived on eating only potatoes, cabbage and carrots Surviving and thriving are very different things. Even obese people could be told to have survived, because they live long years; yet, they leave many on the table. > And one still builds muscles with just 60 gram of protein per day Only untrained individuals can do that. Most of the population with just 6 months of training will easily hit the wall with less than 10% of calories coming from protein.

santiagobasulto 4y ago

The biggest “belief-system” group to blame here are just doctors. I know this is a highly controversial opinion, but we should stop listening to doctors because they’re “doctors” and start fact-checking them. Most Drs I know have NO idea of the basics principles of statistics. They just repeat things, eg “fat is bad, a healthy diet has a base of >=50% grain”. When you ask them where they get that from, they tell you they read it while in school (in the 90s), from a book that was edited in the 70s, that took it from a study conducted in the 60s, that is just an appeal to P-hacking.

ReptileMan 4y ago
>The biggest “belief-system” group to blame here are just doctors. I know this is a highly controversial opinion, but we should stop listening to doctors because they’re “doctors” and start fact-checking them. That didn't go well - the way covid sceptics were treated by the Cathedral was not nice.
- santiagobasulto 4y ago
  With Covid it was exactly this case. There was a few months that nobody knew nothing about it. Most doctors were treating COVID as any other coronavirus. At the time, I helped with some Data-related tasks to a group of researchers (Biologists, Biochemists, PhDs, etc) and I remember it clearly. A lot of uncertainty, but yet doctors had already arrived to a conclusion.
  - noobly 4y ago
    What did your data related tasks imply?
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    That's what doctors are paid to do. Unfortunately, they can't wait for the RCT's to be finished before making a decision, and so we train them well and pay them well to make decisions under uncertainty. It's rather like software engineering, but with lives/health at stake.

strken 4y ago

I've been trying to balance my diet recently by filling out all the bars in my calorie tracking app to 100%, and it's surprisingly hard to do. For instance, to get the necessary calcium I have to drink half a litre of milk, folate needs half a bag of cooked spinach (or enriched grains), vitamin e needs maybe 30 or 40 grams of sunflower seeds, vitamin c needs three or four mandarins, and so on. The first problem is that this isn't always obvious. You can't substitute all leafy greens for spinach, there aren't many good non-milk non-fish sources of calcium, not all nuts and seeds have the right amount of vitamin e. It's quite hard to balance everything even when you're tracking individual foods, and it makes for some very strange meals. The second problem is that a lot of the important nutrients are coming from foods that are otherwise calorie-dense or have other problems. Citrus fruits are sugary, milk and nuts are fatty, uncooked spinach can cause stomach trouble. It's not necessarily bad to eat calorie-dense food, but it does make things less forgiving when you're trying to eat at a calorie deficit to lose weight. It makes me wonder if maybe I had long-term deficits in some of these nutrients and just didn't know.

jimmytidey 4y ago
I'm open to being wrong, but it seems highly unlikely a requirement for being healthy is drinking half a litre of milk a day.
- strken 4y ago
  I don't mean to suggest that it is. The RDI for calcium is 1000mg/day, though, and it's really difficult to hit that by accident unless you have spectacularly good eating habits. The half-litre of milk is one of the many things you could try. You could also eat 100g of poppy seeds, 5 cups of cooked lentils, or a kilogram of cooked kale. The point is that it's genuinely very hard to eat enough calcium, and that's only one of the nutrients that need to be juggled.
  - maccard 4y ago
    1000mg/day is 40% more than the NHS say [0]. (If there's multiple sources then I guess that's a great example of this article! ) The rest of your post is a little ridiculous too - instead of painting the ridiculous quantities why not talk about what a balanced intake might look like? 1 serving of regular yoghurt, a glass of a fortified juice, a leafy green with lunch and a legume with your main meal is more than even the 1000 number. > it's genuinely very hard to eat enough calcium, and that's only one of the nutrients that need to be juggled. Ive found that eating a variety of food stuff, and not hyper optimising for one nutrient goes an awfully long way towards hitting all of those goals. If you followed my suggestion above, you've likely hit your calcium, iron, vitamin A and C nutrients for the day out of ~700 calories leaving an average person 800-1200 calories leftover to burn on whatever they want to! [0] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/calcium/#:~:text=How%20much%20calcium%20do%20I,need%20from%20your%20daily%20diet https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/calcium/....

alecco 4y ago

An engineer enlightening us with his keto diet.

Kaibeezy 4y ago
Author denounced the keto diet right there in the article. Author proposed using sound scientific research rather than superstition to analyze diet and nutrition. Maybe he’s shilling for his blog or whatever, but it didn’t seem overt. The narrative around the development of dietary guidelines bears repeating. This mythology recently killed someone I cared about, a chemist and engineer well capable of analyzing the data, but who couldn’t overcome the fear of fat and salt.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  > This mythology recently killed someone I cared about, a chemist and engineer well capable of analyzing the data, but who couldn't overcome the fear of fat and salt. Can you expand on this please? Someone I know went on the keto diet like it was a religion, and I'm concerned about their long-term health.
  - Kaibeezy 4y ago
    Sure. This was an older person, educated in the 50s, and subjected to all the “old wives tales”, scientific pronouncements and popular dietary fads of the 70s and beyond. The ones that stuck hardest were, on one hand, fears of cholesterol and sodium; on the other hand, the twisted embrace of both fruit and “sugar-free”; and on the gripping hand, the mortal fear of being fat / the holy grail of being thin. This led to “healthy” meals of barely seasoned steamed chicken breast and broccoli, with fat/sugar-free oatmeal cookies and a bowl of fruit for dessert. Which led to fairly obvious malnutrition, wasting away, lack of resilience, etc. We’d go out for Mexican or Vietnamese dinners sometimes, and it was fascinating to watch this picky eater ravage a big plate of cochinita pibil or gà nướng.
    - tpush 4y ago
      What? Chicken breast, broccoli, oatmeal cookies and fruits don't lead to anyone "wasting away", assuming he ate enough calories in total.

jcynix 4y ago

Superfoods. Marketing. Chia for example was imported as chicken food first, but producers soon realized that chickens fed with chia produced eggs with smaller yolk. So importers had seeds which they couldn't sell anymore. The solution? Let's market them as superfoods …

netmonk 4y ago
Same story with vegetable oil.

kimi 4y ago

I know I'm a contrarian here, but frankly I won't take health suggestions from someone who is an amateur and has never studied the field (where "studied" means at least a degree not taken from Youtube university) and never done proper peer-reviewed research. "My wife feels better" is just different superstition, not science.

MrWB 4y ago
The article linked was very scant on references too. A majority of his references per article are one or two papers and health websites, such as Healthline. On the satiety page [1] him and another scrape MyFitnesPal diary entries and uncritically label diaries where the intake exceeded desired calorie amounts as having low satiety, and vis versa. It somewhat ignores that people may have not logged all of their food for the day; I would have expected to see controls for that, and maybe ensuring the data was coming from regular loggers instead of incidental ones. The actual method of analysis is not well-described. Again, when claiming to be driven by data: - In the Holt paper, there are 41 people are broken down into 6 groups, so ~11 people per group - When you look at the the analysis, the SEM can correspond ~25-30% of the mean value; when you consider this to be ~11 people, when the I score for popcorn was 154 +/- 40 the veracity/reliability of the data for founding all of his arguments starts to become challenging - The Holt data uses a scale looking at six different qualitative factors of the food/eating experience and constructs a score from this and satiety perception after 2hrs and uses bread as a baseline - A lot of his graphs are missing proper labels - Many have lines where the data's source is poorly indicated - He uses nebulous terms such as satiety and hunger without it being effectively operationalised (or having a meaningful scale) - The "The Optimising Nutrition Satiety Index" graph omits most of the labels and does not provide the data - The same graph uses a linear correlation, but has a curved line and does not provide a p-value - I managed to perform a partial reconstruction through. I found their SI data [2] and hovered over a lot of data points (found 26 of them which took a fair bit of time - you can't export it) and combined that with the Holt data. My graph approximates theirs relatively well [3] - From my tentative analysis from a one tailed Pearson, I found: n=26, r=.631, r2=0.399, p<0.001, 95% CI (0.370, 1) - I'm a bit sceptical that their r2 is in fact 0.6031 when the one I found was 0.339. I wonder if they are using the r value which I found to be 0.631. - To be sympathetic and assuming the r was misstated (and my r would change with additional data), they have managed to demonstrate a moderate significant correlation with reasonable effect size, between Holt's measure and their own. - However, Holt's uses a significantly different methodology to his, and to that end I fundamentally question if they are measuring the same thing as to justify his claims, such that the correlation could be co-incidental. - I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect meaned data from ~11 people (and 41 data points) to have some form of relationship with data from 9000 (or 587187 days of entries). - A majority of the article relies on the reader to look at a graph and draw an inference (without labels or meaningful information - Interestingly the Satiety-Hunger axis is reversed on their simple diagrams compared to what the analysis uses I think that when they consider themselves to be data analysts, the analysis has to be of a high-standard. Sloppy presentation, communication, withholding of data/methodology, reliance on one or two articles to substantiate claims (often times very old articles) generally leaves a lot of room to question their findings/claims. 1 - https://optimisingnutrition.com/satiety-index/ https://optimisingnutrition.com/satiety-index/ 2 - https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/marty.kendall7139/viz/satietyvsketoscore-plantbased/satietyvsnutrivore https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/marty.kendall7139/viz... 3 - https://postimg.cc/sBbnQZ70 https://postimg.cc/sBbnQZ70

neuroma 4y ago

I do commend the use of science and data analysis that the author is advocating. There is a caveat. Most science, even when high calibre and delivering clear results, doesnt reliably predict wwhat individuals should do. It only speaks to an average across the population. Individuals have unique responses, which can vary by degree and also by direction. The gold standard is always careful experimentation on a case by case basis. This phenomena is more apparent in diet science where dissecting causation and elaborating mechanism is particularly difficult. Many studies are narrow in scope, with short duration, and applied to limited demographic types... limiting generalisability. Larger, longer studies in more natural contexts produce results that often conflict, presumably because of factors we don't fully understand. So my two cents would be to remember that results of studies are not always true for individuals, annoying as that is. If you're serious about change you'll need to experiment.

fasthands9 4y ago
>Individuals have unique responses, which can vary by degree and also by direction. I think the tension is that that are errors in both directions here. Sure - some people will have worse results than optimal because they followed advice meant for the "average" person when they have unique body chemistry. But on the contrary many people who think they are unique will shun advice for the "average" person and have worse results. My hunch is that more people make the second mistake than the first.

ciphol 4y ago

This article sounds like more of a cult or superstition than the "conventional wisdom" medical advice it wants to replace.

jiggywiggy 4y ago

Claims to go for data, then throws away all modern advice (which some of it should indeed be looked at critically if the data is corrcect but is based on data) and then argues for optimizing vitamins & minerals, without any backing of real data. Optimum vitamin doses, balance & requirements are poorly understood. (deficiencies are easier to understand).

Kaibeezy 4y ago
If the shark has been jumped, it’s here: What if we have innate cravings for ALL of the essential nutrients, and what if we keep eating until we get enough of them? Hence, rather than avoiding bad things in food, the ultimate quest in the nutrition space should be to understand what foods we need to prioritise to get the nutrients we need to be satiated and thrive! That’s definitely an overreach. Here’s how I might have put it: What if we have a sense of “craving” for a broad-based and long-term level of adequate nutrients, and what if we tend to keep eating towards that general goal? [the subsequent paragraph, minus the exclamation point]

ginko 4y ago

At this point I think following a Medieval diet based on the 4 bodily humors[1] would be just as healthy if not healthier than whatever is in these days. [1] https://www.oldcook.com/en/medieval-hippocratic_dietetics https://www.oldcook.com/en/medieval-hippocratic_dietetics

archi42 4y ago

Properly researching this isn't totally new. A decade ago we had a student of "sports science" in our peer group, and his advice for goal-driven diets was invaluable for some. I sometimes feel like in the past, previous generations had a good signal-to-noise ratio; but the signal was tainted by commercial (or today I learned: religious) interests and bad scientific methods. (I'm thinking of fossils/climate and tobacco/health). For a while the quality of the signal improved, but so did the noise floor. And now we're in the situation that quality information is theoretical available for everyone (thank you internet), but (for a lay person) it became very hard to discriminate from bad (or tainted) information: Is that influencer/blogger selling me a new diet because they think it's a great idea? Are they paid/incentived to do it? Or do they actually know what they're talking about? Maybe everyone had that impression in a certain age; I'm not above that. Obviously that could be said about this article was well; but since it aligns with my belief I'm biased to think it can't be totally wrong. Now am I falling for anti-SDA/industry propaganda by someone who (maybe subconsciously) has an axe to grind (noise), or is this this well researched advice that I can follow (a clean signal)?

niemandhier 4y ago

Talks about data and nutrition. Claims Alzheimer’s is caused by nutrition.

oifjsidjf 4y ago
Can you prove that it's not? If you state the contrary with certanty you must present atleast some evidence that food has no effect on it. Even wiki has this info: >> Diet may be a modifiable risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease. The Mediterranean diet, and the DASH diet are both associated with less cognitive decline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease#Diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease#Diet

aitchnyu 4y ago

Tangential, but how much protein should a guy with a light running hobby consume? All the interwebs state a bare minimum of 1 g per kg but I can't hit that with traditional Indian rice diet with small fish and meat portions and extra legumes. It should also predict that strong and healthy acquaintances with similar diet should be dying.

netmonk 4y ago
The optimum protein intake is around 1.5 to 2.5g per kg of lean body mass. The most protein dense food is red meat. And the most complete an amino-acid panel. So basically increase your meat intake. As a carnivore myself i eat around 1kg of beef a day
- alecco 4y ago
  [citation needed] I've only heard of such high protein diets in bodybuilding forums. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/are-you-getting-too-much-protein https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak... https://www.nutrition.org.uk/healthy-sustainable-diets/protein/?level=Health%20professional#dietaryrequirements https://www.nutrition.org.uk/healthy-sustainable-diets/prote...
  - netmonk 4y ago
    Dont ask me citation, by just providing supersitious article and reference. Not even peer-reviewed...Superb. Did you read the article on top of this thread ? Evidence that protein requirements have been significantly underestimated Rajavel Elango 1, Mohammad A Humayun, Ronald O Ball, Paul B Pencharz Affiliations expand PMID: 19841581 DOI: 10.1097/MCO.0b013e328332f9b7 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841581/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841581/ A high protein diet (3.4 g/kg/d) combined with a heavy resistance training program improves body composition in healthy trained men and women – a follow-up investigation https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-015-0100-0#:~:text=Consuming%20a%20high%20protein%20diet,diet%20has%20any%20deleterious%20effects https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-015-.... Relatively high-protein or 'low-carb' energy-restricted diets for body weight loss and body weight maintenance? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22935440/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22935440/ ...