6 ms·

Science doesn't support keto as an optimal diet for most cases, which I wouldn't call a weird stigma. The book How Not To Die is a good primer on nutrition, maj

Science doesn't support keto as an optimal diet for most cases, which I wouldn't call a weird stigma. The book How Not To Die is a good primer on nutrition, major diseases and longevity, and includes references to all the scientific studies references. Meat and dairy have causal or correlations with a lot of terminal diseases, which is bad news for the keto diet. Whole-food plant-based diets fare best in most scientific trials, which is fairly incompatible with keto. Research into optimal diets for longevity also found whole-food, mostly plant-based was what folks that live the longest eat. WFPB has also been used successfully in to address Alzheimer's and diabetes.

jjtheblunt 3y ago
What is meant by “whole” when used in “whole food”?
- riehwvfbk 3y ago
  Leaving the whole contents of your wallet at the grocery store rather than partial.
  - markstos 3y ago
    Ah yes, the "beans and rice are more expensive than beef" argument.
    - riehwvfbk 3y ago
      It's a joke. It went whoosh.
    - abduhl 3y ago
      Are beans and rice more "whole" than beef? Is beef not a "whole food"?
      - rmast 3y ago
        Beans and brown rice would be… unless you’re eating the whole cow. But actually, it’s surprising how many things like preservatives get added to things like ground beef.
        abduhl 3y ago
        Sorry but this is a ludicrous statement. Beans and brown rice are more "whole" than beef unless you're eating the whole cow? You're not eating the whole bean plant or rice plant. Even looking at brown rice or beans off the plant, with brown rice you are still removing the husk and with beans you are removing the pod.
        rmast 3y ago
        That part was humor, sorry you missed it. I’ll elaborate. If it’s unprocessed beef it could be considered a whole food — but often people don’t bother checking the ingredients for the meat they buy and just assume that it doesn’t have things added. That said, there is research that points to eating too much beef and other red meats potentially being bad for health.
- genezeta 3y ago
  From the dictionary: "food that has not had any of its natural features taken away or any artificial substances added". That would mean unprocessed food: fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains (such as oats, brown rice and barley), nuts, beans, fish, shellfish and eggs.
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  It's what you'd call just "normal food" in the rest of the world.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    > the rest of the world. Much of the rest of the world but not all. The UK is following the US in pursuit of a diet consisting entirely of ultra-processed 'food'. "Ultra-processed foods account for 56.8% of total energy intake and 64.7% of total free sugars in the UK diet. Free sugars represent 12.4% of total energy intake, and 61.3% of the sample exceeded the recommended limit of 10% energy from free sugars. This percentage was higher among children (74.9%) and adolescents (82.9%). Prevalence of excessive free sugar intake increased linearly across quintiles of ultra-processed food consumption for all age groups, except among the elderly. Eliminating ultra-processed foods could potentially reduce the prevalence of excessive free sugar intake by 47%." https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/10/e027546 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/10/e027546
- rmast 3y ago
  Basically leave out things like added oils and refined ingredients (sugar).
- bregma 3y ago
  Maybe as in "I can't believe I ate the whole thing"?
- klyrs 3y ago
  Am I allowed to peel my orange? ... sounds like a smartass question; that's probably not where the line is drawn. Here's a website that describes something they call a whole-food diet: https://www.verywellfit.com/what-is-a-whole-foods-diet-2241974 https://www.verywellfit.com/what-is-a-whole-foods-diet-22419...
- markstos 3y ago
  In this context, it doesn't mean "no processing" but more like "nothing good removed, nothing bad added". Unlike veganism, which has yes/no test of "does it contain animal products", with WFPB there's more a spectrum as you move from "no processing" to "minimal processing" to more processing. And the science supports getting nearly all the benefits by being mostly compliant, even if you don't eat 100% whole-foods or 100% plant-based. People still have 5% or so processed foods are still having very good results.
abathur 3y ago
I'm not sure it's intrinsically bad news for the diet (but I won't dispute that it's a challenge for how it's usually followed). I haven't met one, but I've at least heard that there are vegans following ketosis-inducing diets.
- markstos 3y ago
  I've been at meals where common ground is attempted... you end up with things like cauliflower mashed potatoes. Yes, there's technically some overlap, but people on low-fat WFPB diets often have good short and long term results so there's not an incentive to keto-ize it. For example, I just ran 4 marathons in 5 weeks in my late 40s eating mostly WFPB. That's good-enough health for me.
- throwawaycities 3y ago
  I’ve personally done both vegetarian and vegan keto diets (a couple months each). From my normal keto diet it basically meant I stopped eating eggs/bacon and meat. Vegetarian was easier than vegan because I could still eat eggs. Ketosis definitely can be achieved with “whole food diets” and “whole food plant based diets”
slibhb 3y ago
> Meat and dairy have causal or correlations with a lot of terminal diseases How do studies show causation? I imagine almost all the evidence here is observational. In general, due to that limitation, I don't think we can really draw conclusions about what foods are good/bad. With an intervention like a keto diet, at least we could potentially get some experimental data.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  Not familiar with the specific studies being discussed, but there are techniques available to infer causal relationships from observational data (generally referred to as “causal inference/statistics”). The specific method depends heavily on the question you’re trying to answer, but the general idea is to identify sources of variation in your population that are unrelated to the variables under study, and then to exploit that variable to create a situation where you’ve got a “proxy” control and treatment group. A classic example is discontinuity regression, but other methods exist.
  - spacephysics 3y ago
    As I understand, you’d need to know all the confounding factors to account for variations? What about multi-variate problems? For instance many studies used red meat intake in the form of burgers from fast food as “red meat” full stop, and concluded that causes cancer. Not really paying attention to the seed oils or mountains of other ingredients in a SAD which are banned in other places yet allowed here. Not including the problems with pesticide use. I really don’t trust meta analysis or statistical gymnastics to draw causal conclusions from nutrition studies given the wide array of factors that we really can’t account for. Genetics of the individual, environmental history (high protein with someone who has a history of kidney disease is bad vs an average person for example) I’m more concerned over pesticides, preservatives, and even storage containers produced in the last 75 years to cause cancer and other issues than a source of food that we’ve and many others have lived off for some thousands of years. Plants and meat included. Unfortunately there’s a mistrust in many of these institutions, but I think for good reason. They need to get their act together (see sugar industry’s collusion with scientist that asserted saturated fats cause heart disease). Not to mention the enormous p-hacking and reproducibility crisis.
toolz 3y ago
The author of that book seems to exaggerate quite heavily, often stating that there's only one proven diet that reverses heart disease, which I find completely overstating the evidence. I do think he's onto something, but he completely oversells how confident science is on plant based dieting. Here's an interesting overview on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypilw1KCq9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypilw1KCq9Y it would seem to me that Dr. Greger is simply wrong on this subject as the mediterranean diet would also appear to meet his criteria of "proven" diets and he claims only plant diets have been "proven"
- markstos 3y ago
  The Mediterranean is a similar diet-- also emphasizes whole foods and mostly plants with less animal products. It's gets mentioned alongside WFPB as being good for longevity.
  - throwawaycities 3y ago
    Most “keto friendly foods” are part of the Mediterranean diet, the main difference is really a matter of cutting out foods that spike insulin and managing the marcos for ketosis. So the emphasis is on fats from the Mediterranean diets like fish, olive oils, meat, and nuts. It’s not like green vegetables (and other low glycemic vegetables) from the Mediterranean diet aren’t permitted.
    - rmast 3y ago
      There’s also research showing fruits (the whole thing with the fiber, not juice) can be eaten without causing an insulin spike — as in, X grams of natural sugar eaten in the form of an apple is not the same as getting those X grams as refined sugar such as a can of soda.
      - throwawaycities 3y ago
        Yes it’s possible to eat small amounts of certain fruits (not sure about apples specifically) and not be thrown out of ketosis. When in ketosis I tend to avoid fruit, sometimes I’ll have a small amount of blueberries in a smoothie balanced out with fats from coconut milk, almond butter and chia seeds, plus some fiber (spinach). But I even avoid high-glycemic vegetables, like carrots, when in ketosis. Generally in calculating their carb/sugar intake people will reduce carbs/sugars by fiber, it’s not exactly scientific but probably works for the most part. I don’t even bother calculating carbs for stuff like spinach, kale, or Broccoli.
verticalscaler 3y ago
The folks that live the longest in your studies were all born at the beginning of the tumultuous 20th century rather than some optimal fishbowl experiment. If, for example, one of them was visiting a market in NYC around 1924 it is unlikely that bananas were on offer. Much has changed in what we eat and how it is produced and an infinity other confounding factors. Science does not put forth an "optimal diet" to begin with. It is unlikely there exists such a thing but rather diets carry various tradeoffs for differing populations.
fl0ki 3y ago
I would really appreciate if people would stop referencing this book as evidence for anything. If it was written as a literature review paper and subjected to peer review, it would have been torn to shreds, not published and endorsed by a scientific journal. (Even by the infamous standards of an industry neck-deep in replication crisis) https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-not-to-die-review https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-not-to-die-review https://thehealthsciencesacademy.org/book-reviews/how-not-to-die/ https://thehealthsciencesacademy.org/book-reviews/how-not-to... Meanwhile, what do actually peer-reviewed studies say: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8881926/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8881926/ https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2022/02/22/meat-eating-extends-human-life-expectancy-worldwide https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2022/02/22/me... There seem to be people out there who managed to make plant-based diets work for them, but it took more than reading a single book, and it takes a lot of maintenance and monitoring to sustain. That gets more and more difficult in advanced age, as nutritional needs naturally change, including changes to the the absorption, metabolism, and even transport of the raw nutrients we do eat. Even steelmanning the cardiovascular case: The population base rates of depression, anxiety, and obesity are far greater than cardiovascular disease. It is ignorant at best and irresponsible at worst to encourage people to optimize for reducing their already slim chances of cardiovascular issues while increasing their already high chances of several other issues. Even that doesn't hold, of course, because obesity also increases the risk of cardiovascular issues anyway. I'm going to stop short of accusing plant-based diets of being a scam or a conspiracy, but I do believe they are somewhere in the space of bad science and poor reasoning, even in the most well-trodden easily-avoidable ones like the base rate fallacy.
- rmast 3y ago
  That adelaide article claims that meat was a staple pre-agriculture, but doesn’t do much to back it up. Studies of feces appear to indicate plant consumption was high. There’s also one I came across on Neanderthal diet 50k years ago that suggests they ate more plant stuff than previously thought. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329486931_Dietary_fiber_From_early_hunter-gatherers_to_the_1990s https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329486931_Dietary_f... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2481-2_8 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2481-2_... This one says meat was an important component, but that fiber (only from plants) consumption was much higher than it is now. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Biological_Anthropology/EXPLORATIONS%3A__An_Open_Invitation_to_Biological__Anthropology_1e/16%3A_Contemporary_Topics%3A_Human_Biology_and_Health/16.01%3A_Osteology https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Bi...
Attummm 3y ago
It must be noted that science is not a single entity, and with nutrition, different sciences will have opposing views. For example, the ketogenic diet has been used in medicinal contexts for more than a century. Longevity research is heavily focused on insulin, making ketogenic diets of interest even when used cyclically.
- rmast 3y ago
  Specifically, keto was aimed at helping manage epilepsy.
stcredzero 3y ago
Science doesn't support keto as an optimal diet for most cases, which I wouldn't call a weird stigma. In fairness, the spike in cholesterol is a legit piece of data to be concerned about. But then again, there's other data that supports the idea that the higher cholesterol is an adaptation which doesn't increase the risk of heart disease. Something as complex as the human metabolism is going to require a higher degree of nuance. (Also works this way for climate.)
newzisforsukas 3y ago
> The book How Not To Die is a good primer on nutrition, major diseases and longevity, and includes references to all the scientific studies references I read this book. You might want to check some of those references.
- markstos 3y ago
  Any you'd like to refute?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
dham 3y ago
It's not meat and dairy; it's meat and dairy...with carbs. It's why societies that only ate saturated fat we're fine until they started eating carbs. Then they started dying off and getting diabetes. Steak and eggs are not bad for you. Steak, eggs, toast and pancakes will kill you.
- newzisforsukas 3y ago
  Anyone stating a truth like this around nutrition is over confident, if not completely disingenuous. No one has a complete picture of this. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7789746717773890744&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7789746717773890744...
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  > It's why societies that only ate saturated fat we're fine until they started eating carbs. Define "fine"? Calcified atheromas are even found in Inuit mummies. If you're trying to eat a diet that's not atherogenic, you'd drop eggs and especially red meat, and you'd include carbs like beans and broccoli.
  - cykros 3y ago
    I don't think I've ever met someone doing a keto diet that didn't eat an obscene amount of broccoli and other brassicas. But yes, beans generally don't make the cut.
riku_iki 3y ago
> The book How Not To Die did that book receive any kind of proofreading itself?.. Many pop-science authors manipulate studies results to push narrative.
chlodwig 3y ago
There are an infinite number of lousy and p-hacked studies showing that every single possible diet is both good and bad before. What are the one to three highest quality, most convincing studies showing that eating unprocessed ruminant meat (ie, beef and lamb) is bad for your health?

jjtheblunt 3y ago

What is meant by “whole” when used in “whole food”?

riehwvfbk 3y ago
Leaving the whole contents of your wallet at the grocery store rather than partial.
- markstos 3y ago
  Ah yes, the "beans and rice are more expensive than beef" argument.
  - riehwvfbk 3y ago
    It's a joke. It went whoosh.
  - abduhl 3y ago
    Are beans and rice more "whole" than beef? Is beef not a "whole food"?
    - rmast 3y ago
      Beans and brown rice would be… unless you’re eating the whole cow. But actually, it’s surprising how many things like preservatives get added to things like ground beef.
      - abduhl 3y ago
        Sorry but this is a ludicrous statement. Beans and brown rice are more "whole" than beef unless you're eating the whole cow? You're not eating the whole bean plant or rice plant. Even looking at brown rice or beans off the plant, with brown rice you are still removing the husk and with beans you are removing the pod.
        rmast 3y ago
        That part was humor, sorry you missed it. I’ll elaborate. If it’s unprocessed beef it could be considered a whole food — but often people don’t bother checking the ingredients for the meat they buy and just assume that it doesn’t have things added. That said, there is research that points to eating too much beef and other red meats potentially being bad for health.
genezeta 3y ago
From the dictionary: "food that has not had any of its natural features taken away or any artificial substances added". That would mean unprocessed food: fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains (such as oats, brown rice and barley), nuts, beans, fish, shellfish and eggs.
bondarchuk 3y ago
It's what you'd call just "normal food" in the rest of the world.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > the rest of the world. Much of the rest of the world but not all. The UK is following the US in pursuit of a diet consisting entirely of ultra-processed 'food'. "Ultra-processed foods account for 56.8% of total energy intake and 64.7% of total free sugars in the UK diet. Free sugars represent 12.4% of total energy intake, and 61.3% of the sample exceeded the recommended limit of 10% energy from free sugars. This percentage was higher among children (74.9%) and adolescents (82.9%). Prevalence of excessive free sugar intake increased linearly across quintiles of ultra-processed food consumption for all age groups, except among the elderly. Eliminating ultra-processed foods could potentially reduce the prevalence of excessive free sugar intake by 47%." https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/10/e027546 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/10/e027546
rmast 3y ago
Basically leave out things like added oils and refined ingredients (sugar).
bregma 3y ago
Maybe as in "I can't believe I ate the whole thing"?
klyrs 3y ago
Am I allowed to peel my orange? ... sounds like a smartass question; that's probably not where the line is drawn. Here's a website that describes something they call a whole-food diet: https://www.verywellfit.com/what-is-a-whole-foods-diet-2241974 https://www.verywellfit.com/what-is-a-whole-foods-diet-22419...
markstos 3y ago
In this context, it doesn't mean "no processing" but more like "nothing good removed, nothing bad added". Unlike veganism, which has yes/no test of "does it contain animal products", with WFPB there's more a spectrum as you move from "no processing" to "minimal processing" to more processing. And the science supports getting nearly all the benefits by being mostly compliant, even if you don't eat 100% whole-foods or 100% plant-based. People still have 5% or so processed foods are still having very good results.

abathur 3y ago

I'm not sure it's intrinsically bad news for the diet (but I won't dispute that it's a challenge for how it's usually followed). I haven't met one, but I've at least heard that there are vegans following ketosis-inducing diets.

markstos 3y ago
I've been at meals where common ground is attempted... you end up with things like cauliflower mashed potatoes. Yes, there's technically some overlap, but people on low-fat WFPB diets often have good short and long term results so there's not an incentive to keto-ize it. For example, I just ran 4 marathons in 5 weeks in my late 40s eating mostly WFPB. That's good-enough health for me.
throwawaycities 3y ago
I’ve personally done both vegetarian and vegan keto diets (a couple months each). From my normal keto diet it basically meant I stopped eating eggs/bacon and meat. Vegetarian was easier than vegan because I could still eat eggs. Ketosis definitely can be achieved with “whole food diets” and “whole food plant based diets”

slibhb 3y ago

> Meat and dairy have causal or correlations with a lot of terminal diseases How do studies show causation? I imagine almost all the evidence here is observational. In general, due to that limitation, I don't think we can really draw conclusions about what foods are good/bad. With an intervention like a keto diet, at least we could potentially get some experimental data.

tech_ken 3y ago
Not familiar with the specific studies being discussed, but there are techniques available to infer causal relationships from observational data (generally referred to as “causal inference/statistics”). The specific method depends heavily on the question you’re trying to answer, but the general idea is to identify sources of variation in your population that are unrelated to the variables under study, and then to exploit that variable to create a situation where you’ve got a “proxy” control and treatment group. A classic example is discontinuity regression, but other methods exist.
- spacephysics 3y ago
  As I understand, you’d need to know all the confounding factors to account for variations? What about multi-variate problems? For instance many studies used red meat intake in the form of burgers from fast food as “red meat” full stop, and concluded that causes cancer. Not really paying attention to the seed oils or mountains of other ingredients in a SAD which are banned in other places yet allowed here. Not including the problems with pesticide use. I really don’t trust meta analysis or statistical gymnastics to draw causal conclusions from nutrition studies given the wide array of factors that we really can’t account for. Genetics of the individual, environmental history (high protein with someone who has a history of kidney disease is bad vs an average person for example) I’m more concerned over pesticides, preservatives, and even storage containers produced in the last 75 years to cause cancer and other issues than a source of food that we’ve and many others have lived off for some thousands of years. Plants and meat included. Unfortunately there’s a mistrust in many of these institutions, but I think for good reason. They need to get their act together (see sugar industry’s collusion with scientist that asserted saturated fats cause heart disease). Not to mention the enormous p-hacking and reproducibility crisis.

toolz 3y ago

The author of that book seems to exaggerate quite heavily, often stating that there's only one proven diet that reverses heart disease, which I find completely overstating the evidence. I do think he's onto something, but he completely oversells how confident science is on plant based dieting. Here's an interesting overview on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypilw1KCq9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypilw1KCq9Y it would seem to me that Dr. Greger is simply wrong on this subject as the mediterranean diet would also appear to meet his criteria of "proven" diets and he claims only plant diets have been "proven"

markstos 3y ago
The Mediterranean is a similar diet-- also emphasizes whole foods and mostly plants with less animal products. It's gets mentioned alongside WFPB as being good for longevity.
- throwawaycities 3y ago
  Most “keto friendly foods” are part of the Mediterranean diet, the main difference is really a matter of cutting out foods that spike insulin and managing the marcos for ketosis. So the emphasis is on fats from the Mediterranean diets like fish, olive oils, meat, and nuts. It’s not like green vegetables (and other low glycemic vegetables) from the Mediterranean diet aren’t permitted.
  - rmast 3y ago
    There’s also research showing fruits (the whole thing with the fiber, not juice) can be eaten without causing an insulin spike — as in, X grams of natural sugar eaten in the form of an apple is not the same as getting those X grams as refined sugar such as a can of soda.
    - throwawaycities 3y ago
      Yes it’s possible to eat small amounts of certain fruits (not sure about apples specifically) and not be thrown out of ketosis. When in ketosis I tend to avoid fruit, sometimes I’ll have a small amount of blueberries in a smoothie balanced out with fats from coconut milk, almond butter and chia seeds, plus some fiber (spinach). But I even avoid high-glycemic vegetables, like carrots, when in ketosis. Generally in calculating their carb/sugar intake people will reduce carbs/sugars by fiber, it’s not exactly scientific but probably works for the most part. I don’t even bother calculating carbs for stuff like spinach, kale, or Broccoli.

verticalscaler 3y ago

The folks that live the longest in your studies were all born at the beginning of the tumultuous 20th century rather than some optimal fishbowl experiment. If, for example, one of them was visiting a market in NYC around 1924 it is unlikely that bananas were on offer. Much has changed in what we eat and how it is produced and an infinity other confounding factors. Science does not put forth an "optimal diet" to begin with. It is unlikely there exists such a thing but rather diets carry various tradeoffs for differing populations.

fl0ki 3y ago

I would really appreciate if people would stop referencing this book as evidence for anything. If it was written as a literature review paper and subjected to peer review, it would have been torn to shreds, not published and endorsed by a scientific journal. (Even by the infamous standards of an industry neck-deep in replication crisis) https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-not-to-die-review https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-not-to-die-review https://thehealthsciencesacademy.org/book-reviews/how-not-to-die/ https://thehealthsciencesacademy.org/book-reviews/how-not-to... Meanwhile, what do actually peer-reviewed studies say: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8881926/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8881926/ https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2022/02/22/meat-eating-extends-human-life-expectancy-worldwide https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2022/02/22/me... There seem to be people out there who managed to make plant-based diets work for them, but it took more than reading a single book, and it takes a lot of maintenance and monitoring to sustain. That gets more and more difficult in advanced age, as nutritional needs naturally change, including changes to the the absorption, metabolism, and even transport of the raw nutrients we do eat. Even steelmanning the cardiovascular case: The population base rates of depression, anxiety, and obesity are far greater than cardiovascular disease. It is ignorant at best and irresponsible at worst to encourage people to optimize for reducing their already slim chances of cardiovascular issues while increasing their already high chances of several other issues. Even that doesn't hold, of course, because obesity also increases the risk of cardiovascular issues anyway. I'm going to stop short of accusing plant-based diets of being a scam or a conspiracy, but I do believe they are somewhere in the space of bad science and poor reasoning, even in the most well-trodden easily-avoidable ones like the base rate fallacy.

rmast 3y ago
That adelaide article claims that meat was a staple pre-agriculture, but doesn’t do much to back it up. Studies of feces appear to indicate plant consumption was high. There’s also one I came across on Neanderthal diet 50k years ago that suggests they ate more plant stuff than previously thought. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329486931_Dietary_fiber_From_early_hunter-gatherers_to_the_1990s https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329486931_Dietary_f... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2481-2_8 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2481-2_... This one says meat was an important component, but that fiber (only from plants) consumption was much higher than it is now. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Biological_Anthropology/EXPLORATIONS%3A__An_Open_Invitation_to_Biological__Anthropology_1e/16%3A_Contemporary_Topics%3A_Human_Biology_and_Health/16.01%3A_Osteology https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Bi...

Attummm 3y ago

It must be noted that science is not a single entity, and with nutrition, different sciences will have opposing views. For example, the ketogenic diet has been used in medicinal contexts for more than a century. Longevity research is heavily focused on insulin, making ketogenic diets of interest even when used cyclically.

rmast 3y ago
Specifically, keto was aimed at helping manage epilepsy.

stcredzero 3y ago

Science doesn't support keto as an optimal diet for most cases, which I wouldn't call a weird stigma. In fairness, the spike in cholesterol is a legit piece of data to be concerned about. But then again, there's other data that supports the idea that the higher cholesterol is an adaptation which doesn't increase the risk of heart disease. Something as complex as the human metabolism is going to require a higher degree of nuance. (Also works this way for climate.)

newzisforsukas 3y ago

> The book How Not To Die is a good primer on nutrition, major diseases and longevity, and includes references to all the scientific studies references I read this book. You might want to check some of those references.

markstos 3y ago
Any you'd like to refute?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

dham 3y ago

It's not meat and dairy; it's meat and dairy...with carbs. It's why societies that only ate saturated fat we're fine until they started eating carbs. Then they started dying off and getting diabetes. Steak and eggs are not bad for you. Steak, eggs, toast and pancakes will kill you.

newzisforsukas 3y ago
Anyone stating a truth like this around nutrition is over confident, if not completely disingenuous. No one has a complete picture of this. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7789746717773890744&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7789746717773890744...
hombre_fatal 3y ago
> It's why societies that only ate saturated fat we're fine until they started eating carbs. Define "fine"? Calcified atheromas are even found in Inuit mummies. If you're trying to eat a diet that's not atherogenic, you'd drop eggs and especially red meat, and you'd include carbs like beans and broccoli.
- cykros 3y ago
  I don't think I've ever met someone doing a keto diet that didn't eat an obscene amount of broccoli and other brassicas. But yes, beans generally don't make the cut.

riku_iki 3y ago

> The book How Not To Die did that book receive any kind of proofreading itself?.. Many pop-science authors manipulate studies results to push narrative.

chlodwig 3y ago

There are an infinite number of lousy and p-hacked studies showing that every single possible diet is both good and bad before. What are the one to three highest quality, most convincing studies showing that eating unprocessed ruminant meat (ie, beef and lamb) is bad for your health?