7 ms·

"Not too much" and "mostly plants" are good, but trying to redefine food is a bit wacky, once you learn that that's his game. I'm not even against the idea tha

"Not too much" and "mostly plants" are good, but trying to redefine food is a bit wacky, once you learn that that's his game. I'm not even against the idea that processed food is often bad and should always be treated with skepticism, but naturalism as a foundational principle is just way too exploitable. I called "companies are going to start marketing sugar as a natural alternative to low-calorie sweeteners" a decade before I saw it in grocery stores and I would like to pre-register my prediction that tobacco products will soon come back as "natural alternatives to vapes" in the not too distant future.

testing22321 1y ago
> trying to redefine food is a bit wacky No, it’s incredibly simple and makes sense. Coke are Doritos are not food, they are a science experiment designed for the express purpose of getting you hooked. They have virtually no health benefits and a ton of negatives. Nobody should ever put them into their body, or certainly as little as possible. Our “food” has changed more in 50 years than the preceding 500. Take away all the science experiments and eat what your great grandma did “mostly greens, not too much” and a massive number of health epidemics go away.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  My 15 year old son is now taller than I am and most of his nutrition is not food. It’s horrid. I suspect this is why Dutch people are so tall. Mostly cheap processed food and hormones in the milk. Ymmv
  - s_m_t 1y ago
    The cognitive dissonance here is striking. A growing man needs a shit ton of calories to grow to their full potential. You might as well fill your caloric needs with "junk" food otherwise you will need to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing and eating "natural" food at a higher cost for the exact same effect.
    - dr_dshiv 1y ago
      > The cognitive dissonance here is striking Agreed!
    - neuralRiot 1y ago
      >otherwise you will need to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing and eating "natural" food at a higher cost for the exact same effect. This is a myth, healthy whole foods are way cheaper than any ready-made “meal” and that is not even taking in account the future savings in healthcare!
      - dr_dshiv 1y ago
        ...if you don't take into account the labor of preparation. Then they are surely more expensive than a bag of doritos.
        worik 1y ago
        That is true I eat well. I spend a lot of time cooking
        neuralRiot 1y ago
        That’s a good point. I believe people need to reconcile with the rituals of food like cooking and sharing the table with loved ones.
  - dowager_dan99 1y ago
    Would you prefer that he graze natural plants 20 hrs/day? He's the premium calorie consumer of all humans: a pubescent male. Are Dutch people statistically taller than Germans? Do they eat more junk food? Does your milk have more hormones? Are Dutch taller today than previous generations? Have you accounted for all the other variables. You can't throw out shit like this and then tack on "ymmv" as a disclaimer.
    - dr_dshiv 1y ago
      > Would you prefer that he graze natural plants 20 hrs/day? No, it would interfere with his Vibecoding > Are Dutch people statistically taller than Germans? Yes. 183 vs 179cm > Do they eat more junk food? Arguably. Few would argue that the food quality is better in the Netherlands than Germany. > Does your milk have more hormones? Well, there are hormones in milk, and the Dutch drink a lot of it. 25% more than Germans. > Are Dutch taller today than previous generations? Yes. But a centimeter shorter than those born in the 1980s, when it was still legal to pump cows up with hormones. >You can't throw out shit like this and then tack on "ymmv" as a disclaimer. I can’t exactly advocate for his diet — nor disclaim it. It’s confusing for me! Govt statistics linked here, O3: https://chatgpt.com/share/6838c51d-c4a4-8007-97e7-431006f4950a https://chatgpt.com/share/6838c51d-c4a4-8007-97e7-431006f495...
  - paulpauper 1y ago
    The SAD diet despite its critcism is perfect for spurring growth, as it's calorie-dense, balanced, and very palatable. It's hard to come up with a better diet if the goal is to produce big people or athletes. The problem is when adults continue to eat it, long past the growth phase, and get obese as a result.
    - neuralRiot 1y ago
      >It's hard to come up with a better diet if the goal is to produce big people or athletes. Submitting children to the standard american diet (or mostly western diet as sadly it is not relegated just to the USA anymore) should be considered child abuse, by feeding them high calorie, high cholesterol, high protein, high sugar meals you’re condemning them to a certain disease-ridden future.
      - dr_dshiv 1y ago
        Child self-abuse -- It's what the kids demand to eat!
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  Doritos are just fried corn tortillas with salt, and depending on the variety, some flavourings like dehydrated cheese and bell pepper. It's not a perfect food, but it's food. In fact, combine that with some refried beans and you might be able to live off it for a long time. > Take away all the science experiments and eat what your great grandma did “mostly greens, not too much” I don't know about your great grandma, but mine was mostly eating bread and potatoes, not mostly greens. Certainly generations before her were as well.
  - s_m_t 1y ago
    Doritos are bad because poor people can afford them. Making your diet mostly organic greens is good because you need lots of money to afford them and you will be underweight and incapable of performing peasant style manual labor.
  - drekipus 1y ago
    > In fact, combine that with some refried beans and you might be able to live off it for a long time. Might it be the beans that are what you're able to live off? What are Doritos adding to the equation here?
    - badc0ffee 1y ago
      Carbohydrates. Slow-release caloric intake - the main thing you need in your diet after your protein/vitamin/mineral needs are met. Also provides some fat. Living off beans alone sounds hellish.
      - Spivak 1y ago
        People are being really weird about greens which have almost no caloric value and supplementary health benefits at best when for all of human history the name of the game is cheap readily available carbs, fats, sugars, and protein. That's stuff is food. Everything else, while good for you, is a garnish.
  - dmonitor 1y ago
    you're forgetting the corn maltodextrin in doritos, which is a kind of predigested food-derivative that this article is warning about. Your body turns it into glucose much more efficiently than just corn, and overdosing over a long period of time probably leads to health issues.
- dowager_dan99 1y ago
  and yet I can do nothing and live a much better, longer life than my grandma.
- Swizec 1y ago
  > eat what your great grandma did “mostly greens, not too much” My great grandma is from eastern-ish europe and grew up on a farm. Her diet mainly consisted of potatoes, bread, corn, milk, sausage, lard, butter, fermented cabbage or turnip, various preserved fruits (jams and compotes), and copious amounts of extra salty preserved meats. Fresh food was a luxury reserved for the summer (fruits, veggies) or slaughter weeks (fresh meat). No refrigeration, remember? If I ate like her I'd die of a heart attack before I turned 40. And I'd be pretty obese, too. Many of those farmers got pretty chunky in their 30's despite working on the farm all day. Oh and I almost forgot: liters of wine per day per person. Liters!
  - owenversteeg 1y ago
    > If I ate like her I'd die of a heart attack before I turned 40. And I'd be pretty obese, too. No you wouldn’t. Obesity rates back then were near zero. For the general population, not just for farm laborers. Heart disease killed far fewer people per capita per year. If you remove the infectious diseases that we have practically cured, mortality per capita per year in 1900 and 2020 is pretty similar. Mind you, those infectious diseases were 90% eliminated by sanitation and understanding and 10% modern medicine; tuberculosis deaths were down by 90% from the 1860s to 1947, which is when streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against TB, was used. For some time I ate similar diets to the one you describe - a poor farmer’s diet high in potatoes and bread, with some vegetables, meats and dairy - and I know people who eat that diet today. None of them are fat. It’s because potatoes and bread aren’t very calorie-dense. It is difficult to eat a caloric surplus every day when the majority of the food in front of you is greyish brown, vaguely mushy and of a sufficiently insufficient density that you must take your time to eat it. Modern processed foods, even the fairly simple ones, take the labor out of eating and make the regular things around us infinitely snackable. Modern foods have just the right amount of sweetness and salt and crunch with the right color and appealing packaging and advertising and so on. A standard potato in a standard kitchen will never have that. There’s a reason why obesity rates precisely track consumption of processed foods.
    - Swizec 1y ago
      > No you wouldn’t. Obesity rates back then were near zero. Define back then. My great grandma lived from 1910’s to 1990’s. I believe she got indoor plumbing and electricity sometime in the 1950’s or 60’s. Because everyone grew their own food, supermarkets were mostly for sugar, salt, and such. Vegetable oils and margarine started becoming popular in the 70’s as a healthy alternative to lard. From what I remember visiting those farms as a kid, the farm guys all had big bellies. Maybe from the alcohol? They weren’t american fat, true, more like power lifter fat. PS: sausages are extremely calorie dense. A good blutwurst will pack about 1000 calories in 1 portion.
- aggie 1y ago
  It's far from simple. There is no clear delineation between food and non-food offered by saying Doritos are a science experiment. Is an ear of corn real food? It has of course been significantly modified by selective breeding. And your grandma ate GMO corn.
  - neuralRiot 1y ago
    Actually it is really simple, there’s no “doritos plant” corn is turned into cornmeal, dried, mixed with oils, salt, then fried in more oil then sprinkled in chemical flavorings and more salt. Roast some corn cobs and that’s real food.
    - badc0ffee 1y ago
      Someone better tell the Mexicans about tostadas not being food
      - neuralRiot 1y ago
        40% of Mexico population is over the obesity level.
    - saghm 1y ago
      At what point in the process does it stop being food? Is cornmeal with oil and salt still food, even though there's not a "cornmeal with oil and salt" plant? I think the point of the parent comment is that it's not clear that there's a single place to draw the line between "food" and "not food" in a way that everyone will immediately agree on.
      - neuralRiot 1y ago
        Of course, if you’ll go to the semantic approach then anything edible would be “food”, foods are no simply “good” or “bad”, they’re “better than…” “worst than…” As a side observation and not particularly referring to your reply, I see that people tend to put food or nutrition if you want, almost in the same scope of politics and religion, many people I know who I consider very open-minded will get very on the defensive whenever I tell them that the best thing to do is to reduce the intake of proteins of animal origin and increase plant consumption. That goes to show that years of propaganda have worked very well.
spondylosaurus 1y ago
Agreed, it really depends because "processing" can mean so many different things. A Twinkie is processed, but so is a brick of ultra-firm tofu.
- sellmesoap 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - spondylosaurus 1y ago
    How did I know I was gonna get a "soy = estrogen = bad" comment? :P I have yet to see any credible evidence that tofu is bad for your endocrine system.
    - sellmesoap 1y ago
      I don't know much about the contents and outcomes of twinkies, but a search for "soy endocrine" gave me this https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5646220/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5646220/ a mixed bag, but higher reports of reproductive cancer, prolonged menstrual bleeding for young women stood out as reasons I might limit my intake, and the same for my children. I've heard personal accounts of vegan friends turning to meat and dairy to keep up with their fitness demands (studying yoga in Astanga, and Olympic lifting.) I've been vegie for parts of my life, but it sure is a loaded topic!
    - scripturial 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - tpm 1y ago
        Does it? Maybe we should just process the soy a bit more: Traditional and Domestic Cooking Dramatically Reduce Estrogenic Isoflavones in Soy Foods https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/13/7/999 https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/13/7/999
danw1979 1y ago
I’ll wager that sugar is probably better for you (in moderation) than artificial sweeteners. I remember reading something not that long ago about insulin response to sweeteners being similar to sugars. Give me fat coke over diet coke any day. But yeah, I agree with your point that “naturalism” isn’t often optimal. I’ve read the book he wrote after this article and it’s really quite good. The principal that if your great grandparents wouldn’t recognise it as “food”, then avoid, is a pretty good rule of thumb.
- Spivak 1y ago
  I will take the other side of that bet. I've joked for years about aspartame surely going to give me cancer and yet despite the not inconsiderable amount of research into it trying to find a smoking gun the results are at best vaguely suggestive, which is another way of saying there have still yet been no provable connection between aspartame and any heath problem. If you're a Bayesian thinker at this point your priors should be set on the far side of "it's for all practical purposes inert in the body." But refined sugar, you'll be drowning in real documented health problems.
  - hndamien 1y ago
    The problem with aspartame is your gut microbiome, not cancer. Sugar is probably better for you, but keep it to small amounts.
- worik 1y ago
  > I’ll wager that sugar is probably better for you (in moderation) than artificial sweeteners The key is "in moderation" Many people seem to get their entire liquid intake out of aluminum cans. That is too much sugar.
aidenn0 1y ago
Any idea about how he feels on honey? My personal pet peeve is people who use honey as a sweetener because they are "avoiding refined sugars." Apparently if a bee does the refining, it doesn't count!

testing22321 1y ago

> trying to redefine food is a bit wacky No, it’s incredibly simple and makes sense. Coke are Doritos are not food, they are a science experiment designed for the express purpose of getting you hooked. They have virtually no health benefits and a ton of negatives. Nobody should ever put them into their body, or certainly as little as possible. Our “food” has changed more in 50 years than the preceding 500. Take away all the science experiments and eat what your great grandma did “mostly greens, not too much” and a massive number of health epidemics go away.

dr_dshiv 1y ago
My 15 year old son is now taller than I am and most of his nutrition is not food. It’s horrid. I suspect this is why Dutch people are so tall. Mostly cheap processed food and hormones in the milk. Ymmv
- s_m_t 1y ago
  The cognitive dissonance here is striking. A growing man needs a shit ton of calories to grow to their full potential. You might as well fill your caloric needs with "junk" food otherwise you will need to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing and eating "natural" food at a higher cost for the exact same effect.
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    > The cognitive dissonance here is striking Agreed!
  - neuralRiot 1y ago
    >otherwise you will need to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing and eating "natural" food at a higher cost for the exact same effect. This is a myth, healthy whole foods are way cheaper than any ready-made “meal” and that is not even taking in account the future savings in healthcare!
    - dr_dshiv 1y ago
      ...if you don't take into account the labor of preparation. Then they are surely more expensive than a bag of doritos.
      - worik 1y ago
        That is true I eat well. I spend a lot of time cooking
        neuralRiot 1y ago
        That’s a good point. I believe people need to reconcile with the rituals of food like cooking and sharing the table with loved ones.
- dowager_dan99 1y ago
  Would you prefer that he graze natural plants 20 hrs/day? He's the premium calorie consumer of all humans: a pubescent male. Are Dutch people statistically taller than Germans? Do they eat more junk food? Does your milk have more hormones? Are Dutch taller today than previous generations? Have you accounted for all the other variables. You can't throw out shit like this and then tack on "ymmv" as a disclaimer.
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    > Would you prefer that he graze natural plants 20 hrs/day? No, it would interfere with his Vibecoding > Are Dutch people statistically taller than Germans? Yes. 183 vs 179cm > Do they eat more junk food? Arguably. Few would argue that the food quality is better in the Netherlands than Germany. > Does your milk have more hormones? Well, there are hormones in milk, and the Dutch drink a lot of it. 25% more than Germans. > Are Dutch taller today than previous generations? Yes. But a centimeter shorter than those born in the 1980s, when it was still legal to pump cows up with hormones. >You can't throw out shit like this and then tack on "ymmv" as a disclaimer. I can’t exactly advocate for his diet — nor disclaim it. It’s confusing for me! Govt statistics linked here, O3: https://chatgpt.com/share/6838c51d-c4a4-8007-97e7-431006f4950a https://chatgpt.com/share/6838c51d-c4a4-8007-97e7-431006f495...
- paulpauper 1y ago
  The SAD diet despite its critcism is perfect for spurring growth, as it's calorie-dense, balanced, and very palatable. It's hard to come up with a better diet if the goal is to produce big people or athletes. The problem is when adults continue to eat it, long past the growth phase, and get obese as a result.
  - neuralRiot 1y ago
    >It's hard to come up with a better diet if the goal is to produce big people or athletes. Submitting children to the standard american diet (or mostly western diet as sadly it is not relegated just to the USA anymore) should be considered child abuse, by feeding them high calorie, high cholesterol, high protein, high sugar meals you’re condemning them to a certain disease-ridden future.
    - dr_dshiv 1y ago
      Child self-abuse -- It's what the kids demand to eat!
badc0ffee 1y ago
Doritos are just fried corn tortillas with salt, and depending on the variety, some flavourings like dehydrated cheese and bell pepper. It's not a perfect food, but it's food. In fact, combine that with some refried beans and you might be able to live off it for a long time. > Take away all the science experiments and eat what your great grandma did “mostly greens, not too much” I don't know about your great grandma, but mine was mostly eating bread and potatoes, not mostly greens. Certainly generations before her were as well.
- s_m_t 1y ago
  Doritos are bad because poor people can afford them. Making your diet mostly organic greens is good because you need lots of money to afford them and you will be underweight and incapable of performing peasant style manual labor.
- drekipus 1y ago
  > In fact, combine that with some refried beans and you might be able to live off it for a long time. Might it be the beans that are what you're able to live off? What are Doritos adding to the equation here?
  - badc0ffee 1y ago
    Carbohydrates. Slow-release caloric intake - the main thing you need in your diet after your protein/vitamin/mineral needs are met. Also provides some fat. Living off beans alone sounds hellish.
    - Spivak 1y ago
      People are being really weird about greens which have almost no caloric value and supplementary health benefits at best when for all of human history the name of the game is cheap readily available carbs, fats, sugars, and protein. That's stuff is food. Everything else, while good for you, is a garnish.
- dmonitor 1y ago
  you're forgetting the corn maltodextrin in doritos, which is a kind of predigested food-derivative that this article is warning about. Your body turns it into glucose much more efficiently than just corn, and overdosing over a long period of time probably leads to health issues.
dowager_dan99 1y ago
and yet I can do nothing and live a much better, longer life than my grandma.
Swizec 1y ago
> eat what your great grandma did “mostly greens, not too much” My great grandma is from eastern-ish europe and grew up on a farm. Her diet mainly consisted of potatoes, bread, corn, milk, sausage, lard, butter, fermented cabbage or turnip, various preserved fruits (jams and compotes), and copious amounts of extra salty preserved meats. Fresh food was a luxury reserved for the summer (fruits, veggies) or slaughter weeks (fresh meat). No refrigeration, remember? If I ate like her I'd die of a heart attack before I turned 40. And I'd be pretty obese, too. Many of those farmers got pretty chunky in their 30's despite working on the farm all day. Oh and I almost forgot: liters of wine per day per person. Liters!
- owenversteeg 1y ago
  > If I ate like her I'd die of a heart attack before I turned 40. And I'd be pretty obese, too. No you wouldn’t. Obesity rates back then were near zero. For the general population, not just for farm laborers. Heart disease killed far fewer people per capita per year. If you remove the infectious diseases that we have practically cured, mortality per capita per year in 1900 and 2020 is pretty similar. Mind you, those infectious diseases were 90% eliminated by sanitation and understanding and 10% modern medicine; tuberculosis deaths were down by 90% from the 1860s to 1947, which is when streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against TB, was used. For some time I ate similar diets to the one you describe - a poor farmer’s diet high in potatoes and bread, with some vegetables, meats and dairy - and I know people who eat that diet today. None of them are fat. It’s because potatoes and bread aren’t very calorie-dense. It is difficult to eat a caloric surplus every day when the majority of the food in front of you is greyish brown, vaguely mushy and of a sufficiently insufficient density that you must take your time to eat it. Modern processed foods, even the fairly simple ones, take the labor out of eating and make the regular things around us infinitely snackable. Modern foods have just the right amount of sweetness and salt and crunch with the right color and appealing packaging and advertising and so on. A standard potato in a standard kitchen will never have that. There’s a reason why obesity rates precisely track consumption of processed foods.
  - Swizec 1y ago
    > No you wouldn’t. Obesity rates back then were near zero. Define back then. My great grandma lived from 1910’s to 1990’s. I believe she got indoor plumbing and electricity sometime in the 1950’s or 60’s. Because everyone grew their own food, supermarkets were mostly for sugar, salt, and such. Vegetable oils and margarine started becoming popular in the 70’s as a healthy alternative to lard. From what I remember visiting those farms as a kid, the farm guys all had big bellies. Maybe from the alcohol? They weren’t american fat, true, more like power lifter fat. PS: sausages are extremely calorie dense. A good blutwurst will pack about 1000 calories in 1 portion.
aggie 1y ago
It's far from simple. There is no clear delineation between food and non-food offered by saying Doritos are a science experiment. Is an ear of corn real food? It has of course been significantly modified by selective breeding. And your grandma ate GMO corn.
- neuralRiot 1y ago
  Actually it is really simple, there’s no “doritos plant” corn is turned into cornmeal, dried, mixed with oils, salt, then fried in more oil then sprinkled in chemical flavorings and more salt. Roast some corn cobs and that’s real food.
  - badc0ffee 1y ago
    Someone better tell the Mexicans about tostadas not being food
    - neuralRiot 1y ago
      40% of Mexico population is over the obesity level.
  - saghm 1y ago
    At what point in the process does it stop being food? Is cornmeal with oil and salt still food, even though there's not a "cornmeal with oil and salt" plant? I think the point of the parent comment is that it's not clear that there's a single place to draw the line between "food" and "not food" in a way that everyone will immediately agree on.
    - neuralRiot 1y ago
      Of course, if you’ll go to the semantic approach then anything edible would be “food”, foods are no simply “good” or “bad”, they’re “better than…” “worst than…” As a side observation and not particularly referring to your reply, I see that people tend to put food or nutrition if you want, almost in the same scope of politics and religion, many people I know who I consider very open-minded will get very on the defensive whenever I tell them that the best thing to do is to reduce the intake of proteins of animal origin and increase plant consumption. That goes to show that years of propaganda have worked very well.

spondylosaurus 1y ago

Agreed, it really depends because "processing" can mean so many different things. A Twinkie is processed, but so is a brick of ultra-firm tofu.

sellmesoap 1y ago
[flagged]
- spondylosaurus 1y ago
  How did I know I was gonna get a "soy = estrogen = bad" comment? :P I have yet to see any credible evidence that tofu is bad for your endocrine system.
  - sellmesoap 1y ago
    I don't know much about the contents and outcomes of twinkies, but a search for "soy endocrine" gave me this https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5646220/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5646220/ a mixed bag, but higher reports of reproductive cancer, prolonged menstrual bleeding for young women stood out as reasons I might limit my intake, and the same for my children. I've heard personal accounts of vegan friends turning to meat and dairy to keep up with their fitness demands (studying yoga in Astanga, and Olympic lifting.) I've been vegie for parts of my life, but it sure is a loaded topic!
  - scripturial 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - tpm 1y ago
      Does it? Maybe we should just process the soy a bit more: Traditional and Domestic Cooking Dramatically Reduce Estrogenic Isoflavones in Soy Foods https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/13/7/999 https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/13/7/999

danw1979 1y ago

I’ll wager that sugar is probably better for you (in moderation) than artificial sweeteners. I remember reading something not that long ago about insulin response to sweeteners being similar to sugars. Give me fat coke over diet coke any day. But yeah, I agree with your point that “naturalism” isn’t often optimal. I’ve read the book he wrote after this article and it’s really quite good. The principal that if your great grandparents wouldn’t recognise it as “food”, then avoid, is a pretty good rule of thumb.

Spivak 1y ago
I will take the other side of that bet. I've joked for years about aspartame surely going to give me cancer and yet despite the not inconsiderable amount of research into it trying to find a smoking gun the results are at best vaguely suggestive, which is another way of saying there have still yet been no provable connection between aspartame and any heath problem. If you're a Bayesian thinker at this point your priors should be set on the far side of "it's for all practical purposes inert in the body." But refined sugar, you'll be drowning in real documented health problems.
- hndamien 1y ago
  The problem with aspartame is your gut microbiome, not cancer. Sugar is probably better for you, but keep it to small amounts.
worik 1y ago
> I’ll wager that sugar is probably better for you (in moderation) than artificial sweeteners The key is "in moderation" Many people seem to get their entire liquid intake out of aluminum cans. That is too much sugar.

aidenn0 1y ago

Any idea about how he feels on honey? My personal pet peeve is people who use honey as a sweetener because they are "avoiding refined sugars." Apparently if a bee does the refining, it doesn't count!