7 ms·

What counts as scientific evidence has fairly high standard. What we know may not reach that level of rigor, but isn't it still a bit more than 'very little'.

What counts as scientific evidence has fairly high standard. What we know may not reach that level of rigor, but isn't it still a bit more than 'very little'. If, say, it's 80% (rather than 95%) likely that eating more than 4 servings of fruits and vegetables per day helps reduce your chance of having cardiovascular diseases by 35%, and you don't mind the food group anyway, why shouldn't you try? In any case, there are very few (or no?) studies that say eating a lot of vegetables and fruits (within reason) will cause you health problems. A principle of entrepreneurship is that whenever a bet yields either positive or neutral results, you should do it. Why shouldn't this principle be applied to such an important area as our health and wellness?

pron 13y ago
There's actually evidence to support that eating fruit is quite detrimental to your health, as modern fruit contain so much sugar. What are you eating fruits for? Water? Vitamins you can get from meat anyway? A lot of people say fruits are bad for you. Now, I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do one thing or another when it comes to nutrition. All I'm saying is you should be aware that it's little more than superstition and magical thinking. It's very hard to resist magical thinking, but it's often good to know when you're doing it. Sometimes doing things with your eyes open is better than doing them with your eyes shut. Although in this case I'm not 100% sure about that: there's clearly a lot of (positive) placebo effect at the cause of many anecdotal reports about nutrition, and knowing that it's mostly superstition may negate it.
- beagle3 13y ago
  > There's actually evidence to support that eating fruit is quite detrimental to your health, as modern fruit contain so much sugar. What are you eating fruits for? Water? Vitamins you can get from meat anyway? A lot of people say fruits are bad for you. Is there? As far as I know, there is evidence about sugar but not about fruit. And assuming that evidence about sugar translates to evidence about fruit is exactly the kind of sin your first post talks about. (But if you can point me to experimental evidence specifically about fruit, I'd be very interested in reading that)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Current fruits are with much higher sugar content than in generations past. So you are pumping yourself with fructose much faster.
    - beagle3 13y ago
      I suppose that might be true (though I don't assume that -- references will be appreciated). However, that does not at all address the question of whether or not they are healthy for you or not. Fructose on its own is associated with all kinds of problems. But a fruit is not fructose on its own, and it's possible that other things in fruit make fructose "not a problem". e.g.: Table sugar is 50% fructose - however, it is not associated with the same kind of problems that pure fructose is associated with. e.g.: Table salt, Sodium Chloride, is harmless (actually, essential) in small amounts - however, just the same amount of chlorine (if you managed to take the sodium away somehow) will easily kill you. And I don't know, but I'm sure pure sodium if ingested wouldn't be health for you either. So, the question stands: Is there evidence that fruit is bad for you? Even suggestive evidence? A study of comparable populations whose main difference is the amount of fruit eaten, which shows that the less-fruit-eating population is better off?
      - jasallen 13y ago
        This line of discussion rather proves the original point. We don't know if unbounded fruit consumption is bad. Of course unbounded simple sugar consumption is (we think) but some evidence has shown that for whatever reason, sugars directly from fruit enter the blood stream slower. Maybe. :-)
      - venomsnake 13y ago
        Anecdotal evidence how sweet current fruits are - the difference between wild apples, cherries and strawberries and the ones you can buy in the supermarket. First about the salt - NaCl is salt so it is chemically quite inert you will have hard time breaking it unless you pump quite a lot of energy (or use elements that are more chemically active than either Na or Cl and there aren't many (lithium, fluorine, hydrogen). Chlorine is very potent oxidizer that will wreak havoc in all kind of processes. Sodium will just try to make your intestines into soap - quite unpleasant thing. But they are chemically different elements. Fruits are not bad for you in the same way most of the food is not bad for a healthy person. But if you are a person with the metabolic syndrome, high insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes you just cannot assume that a diet of only bananas, ultra sweet apples, pomelo, peaches etc will do you much good. Of course fruits have the benefit of containing lots of water and pulp so they are digested slower than a can of coke with the same sugar amount which is good. If you are healthy person eat fruits freely. If you are not be careful with the blind assumptions that they are good for you. Ask someone with great knowledge about human metabolism specifically for your case.
- chestnut-tree 13y ago
  "There's actually evidence to support that eating fruit is quite detrimental to your health.." If there is actual evidence, please cite it. I've never heard fruit proclaimed as bad for you. In fact, every major healthly eating initiative or campiagn (whether from governments, the World Health Organisation, or NGOs) always recommend consuming more fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet. The fructose in fruit is not the same as high fructose corn syrup found in many processed foods. Yes, fruit can contribute to acid erosion on teeth, but this is also dependent on the type of fruit, the quantity you eat and when you eat it (e.g. eating fruit with a meal can lessen the impact of the sugar). Eating fresh fruit is always preferable to dried fruit or fruit juices.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    Do you have any evidence for your claim that fructose in fruit is different from fructose in corn? Absent such evidence, you're just repeating the same magical nutrition claims this thread is about, and name dropping the WHO does nothing to change that. Here's an interview with a UCSF professor who claims fructose in all its forms is a problem: http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/11/2013/the-fallacies-of-fat.html http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/11/2013/the-fallacie... Also http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/11/2013/the-fallacies-of-fat.html http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/11/2013/the-fallacie...
    - 7Figures2Commas 13y ago
      Please note that while Professor Lustig's claims about the wholly toxic nature of fructose are not accepted as fact (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20047139 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20047139 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411192/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411192/ for a couple of examples), I think you're still miscategorizing his claims. Please see: http://www.crsociety.org/index.php?/topic/291-dr-lustig-on-fruit-fructose/ http://www.crsociety.org/index.php?/topic/291-dr-lustig-on-f... "I think that fruit is so much better a choice than virtually anything else in the store -- particularly any processed food -- that I don't want to come down on it. But I would say, fruit is one of those things where I would say, everything in moderation." This sort of falls into the "duh" category. Just as a sensible person wouldn't consume a ton of saturated fats in the name of eating a high protein diet, a sensible person is not going to be eating 20 bananas and five pounds of strawberries a day in the name of getting enough fruit. As for the professor's claim that exercise isn't effective for weight loss, I think laypeople should be aware of the tendency for academics to speak in macro terms. The vast majority of people I have met who are overweight and have tried unsuccessfully to lose weight a) do not have as healthy a diet as they believe they do (far too many processed foods) and b) if they exercise and exercise consistently (a big if), do not exercise long enough and intensely enough to burn fat and become conditioned. Anecdotal? Yes, but instead of blaming specific foods and claiming that exercise isn't effective, let's just be honest: most people won't lose weight because they can't commit to major changes in their lifestyle.
- alanctgardner2 13y ago
  OK, this is a pretty ridiculous claim. Other people have already pointed out, "There's actually evidence" requires some evidence. You have none. Why would modern fruit contain "more sugar"? More sugar than when? How much more sugar? Who miraculously put the extra sugar in the fruit? The fact is, even if we selectively bred fruit to be sweeter, we're not going to get it much sweeter than it already was. Nobody's going around injecting apples with extra fructose with a syringe. Getting all your vitamins from meat is ridiculously inefficient; you can do it, but you're creating a tremendous ecological burden. All of that meat has to be raised, fed, watered, and pastured. Fruits and vegetables cut out the middle man; they use much less water and land to get the same nutrients into your body. It's fine to say that 'magical thinking' is bad, but you're not doing any better. If anything you're ignoring facts based science in favour of 'what some people say'.
  - pron 13y ago
    Ok, I wasn't not trying to insult fruit or anything, and I was referring to research about sugar, which some other commenters are debating. Just saying that it's not even clear cut that eating fruits is particularly healthful. And regarding "Getting all your vitamins from meat is ridiculously inefficient" -- you are trying to hack the unhackable, speaking in scientific terms about things we have little clear scientific understanding of. "Fruits and vegetables cut out the middle man; they use much less water and land to get the same nutrients into your body." -- Nope; you don't know that. Some people believe that, some don't. For all we know, such careful nutritional hacking has little, if any, effect on our health. That's what we know. What people believe is a whole other matter. Most of the diet-talk we hear is just catechism of a new religion (and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, except that pseudoscience is a little annoying) and a whole lotta politics (in this case, it's fascinating to see liberals defending pseudoscience, while conservatives discard it, maybe because they believe the liberals who believe it's actual science). Science it ain't.
    - cmsefton 13y ago
      As I understand it, fructose in fruit tends to be offset by the fact that fruits have fibre. The fibre means the fructose is kept in your gut for longer, and bacteria there break it down before it has a chance to hit your liver. The issue with fructose/sucrose tends to arise when we have it in liquid format (juices, soft drinks etc.), or eat large quantities of foods high in sugar without the accompanying fibre.
eru 13y ago
A few broad facts are well known, but our knowledge is still quite limited. > A principle of entrepreneurship is that whenever a bet yields either positive or neutral results, you should do it. Why shouldn't this principle be applied to such an important area as our health and wellness? It's not only positive or negative expected value, but rather that the uncertainty (i.e. variance) outweighs the expected value of almost all detailed propositions. After you took care of the simple and uncontroversial things, e.g. adequate amount of calories, enough iron etc, there's not too much we know how to optimize in general.
beagle3 13y ago
When it's a neutral thing for you, sure, why not. However, most things about nutrition are NOT neutral. Is salt bad for you? (hint: unless you have a very specific hypertension condition, all the bad things you heard about salt are not relevant to you) How much is too many eggs per day? (hint: no known limit. Cholesterol from eggs was never shown to be a problem) Well, how about butter and fat? (hint: right kind of butter is good for you, as is the right kind of fat) But surely, saturated fat is bad for you! (hint: no proof of that) But at least bacteria and dirt are bad for you, I'm sure of that! (hint: life span is correlated with eating lots of fermented - i.e. bacteria laden foods. Also, people who work in sewage have higher life span and less illness overall) You are taking tens or even thousands of bets based on bogus research without even knowing that. It is not unreasonable to assume that washing your hands all the time and keeping your house clean significantly raises the probability of autoimmune disease. And really, if you go through nutrition literature and try to trace the knowledge to repeatable and demonstrable experiments, you'd agree with "very little". e.g., the calorie marking system used on foods is based on bomb calorimeter experiments (which you can debunk at home) and atwater factors (which have been shown to be grossly inaccurate, as in tens to hundreds of percents).
- pron 13y ago
  Right on. In fact, I think there's little conclusive evidence linking dietary (ingested) cholesterol to heart disease (though, if I'm not mistaken, there is some/strong? evidence linking blood cholesterol to heart disease). It's best to assume all nutritional claims are bogus, because the vast majority of them probably are, and there is no way for us to tell which at this point.
  - beagle3 13y ago
    > , if I'm not mistaken, there is some/strong? evidence linking blood cholesterol to heart disease Cholesterol is ultimately used (and therefore made) by the body in an attempt to heal conditions that cause heart disease (The main use is for making vitamin D, whose other ingredient -- sunlight -- is in short supply for most people in the western civilization). Thus, cholesterol is a good marker for pending problems, but is not itself the problem. Analogy: People who take an advil are likely to report a headache 1 minute after taking it. Therefore, seeing someone take an advil is a good indication for a headache. But it is not the cause of the headache - and in fact, banishing all advil will not make anything better. But somehow, people think that banishing cholesterol will -- despite evidence to the contrary. (Yes, statins do decrease heart disease, but they increase all cause mortality. And there have so far been many cholesterol-decreasing drugs developed - but none other than statins have decreased heart disease)

pron 13y ago

There's actually evidence to support that eating fruit is quite detrimental to your health, as modern fruit contain so much sugar. What are you eating fruits for? Water? Vitamins you can get from meat anyway? A lot of people say fruits are bad for you. Now, I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do one thing or another when it comes to nutrition. All I'm saying is you should be aware that it's little more than superstition and magical thinking. It's very hard to resist magical thinking, but it's often good to know when you're doing it. Sometimes doing things with your eyes open is better than doing them with your eyes shut. Although in this case I'm not 100% sure about that: there's clearly a lot of (positive) placebo effect at the cause of many anecdotal reports about nutrition, and knowing that it's mostly superstition may negate it.

beagle3 13y ago
> There's actually evidence to support that eating fruit is quite detrimental to your health, as modern fruit contain so much sugar. What are you eating fruits for? Water? Vitamins you can get from meat anyway? A lot of people say fruits are bad for you. Is there? As far as I know, there is evidence about sugar but not about fruit. And assuming that evidence about sugar translates to evidence about fruit is exactly the kind of sin your first post talks about. (But if you can point me to experimental evidence specifically about fruit, I'd be very interested in reading that)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Current fruits are with much higher sugar content than in generations past. So you are pumping yourself with fructose much faster.
  - beagle3 13y ago
    I suppose that might be true (though I don't assume that -- references will be appreciated). However, that does not at all address the question of whether or not they are healthy for you or not. Fructose on its own is associated with all kinds of problems. But a fruit is not fructose on its own, and it's possible that other things in fruit make fructose "not a problem". e.g.: Table sugar is 50% fructose - however, it is not associated with the same kind of problems that pure fructose is associated with. e.g.: Table salt, Sodium Chloride, is harmless (actually, essential) in small amounts - however, just the same amount of chlorine (if you managed to take the sodium away somehow) will easily kill you. And I don't know, but I'm sure pure sodium if ingested wouldn't be health for you either. So, the question stands: Is there evidence that fruit is bad for you? Even suggestive evidence? A study of comparable populations whose main difference is the amount of fruit eaten, which shows that the less-fruit-eating population is better off?
    - jasallen 13y ago
      This line of discussion rather proves the original point. We don't know if unbounded fruit consumption is bad. Of course unbounded simple sugar consumption is (we think) but some evidence has shown that for whatever reason, sugars directly from fruit enter the blood stream slower. Maybe. :-)
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      Anecdotal evidence how sweet current fruits are - the difference between wild apples, cherries and strawberries and the ones you can buy in the supermarket. First about the salt - NaCl is salt so it is chemically quite inert you will have hard time breaking it unless you pump quite a lot of energy (or use elements that are more chemically active than either Na or Cl and there aren't many (lithium, fluorine, hydrogen). Chlorine is very potent oxidizer that will wreak havoc in all kind of processes. Sodium will just try to make your intestines into soap - quite unpleasant thing. But they are chemically different elements. Fruits are not bad for you in the same way most of the food is not bad for a healthy person. But if you are a person with the metabolic syndrome, high insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes you just cannot assume that a diet of only bananas, ultra sweet apples, pomelo, peaches etc will do you much good. Of course fruits have the benefit of containing lots of water and pulp so they are digested slower than a can of coke with the same sugar amount which is good. If you are healthy person eat fruits freely. If you are not be careful with the blind assumptions that they are good for you. Ask someone with great knowledge about human metabolism specifically for your case.
chestnut-tree 13y ago
"There's actually evidence to support that eating fruit is quite detrimental to your health.." If there is actual evidence, please cite it. I've never heard fruit proclaimed as bad for you. In fact, every major healthly eating initiative or campiagn (whether from governments, the World Health Organisation, or NGOs) always recommend consuming more fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet. The fructose in fruit is not the same as high fructose corn syrup found in many processed foods. Yes, fruit can contribute to acid erosion on teeth, but this is also dependent on the type of fruit, the quantity you eat and when you eat it (e.g. eating fruit with a meal can lessen the impact of the sugar). Eating fresh fruit is always preferable to dried fruit or fruit juices.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Do you have any evidence for your claim that fructose in fruit is different from fructose in corn? Absent such evidence, you're just repeating the same magical nutrition claims this thread is about, and name dropping the WHO does nothing to change that. Here's an interview with a UCSF professor who claims fructose in all its forms is a problem: http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/11/2013/the-fallacies-of-fat.html http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/11/2013/the-fallacie... Also http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/11/2013/the-fallacies-of-fat.html http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/11/2013/the-fallacie...
  - 7Figures2Commas 13y ago
    Please note that while Professor Lustig's claims about the wholly toxic nature of fructose are not accepted as fact (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20047139 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20047139 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411192/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411192/ for a couple of examples), I think you're still miscategorizing his claims. Please see: http://www.crsociety.org/index.php?/topic/291-dr-lustig-on-fruit-fructose/ http://www.crsociety.org/index.php?/topic/291-dr-lustig-on-f... "I think that fruit is so much better a choice than virtually anything else in the store -- particularly any processed food -- that I don't want to come down on it. But I would say, fruit is one of those things where I would say, everything in moderation." This sort of falls into the "duh" category. Just as a sensible person wouldn't consume a ton of saturated fats in the name of eating a high protein diet, a sensible person is not going to be eating 20 bananas and five pounds of strawberries a day in the name of getting enough fruit. As for the professor's claim that exercise isn't effective for weight loss, I think laypeople should be aware of the tendency for academics to speak in macro terms. The vast majority of people I have met who are overweight and have tried unsuccessfully to lose weight a) do not have as healthy a diet as they believe they do (far too many processed foods) and b) if they exercise and exercise consistently (a big if), do not exercise long enough and intensely enough to burn fat and become conditioned. Anecdotal? Yes, but instead of blaming specific foods and claiming that exercise isn't effective, let's just be honest: most people won't lose weight because they can't commit to major changes in their lifestyle.
alanctgardner2 13y ago
OK, this is a pretty ridiculous claim. Other people have already pointed out, "There's actually evidence" requires some evidence. You have none. Why would modern fruit contain "more sugar"? More sugar than when? How much more sugar? Who miraculously put the extra sugar in the fruit? The fact is, even if we selectively bred fruit to be sweeter, we're not going to get it much sweeter than it already was. Nobody's going around injecting apples with extra fructose with a syringe. Getting all your vitamins from meat is ridiculously inefficient; you can do it, but you're creating a tremendous ecological burden. All of that meat has to be raised, fed, watered, and pastured. Fruits and vegetables cut out the middle man; they use much less water and land to get the same nutrients into your body. It's fine to say that 'magical thinking' is bad, but you're not doing any better. If anything you're ignoring facts based science in favour of 'what some people say'.
- pron 13y ago
  Ok, I wasn't not trying to insult fruit or anything, and I was referring to research about sugar, which some other commenters are debating. Just saying that it's not even clear cut that eating fruits is particularly healthful. And regarding "Getting all your vitamins from meat is ridiculously inefficient" -- you are trying to hack the unhackable, speaking in scientific terms about things we have little clear scientific understanding of. "Fruits and vegetables cut out the middle man; they use much less water and land to get the same nutrients into your body." -- Nope; you don't know that. Some people believe that, some don't. For all we know, such careful nutritional hacking has little, if any, effect on our health. That's what we know. What people believe is a whole other matter. Most of the diet-talk we hear is just catechism of a new religion (and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, except that pseudoscience is a little annoying) and a whole lotta politics (in this case, it's fascinating to see liberals defending pseudoscience, while conservatives discard it, maybe because they believe the liberals who believe it's actual science). Science it ain't.
  - cmsefton 13y ago
    As I understand it, fructose in fruit tends to be offset by the fact that fruits have fibre. The fibre means the fructose is kept in your gut for longer, and bacteria there break it down before it has a chance to hit your liver. The issue with fructose/sucrose tends to arise when we have it in liquid format (juices, soft drinks etc.), or eat large quantities of foods high in sugar without the accompanying fibre.

eru 13y ago

A few broad facts are well known, but our knowledge is still quite limited. > A principle of entrepreneurship is that whenever a bet yields either positive or neutral results, you should do it. Why shouldn't this principle be applied to such an important area as our health and wellness? It's not only positive or negative expected value, but rather that the uncertainty (i.e. variance) outweighs the expected value of almost all detailed propositions. After you took care of the simple and uncontroversial things, e.g. adequate amount of calories, enough iron etc, there's not too much we know how to optimize in general.

beagle3 13y ago

When it's a neutral thing for you, sure, why not. However, most things about nutrition are NOT neutral. Is salt bad for you? (hint: unless you have a very specific hypertension condition, all the bad things you heard about salt are not relevant to you) How much is too many eggs per day? (hint: no known limit. Cholesterol from eggs was never shown to be a problem) Well, how about butter and fat? (hint: right kind of butter is good for you, as is the right kind of fat) But surely, saturated fat is bad for you! (hint: no proof of that) But at least bacteria and dirt are bad for you, I'm sure of that! (hint: life span is correlated with eating lots of fermented - i.e. bacteria laden foods. Also, people who work in sewage have higher life span and less illness overall) You are taking tens or even thousands of bets based on bogus research without even knowing that. It is not unreasonable to assume that washing your hands all the time and keeping your house clean significantly raises the probability of autoimmune disease. And really, if you go through nutrition literature and try to trace the knowledge to repeatable and demonstrable experiments, you'd agree with "very little". e.g., the calorie marking system used on foods is based on bomb calorimeter experiments (which you can debunk at home) and atwater factors (which have been shown to be grossly inaccurate, as in tens to hundreds of percents).

pron 13y ago
Right on. In fact, I think there's little conclusive evidence linking dietary (ingested) cholesterol to heart disease (though, if I'm not mistaken, there is some/strong? evidence linking blood cholesterol to heart disease). It's best to assume all nutritional claims are bogus, because the vast majority of them probably are, and there is no way for us to tell which at this point.
- beagle3 13y ago
  > , if I'm not mistaken, there is some/strong? evidence linking blood cholesterol to heart disease Cholesterol is ultimately used (and therefore made) by the body in an attempt to heal conditions that cause heart disease (The main use is for making vitamin D, whose other ingredient -- sunlight -- is in short supply for most people in the western civilization). Thus, cholesterol is a good marker for pending problems, but is not itself the problem. Analogy: People who take an advil are likely to report a headache 1 minute after taking it. Therefore, seeing someone take an advil is a good indication for a headache. But it is not the cause of the headache - and in fact, banishing all advil will not make anything better. But somehow, people think that banishing cholesterol will -- despite evidence to the contrary. (Yes, statins do decrease heart disease, but they increase all cause mortality. And there have so far been many cholesterol-decreasing drugs developed - but none other than statins have decreased heart disease)