3 ms·

The problem is there is no incentive for industrial food to find out how to truly make things healthier, it's primarily about taste and marketability. So whate

The problem is there is no incentive for industrial food to find out how to truly make things healthier, it's primarily about taste and marketability. So whatever the latest scientific study says is just fodder to be reduced to a small change and a bullet point (witness gluten-free), while the lab scientists continue to pour effort into synthesizing better and better tastes and addictive qualities to the food. We can demand healthier foods yes, but it's nigh impossible to ensure that the best nutritional and scientific knowledge makes it from the lab all the way through the food design process to the products that end up on the shelves. Plus, even if we did, nutrition is not a simple thing that we have all figured out. So even assuming the best of intentions from everyone involved, it's still a big leap that chopping everything up into its constituent parts, then reformulating it to be as tasty as possible (while still meeting nutritional standards of course!) is going to result in a healthy diet. In this light, eating whole foods is not about declaring the superiority of "natural" foods, it's just a hedge against the ignorance and mis-aligned incentives that exist in the industrial foods industry.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>In this light, eating whole foods is not about declaring the superiority of "natural" foods, it's just a hedge against the ignorance and mis-aligned incentives that exist in the industrial foods industry. Yes, but the whole point of the article is that what we consider today to be whole, unprocessed, natural foods are in fact: * Selectively bred for digestibility and taste * Only affordable thanks to agriculture becoming a mass-production industry
pron 11y ago
Much of "the best nutritional and scientific knowledge" is hardly science and mostly magical thinking. Nutrition studies are probably the most misleading "scientific" papers out there. When John Ioannidis demonstrated in 2005 that most medical research findings are false, he singled out two particularly grievous offenders: genetics and nutrition. Yes, we know a few things about what's healthy and what's not, but precious few. Most of nutritional "findings" are based on sketchy statistics run on inaccurate data obtained from really bad experiments. If anything, what little evidence there is suggests that there may not even be such a thing as "healthy" or "unhealthy" food, but food that may be more or less healthy for a specific individual. And what is more certain (from large scale statistics) is that the effect food has on our health (within a reasonable margin) is quite small in most healthy people without some genetic anomalies. What makes it seem large is simply magical thinking (or placebo, if the two are different). Which raises the far more interesting question of why is it that otherwise scientifically minded people treat nutrition as a science rather than the "science" it really is? The psychologist and anthropologist Jonathan Haidt believes that this is a psychological manifestation of a drive for "purity" (one of several common moral drives he's classified in many societies) as it expresses itself among some people, especially liberals. He says conservatives channel purity to sex and liberals to food. He says people in all cultures believe that some behaviours contaminate us; conservatives tend to think those behaviors are sex related, and liberals think they're food related. Which is why accounts of people "feeling more energetic" after changing their diet read just like conversion stories -- they are simply two manifestations of the same phenomenon. And just like what religion people convert to doesn't matter, the accounts of being "more energetic" and "feeling better" are the same no matter what diet people switch to (of course, sometimes you read other accounts, but such is the nature of placebo -- it's complicated). As long as there is the slightest excuse to justify a particular choice of diet -- and in the case of science fans that can be a "science" paper -- psychology kicks in.
- paintrayne 11y ago
  Really? So would you like to explain the widespread trend of increasing adult onset diabetes, and do you consider having diabetes to be healthy or unhealthy?
  - pron 11y ago
    First, I don't need to provide an explanation to demonstrate that other explanations are completely unfounded. If you don't have sufficient data to justify your statistical explanation or if your statistical reasoning is fundamentally flawed, then your explanation is unfounded whether or not I can provide an alternative one. Your statement is like an ancient Greek man saying to another: "Really? So if you don't believe in Zeus, what else could explain lightning?" If we don't know then we don't know. That someone comes up with one bogus explanation doesn't mean it's valid -- or even a good working hypothesis -- until someone else comes up with another bogus one. It is the magical mind that expects an explanation -- any explanation -- to any phenomenon. Science readily accepts that we just don't (yet) have an explanation for many things. Second, there's a world of difference between saying something is related to nutrition in general, saying it relates to some global nutritional variable such as calorie intake, and saying something relates to a more specific nutritional variable such as intake of animal fat. While making each of these statements may be dubious due to the inherent difficulty of doing any sort of nutritional research (it must be observational and longitudinal, and there are too many confounding variables), at each of these three levels of nutritional explanation, there are so many more variables being added, so that to prove the third one you'll probably need many more samples than there are people on this planet. The dimensionality is just too big to tackle with statistics. Imagine that the real explanation could be something like: amount of animal fat consumed between the ages 0 and 13, and unrelated to anything consumed later. Or it could also be that the same causes of diabetes also reduce the chance of, say, brain cancer, and so what we're seeing is actually a good thing. There are just too many variables, especially that we know food interacts in very complex ways with anything from hormones to gut flora. What we can say with certainty is that life expectancy has been increasing steadily (not at a steady pace, of course) since the industrial revolution, and that it is very similar among all industrialized countries. The variations are hardly more than a couple of percentage points in spite of sometimes very different diets, different levels of pollution, different amounts of sunlight, different occupations, different leisure activities etc. So countries are so different, yet life expectancy is almost the same everywhere (in the industrial world, of course). Another thing we know for sure is that life expectancy in the developing world is much, much lower. Of course, rather than clinical studies -- or "clinical", as nutritional studies are observational and wildly confounded -- one could try to study nutrition through biological metabolism, but we're probably decades away from having a really good grasp of human metabolism.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

>In this light, eating whole foods is not about declaring the superiority of "natural" foods, it's just a hedge against the ignorance and mis-aligned incentives that exist in the industrial foods industry. Yes, but the whole point of the article is that what we consider today to be whole, unprocessed, natural foods are in fact: * Selectively bred for digestibility and taste * Only affordable thanks to agriculture becoming a mass-production industry

pron 11y ago

Much of "the best nutritional and scientific knowledge" is hardly science and mostly magical thinking. Nutrition studies are probably the most misleading "scientific" papers out there. When John Ioannidis demonstrated in 2005 that most medical research findings are false, he singled out two particularly grievous offenders: genetics and nutrition. Yes, we know a few things about what's healthy and what's not, but precious few. Most of nutritional "findings" are based on sketchy statistics run on inaccurate data obtained from really bad experiments. If anything, what little evidence there is suggests that there may not even be such a thing as "healthy" or "unhealthy" food, but food that may be more or less healthy for a specific individual. And what is more certain (from large scale statistics) is that the effect food has on our health (within a reasonable margin) is quite small in most healthy people without some genetic anomalies. What makes it seem large is simply magical thinking (or placebo, if the two are different). Which raises the far more interesting question of why is it that otherwise scientifically minded people treat nutrition as a science rather than the "science" it really is? The psychologist and anthropologist Jonathan Haidt believes that this is a psychological manifestation of a drive for "purity" (one of several common moral drives he's classified in many societies) as it expresses itself among some people, especially liberals. He says conservatives channel purity to sex and liberals to food. He says people in all cultures believe that some behaviours contaminate us; conservatives tend to think those behaviors are sex related, and liberals think they're food related. Which is why accounts of people "feeling more energetic" after changing their diet read just like conversion stories -- they are simply two manifestations of the same phenomenon. And just like what religion people convert to doesn't matter, the accounts of being "more energetic" and "feeling better" are the same no matter what diet people switch to (of course, sometimes you read other accounts, but such is the nature of placebo -- it's complicated). As long as there is the slightest excuse to justify a particular choice of diet -- and in the case of science fans that can be a "science" paper -- psychology kicks in.

paintrayne 11y ago
Really? So would you like to explain the widespread trend of increasing adult onset diabetes, and do you consider having diabetes to be healthy or unhealthy?
- pron 11y ago
  First, I don't need to provide an explanation to demonstrate that other explanations are completely unfounded. If you don't have sufficient data to justify your statistical explanation or if your statistical reasoning is fundamentally flawed, then your explanation is unfounded whether or not I can provide an alternative one. Your statement is like an ancient Greek man saying to another: "Really? So if you don't believe in Zeus, what else could explain lightning?" If we don't know then we don't know. That someone comes up with one bogus explanation doesn't mean it's valid -- or even a good working hypothesis -- until someone else comes up with another bogus one. It is the magical mind that expects an explanation -- any explanation -- to any phenomenon. Science readily accepts that we just don't (yet) have an explanation for many things. Second, there's a world of difference between saying something is related to nutrition in general, saying it relates to some global nutritional variable such as calorie intake, and saying something relates to a more specific nutritional variable such as intake of animal fat. While making each of these statements may be dubious due to the inherent difficulty of doing any sort of nutritional research (it must be observational and longitudinal, and there are too many confounding variables), at each of these three levels of nutritional explanation, there are so many more variables being added, so that to prove the third one you'll probably need many more samples than there are people on this planet. The dimensionality is just too big to tackle with statistics. Imagine that the real explanation could be something like: amount of animal fat consumed between the ages 0 and 13, and unrelated to anything consumed later. Or it could also be that the same causes of diabetes also reduce the chance of, say, brain cancer, and so what we're seeing is actually a good thing. There are just too many variables, especially that we know food interacts in very complex ways with anything from hormones to gut flora. What we can say with certainty is that life expectancy has been increasing steadily (not at a steady pace, of course) since the industrial revolution, and that it is very similar among all industrialized countries. The variations are hardly more than a couple of percentage points in spite of sometimes very different diets, different levels of pollution, different amounts of sunlight, different occupations, different leisure activities etc. So countries are so different, yet life expectancy is almost the same everywhere (in the industrial world, of course). Another thing we know for sure is that life expectancy in the developing world is much, much lower. Of course, rather than clinical studies -- or "clinical", as nutritional studies are observational and wildly confounded -- one could try to study nutrition through biological metabolism, but we're probably decades away from having a really good grasp of human metabolism.