In line with the point of the article, I can attest to the difficulty of tracking food intake. It's an experiment I've done several times in the past 20 years. The idea is not only recording everything eaten, but weighing every item consumed to assure accuracy. Doing that for a week is a lot of work, but also highly educational.
What's interesting, on repetition the experiment has shown 2 somewhat contradictory results. Day to day there was wild variation in diet, always found surprises in what or how much I ate. OTOH at the end of the week, the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable at 2100 +/-100 kcal/day. Of course there was a wealth of info about my diet composition as well.
I'd understand how very difficult it would be to scale up my experiment to the point of having enough participants to make it scientifically useful. In fact I'm not at all sure I'd recommend it to anyone unless the individual was so committed to the project to willingly put up with its arduous and tedious process.
However, as a personal nutrition learning tool nothing else I know of could possibly ever beat it.
I started tracking everything I eat. MyFitnessPal* makes it much easier, combined with buying a scale and leaving it on the counter (meaning I weigh every serving of everything I eat). I don't find it particularly arduous (been doing it since ~April last year) and it has made a noticeable impact on my waistline and my shopping bill (forced me to plan my meals to an extent).
* Not affiliated with MyFitnessPal, but they provide a nice mobile app (iOS at least) and a HUGE database of foods and recipes. If you cook from BBC Good Food (as I do regularly0 you can normally find the recipe entered w/ calories and macro nutrients. I dislike the amount of tracking they perform, but no other software comes even close to offering the functionality they offer.
I have also been using that app and I am very happy with the results. I had a couple of false starts, but now have gotten into a nice rhythm. The trick is to not judge or criticize yourself during data entry. Analysis is a completely separate phase.
Seeing a few months of data really helped me think differently about my diet. My mother programmed all her children to be "comfort eaters," and when I saw that the bulk of my too many calories were coming from "comfort foods," it helped me tackle the situations and stress responses that triggered non-nutritional eating.
I am not suggesting that MyFitnessPal is the only tool/process/technique that could lead one to these revelations. It is the tool that led me to those revelations, so I am a happy customer. (Also not affiliated.)
I also use MyFitnessPal and while it can be a slight pain to use sometimes it really is best in class. Reminders to log food, save full meal for reuse, huge DB of food, ability to enter new foods, copy from yesterday (great when you eat the same thing for breakfast almost every morning). It also integrates into my Withings WiFi scale (which I HIGHLY recommend), I love just stepping on it in the morning and knowing it will all be synced up and ready for me to access from the API/Web/Mobile app.
I liked MFP, but I do think it's gotten crappier in the last few months (possibly since the UA purchase? Not sure of the exact timing there). I just switched to LoseIt.
For sure. It's become a lot slower, the targeted ads are slightly unpleasant, and they really try and push their premium offering... Id love an open source alternative, but the problem is the food database (imho)
If you don't want to track your calories intake per meal
1) Prepare your food before hand
2) Eat the same meal often, so you only have to figure it out once.
I didn't bother counting calories. Just figure out the calory content for a typical serve and just counted that.
In the end its the same thing, but just less administration at eating time.:)
Another interesting approach that can simplify things is to track calories when you buy them rather than when you eat them.
For instance, suppose that on Monday you go to the grocery store and buy a 3 pound ham (100 calories per 85 g serving), 1 half gallon of whole milk (8 servings at 160 calories per serving), a loaf of sliced bread (20 slices at 100 calories per slice), and a bottle of ketchup (33 servings of 20 calories each).
You record in your food log 5541 calories for Monday.
Tuesday you buy no food or drink, just consuming stuff you previously bought. So you record 0 calories for Tuesday.
Wednesday, you eat breakfast at home, and then for lunch you buy a Son of Baconator from Wendy's (650 calories), and a 20 oz Pepsi (250 calories) from the vending machine at work. Dinner comes out of your fridge. So Wednesday you log 900 calories.
...and so on.
This kind of log is useless for determining exactly what or how much you ate on a particular day, but over time your average daily calorie purchase will be very close to your average daily calorie consumption.
This is probably not a good approach when you are trying to make a change in your eating habits and need to know exactly what is going on day to day, but once you've gotten settled in your new eating habits and just need to make sure you aren't drifting off track this can be a good approach.
I don't think scaling this "experiment" is a problem anymore.
There are millions of people that use calorie counting apps and websites. Among them there must be plenty of people with consistent data.
My personal anecdata: I have 5+ years of personal food intake and exercise data in MFP app. It is not hard at all. Data entry takes about 10 minutes a day. And now I know what a cup of salmon looks like.
I've also ran some unscientific analysis that confirmed my biases. Major one: when I consume less calories then I burn my weight goes down, and vice versa. ;-)
It would be amazing to use this data in a study. I'm all for observing and analyzing unsuspecting people - that's the only reasonable way you can avoid the effect of people changing their behavior when they know they're being studied. I think that the biggest issue here is not with scaling, or even with finding a reliable subset of the data - it's with fitting such experiment into formal and ethical framework of science. Some of the issues I see:
- Scientists generally design their studies, trying to amplify the visibility of studied phenomenon while filtering out as much noise as possible. Here you'd have an experiment that's not designed. My guess is that it's something most researchers are not used to nowadays.
- It may be hard to reuse this technique. The first team to run this study may have some results that we could trust, but as soon as they publish and everyone knows that apps are now used to study people, users will change behavior.
- It creates a whole battlefield of interest. It suddenly is in the interest of scientists and their research institutions to promote commercial apps. It's also in the interest of the app vendors to enter into agreements with researchers, because getting an interesting result will become a huge marketing opportunity. And so there will be pressure to find "proper" results.
> I've also ran some unscientific analysis that confirmed my biases. Major one: when I consume less calories then I burn my weight goes down, and vice versa. ;-)
The notorious "calories in, calories out" is so unscientific and is in my view a criminal oversimplification. It ignores things like epigenetics, hormones, thermogenesis, metabolic diseases, digestion problems, microbiota, etc. Yes, counting calories can give you some rough idea about things, but it's so rough that it's useless for the purpose of dieting! Calories from fats and carbs don't get metabolised the same way either! When I see MDs giving such advice, I smell quackery! I cut my dietary intake by over 1,000 from fats (I was putting ghee and MCT/coconut oil in my coffee) without actually compensating or expending less energy. I didn't lose a gram of weight!
* Day to day there was wild variation in diet ... at the end of the week the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable
I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day. The average person's daily calorie burn is generally not as stable as they think it is unless they are closely following a plan.
You can calculate base rate then add the standard percentage for a normal relatively sedentary lifestyle to guestimate your normal daily output but that ignores the fact that you body's daily routine is not fixed. In your working day you will walk around more or less some days, the difference won't be massive but if you are micromanaging (which you probably shouldn't: that can lead to over-worrying and potentially to certain physiological eating disorders) it counts, your social hours will vary too and probably more so on a day-to-day basis then your working and "doing nothing" hours, your environment will vary, particularly by temperature which will affect what your body does to maintain internal equilibrium, and unless you eat exactly the same food at exactly the same time every day there are differences there: different foods take different amounts of time to digest, have their energy extracted, and have their waste pass on through, have different water content which adds to the natural variation in what you drink, different amounts of drugs (caffeine and alcohol for most people) that affect water intake/output in the body is an issue and so forth. There are extra complications for a woman: changing hormone levels over the course of their regular reproductive cycle can make quite a difference to water retention and hunger levels.
Basically: your body's routine does not follow an exact 24 hour cycle - this is why your weekly diet is a lot more predictable than your daily one, over the longer time the natural variances average out.
But we do have mechanisms that alter out hunger levels to try make sure things do even out over time. There are things that these mechanisms don't account for though: problems such as diabetes and other illnesses that affect energy absorption and use, and it is generally believed that a high sugar diet "breaks" these systems because they are geared towards slow-ish release foods and the energy in compact food high in small sugars is very quickly either used or stored away (so you have the energy ready for use, but you become hungry because the food is so easy to break down that it has already passed the parts that register hunger).
I monitor my intake very closely, having gone (over the last ~30 months) from ~18.5 stone to ~10 and wanting to stay somewhere near there. I weigh myself every day or two but only really watch a fortnightly average as a key value because I know there will be daily variations both that are due to either my routine not being very routine or sometimes are far less intuitively understandable.
It is actually easier for athletes because they can measure their extra calorie output with some accuracy, and if you are training a lot then this output is going to be more significant than the random daily variations. Their incoming diet is likely to be far more predictable than that of the man on the street too. I'm not an athlete by anyone's definition but I do exercise "recreationally" these days (mostly running, some strength/tone work, some cycling & walking for fun/exercise not just to suit commuting requirements) and I do notice the results being more predictable in periods when I do quite a bit of that compared to times when I do very little.
> I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day.
> I weigh myself every day or two but only really watch a fortnightly average as a key value(...)
That's the key. I was always under the impression that the reason for advising people against weighing daily is because you can't rely on general population to understand the concepts of moving average and low-pass filtering. Personally, I try to weigh daily (easier to keep a habit this way), but I care only about the 7-day moving average.
That is similar to my reasoning: I've kept to the changes I've made over the last couple of years by making them habit.
My general morning routine, when I don't oversleep are am otherwise in more of a rush than usual, is now "wake up, feed the cat, lavatory, check and note mass, dress, breakfast while checking messages, go to work/other". Weighing myself weekly, or possibly even less often, would almost certainly suffice - but doing it more often keeps it habit and much reduces the risk that I'll simply stop doing it at some point.
Similarly with exercise, while I don't have a fixed schedule except where there are things I do with a group of people I do try do something (sometimes something small, but not nothing) at least every other day.
If something is a habit you notice when you miss it (your routine feels wrong because of the "forgotten something" feeling) which I find helps my self management. Of course you have to be careful not to care too much about the routine and the occasional missing something, or there is a risk it can become mentally unhealthy (which may be another reason people are careful about recommending daily measurements - it needs to become a habit not an obsession).
Analog ones always seem to have the precision of ±10kg and generate an aura of untrustworthiness around themselves. Digital ones behave as if they were haunted. Every once in a while, usually when the upward-opening crescent Moon passes through an astral node on the sky, my digital scale just picks one of two or three values at random. The values are around 1-2kg apart. I learned to just step on and off it until it either settles on a single result, or I get tired and just end up averaging last three or five measurements.
> I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day.
After weighing myself every day on a Withings scale for 3.5 years, I disagree with this recommendation. I recommend weighing oneself every day, just not necessarily immediately acting upon the measurement, because of the instability you mention. I step on the scale once a day upon waking. I review the trend in my graph about once a week to see if I need to adjust my diet. Having the recorded electronic measurement makes it possible to decouple the act of taking the measurement from the mental effort of thinking about what it means. I've found this very useful in managing my body fat.
This is what I do (I keep an eye on a rolling fortnightly average), but some people can stop themselves fixating on single results which leads to unnecessary worry and micromanaging.
I think this is quite normal and why people recommend
not measuring yourself every day
This is well-intentioned but has an inherent problem: any single weighing could be skewed to either end of the scale.
Instead, I weigh myself almost every day and record it, but I don't attach meaning to any given weighing; I look for a moving average.
I also use a Tanita bodyfat-estimating scale, which helps distinguish day-to-day variations due to hydration level (e.g. a lower bodyfat estimate combined with an upward tick in weight just means you are more hydrated).
This is what I do (I keep an eye on a rolling fortnightly average), though I don't currently measure body fat, but some people can stop themselves fixating on single results which leads to unnecessary worry and micromanaging - incorrect micromanaging at that (eating less when the extra weight that day is mostly water, and cutting out more of the better things when eating less so ending up with a worse nutritional balance).
Nutrition is like SEO: lots of studies, lots of claims, lots of data... but all the claims/conclusions seem to be based on post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning and anecdotal evidence where the true reasons for success were either misunderstood or not known at all.
And both fields have a lot of "experts" who all somehow manage to disagree with one another.
and then there are some basic/no-brainer principles that do seem to make sense: don't eat loads of sugar, include a <title>.
This is completely false. Scientific studies, controlled, on nutrition and health are going back at least 30 years, and in these 30 years you can find a huge amount of quality research and quality data.
Problem is that no one looks at meta-analyses, no one reports about it.
WHO has reports that are sometimes half-assed and clearly * put large food industry * neutral.
Just take the newest biggest report on eating processed meat being equivalent to 3-5 cigarettes per day (cancer up by 18%). They did a meta-analysis on 800 articles, and in those articles and conclusions authors clearly state that meat can be substituted by alternatives that do not cause cancer, but WHO decided to skip that and mention that there are health benefits to eating meat (high iron which is not that high compared to plant sources, B12 which of course, cannot be found anywhere except animals and fortified foods).
They do the same thing with milk, supplements etc.
Except most of those studies are bullshit bad science done with fundamentally flawed methodology. It got a throwaway line in the article, but just about the only honest way to make scientific conclusions about nutrition would be to take a human population of statistically significant size and diversity, move them underground to a controlled environment, and control and monitor their food intake for some period of years. That would be a data set that might not be spurious (although I bet even within that, people would find ways to eat stuff the researchers can't record). That's not going to happen, so nutrition will continue to mostly be junk science that utilizes crappy methods and statistical manipulations to create sensationalist headlines and keep selling books.
A controlled environment of people not changing their diet and lifestyle in a 20 year time span.
There's plenty of studies like that.
There are quality studies where p-values tell that their sample size isn't large enough, but when you do a meta-analysis of studies with same methodology you get a relevantly sized sample.
I do guess you are talking about those "Phd nutrition guys" and yes, they are full of bullshit and aren't scientists, because if you are talking about the real science, your comment is full of disinformation.
Not only that, but people's bodies differ greatly. People have different metabolisms, males use more energy than females, some people are bigger (taller) and heavier than others, etc. Also, people's bodies just work differently, some of which may be attributable to gut bacteria. Some people can get away with eating a lot more calories than others, or different foods, and have a totally different effect.
What wouldn't likely be measured with any sort of accuracy is individual variance is gut microbiota, which I'd assume could lead to notable differences. Even so, I think we'd get more signal than noise doing our best to measure and factor out what we are currently able to.
Sequencing to identify gut microbiota is now common in research. The general makeup of gut bacteria is relatively stable, so weekly or monthly sampling should be adequate.
I don't think it's equivalent to 3-5 cigarettes. An 18% increase isn't the same when the incidence rate on colorectal cancer starts off so low compared to lung cancer. This article is one that got posted on HN a while back.
Current study says it's bad for you. Next study says it's good for you. Next study says it's bad for you. Next study says it's good for you.
This study is good because group A paid for it. This study is bad because group B paid for it. This study is good because group B paid for it. This study is bad because group A paid for it.
Hahaha. Just wait 25 minutes and someone else will tell you it's actually good for you, then just avoid any and all other nutrition advice for the rest of your life.
Unfortunately, the medical industry (and their lack of focus on nutrition) has done a rather poor job illustrating why milk is bad for you. The studies do support that, but due to poor communication, you get people hand waving away the results suggesting it will be shown to be good for you next week, i.e. this thread.
I can't help but draw parallels to the 60's, when the causal link between smoking and lung cancer was absolutely apparent. Yet, most doctors smoked, so few actually recommended people cut it out. As a result, millions of people perished or had serious health complications. Yes, it's incredibly unfortunate the medical authorities have failed us - but it's not entirely their fault. Doctors receive no nutrition training during their education - none!
What milk though? UHT nonfat milk is not milk, it's what they fed the pigs with to gain weight. For years, I've been drinking raw milk without any issues. In fact, I have UHT milk spoil and never the raw kind. Never had any stomach upset, nothing! The taste is without a match! No need to homogenize - in raw milk, fat is evenly distributed. It's medicine, not food! You should try it! Organic Pastures is widely available in California! And as a bonus - try their raw cream and cheddar! Yum! In fact, the cream has the most precious nutrients in milk, it's much healthier than butter.
NutritionFacts.org should rebrand to VeganPropaganda.org, because that will reflect its mission much better! Otherwise, it's the most single-sided nutrition site I've encountered so far!
There's evidence on both sides, many conflicting studies and findings and so on. The Greger guy cherry-picks - he's a propaganda leader, not a scientist!
Meat has heme iron which is actually quite bad for you. B-12 can be found in a weekly sub-lingual pill and it's the only vitamin which needs to be supplemented on an animal product-free diet. The dangerous of meat consumption far outweigh any purported "health benefits".
The [sic] "dangerous" of meat consumption are not established and likely non-existent. Almost all "evidence" that meat is harmful comes from the type of poorly conducted, magic-statistics studies this article discusses. Also, meat is an awfully broad category. Fish is meat, and almost every reputable nutrition information source considers fish to be very healthy.
If it's your moral position to avoid animal products, so be it, but don't think you're doing it to improve your health.
They're absolutely well established; don't kid yourself. Look at the latest report from the World Health Organization on the carcinogenic properties of meat for just one recent example. All meat is high in saturated and trans fat, has animal cholesterol, has industrial pollutants which bio-accumulate in fatty tissue. It really isn't just the moral and environmental imperatives which should cause one to question the habit of eating animals - your own health greatly depends on it. Check out my post history for further citations and references if you're not convinced.
Did you read it far enough to get to the part about correlating foods with cancer risk?
If you did, you are implicitly saying that broad-based search for significance on survey-based data sets is good enough science to plan your entire lifestyle around it.
Many people saying similar things does not make any of them correct. Being correct makes them correct. And to be correct, we have a religious ritual known as the scientific method, wherein the value of your conclusion is dependent not only on the strength of your data, but also how you collected it, and even how you asked the question that you wanted to answer.
According to the article, the overwhelming majority of dietary studies do not strictly adhere to the ritual, and therefore produce unreliable results. So if you would, please indicate the biochemical mechanism by which ingested meats promote any single type of cancer.
When you say "saturated fat", "trans fat", and "animal cholesterol", you are eliding over the fact that these are not specific chemicals, but broad classes of many different chemicals, each of which has a distinct biochemical role in humans.
For instance, the trans fats in meats and dairy are, specifically, vaccenic acid (18:1 trans-11) and rumenic acid (18:2 cis-9 trans-11), along with a few other conjugated linoleic acids. They are produced by gut bacteria. There's a fun article about those, showing how rumenic acid is actually the trans fat that prevents breast cancer in rats, by interrupting the normal conversion of VA to RA. [0].
The trans fats in partially hydrogenated oils are an entire zoo of chemicals, most of which are not naturally produced by the intestinal flora of livestock animals.
And stearic acid (18:0) and lauric acid (12:0) are probably healthier in isolation than palmitic acid (16:0) and myristic acid (14:0). Meats, while having a higher saturated fat fraction than vegetable oils, also have more stearic acid in proportion to palmitic.
Additionally, humans can and will convert stearic acid (18:0) to oleic acid (18:1 cis-9) with stearoyl-CoA 9-desaturase, and palmitic (16:0) converts to palmitoleic acid (16:1 cis-9) by the same enzyme.
So what chemical present in all meat promotes the cancers?
Your study is on rats and funded by the dairy industry. That ought to give you some idea of how desperate Big Ag is to exonerate the poisonous saturated fat.
Scroll down to references and citations, and educate yourself about the trans fats that are present in meat and dairy.
You may wish to re-examine your previous claim that vaccinic acid and conjugated linoleic acids may contribute to negative health effects when eaten with meat.
It is also worth mentioning that some of those trans fatty acids are produced by bacteria found inside the human intestinal tract [0]. You're getting those anyway, whether you eat meat or not.
Can you identify one or more of the saturated fats found in meat that produce adverse health effects? Better yet, can you identify the reactions in the biochemical pathway that produce those effects?
I am reluctant to accept your apparent claim that "saturated fat is bad for you", when I am well aware that medium chain saturated fats are sent directly to the liver, whereas long chain saturated fats are assembled into triglycerides if not already in that form, packaged up with cholesterol and protein, and transported through the lymphatic system before reaching the bloodstream.
As the original article stated, correlation based on survey responses is a weak, weak, weak way to do research.
It may be true that eating meat is relatively unhealthy. But it also may be the case that the unhealthful effects are produced by the Maillard reaction products from the cooking process, and that changing the preparation method removes the additional health risks [1]. You won't know until doing enough real, rigorously scientific studies to more precisely identify the mechanisms in play.
I don't have a good enough understanding about human physiology to give a satisfactory answer on exactly by what mechanism saturated fat messes you up by. But if you're looking for more evidence for my claim that it is unhealthy, have a look at the following videos. Each has citation links to direct papers you can read to understand this subject further.
> Almost all "evidence" that meat is harmful comes from the type of poorly conducted
In the last 30 years there have been studies claiming that with very very good methodology, you could cite some of the stuff from the '80s and you wouldn't be incorrect.
While long term low dose impacts are very difficult to track resulting in this surveying challenge, there are scientific alternatives, like measuring blood glucose or insulin.
This is how we know that sugar and refined carbs are bad. The author does a huge disservice by claiming everything is a correlation study
At least I think nobody advises to increase intake of sugar? Maybe just reducing sugar gets you 99% of the way...
The thing about humans is, they manage to live in all sorts of environments. I think the Inuit have no access to vegetables at all, meat only? But other societies probably don't eat meat at all (for example some castes in India, afaik). So I suspect the human digestive system is actually very adaptive.
Problems may start if you try to manipulate the signals the digestive system reacts to, as is happening with industrialized, processed food. If you lie to the system, it can not (always) react in a healthy way. (That's my guess, anyway).
On the other hand, comparing different societies might yield some valid insights? If a whole country doesn't eat certain foods? Or what about the result that general health declined with the advent of agriculture?
I think you have to be careful because there are two things that need to be separated:
1) the human digestive tract is adaptable -- this measures the amount of adaptation the individual is capable of.
2) evolutionary pressure selects individuals who are highly adapted to their environment (I.e. The others simply die off!) -- this measures the adaptations of a population towards diet.
Ex: Swedish ability to digest lactose in adults. Asian insulin response to high carb/rice diets.
It seems that if we really want to crack this nut, we should be looking at DNA data as well. I.e. This population gets this response with this diet, while that population has a completely different response.
And yes, unfortunately adding DNA populations makes all of this research even more complex than it already was.
Absolutely, just because population A does well on some diet doesn't imply everybody does.
Actually that is for me often a good heuristic to discard most nutrition advice right away. A lot of recommendations I see include lots of diary products. Yet 16% or more of the (European) population are lactose intolerant (even more in other countries). So that advice simply can't be true, and it seems like a good idea to regard the rest of it with suspicion, too. I guess that at least shows it is not completely hopeless for the individual, some common sense might go a long way.
A lot of people are Fructose intolerant, yet the "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" advice won't die.
Then again there is a lot of fear mongering about milk going on. But the ability to digest lactose (as an adult) spread like wildfire at some point in time, seems to have had some evolutionary advantage.
"my body tells me what I need" doesn't reliably work either, because it might crave for sugar, alcohol and nicotine :-/
Nassim Taleb avoids foods that haven't been eaten by his population for thousands of years, for example Mangoes. Might be too extreme, but worth thinking about. Atm there is a new craze in my country about some new healthy grain from South America. I pass - it seems obvious that people can be healthy without that grain (because people have survived in Europe for millennia), so why risk it? So maybe if Bananas were a new fad I would feel the same way, I only eat them because they were already a fad when I was born.
There's little to no lactose in many dairy products. Notably, cheeses and yogurt have essentially none.
(I'm of northern European heritage and lactose intolerant)
What is fructose intolerance? Lactose intolerance is the lack of production of a certain enzyme (lactase) in adulthood, but I wasn't aware that there were humans that lacked the ability to metabolize fructose in the liver (which is what I would expect given the analogous name).
The ability to digest lactose probably spread like wildfire because it was a genetic mutation and those with the mutation had a new source of nutrition they could take advantage of which helped them survive better than those without. So, as a result, most Europeans now are lactose-tolerant.
Personally, as someone of northwestern European ancestry, I seem to do just great with a lot of milk in my diet. But back when I was younger and drank a lot of soda with HFCS, I got fat. But I wouldn't expect someone of, say, Asian ancestry to do so well with a lot of milk; they probably wouldn't even be able to drink it without having a lot of gas problems or needing to add lactase (or buy "Lactaid" brand milk).
What we really need is nutrition advice that's tailored for an individual's genetic profile, and probably also of the genetic profile of their gut bacteria.
And the best option I think actually seems to be mass surveillance. Just take that somewhat structured environment, where people stay all the time, and surveil the shit out of it. Without telling the subjects. Task a group of people to objectively observe and note what is being eaten and how it affects people's health. A pure observation like this could provide a lot of useful data, that would be free from biases introduced by subjects underreporting things or simply changing their behaviour because they know they're being studied.
How about grocery store loyalty cards? A big study could be done by offering everyone a $x gift card if they fill out a survey about their family, get a baseline medical test and promise to get another one in say 1 year. Changes in diet could be induced by mailing them coupons for specific foods and tracking their use.
An interesting proposal, but I see following problems with it:
- You have both zero control and zero objective input on what subjects are actually eating. They can ignore your coupons, they can lie or omit (by simply forgetting about) what they've eaten. They can buy stuff without using loyalty card (and probably will, in different stores - just how many people shop in one and only one store?).
- The data would be very imprecise - while individuals would do the medical tests, unless you're targeting singles, their grocery shopping will go towards the household, and you have no idea who ate what.
- I'm not confident that mailing them coupons would change their diet, unless you've got yourself either very poor, or very cooperative subject. The outcome I expect is that people would mostly ignore the coupons if they don't feel like eating the thing you want them to.
In the end, while interesting, it seems less precise than the current questionnaire/journal/self-reporting based approach.
I just finished reading "Why We Get Fat" [1] and was really surprised by it. The research seems quite plausible to me, but the recommendations in terms of not getting fat are not what I have heard as the common advice.
The advice in short is: avoid all carbohydrates as much as possible, and eat protein and fat.
Probably good advice for people that don't move much. But I wouldn't generalise it to everyone.
as someone who spends far too much time on his 'physique'... I have gotten extremely lean on a high carb and protein diet. Ultimately the key factor above and beyond everything else is calories in.
If you are in a caloric deficit you will lose weight.
There are multiple fad diets that are popular in the US that boil down to 'low carb'.
I often wonder if it isn't anything subtle, just that processed carbohydrates are incredibly energy dense. 100 grams of sugar or flour has twice the calories of 100 grams of beef (prepared bread still has more calories per gram than beef). 100 grams of greens or non starchy vegetables almost doesn't have calories.
I have a tricky time talking to people who subscribe to fad diets. I don't want to discourage people from caring about their health. The fact that they have gone from eating whatever to trying to control their diet is a positive step and I want to encourage them for doing that in the first place.
But then there's garbage crap like paleo and "cleanses" that are ridiculous and can be actively harmful. So how do you tell someone their diet is stupid while not insulting them for caring about their diet? Mostly I settle for trying to give them well-written articles by scientists and nutritionists to read, but at the end of the day, I'm not their main source of information and good information gets drowned out in the hours spent on Pinterest.
It gets even trickier with diets like gluten-free. The vast majority of people on gluten-free diets do not have any gluten allergy. But, as you said, cutting down carbs would vastly improve the health of most Americans. So, cutting out gluten also cuts down on carbs which leads to a healthy outcome, even though there is actually no reason for them to cut down on gluten itself.
So their reason for cutting down on carbs is wrong, but the final effect is good. Is this misconception worth correcting? Can I tell them they don't actually have an allergy and it's OK to have a bagel or a beer if it fits their calorie requirements? Would that be defeating the ultimate goal of improving their health?
In the end, mostly I just butt out. Let people do whatever they feel is best to their bodies and I'll continue to do so to mine: "eat food; not too much; mostly plants."
Think of it this way - for the calorie price of a tablespoon of olive oil (all fat, nothing nutritious), you can have a huge, ~10 oz salad filled with veggies, fruit, whole grains and legumes. Have a look at PubMed for "low-fat vegan" clinical trials - people are put on plant-based diets with no calorie restriction and end up losing weight. Also, this recent video does a great job explaining energy density in foods: http://nutritionfacts.org/video/eating-more-to-weigh-less/
Given how little we know about digestion and the interaction between us and our gut flora I'd rather not limit the variety of my food based on the latest fad. From what I know, certain beneficial bacteria like to eat fibres and starches, a high protein diet can have negative effects on those.
you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who advocates for a high protein diet. And its the bad gut bacteria (or at least the ones found more in obese people) that thrive on sugars and starches.
I mean...so is every diet. That's sorta the point of the 538 article, no? Diet science is trash. I was just pointing out that you would not at all "be hard pressed to find anyone who advocates for a high protein diet".
And honestly, I could have just said "anyone strong, ever" and been done with it. You can dismiss the diets I named as fads, but I have never met anyone with any appreciable muscle who doesn't have protein intake a few standard deviations above the norm. There's all kinds of disagreement about how to get that protein - there are vegan bodybuilders, strongman competitors who eat five pounds of chicken a day, the GOMAD folks chugging their milk - but there's no substantial disagreement that you need protein, and lots of it.
> Given how little we know about digestion and the interaction between us and our gut flora I'd rather not limit the variety of my food based on the latest fad.
Some folks are saying that what we eat these days in western countries is indeed "the latest fad" - compared to at least what mankind ate 100'000-20'000 years ago. So, don't eat the latest fad - go back what your genome is used to. High protein?
That's a bunch of pseudo-historic non-sense with basically no scientific foundation to it.
The fact remains that eating less calories than you burn resulting in weight loss. There isn't any magic to this. There is nothing to indicate otherwise.
There is no strong evidence of what people ate dozens of millennia ago, and there is even less evidence that they were healthier than people who follow modern diets recommended by nutritionists.
Just stop. You are giving dangerously wrong advice. Avoid all carbohydrates? So you mean, don't eat any fruit or vegetables, instead eat excessive protein and fat which are known to cause cancer, diabetes and heart disease? No, thanks!
Go ask the Innuit about "excessive protein and fat". That's all they've had in their diet for eons: vegetables don't grow on tundra.
The simple fact is: people are not the same, and have significant genetic differences. What may work great for an Innuit may not work too well for you, and vice-versa.
Innuit are incredibly unhealthy, and serve as a poor example when discussing optimal human nutrition. While it's true vegetables don't grow everywhere, for the vast majority of HN readers and beyond, there is no problem shopping for fresh produce.
The Atkins diet, as it's frequently called, does often work. But, it's really unhealthy. You shouldn't do this forever, only in limited bursts.
Humans have a physiological aversion to the very idea of eating less, evolution baked it into our bones. Because of this, there's a lot of money in books, articles, and videos that offer weight loss alternatives that don't involve consuming fewer calories.
But, what makes us fat is eating more calories than we use. You can get fat on a high carb diet. You can also get fat on an all protein diet, though not as easily.
> Humans have a physiological aversion to the very idea of eating less, evolution baked it into our bones.
I'm not so sure about this. I recall reading (but can't find right now) about some Asian cultures (IIRC) that find eating too much to be unpleasant, as it makes you feel sluggish bodily and slows your thinking down. "Too much" for them being something like what Westerners would consider "satisfied".
Pretty much what you said is true. What I find interesting is the question of why humans evolved to be able to switch into ketosis, though. I think it's odd since plant matter would be more abundant even during the last Ice Age than say animal proteins would it not? And the fat content of insects I assume isn't very high comparably to other animals. So, why did we get it or rather what was the environmental factor that selected for it is what I'm asking (I guess).
What I find interesting is the question of why humans
evolved to be able to switch into ketosis, though
Well, organs and muscles have to run on something... most of them can run fine on ketone bodies, and it's more efficient to produce them from animal foods than to force gluconeogenesis on everything to run on glucose.
I have no idea. It just seems odd to me that assuming a relatively low protein/fat intake is easily done then why have a metabolic pathway for it? My guess it's to work with fat stores over long periods of starvation (get fat in Spring/Summer/Autumn, 'starve' in winter).
I'm trying to be charitable here, but I want to let you know that linking to sites that are basically giant collections of logical fallacies doesn't really make it seem like you have a strong argument.
It may be interesting to note I have no stake in the low-carb game, in case you think you need to attack me on that front in response.
Please explain how they are logical fallacies. Most of the site's content is literal quotes from leading medical and science professionals.
No stake in the low-carb game? You are kidding, right? Atkins is a for-profit, multi-million dollar corporation, akin to anyone else promoting a diet based on excessive animal product consumption.
The site is a giant appeal to authority. On the 'Atkins Facts' page I didn't manage to find a single fact about why Atkins is bad, only a bunch of quotes saying that it is.
You couldn't find a single fact? That's odd, because this was written right on the front page:
> In fact there does not seem to be a single major governmental or nonprofit medical, nutrition, or science-based organization in the world that supports the Atkins Diet. As a 2004 medical journal review concluded, the Atkins Diet "runs counter to all the current evidence-based dietary recommendations.
I can't take advice seriously if it is to "avoid all carbohydrates" since one of the healthiest things you can do for your heart, intestines, and waistline is to increase your dietary fibre intake. Protein is certainly important too, and fat isn't as scary as it was made out to be in the 90s, but carbs are fine in smaller doses, and especially in the presence of water soluble fibre (to lower the GL).
If you want to be skinny eat cottage cheese with carrots and hummus.
Almost always those "avoid carbohydrate" statements refer to "avoid NET carbohydrates". Fiber (basically) doesn't count as a carbohydrate in terms of caloric effect, even though it is.
Fibre is carbohydrate. Protein isn't that important - WHO recommends just 10% of calories be protein. Fat isn't as scary? I assume you meat saturated and trans fat found in almost all processed and animal foods - avoid them at all costs for optimal health.
Actually, saturated fats aren't all that bad at least from what I've read as long as you don't go overboard with them. You can't survive w/o them as they make up quite a bit of your brain, skin, muscle, and the like. What I think is the problem with the US/EU diet situation is the fact we just over eat. Fast/Junk food being easily accessible and made to be savory just makes it easier to over eat. I know for me at least that's the case. The worse part is when going back to eating whatever I can cook (even chili or some other semi-spicy dish) it just doesn't feel as satisfying as just munching on a Chipotle burrito. So, I think there's some psychology (picking up food feels more fun than having to prep and cook it yourself) and probably other tricks (flavor combinations?) at work here.
You can't survive without saturated fat? I'm going to ask for you to provide a citation for that. I eat ~0g saturated and trans fat and have never been more healthy.
You're getting your fat sources from unsaturated fats then? I believe the body converts those sources into the fatty acids found in saturated fats when needed and vice versa (same w/ Omega 6 to Omega 3). You literally cannot survive on 0% fat intake it just doesn't work. You'll get vitamin deficiencies in short order. It's why I'm leery of any diet that prescribes an extremely low fat content (sub-10% daily intake).
Yes, sir/ma'am! I mix nuts, seeds, avocado, or similar plant-foods into almost every meal because you're right - unsaturated fats are essential, and conduce vitamin absorption. I also have a daily smoothie with a generous helping of ground flaxseed, chia seed, or hemp seed to get my tasty omega's. My own experience and research has led me to conclude the optimal amount of fat in my diet is less than 10%. Oh, and my acne is gone completely.
Thanks for the information, but I'm going to say that your sarcasm isn't necessary if you want to discuss the matter. This isn't a subject that requires it as I never came to it with such (as I see it).
Edit: after seeing the way you behave in other comment threads, I'm retracting my apology. You have the characteristic of a zealot which makes all discussion impossible (personal experience of myself being a zealot in the past, so I'm going to tell you to take a chill pill, the universe is fine if I/others eat saturated fats and meats). Have fun promoting your diet onto others with such zealotry. Also, take the misgendering and stuff it.
Hey - I'm sorry about that, no sarcasm was intended, nor implied. I just explained how I get my fats and in what amount. If you want to get technical, yes - the universe is fine with others eating saturated fats and meat, but the planet definitely is not. Animal agriculture is an unsustainable practice and is the leading cause of climate change, for instance. So, if you want to go there, it's important to recognize these facts first.
Everything in the long run unsustainable. You're not going to magically undo centuries worth of socialization on millions of people. So, I think it's best to work on what you can change (which it seems you did with your diet).
Also, I'm sorry if I snapped at you. I intend no malice.
I assume you meat saturated and trans fat found
in almost all processed and animal foods
For the umpteenth time, transfats do not occur in meaningful amounts "almost all" animal products. There are small amounts in dairy, and those naturally-occurring animal transfats have been found to be neutral or beneficial!
See, for example:
Effects of Ruminant trans Fatty Acids on Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer: A Comprehensive Review of Epidemiological, Clinical, and Mechanistic Studies
(Adv Nutr July 2011 Adv Nutr vol. 2: 332-354, 2011)
Your evidence is, once again, fraught with bias and cherry-picking.
> Supported by the Global Dairy Platform
> Although data from experimental models suggest that rTFA may beneficially affect risk of CVD and cancer, further research is needed to determine the effects of VA and c9,t11-CLA in humans. Data from existing human studies do not consistently support the findings from experimental studies.
> thus, it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding VA and c9,t11-CLA and various cancers.
You're never going to convince me trans fat is good for you.
> 'The National Academy of Sciences’ report is the first attempt by a panel of experts to set a safe intake level for trans fat. The panel found that, like saturated fat, trans fat promotes heart disease. Furthermore, the panel concluded that the only safe intake of trans fat is ‘zero.’ However, because it would be impractical to eliminate all trans fat from the diet, the panel recommended that people consume as little trans fat as possible. Yet it is currently impossible for consumers to follow the panel’s advice because the Food and Drug Administration does not require trans fat to be listed on Nutrition Facts food labels.
I've heard very similar advice from a number of sources. Though I've also heard an argument that you should only avoid sugars as avoiding more complex carbohydrates will only slow your metabolic rate.
Haven't read the book but an argument is that sugars (carbohydrates) = insulin response which results in 'damage' to the body. I am not a doctor, this is only an argument I have read put forth by others.
I try to avoid eating biodiesel. If an oil requires the petroleum distillate hexane for its production, I figure it's not appropriate for human consumption.
It's great that Five Thirty Eight called out the lack of rigor behind these studies. Most of them are indeed shoddy. However, that's not to say that we don't have a pretty good general idea of what's good for you. Here's a pretty well-balanced article on the topic, with this awesome TL;DR:
That line by Michael Pollan is the most universally applicable line to any diet. My grandmother had a similar saying: "Beans and greens first, everything else second."
Advise of a doctor called Hiromi Shinya, who studied/observed intestines all his live. He is one of the best in his field and the explanations he gives in his book are really really logic and inspirational. I highly recommend it, it changed my perspective of food. Counting calories never done it for me. Not all calories are not the same.
Hiromi Shinya also made it clear that we only think about our outside and not about. The inside and the inside is all what counts to stay healthy and live a long live. You can be thin and extremely unhealthy. It is the inside what counts and we shouldn't exhaust our organs.
Imo it's not really the science itself, but rather the results which are deficient and the article lays out pretty well why that is. That, combined with the huge amounts of pseudo-science and almost-religious takes on what and how to eat (esp. by people who read a popular food book and think it is The Sole Truth) definitely creates an image that the whole of food science is utter BS.
It seems that something like this would be at least as good as food diaries
It would be relatively easy to test properly how correct the calory estimate is. Which wouldn't be bad maybe, I know a bunch of people who sort of swear by it for estimating clary intake. (not sure if it's the same app, but they definitely use something like it. And also tend to think everything it says is 100% correct..)
Don't forget that there's also tons of misinformation spread by companies that have an interest in it: coca-cola spends millions to tell us that drinking as much cola as we want is okay as long as we exercise enough. But they don't tell us the ridiculous amount of exercise we would need to do to burn the calories of a small glass of cola.
It's not really a ridiculous amount of exercise for a small glass of soda. A can of Coke has 140 calories. 30 minutes on an exercise bike will burn around 300 calories for an average sized man. So it's around 15 minutes of exercise to burn off a Coke. Hardly a ridiculous amount.
Fair point, but a small glass of soda isn't exactly the typical serving size. Go to any gas station and that small glass of soda option got turned into 3 or 4 as your default option. As for the claim of drinking as much as you want as long as you exercise, I could see that easily getting out of hand with those types of conversion ratios.
Isn't that putting the cart in front of the horse? That is, isn't poorly conducted nutrition research getting in the way of doing proper nutrigenomics research, meaning nutrigenomics can't really catch on until that is fixed?
Perfection Salad explains a lot about the attitudes of my parents and grandparents about food and how it seems so contrary to more modern "knowledge" about nutrition. How Crisco ever came into existence and was once popularly used finally makes sense to me.
Also the actual Perfection Salad, basically a salad encased in a jello mold, looks pretty disgusting.
Pinning down the long term effects of individual nutrients is very difficult, but we know a lot more about the positive and negative effects of diet choices than this article lets on.
Acne is thought to be largely genetic [1], which could explain why no one in that study had it.
Anecdotally, I had cystic acne as a teen and was cured after a single cycle of Accutane. It never returned, even though I kept eating the same diet - which included a lot of dairy and a lot of fast food.
"At over 40%, the mortality rate due to cardiovascular disease (CVD) in China is amongst the highest in the world¹ and has been rightly described as an epidemic."[1]
And literally the topic of this thread is an article discussing how small sample sizes, bad methodology, and statistical massaging/manipulation (depending on where you want to situate people on the stupid/evil continuum) mean that nutritional studies can't actually be trusted. The evidence that we have is all over the map.
There is a huge difference between looking at nutritional studies with small sample sizes and huge populations, their diets, and the diseases they get.
I counted my calories for a half year and successfully lost 14 kilos. But since I like to feel full and I enjoy eating I only ate foods with low calories/gram ratio. These foods are generell also healthy as well.
Calorie-couting definately works, you just have to be honest with yourself and count everything you eat and measure always exact.
I recommend you workout a bit while doing this though, I lost not only fat but muscle mass and my daily calories intake my body need went down about 400 calories.
>>But since I like to feel full and I enjoy eating I only ate foods with low calories/gram ratio. These foods are generell also healthy as well.
Yes. Berries are great for this, especially blackberries. They have very low sugar compared to other fruits, and high fiber. So they are good for satiety. They go bad relatively quickly though, and tend to be expensive out of season. :)
Lemonade is associated with a positive belief that Crash deserved Best Picture and iced tea is associated with a negative belief that Crash deserved Best Picture. I wonder what the consensus on Crash's Oscar is among Arnold Palmer drinkers.
According to the statistic available the number of drowning accidents among children and sale of ice-cream is highly correlated, we must take measures to lower sale of ice-cream, please think of the children!
Most of the time a journalist will easily believe a statement like above and rewrite into a newspaper article.
And soon thereafter official recommendations and legislation will follow.
I'm looking forward to http://nusi.org/ publishing some results, they appear to be intellectual honest.
I'm always wary of articles that try to support their point by showing some ridiculous correlations. It's very easy to look at thousands of correlations and select the few most ridiculous, ignoring the vast amount of them that maybe make sense. Suddenly it seems like statistics are irrelevant and we cannot trust anything. I suppose that nobody is free from personal bias since even Fisher, yes the great statistician, rejected correlation between smoking and lung cancer as a spurious correlation (look up in Wikipedia)
> It's very easy to look at thousands of correlations and select the few most ridiculous, ignoring the vast amount of them that maybe make sense.
The reality is in fact reverse. Out of thousands of correlations you could pick, only very few actually make sense. It's trivially easy to find - or accidentally stumble upon - a meaningless correlation.
Drowning accidents and the sale of ice cream probably have a common causal factor -- warm weather. A lot of the correlations in the article are a lot weirder and harder to explain.
There's no value in nutrition studies that don't identify an actual physical mechanism for the effect. Virtually all past and present nutrition advice is just superstition. Since we are only just now gaining an understanding of the microscopic mechanisms that actually run the body, we can hope for truly valuable nutrition advice in the future.
It's not a nutrition article, it's a statistics article. From 5:38. They have a pretty good reputation so far. That's besides the fact that their point is absolutely obvious, and the biggest value of that article is that some widely recognized outlet put the problems with nutrition "science" in terms of actual numbers.
Just FYI, "538" is a reference to the number of electoral votes in the United States, since the blog was born while covering the 2008 presidential election.
It's an article about nutrition articles, not a nutrition article itself. Russell's types save the day again.
Note that even if it was a "nutrition article", it telling you not to trust those articles doesn't fully invoke the liar's paradox.
Unlike with the liar's paradox, where the case is supposed to always hold ("cretans always lie") and as such the statement doesn't hold (and vice versa), a call to "not trust" doesn't translate to a call for never trusting. It only means do not trust in advance, you can still trust the ones you have verified (which breaks the infinite loop).
What's interesting, on repetition the experiment has shown 2 somewhat contradictory results. Day to day there was wild variation in diet, always found surprises in what or how much I ate. OTOH at the end of the week, the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable at 2100 +/-100 kcal/day. Of course there was a wealth of info about my diet composition as well.
I'd understand how very difficult it would be to scale up my experiment to the point of having enough participants to make it scientifically useful. In fact I'm not at all sure I'd recommend it to anyone unless the individual was so committed to the project to willingly put up with its arduous and tedious process.
However, as a personal nutrition learning tool nothing else I know of could possibly ever beat it.