If there is any information domain were it’s harder to figure out the real truth than current US politics, it’s “nutrition science”. As someone who actually tries to invest the time to check on sources and methods beyond the clickbait headlines, it’s really a mess. Poor scientific methods (observational studies), cherry-picking data to match a bias (Ancel Keys), conflicts of interest all over the place, etc. At a very macro level it seems like a few things are true: (a) 300,000 years of human evolution eating meat; (b) per-capita leveling off or even a drop in consumption of red meat, that didn’t stem the huge spikes in disease; and (c) being told to swap out good fats (meat, eggs, dairy) for industrial seed oils and ‘fat-free’ cookies to make up the calories, leading to an explosion of diabetes.Fallacious arguments abound for the carnivore group all the way over to the militant vegans who would want to tax or outlaw meat eating altogether, while telling us to shut up and eat our processed patty of canola oil and isolated pea protein. For now, I’ll keep eating like my grandparents ate - you know, real food.
vfc1|6 years ago
This is a straw man argument, because the perfect experiment will never be conducted. You would have to take 5000 people, put them in an island and feed them plant foods their whole life, collect blood and urine sample periodically to monitor them, wait for them to die and autopsy them.
Like we are doing with chimps currently literally. And we would need a control group. So because we can't conduct this perfect experiment, nothing in nutrition science has validity.
This is nonesense, its about gluing the pieces together. There are studies that show that certain populations are healthier than others, and we know what they eat.
There are studies that track population movement across the globe and their changes in health. Africans and Asians moving to the US and developing heart diesase and diabetes, when before they had none.
There are also studies that identify the mechanisms, we know certain molecules produced from the result of digesting meat that are carcinogenic.
So its the population studies, the observational studies, the studies of the action mechanisms all together that form a complete picture.
belorn|6 years ago
Going by the top 5 countries: wealth, high-quality healthcare, healthcare focusing on preventative care, strong personal safety and sense of wellbeing, strong community, siesta, favour walking and biking, reduce stress and improve mental wellbeing.
If I recall the findings of one of the longest study ever done on human health, if you want to live long be born with few stressers, genes that is correlated to low stress, and have good access to stress management, regularly exercise the hearth and genuine enjoy it. Don't drink and don't smoke, through they could also be correlating to a lack of access to better strategy for stress management.
We could ask what the diets of Japan, Spain, Singapore, Switzerland, and South Korea has in common, as those are the top 5 countries with longest life expectancy, but it seems much more relevant to look at stress factors and stress management. Cancer rate and cancer recovery in particular is very interesting subject matter in this context.
Diabetes is an interesting side note, in particular to the finding from studies looking at children born around the dutch hunger winter. It doesn't say anything about meat but a lot about how diabetes in part occur when there is a mismatch between how easily it is to access nutrients in the environment and how easy body is expecting it to be. A simplified version is that in one extreme you starve and in the other extreme you get diabetes. A diet that tries to avoid diabetes would be one that tries to match what the individual body expects.
bobthepanda|6 years ago
While sugar consumption is markedly higher in the US, I do believe that a good portion of the health outcomes can be explained by the total unwalkability of most of the US. If walking is part of the regular routine, you don’t need an app to hit 10,000 steps per day. But most Americans only walk the distance from the parking space to the front door on a daily basis.
syshum|6 years ago
One day we will have fully automated cars that will just drop us off right at the door
YeGoblynQueenne|6 years ago
One little problem with that is that your grandparents probably didn't eat what my grandparents ate. I'm guessing you're from a majority English-speaking country, the US, or UK, etc. I'm Greek. Our traditional cuisine is choke-full of strictly vegan dishes that are absolute staples [1]. Only of course no Greek would dream of calling those dishes "vegan". They are simply "food". And, I dare say, they are "real" food, the kind of food that grandma would make, as opposed to the stuff one can find in fast food joints etc.
The same goes for the "300,000 years of human evolution eating meat". Considering how far and wide humans have ranged during our evolution, figuring out what an average human ate would be very tricky. On the one hand, you have the diets of the peoples of the Arctic who eat predominantly meat from seals and caribou and the like. On the other hand, you have the diets of people in the Indian subcontinent who eat mostly pulses.
The bottom line is we've always been omnivores and we cant eat only meat any more than we can eat only plants. And we can't look at the plates of a few million people who have settled down in one part of the world and ignore the rest, who live all over the rest of the planet.
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[1] Rather than me giving a list of Greek cuisine dishes with no meat or animal fasts etc in them, here's a blog post by a vegan touring Greek:
https://www.thenomadicvegan.com/the-nomadic-vegans-guide-to-...
The list includes spanakopita and xoriatiki (Greek salad) that are normally prepared or served with feta cheese as are many of the other dishes. Greek cuisine is not vegan, but a lot of it is lacto- ovo- pescaterian.
Note again that the dishes in the list above are staples- the kind of dish the average Greek would eat a few times a year.
chrisco255|6 years ago
blue_devil|6 years ago
I recently dug out some original USDA documents from the 19th century to research[1] the origins of nutritional science in the US. W. O. Atwater, the guy who introduced things like Calories (equal to kcal), macros, and "dietetics" has had a huge impact on nutritional science, including modern food labelling and things like the simplified conversion of fat to 9 Calories/gram and protein/carbs to 4 Calories/gram. Atwater himself was very much influenced to introduce these to the American public by his German professors (he did a postdoc there), who were themselves looking into making nutrition "efficient - for cattle and humans alike.
I found the history quite fascinating, it gets to the "origins" of the idea of quantifying food.
[1]https://blog.jumpycatapp.com/calorie-counting-weight-loss-hi...
Merrill|6 years ago
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
>The prevalence of obesity was 39.8% and affected about 93.3 million of US adults in 2015~2016.
learc83|6 years ago
For an extreme example--it's a lot easier to gain weight if you regularly stop by the convience store and pick up cookies, chips and a bottle of coke for dinner than if you cook lean chicken and roast vegetables.
Sure you could eat a similar calorie portion of both.
lowdose|6 years ago
mlthoughts2018|6 years ago
It sounds to me like just more bullshit food nostalgia nonsense and you’re just perpetuating your own brand of unscientific nutrition opinion. Researching that a bunch of other hypotheses are wrong or partially wrong doesn’t mean your idea is right.
“Eating like my grandparents ate” for a lot of people in the US means a wildly lopsided diet of mostly meat and a slew of convenience foods foisted on consumers during the advent of mega supply chain processed foods. “Eating like my great grandparents ate” usually means “eat whatever you can and don’t complain” with no serious regard for nutrition or balance.
There are likely confounding effects in rate of disease, obesity, early death etc. due much more to lifestyle differences, general sources of pollution, sedentary habits, prevalence of jobs requiring hard physical work (where even the same job in the same company today is likely partly automated or handled differently to reduce physical labor), lack of good medical screening or testing in past generations obfuscating knowing true rates of disease or health problems due to diet back then, different structures for ensuring screening in schools, etc. The sheer volume of confounding effects that would have to be convincingly controlled for to compare causal impact of past generations’ diets is staggering. If we can’t even get good science on simple studies across cohorts today, it seems like a ludicrous stretch to claim universal positive causal effect from eating “like my grandparents ate.”
The tone of your last paragraph also makes it sound like you would not give credence to ideas of choosing food options that reduce water depletion or CO2 emissions, or even the philosophy of just animal welfare and cruelty in even small-time farming (not saying we know with great certainty what those choices or green impacts would be, only that you seem to have made up your mind that some Norman Rockwell Americana picture of green beans and chicken on the table represents The Right Choice).
If you don’t actually feel that way, you may want to consider writing more charitably and not invoking food nostalgia as the alternative to flawed modern nutrition science.
sbooher|6 years ago
Those who want to drive food guidelines by other factors than actual health, should be honest about their motivations, whatever they are, rather than claiming that they are scientifically/health driven. Arguments for animal welfare, water use etc need to be backed by good science as well, not just platitudes. I’ve had people try to make the argument to me that all the water falling on all the pasture land in the US needs to be ‘counted against’ meat. That because we treat some animals poorly, we should stop eating all of them, rather than asking why we treat them that way, or how other countries might be doing it better. I’ve yet to see a good study on the millions/billions(?) of small animals that are killed in millions of acres of U.S. monocrops, but I’m guessing it would be eye opening. For every warning statement on animal CO2 use, I can find a seemingly well done study on positive CO2 capture by regenerative farms (i.e. traditional farms before feed lots). Carnivores on Twitter seem to have had amazing individual successes getting rid of their own specific inflammatory diseases, but then often assume that experience can be extrapolated to everyone, and often discount the long-term health impact of zeroing out plants completely…. It goes on and on.
Lastly, my statement about eating like my grandparents used the words “I” and “my” and was obviously my own rule - hard to imagine what you found ‘uncharitable’ about that statement. I’m somewhat new to HN - are we not allowed to share our own experiences here?
briandear|6 years ago
I am not the writer of that comment, but yes I don’t give credence to choosing food choices based on water consumption. Water is a renewable resources water “shortages” aren’t a problem with actual water supply, but distribution of water. The Pacific Northwest is really wet, the Mojave is really dry. One could claim a dire shortage of water in the Mojave, which would be true, but that isn’t indicative of actually running out of water.
As far as fearing CO2 output from food; that’s just religious jibber-jabber for the doomsday cult du jour. The world isn’t ending.