[lumb63]

I cannot comment on Nina specifically, since I’m not familiar with her work. I’d only like to suggest that being “a joke in nutrition science circles” in the recent past is probably something of a compliment. Mainstream nutrition science led to advice such as putting energy-dense grains at the bottom of the food pyramid, and villainizing fat with respect to CVD, leading to “reduced fat” alternatives which instead use sugar (which is highly addictive). Now, debates center around how much added sugar should be the recommended daily amount (hint: it should be 0). Lawmakers are considering funding overpriced Ozempic via Medicare to fight our rampant obesity, while nutrition science has abdicated its role in helping people maintain healthful, satiating diets.

At least in the United States, the nutrition science of the last 100 years has overseen the most incredible deterioration of metabolic health in human history. There are some folks doing good work out there, as there always have been, but listening to mainstream nutrition science as if their word is law is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.

[bjoli]

Adherence to guidelines is laughably low in the developed world.

The recommendations regarding fat hasn't changed in 30 years in most countries. FDA recommended limiting saturated fat already in 1980 (didn't bother looking further) and has recommended not exceeding an energy intake from fat over 30% since at least 1990. 30%e from fat is not a low fat diet.

The guidelines from 1980 explicitly mentions reducing saturated fat and sugar.

I think the problem is that we haven't been listening.

[darajava]

The guidelines from 1980 have indeed mentioned reducing satiating saturated fat and since then people have been getting more and more obese.

The problem is that we have, unfortunately, been listening.

[KempyKolibri]

Exactly. And we can’t blame nutrition science for that.

[KempyKolibri]

The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption.

Reduced fat is an interesting one. If you actually look at what Keys was investigating all the way back in the mid 20th century, the hypothesis was always that saturated fat increased CVD risk. The translation of that into policy and marketing aimed at total fat cannot be placed entirely at the feet of mainstream nutrition science.

As to the claims that sugar is addictive, this is unsupported - sugar does not meet the DSM-V criteria for addictive substances based on current evidence (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-8077-9_...)

As for added sugar - again, you’re labelling policy decisions as nutrition science. The DGs that I’m aware of recommend as little added sugar as possible, but when you’re making policy you have to strike a balance between strict enough to make a difference, but not so restrictive that no one listens. That’s different from what mainstream nutrition science would claim (which is indeed that there are no benefits to added sugar and several risks).

The same point applies to your claim that nutrition science has a role in getting people to adhere to satiating diets. No, nutrition science is to help us understand what those diets might look like. It is not responsible for getting populations to adhere to them.

[rendang]

>put whole grains specifically

This is false, in the 90s when I grew up there was no such criterion, and the posters of the pyramid prominently depicted sliced white bread.

The worst part of the food pyramid was the indication to use all fats and oils sparingly. There's never been any point in which the evidence suggested that olive oil or other monounsaturated fats should be avoided

[GuB-42]

The food pyramid makes economic sense.

Grains are cheap and energy dense, if your goal is to feed a large population it makes a lot of sense to put them at the base of the pyramid, that's what will keep you alive, as in, not starving. Higher up are fruits and vegetables, also cheap, they will provide with nutrients that you need to stay healthy on top of the calories that will keep you alive. Higher up are animal products, expensive but rich in proteins and a few other nutrients that are a bit lacking in the base layers, they help you get stronger and more performant in addition to healthy and alive. On top are pleasure foods, not really necessary for your body, but enjoyable.

I take it like a mirror of the "hierarchy of needs" pyramid rather than nutritional advice for people with effectively unlimited resources.

[ASalazarMX]

The elephant in the room is that nutrition studies (whose results influence health and economic policy) are frequently funded by dominant players of the food industry, creating a huge conflict of interest. This has to end.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption.

Citation please or I'm calling extreme bullshit. Everything I've ever read has argued for putting more nutrient dense fruits and vegetables as the basis for a healthy diet.

More importantly, I think the nutrition community was woefully naive to the point of being negligent when they tried to defend the food pyramid. One quote I heard was "When we were recommending lower far intake, we never imagined Snackwells." Well, why TF not??? It should have been blatantly obvious that by demonizing fat and making people feel like carbs were "free" that companies would react appropriately and come up with fat-free, sugar-stuffed replacements that had a huge amount of calories, left you feeling unsatiated, and tasted like sweet cardboard. Probably even worse was frankenfood like Olestra.

I agree with the original point - while I think the field of nutrition science has improved a lot over the past decade, they have a ton to answer for and never did an appropriate "mea culpa" for all the great harm they caused.

[riku_iki]

> The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption.

my humble research found that diffs in nutrition between whole grains and refined grains carbs is very small compared to say whole grain to some complex carbs from leaf veggies. The same goes to glycemic index, satiety index, etc.

[AStonesThrow]

Let's get real here: the benefits in the USDA Food Pyramid are benefits for agribusiness and the big subsidized food producers. The benefits that the USDA pushes have nothing to do with good nutrition for the average citizen. This is 100% "regulatory capture" as we call it around here. The Food Pyramid is a scam and a hoax, and the more it can be ignored, the better.

When I joined a Christian Health Sharing ministry, they determined that I needed remedial help, due to hypertension and dyslipidemia. They assigned me to monthly virtual meetings with a dietician. The dietician's advice horrified me, because it would've made me sicker, and exacerbated my conditions. I approached the ministry's administrators, requested a replacement dietician, and they replaced her alright. The new dietician had basically the same credentials and the same letters after her name, but she was way more flexible, listened to my reasoning, and supported my choices with encouragement.

My parents followed every "diet fad" in the 1970s-1980s, from 2% milk, to margarine, to yolk-less-egg-whites, to reducing red meat, to low-sodium everythings, to bottled fluoridated water. It was sheer torture and disgusting. My mother didn't know the first thing about flavor or pleasure in cooking, and never used the spices in her rack. Our food was always bland. For breakfast she'd slap down a jug of milk, a box of Chex, a bowl and a spoon, and abandon me to go do housework. I would sit there and read the mendacious lies known as "Nutrition Panel" on the side, and simply stewed in my resentment for the whole thing. It's a travesty.

[s1artibartfast]

This is the story as old as time. Much of science is good faith, fairly accurate, and nuanced.

Policy and advocacy is deceptive, dishonest, and lacks nuance.

[wathef]

Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is one of the best takes here. It sits squarely in the realm of evidence where the majority of these comments are anecdotal and they don’t translate to population level studies.

[hollerith]

>The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption.

Many, many people disagree with that. Most days I eat no grains at all and the rest of the time, I strictly limit my grain intake. For example, I just finished a meal where I used one tablespoonful (uncooked volume) of rice (boiled with some peas). (The meal also included meat and butter, the source of most of my calories.) White rice is the only grain I eat anymore, and I would never eat brown rice, which is loaded with oxalate and other phytotoxins. I added to this just-finished meal B vitamins in the form of pure refined powder (which I liberated from capsules).

It is very obvious from how it makes me feel that brown rice is bad for me.

The cultures that have eaten rice for thousands of years eat almost exclusively white rice. Brown rice was not even possible to make before the spread of tech for precision machining (which reached East Asia in the 1900s). You have to remove the hull from the rice before you can eat it, and before precision machining, removing the hull (traditionally done by pounding the rice with a log) also removed most of the bran and germ. Yes, some bran and some germ remained stuck to the rice -- so it was mostly-white rice, as opposed the polished, completely-white rice we have today with no bran and no germ at all. Still it had only a small fraction of the amount of bran and germ that modern brown rice has.

[Aurornis]

> I’d only like to suggest that being “a joke in nutrition science circles” in the recent past is probably something of a compliment.

This is the fallacy that makes pseudoscience thrive right now: The idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Wannabe influencers position themselves as the anti-establishment position. People who are frustrated with institutions blindly fall in line behind them.

The fallacy doesn’t stand up to even the simplest critical thinking, yet it triggers something subconsciously that leads far too many people to see a contrarian statement and assume it must be true.

Meanwhile, these people are grifting away, selling books and pitching Athletic Greens (or the latest sponsor of the day). This person is no exception.

[r3trohack3r]

It’s a shame that our institutions have burned so much good will and credibility that they’ve created an environment for this to thrive.

All metrics I see show faith in these institutions going to zero. Most good science I see is making (and has been making for decades) a really strong case that this loss of faith is deserved.

Credentialism is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption.

[tomcar288]

with regards to who you follow in nutritional circles, just beware that there's a lot of social media content out there by people who are really good at business (seo, social media content gen, etc) but haven't read much nutritional research. Meanwhile the real scientists who know a great deal, have very little social media content, if any at all.

Personally, I follow the advice of Dr Micheal Gregor, one of his most recent books has over 13,000 citations! Their team has read over 20,000 nutritional papers!! And he'll tell you that whole grains and beans are an excellent staple of a healthy diet.

And with regards to Saturated Fat and even dietary cholesterol, he said, to make a really long story short, that they're really bad for you. There's way too many specifics to list but his 500+ page book (How not to age, and How not to Die) goes into great details and backs it up with a ton of research.

[davebrown10]

Actually, excessive omega-6 arachidonic acid intake is far more problematic than saturated fats. Dr. Gregor knows about the arachidonic acid problem but doesn't seem to understand it. https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/arachidonic-acid/ Compare what Gregor says to this comment by Norwegian animal science researchers. "Chicken meat is commonly regarded as a healthy type of meat; it is popular, and hence the consumption has increased. Chicken meat is lean, protein-rich and rich also in other important nutrients. However, the fatty acid composition is strongly dependent on the diet fed to the birds. A typical modern poultry diet is rich in cereals having a high ratio between omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. This diet is very different from the natural diet for the same species containing more green leaves that are rich in the omega-3 fatty acid alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). It has been shown that a diet rich in ALA gives increased concentrations of ALA, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosapentaenoic acid (DPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) in broiler muscle and improved, i.e. reduced ratio between total omega-6 and total omega-3 fatty acids. The utilisation of ALA and linoleic acid (LA) for synthesizing EPA and arachidonic acid (AA) depends on feed concentrations of ALA and LA as well as on other factors. Much AA in the diet may contribute to prostaglandin overproduction in disease situations in humans, but some AA is necessary for virtually every body function. Dietary sources of AA are especially meat, eggs and offal, with smaller amounts coming from milk and fish. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2875212/ It's likely that the global increase in obesity and diabetes is largely due to increased consumption of grain-fed monogastrics such as poultry and swine. A 2021 paper by Australian zoologist Anthony Hulbert, PhD entitled 'The under-appreciated fats of life' concludes, "As a final comment, I note that we are only beginning to understand the implications of the balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fats in the human diet. Although most animals have a relatively constant diet, we humans are especially diverse (both between individuals and over time) in the types of food we consume. Over the last half-century, the modern human food chain has emphasised omega-6 and diminished omega-3 intake, largely because of: (i) a shift from animal fats to vegetable oils, (ii) an increase in grain-fed meat and dairy, and (iii) a decline in full-fat dairy products from grass-fed livestock (an important source of omega-3). In the opinion of the current author and others, these diet trends are likely to be responsible for the increased incidence of obesity and other modern epidemics of chronic disease, but that is a story for another time." https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/224/8/jeb232538/...

[pkphilip]

What about all the "consensus" about red meat being bad and that it must be avoided at all cost?

[rawgabbit]

I believe the current thinking is to consider the effect on inflammation and bad cholesterol.

If your doctor says your number one priority should be to lower inflammation or lower bad cholesterol, you should consider lowering the amount of red meat.

The issue is that of course we need protein. Older people who tend to lose muscle mass and are at risk of falling should actually increase protein intake and weight resistance exercises. If their stomach tolerates fish legumes nuts, wonderful. If they tolerate red meat better, then they should eat red meat. Like every thing else in life, there are trade offs and nothing is completely healthy or unhealthy.

[ambientenv]

Personally, I don't think the capitalist-driven agenda anywhere in the world gives a flying fricative about the health of anyone, only the health of the profit motive and it's benefits to shareholders. Food and healthcare is but one more example. Love or hate the JRE, I think this episode [1] provides much food (pun intended) for thought. The common person simply does not matter other than as a(n) (addicted) consumer.

[1] https://youtu.be/G0lTyhvOeJs?feature=shared

[s1artibartfast]

Sure. The government isn't your mommy, and neither are corporations. People have to take responsibility and look out for their own health. Nobody else is going to do it for you.