Nutrient density | Hacker News Reader

Nutrient density

drfuhrman.com

9 pointsca98am7919 comments

I was thinking about writing a fairly short "no bs nutrition for nerds" post. would anyone be interested? I think there was a recipe thread awhile back and in the comments a couple key points were hit, but this hitting the front page indicates that maybe there's some interest again.

Very interested. Very.

okay, shouldn't take too much effort. I'll probably put it up friday.

Here you go: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-to-the-prima...

terrible imo. he contradicts himself.

Any reason to regard this as anything more than yet another crankish diet? The usual signs are there (extravagant claims, "for the details, read my book", "patent pending", distinct shortage of actual science).

The list of nutrient dense foods is interesting. I actually posted this with a different title "A nice list of nutrient dense foods" It's nice to know what are the most nutrient dense foods, because they are the healthiest - they have the highest nutrient/calorie ratio.

If you want a list of healthy foods, consult a doctor or scientist. Eating according to this guy's list is a quick way to severe health problems.

Are you kidding? Eating a lot of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, and nuts are not going to give you severe health problems. It will most likely make you a lot more healthy.

Joel Fuhrman is a doctor.

Are you saying that "healthiest" means "highest nutrient/calorie ratio" (which seems like a very strange definition) or that the healthiest foods in some other sense (e.g., such that eating more of them tends to help you live longer) turn out to be precisely those with highest nutrient/calorie ratio (which even Fuhrman doesn't claim -- he says your diet would have too little fat if you tried to eat only those foods)?

It seems to me that trying to measure how "healthy" any given foodstuff is, is fundamentally misguided. A healthy diet is one that delivers the things you need in suitable proportions, and that can never be a matter of just eating more of one set of foods and less of another. Even that is an oversimplification; it may be better to eat some kinds of things together with others, or avoid doing so; or to eat some kinds of things at particular times, or avoid doing so. None of this stuff is anything like perfectly understood. Sure, there are some foodstuffs that we should almost all eat more or less of than we naturally want to because of differences our distant ancestors' environments and ours (e.g., we mostly like eating fat because when energy is scarce it's a good thing to eat, but these days in the affluent west this is hardly ever anyone's problem), but that's not really a matter of those things being "healthy" or "unhealthy", it's a matter of our calibration being imperfect.

None at all. I stopped reading when he ranked iceberg lettuce as over four times healthier than chicken and beef. Not to mention the telltale "toxins" which are always mentioned (but never enumerated) in this sort of scam.

It is a fact that iceberg lettuce has over 4 times more nutrients per calorie than chicken and beef. He does say "Keep in mind that nutrient density scoring is not the only factor that determines good health. For example, if we only ate foods with a high nutrient density score our diet would be too low in fat."

So iceberg lettuce "wins" by being low in calories, rather than high in nutrients. It's a common problem with any metric involving division. Salt water completely breaks it.

Anyways, are nutrients even a more-is-better sort of thing, or is nutrition more or less threshold-based?

None at all. I stopped reading when he ranked iceberg lettuce as over four times healthier than chicken and beef.

That's a straw man inadvertently created from a cursory reading of the website. It's not his position that maximizing nutrient density is equivalent to eating a healthy diet.

Not to mention the telltale "toxins" which are always mentioned (but never enumerated) in this sort of scam.

I agree that this should be taken as a sign of a scam. (Though it is unfortunately so common, that it's entered the realm of "fluffly marketdroid language.")

If you do read his Eat to Live book, it is cited with hundreds of references in the endnotes. I pulled a few dozen when I was near a university and they were fairly well supportive of his points.

There was a study comparing weight loss and heart disease indicators between, if I recall correctly, Fuhrman-style diet to Ornish-style diet to AHA recommendations. I'll try to dig up the citation tonight.

There is also the complexity of how much the food is cooked and whether it is consumed along with other complementary food that aids in its digestion. I had once heard of a theory that children left to their own devices in the presence of healthy food will eat what and how much they want and still remain healthy- even in the case of a child that prefers to repeatedly eat the same food. It's as if their instincts tell them what to eat and what not to eat by making them averse to a food whose nutrition they have had enough of.

Nutrient density, like he says, isn't the only factor in determining what makes food healthy.

For example, food which tastes delicious and raises blood sugar makes us 'high'. Being high is bad for the body (please note, I'm not saying it's wrong).

Note also that whether something tastes delicious depends on how we interpret the experience and therefore healthiness is not wholly attributable to the foodstuff in question.

To complicate matters still further, worrying about food is surely unhealthy, isn't it?

If I read this chart correctly, it says that by eating more green vegetables and fruit, a person will consume significantly more nutrients than a person who does not.

This advice is certainly unnecessary for Americans, who generally eat only from the first two columns.

However, it could be helpful for the few that eat exclusively from the lower half of the third column.

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