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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat interesting and different look at what different types of foods do to us by focusing on our guts and those little things that help us digest. His recommendation seems to be more complex carbohydrates, less sugar... same old conclusion, different way of getting there I guess. It's still "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

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The take-away, to me, is to append one more variable when we consider wehat goes in our mouth: the bioavailability / effect in your microbiome.

"We realize a diet like this doesn’t lend itself to being packaged and sold. It emphasizes how to think about food in the context of one’s microbiome, rather than prescribing a narrow choice of foods, counting calories, or advocating “dieting” as a daily activity. This advice is far from sexy and certainly not earth-shattering."

My favourite way of phrasing that is: "Athletes don't diet and workout, they eat and train."

How you get there is up to you. Calorie counting and avoiding simple carbs works for me. As does training for at least an hour a day.

Agreed, but I liked that he walked through the reasoning and the processes that inform that conclusion. The more something looks like a mystery, the less we understand it / the less scientific it really is.

Be careful how much you take at face value, though. While a lot of what he has to say is accurate, there's some stuff in there, like a reference to "leaky gut syndrome" which treats it as a legitimate health concern rather than the totally unfounded alternative-medicine BS that it is, which you'd be ill advised to take seriously.

While "leaky gut syndrome" as imagined by pseudoscience believers is a little ridiculous, the general idea of chronic low grade inflammation of the intestinal epithelium due to a breakdown of the innate immune system is not. If anyone is interested, checkout out David Artis' work on commensal bacteria on barrier surfaces.

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