You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
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 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 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.
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.
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.
I think this is quite normal and why people recommend
not measuring yourself every day
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).
* 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.
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.)
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. ;-)
Just Eat Less, its that simple .
*) add individual adjustment (~10%?) based on your personal data.
- 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. ;-)
I think you should publish :).
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.:)
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.
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>.
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.
Oh god, I go through a gallon of milk a week- what do I need to know?
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.
And so on. And so on. And so on.
And, of course I'm generalizing.
Milk isn't inherently bad but the things you need to know are:
A) Consuming it doesn't really affect your calcium levels.
B) Its basically just another sugary drink.
C) Excessive amounts of it can cause anemia.
D) Don't give much of it to small children due to reason C.
Here are some more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzyFZcuHmeI
And what you suggested isn't at all uncommon in those quality work studies.
Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Cornell%E2%80%93...
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.
https://medium.com/life-tips/processed-meats-as-bad-as-cigar...
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.
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?
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.
[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19118369
[1] Some raw meat advocates already believe this.
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-saturated-fat-studies-se...
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-saturated-fat-studies-bu...
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/trans-fat-saturated-fat-and-...
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
(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).
I know there are dairy products without lactose, but then the nutrition guidelines should at least mention the issue.
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.
You can do nutrition studies on animals that are most like us.
And you can study people in structured environments like the military, space, or prison and accurately track what they eat.
- 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.
The advice in short is: avoid all carbohydrates as much as possible, and eat protein and fat.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259/
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.
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."
- Eat much less sugar.
- Eat some less bread/rolls/cake (or other flour based products)
It is almost impossible to over-eat on veggies, they are just too filling for their calorie content.
> Carbohydrate provides 4 calories per gram, protein provides 4 calories per gram, and fat provides 9 calories per gram.
http://fnic.nal.usda.gov/how-many-calories-are-one-gram-fat-...
(I'm not aware of any useful studies in that regard, but I'd be very interested.)
- Does the book claim that you can't get fat when you don't eat carbs?
- Is there a main reason for calories-in-calories-out being "damaging" as it says on the back?
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.
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?
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.
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.
If you want to be skinny eat cottage cheese with carrots and hummus.
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.
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
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)
Noondip made this exact same false claim in a December thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673687
> 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.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra054035
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22059639
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22403632
> '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.
http://www.cspinet.org/new/200207101.html
Please, don't recommend people eat animal products for beneficial properties of trans fat. It's just scientifically untenable.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'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".
What I find interesting is the question of why humans
evolved to be able to switch into ketosis, though
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.
I have been astonished at how just not eating quite so much makes a difference.
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/upshot/simple-rules-for-h...
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.
It seems that something like this would be at least as good as food diaries: http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/google-calorie-coun...
EDIT: Can't find any trace of it since that one press release in June 2015. Looks like it isn't being developed.
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..)
http://meaningness.com/nutrition
An older essay on a similar topic, with a critique of cognitive science too:
Also the actual Perfection Salad, basically a salad encased in a jello mold, looks pretty disgusting.
People who don't eat western diets don't get heart disease, acne, or many other inflammatory related conditions.
Just look at this study Loren Cordain ran in Papua New Guinea: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12472346 - 0 incidents of acne in the entire cohort.
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.
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.
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjd.12149/abstrac...
However, you can take 80% of human beings, feed them nothing but sugar, deprive them of sunlight and sleep, and they will have acne within a week.
But hey, whatever makes you feel better.
[1]: http://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases/...
You can also look at the reverse: Diets high in sugar lead to increased heart disease.
By western diet I meant a diet of modern civilization.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
TFC: "HERE'S A STUDY THAT PROVES THAT PROTEIN/CARBS/FAT/FIBER/VEGETABLES/VEGEMITE/GUM IS THE DEVIL AND GIVES EVERYONE BRAIN CANCER!"
It's the liar paradox all over 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).