The complications of nutrition science | Hacker News Reader

The complications of nutrition science

vox.com

62 pointsprostoalex83 comments

This was fully covered in "In Defense of Food" - good intro read for nutrition. Read that, not Vox, which is rife with strange opinions, like "overeating" being the cause of modern disease? You damn nutritional science then come up with your own solution to everyone's problem, not based in evidence? Neat.

It's oversimplifying to say the only studies nutritional science can use are observational ones. There are plenty of high quality, controlled studies on specific aspects of nutrition. We learn from those. That's also not to say that observational studies are all bad. They can be useful for determining when things don't work and aligning controlled evidence. The fact that nutrition is a hard problem doesn't mean it's not a real science.

TL;DR Learn who you can trust on nutrition (Vox is not a good start)

Isn't "In Defense of Food" the one that tries to alter the definition of "food" until it no longer encompasses many of the unhealthy things we eat? (EDIT: yes, yes it is.)

I originally dismissed it without a second thought because I associate that sort of puerile silliness with... well, things other than science. But now you're saying it gives a solid overview of nutrition science and I can't help but wonder.

> Vox is not a good start

Yeah, but why is "In Defense of Food" a good start? The author is a professor of journalism and the wiki page links to an opinion piece by a professor of nutrition titled "'In Defense of Food' is short on science," which is precisely what I'd expect from a professor of journalism and from someone who tries to redefine what food means. Which puts me back in square 1 of not knowing where to start.

It's a good start because it's an unbiased, well researched book that's not alarmist / linkbait like "Why (almost) everything you know about food is wrong."

Why is it strange to think that over-eating is could be considered problem?

One might better phrase it as "today, many humans have the ability to consume as much as they wish of many kinds of foods, a situation somewhat unique to evolutionary history and many problems seem to stem from this". I think a fair portion of nutrition experts think this. I don't know if it's a majority but as the article mentions, consensus is hard to find and just about any opinion is hard to support.

And you seem to recommend something closer to the cranky fringe as an alternative to a decent article whose main message seems to be "very little is uncontroversial"

I don't disagree with your critique of the parent's preferred "source," but "over-eating" has a certain hand-waving component as well (IMO at least.)

If you eat 10 pounds of celery, there is no doubt that the vast majority of people would consider that over-eating but the negative health effects would at best be an abundance of fiber I suspect.

> 10 pounds of celery > an abundance of fiber

You seem to be misinformed. 10 pounds of celery is most probably a very bad idea. There is no such thing as "good food" if you push it to the limits and eat too much of it. Celery has a lot of active component, just smell this taste and you will know. It is mainly good but as an addition to a normal meal's main component, which is traditionally white rice or noodles in the East, bread or potato in the West.

Among these I would guess the best is rice. But even rice you cannot eat 50 pounds of eat without harm.

I think the main issue here is that food is not science, and should not be the subject of science. Some chemical reactions are, but not nutrition. Nutrition is a cultural thing, much more connected to health, well-being and social living than to chemical reactions, milligrams of whatever and parameters of our bodies.

10 pounds of celery would result in 40g (or thereabouts) of sugar intake, 4 liters or so of water, and round about the US RDA of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, C, E and the minerals calcium, iron, magnesium, phosophorous, potassium, sodium, and zinc.

Granted, the consumption of vitamin K would be noticeably above the USRDA, although we're also not accounting for the reduction in hypertension observed in those that consume celery juice.

Food and nutrition may not be a science, but that is a result of incomplete understanding rather than some special magic that culture exerts on biochemistry.

> incomplete understanding

The first act of ratio (reason) is to assert its own limits. Many things are outside the scope of science, for example no science will ever explain why a novel or a painting is good, why someone love another. From the catastrophic results of nutrition-as-science (things like USRDA), I would bet that the most important part of nutrition is outside the scope of science. Eating food is only marginally the matter of pouring x or y or z into one's body. Just as reading a book is nothing like pouring one by one a long string of words in our memory.

We are no robots, after all.

Learning about diets and food is also terribly difficult because the internet and books are so full of people who are so dead certain about their pseudo science. There is so much emotion attached to food that getting an objective rational opinion on anything food related is next to impossible. Personally I like the Soylent creators take on it. He seems extremely focused on figuring out the objective truths and ignore all the wishy washy emotional bullshit.

And also with so many eating exclusively the soylent mixture which is easy to control what goes into, they got an excellent opportunity to study many hypothesis about food. E.g. how important is it to eat "live fresh food" vs just getting the micro nutrients in the right mix.

There are diet specific versions of soylent, now: https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/

here is the recipe: https://diy.soylent.com/recipes/keto-chow-104-master-rich-ch...

Its true that its hard not to sound like an evangelist when you've lost weight-- but it's not pseudo science when there are studies that support the hypothesis (of course a lot of diets are fad diets and are pseudo science). The thing is its hard to tell the pseudo science from the real science.

Personally, in my experiment, I'm going to try adding Keto Chow to my diet over the next couple of months and see how I feel about it.

You know the dogma is bad when even an innocent comment like this gets downvoted.

While I think the term 'pseudoscience' gets thrown around way too loosely these days, it's no secret that the science surrounding nutrition is a convoluted mess, with various peer reviewed studies showing seemingly conflicting results.

It would be pretty interesting to do A/B testing starting out with a group of people who regularly drink a lot of Soylent. I haven't heard of anyone doing that sort of testing, though.

The experimentation that the Soylent folks are doing themselves looks like the fairly uncontrolled do-it-yourself kind, not like a real scientific study. It seems like it would be difficult to do properly because the formula of Soylent changes quite often.

Yep, since November 2014 all of the versions of Soylent are vegan. So, we'll see how that turns out. It would be really interesting if some results are reported.

There is a really low bar for human nutrition in the short term. Depending on body fat, a person can go many weeks without eating anything, so a juice "cleanse" will seem to work, low-carb will seem to work, high-carb low-fat will seem to work too, vegan, paleo, etc. Nutritional deficiencies might not develop for years!

Low carb for 8 months, so I think I'm beyond the short term measure. My bloodwork is better now than before. I can't imagine what nutrition I'm being deficient in, and the things that are potential issues I already take supplements (and since there's not a lot of risk in vitamins I take more than I probably need and for more types of vitamins than I need.)

Of course this is anecdote and it gets to the key problem the article is addressing-- there's no controlled group of statistically significant size who are all eating the same diet for decades.

When I hit my target weight I'll go into a maintenance mode anyway hat will include more carbs. I've done this twice- once when I was moving and once over christmas where I didn't want to be on the diet and increased carbs. I was able to keep my weight relatively flat.

But there are studies where people do this diet-- not just the scores of anecdotes on reddit/r/keto- but actual studies. And of course self reporting is not ideal, but I saw a meta study of a variety of diets that seemed to indicate the more low carb/high fat you went the more effective you were (there is a spectrum- keto, zero-carb, atkins, protien power, pescatarian diets, etc.)

The practical thing is, this diet not only caused me to lose weight ,but totally changed my relationship with food-- I'm not longer hungry. I eat as much as I want so long as I keep carbs under 20 a day (and really I usually hit less than 10 known carbs, often zero known carbs, but carbs slip in to all kinds of things, like cheese which should be no carbs has some, etc.) Sometimes I forget to eat meals. When I go off the diet and eat carbs, I find myself hungry soon after eating.

This change in my relationship with food and no longer being hungry indicates to me that part of the cause of my previous over eating is the carbs causing hunger. This points to it not being me starving myself, but an orientation towards food, or types of food.

Which I think is hormonal. Since many people report similar effects, and it is reproducible, there's room for real science there.

If low carb is working so well for you, why are you adding more carbs? Seems like people rave about ketonic diets but don't want to be on it for the long term.

Losing weight doesn't mean you are eating well.

It flies in the face of modern food culture, and it's a difficult decision socially. I think this drives a lot of people. That, and they're unable to remove their associations of "how normal people eat" and they feel a lust to consume sugars / complex carbohydrates again. However, the ones that don't start eating more have much better results long-term. You can't get fat again if you don't go back to eating that which got you fat in the first place.

  it's a difficult decision socially

This derails a number of people. Eating keto often means eating separate foods altogether from your family/peers, and your choices when eating out become limited and/or disproportionately expensive[0]. It also means that you are often put in a role of educating people (or trying to) about what you are doing, and why, and that can also mean overcoming skeptics.

Generally, however, after a few months of showing continued positive results, the skepticism turns more to curiosity... and you find people coming to you for dietary advice and reference material.

[0] some restaurants will work with you on this, and it never hurts to ask. For example, I've eaten at multiple diners where they would make a larger omelet in lieu of potatoes and toast.

One potential pitfall of improper long-term keto dieting is microbiome damage. If one isn't eating greens and such at all[0], the lack of other plant fiber could starve certain beneficial microorganisms to small enough populations as to become ineffective.

Having learned this, I now have a big-ass salad daily, generally, and I take a probiotic supplement. (Organic spinach is just $2/bag at Trader Joe's!)

[0] e.g. if one subsisted on mostly processed food before keto, if they don't add some appropriate carbs (even ones they didn't previously eat with any frequency), the microbiome will suffer... and it is difficult to repair without carefully culled fecal transplants.

What did this person do to deserve to be downvoted? They're trying to contribute to the conversation and you're being rude.

Sincerely, a lurker's voice.

I think it's because it goes against the last 45 years of common wisdom about why people get fat. Namely it's all about dietary fat and lack of will power. If you ask your doctor, nutritionist, your mom, or the man on the street they'll tell you this. Try to tell them different and they'll label you as crazy. (Hint hit the vote button now)

If you ask someone that does endocrine research, especially pediatric endocrine research they'll tell you that when you exclude people that are overweight for one of a large number of genetic reasons, the rest are fat because if a diet containing too much added sugars and processed carbs[1]. They'll also tell you normal dietary fat[2] is good for you.

[1] And booze though it breaks my heart to say so. [2] As opposed to trans-fats which are terrible.

Interesting that the cure for scurvy is used as the example of the first clinical trial. The story is an instructive one, since the real reason for the cure was not understood, leading to the cure being lost for ~150 years, due to a variety of bad assumptions, eg that it was the acidity of the fruit that was preventing scurvy. This lead to lemons being replaced with limes (that had far less vitamin C but were more acidic) because they could be sourced from within the British Empire rather than outside.

Long article here:

http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

and shorter summary of above here:

https://lonechemist.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/82/

PG referenced/tweeted a quote by someone "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants". That sums things up pretty well.

That would be Michael Pollan[0]

[0] http://www.amazon.com/In-Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/01...

The tl'dr: Eat actual food.

This article seems to suggest science is hopeless when we can't conduct randomized controlled trials. I don't think that's fair: the methods used in econometrics for learning from quasi-experiments (e.g. natural experiments, regression discontinuity) seem like they would be perfectly good for studying nutrition too.

I really have respect for the work of Weston A. Price. Although his work seems to be discounted and too fringe for a lot of people, I have learned a lot through his Foundation about nutrition as well as practices like culturing foods, soaking grains, making broth.

He was a dentist who started looking into the relationship between diet and teeth in the early 1900s. He decided to do a series of ethnographic nutrition studies in villages in Switzerland, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, Eskimos and Indians of North America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori and the Indians of South America during the 1930s and find out what common denominators they had in their diets that contributed to their great teeth and good health. He published these in his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

I'm not exactly sure why his studies are neglected, but I agree that it's possible to learn about nutrition using other methods.

Via negativa: Avoid what is most likely bad (food processed by industry, sodas, excess sugar, excess salt, trans fat and food blogs). Beyond that there isn't too much you can do.

So avoid all animal products, then? Trans fat are found in all of them.

Naturally occurring trans fats (vaccenic acid and conjugated linoleic acid) occur in trace amounts in animal products. They also have been shown to possibly be beneficial for LDL and triglycerides, while hydrogenated oil is harmful.

Source for that? The top result for me was the following review.

> Published data suggest that all fatty acids with a double bond in the trans configuration [produced either by industrial hydrogenation or by biohydrogenation in the rumens of cows and sheep] raise the ratio of plasma LDL to HDL cholesterol.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20209147

  Source for that?

Um, here's one that you already knew about from the referenced prior thread:

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

Have you got any studies not funded by the dairy industry to share?

This is the third time in a month (that I've noticed) that noondip has repeated this falsehood knowing that it is false.

TL;DR: dairy products have small amounts of naturally-occurring transfat that have no established adverse effects, while meats have essentially none.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10858482 for the previous example of refutation (and it has a link to the one before that, as well as references). The one reference he posts there refers to dairy, not meat.

Have a look at what the National Academy of Sciences - the prestigious and nonpartisan non-profit scientific community in the country - has to say about Trans Fat:

> Trans fatty acids are not essential and provide no known benefit to human health. Therefore, no AI or RDA is set. As with saturated fatty acids, there is a positive linear trend between trans fatty acid intake and LDL cholesterol concentration, and therefore increased risk of CHD. A UL is not set for trans fatty acids because any incremental increase in trans fatty acid intake increases CHD risk.

I know you disagree, but so far you've only cited one dairy industry-funded paper to support the conclusion TFAs are safe - even beneficial - for human consumption. I honestly want to know whether you have more compelling evidence, or are just defending unhealthy fat for some ideological reason.

Trans fats are way more prevalent in hydrogenated vegetable oils that try to look like animal fat replacements. They are simply much cheaper to manufacture.

Example: margarine 15g v.s. real butter 3.3g for each 100g of product.

Agreed, hydrogenated oils - whether from vegetables or ruminants - all seem to have adverse health effects. But to keep things in perspective, margarine is #3 in the list of top sources, after (presumably non-vegan) baked goods and animal products - http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2005/document/html/ch...

If one wants to embark on a moral argument present in the theory of evolution, where no organism is more special than the other, then you'd probably avoid consumption of food coming from animals, or you'd be setting yourself up to some contradiction in the brain. :D

Or, if one wants to embark on a moral argument that humans are special and that life is worth conserving. Then, you'd probably also want to not include animal products, due to high pollution implicitly killing off humans, and animal agriculture being one of the causes of global warming.

Or, if one feels he's compassionate, good, then murder is not the way, or maybe humane murder is? Is there such a thing as humane murder?

Or, one wants to embark on a moral argument that in this universe that is so vast, it's entirely meaningless to ponder over ethics, and morality, and that you just want to maximize your utility function, which includes enjoying the flavor of baked flesh, cooked embryos and sweet vomit. Then, it doesn't matter at all what you eat, if you feel great.

The viewpoint of dairy-as-unnatural gets tricky, as there are parallels in the animal kingdom.

For example, ants keep aphids for honeydew just as humans keep animals for dairy products.

Honeydew isn't tit secretion, it's vomit/shit. And how can a symbiosis of ants and aphids be a parallel for humans and cows. We do not protect cows from their predators, we slit their throats and they know that that's coming. We also do not eat cow's shit. Hilarious parallel.

When did we ever in history of our evolution have a need for another mammal's milk? From an evolutionary perspective, from a perspective of natural parallels, it makes no sense.

The milk you need is the milk your mother gives you. If you seek calcium there's more of it in parsley, basil, origano per mass than is in milk. If you want iron it's also there, more than there is in some of the available animal flesh.

There are also many parallels in the diets of other mammals, 75% of species are herbivore on this planet. If we are seeking parallels in nature to mirror, why are we cherrypicking?

75% herbivores means that genes for plant-based diets are all over the place.

  Honeydew isn't tit secretion, it's vomit/shit

Choose one phony analogy at a time, willya? Point being, ants keep aphids as livestock: they are captives, herded, controlled, denied free will and their preferred environment, and exploited for food products. The ethical questions are exactly parallel.

  We do not protect cows from their predators

In your universe, sheepdogs, cattle dogs, and other shepherd dogs don't exist, and cattlemen from the gauchos of the Pampas to the Masai don't protect their stock? For the rest of us: http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/s/shepherds.htm

  we slit their throats & they know that it's coming

Again, make up your mind what to rant about. In this thread, you raised global warming; slaughter stops that in its tracks. Would you prefer to switch back to the anti-dairy rant again? In any case, humane slaughter is the goal, and new experts in that field like Temple Grandin have helped that.

  (dairy) makes no sense

yet indigenous peoples all over the world independently developed diets with dairy, from central Africa to Mongolia to neolithic Britain to Sinai to Mesopotamia and India.

I never mentioned dairy. You mentioned a half-assed parallel, and it is, and I pointed out every single bit that stinks in it, I do not give a damn about slaughter. I wasn't sure if aphids shit honeydew, or if they vomit it out through mouth. So, pick an analogy you know that makes sense to you, because you've obviously capable of equating an ant with a human and raise a silly ethical question.

I asked you what about 75% herbivores, you cherry picked.

> yet indigenous peoples all over the world independently developed diets with dairy, from central Africa to Mongolia to neolithic Britain to Sinai to Mesopotamia and India.

Yeah, people are known to be very smart and very natural. Lets cherry pick again, people have developed weapons to hunt animals with, but then used them to kill humans. People developed technology to kill animal efficiently with it, then they used the same techniques on humans. I guess we are so smart and natural and it makes sense to do it because everyone did it. We all know what they did when they did that, they raised their utility function. At some point it was a rational decision, at another it stopped being.

Sorry, but this discussion is over, if you aren't kind and compassionate, if you do not value human life, if you do not think that values of the theory of evolution matter, then go keep raising that utility function, I entirely understand your viewpoint and with that there's nothing to discuss.

We should be able to do better than that. If there are indications that some foods are burdensome to health, then there should be indications that some foods are beneficial. It is just taking us forever to separate the facts from the persuasions.

Anecdotally, the spices Tumeric and Cumin seem to be great tonics for my particular metabolism/diet/lifestyle.

  Tumeric and Cumin

turmeric and curcumin

No its coincidental. Cuminum cyminum, Brown Cumin - Asian grocery grade, 1g a day.

I prefer the inverse view: it's not the "bad" food that is unhealthy, it's the lack of "good" food when too much of it is displaced by the "bad". Once the demand for all the required non-energy food components is satisfied it should be perfectly fine to fill the remaining energy balance with whatever junk food available.

As I see it, the basic problem is that our "animal brain" food autopilot, which serves us incredibly well with natural food, is easily fooled by state of the art food preparation tricks. If we lack some random nutrient, let's call it foomium, then the autopilot will make foomium-rich food taste good. And food that is engineered to be very tasty to people who are in "acquire foomium" mode (amongst many others), despite not containing any of it. If we have a candy bar completely devoid of foomium, but that successfully tricks the foomium-deprived body to trigger the "this gives me foomium" heuristic, then we will eat quite a lot of it before giving in to overeating. Repeat this a few times and you will see that industrially processed food is unhealthy. Not because of what it contains, but because of what is missing (but what is cleverly pretended to be there, as a side effect of successful engineering for tastyness)

I think it's helpful to keep in mind, when deciding on our "individual" takeaways from this article, that our DNA requires nothing more of us than that we stay alive long enough to reproduce and pass it along...

The earliest humans likely ate whatever was immediately available to stay alive...some survived doing that and they became your ancestors...some died doing that, their DNA with them...

If you doubt that just observe babies when they first become ambulatory (start crawling), and come to your own conclusions--babies put a great number of things into their mouths to "try it out"...

We think about past humans, and ponder the dietary choices the fossil record indicates they appear to have made...

Is a diet that kept them alive long enough to reproduce a diet that has the potential to keep us feeling well into our 30s-50s, or to keep us alive well into our 60s-90s...?

I've really enjoyed learning about nutrition science through http://nutritionfacts.org, especially in videos about the conflict of interest present in modern research.

Conflicts of interest like the one that Michal Greger has himself, as an employee of the Humane Society? He literally gets paid to put an MD stamp of approval on anything vegan and attempting to discredit anything that is not vegan.

Have you actually critically read anything from this bullshit factory?

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-il...

Here, take a look at this - http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2013/02/harriet-halls-critique...

I'm simply satisfied with the format studies are presented in his videos (they are always directly cited). I often read them for myself and usually agree with the conclusion, but not always.

Do they found how to factor out air, water, climate and bacteria or realized that a body continuously adapts to behavioral patterns and environmental conditions? Or that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and naive studies on already overweight US student subjects does not replicate anywhere in less developed world?

I just wish people would stop acting like food was "designed" for us.

We designed a lot of food for ourselves, from grapefruit to cabbage to bananas.

Actually it is more the other way around. The last 6-8000 years or so we have been genetically adapting to our historically poor diet. The average peasant has been eating nothing much more than a very limited range of grains and most of us have become pretty well adapted to this diet. This is one of the ironies of the palo diet craze.

8000 years is basically an eye blink, for evolution and natural selection to select a whole population (through death and differences in reproduction) with those who are thoroughly well adapted.

Yes, humans might be better off for it than we were 8000 years ago, but that's necessarily not saying much.

3000 years is more than enough in humans. The lactase persistence mutation in Europeans basically went from 0% of the population to near 100% in Northern Europeans in 3000 years. This was totally due to a change in diet when adults started drinking animal milk.

Evolution speed is proportional to the population size as the rate of new genes appearing is directly proportional to the number of individuals while the speed a gene spreads through the population is proportional to the log10 of the population size. If you increase the population 1000 fold then you get 1000 times the rate of evolution. Because the human population has grown so much since the invention of agriculture the rate of human evolution over the last 10,000 years is more than than the preceding million years.

There's a difference between some evolution and being totally ideally adapted. Even lactase persistence hasn't spread though the whole human population.

Heck, we haven't even totally adapted to walking on two legs yet.

(Side note, you don't need to say log10, all logs are proportional to each other by definition.)

The lactase gene has not spread through the human population as only a small percentage of the human population drinks milk as an adult. The human population is full of genes that have only partly spread through the population - it is actually a huge problem when studying human genetics since as a species we violate most of the assumptions of population genetics.

Humans are actually very well adapted to walking on two legs, what we are not well adapted to is the birthing problems caused by the massive increase in brain size and the rotation of the pelvis required to accomodate walking upright.

Yes I know all logs are proportional, but I thought I should be precise or else someone would ask which log ;)

Interesting choice of slugname:

nutrition-science-complicated

We used that (more or less) for the title above, since the article title is linkbaity.

> Why (almost) everything you know about food is wrong

They tell me every other year.

The only proof I have is an anecdote but it is consistent with my research-- and I've lost 100 pounds in 8 months as a result.

The biggest problem is we have rejected science from food to begin with. We have government spending billions pushing a diet designed to create obesity (which is very high in carbs, effectively sugar, and low in fat.)

Likely there are at least two types of people biochemically- those who are insulin sensitive and those who are insulin resistant.

The insulin sensitive tend to not be fat and if they are fat its because they are really over eating. These people are the ones who end up thinking that fat people are lazy, or who think that "You should just eat less sugar" (not realizing that carbs are effectively sugar) or "calories in < calories out".

The insulin resistant people tend to be the fat ones. And for them a diet low in carbs is effective. I've seen a lot of studies and this is consistent in all of them.

Personally, I finally found out about the effect insulin plays on the creation and storage of energy in fat cells.

Government has been pushing a high carb diet for decades and as at the same time we have an obesity epidemic. Instead of recognizing the problem (correlation is not causation but you can't claim they have caused obesity to go down) they are going to war against fats. Transfats being banned is junk science (I eat a lot of them and my blood work is great, and getting better, not worse) and their use in the food system is because of government going to war on "Saturated" fats in the first place.

The war on Fat is the cause of obesity, in my opinion, because it is political, and not scientific, and ignores the insulin sensitivity issue.

=====================================================

I'm slow banned because this site is not tolerant of diversity, so I can't reply to Max below. (And so I'm off to do something fun. Caio!)

Here's the reply I tried to give him:

======================================================

Fish oil is trans fats. I'm taking trans fats supplements!

I think the larger issue is that people are looking at things way too simplistically ("trans fats bad because more of them means problem x") and not controlling for other things-- eg: there's a huge difference between eating a pure meat and vegetable diet (And consequently a lot of fat) and eating a lot of fats in the presence of a lot of carbs. Those anti-trans fats studies did not control for carbs (as far as I can tell).

This is why the blood work of people on keto disproves the "trans fats bad" hypothesis.

And also "trans fats" are a government propaganda boogeyman-- how many people take fish oil supplements and also oppose trans fats, do you think?

I can't do two experiments on myself at once. Since things are going in the right direction now, I want to enhance my weight loss.

What's your blood work look like if you eliminate trans fats while keeping everything else as similar as possible?

Edit to answer: Fish oils are not trans fats. But my point was that you had not yet even run an n=1 experiment and shouldn't draw any conclusions from your experience (unless you think the weight loss and other changes you speak of would have no impact on your blood work...).

Nothing is certain of course but I tend to believe your line of reasoning based on the stuff I've read. I think we really should reduce carbo hydrate intake for the stuff we eat we should use more of the whole grain stuff: whole wheat, brown rice etc. White flower and rice is terrible and we should really try to stop eating it. More chick peas, beans etc instead. But I also think it is important that while pushing more fat in the diet we should emphasize eating the right kind of fat: more fat fish, cold pressed olive oil, avocado, nuts etc.

My problem is that I know a lot of this stuff but I don't really live it. Hard to change habits once you have developed them. I just love bread and pasta too much e.g.

One of the challenges is that the entire industry is following what people want-- so for instance, Apple rather than being mildly sweet and small and a little ugly are now huge, bright red, and super sweet. They've been bred to have more carbs!

For me, I love BBQ. I love Mexican. I hate cooking, so getting a crockpot and cooking mexican dishes (eg: chicken, taco seasoning, salsa and a little bit of peppers, plus 6 hours and you've got great tasting shredded chicken).... I don't feel like I've given up much. It does take a week or two to transition, though, and control over your diet (eating out is tough unless you go to BBQ restaurants.)

As some words of encouragement, it gets way easier. You stop craving the stuff once you stop eating it for a while.

I think it's accepted now also that insulin blocks the effects of leptin (satiety hormone) on the brain. So a diet with an excess of carbs interferes with both fat regulation regulation but also intake.

Also I tried looking this up and failed. But I'm sure that leptin wasn't discovered until the war on fat was well underway. And the first instinct when it was discovered was to try to use it as a drug target (all these failed badly).

Fish oils are NOT trans fats. Omega 3 is a polyunsaturated fat, while trans fats are those we artificially saturated.

Dr. Robert Lustig has a talk called Sugar, the Bitter Truth, in which he talks about his research into pediatric obesity. He shows that many populations have thrived both low-fat and low-carb diets, then demonstrates why you cannot have both high fat and simple carbohydrates without expecting to see high rates of inflammatory disease. If you can predict that the population is going to keep consuming high amounts of sugar, would it be better to recommend a low fat diet?

Trans fat is a fat that has hydrogens next to double bonds on both sides of the carbon chain. The natural trans fats that sometimes occur in beef and milk have been shown to possibly have a positive effect on LDL.

The main source of trans fat in the modern diet has been through artificially created trans fat made in a process using high heat and a catalyst like nickel to rearrange the bonds. Partially hydrogenated fats are ones where not all the hydrogen bonds are saturated, and are technically cis fats.

They did a six year study with monkeys, using fat as a control in the diet. One group ate trans fat, the other saturated: http://www.wakehealth.edu/News-Releases/2006/Trans_Fat_Leads...

Fish oil is not a trans fat. As far as a government boogeymen go, you may be confusing the research done in the late seventies that led to government recommendations against consuming saturated fats. You can read more about that, trans, and cis fats here: http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Biological_Chemistry/Lipids/Fatt...

Three thoughts

1. As Taleb has often argued, you dont need to fully understand a problem, all the interaction effects etc., in order to understand that nature has already solved it. Eat what your ancestors ate.

2. Could it be that the people who go into food science are basically rejects from more respected disciplines?

3. People seem to widely hold beliefs about diet which are patently illogical. For instance everyone seems to talk about how people put on weight because their metabolism slows down, or because it was slow to start with. This doesn't make sense. Rate of conversion of food into energy has nothing to do with eating more than your activity level required. Could someone explain this to me?

Our ancestors at one point in time had a diet consisting 60-80% of animal flesh. Do you think that this is what nature solved? I mean, technology has given us a way to rise above the evolution.

We do not have claws, or teeth that could pierce an elephant, lion, gazelle. It doesn't seem that nature solved anything. Or us, drinking cows milk? Did nature solve the digestion of human to consume milk of another mammal? Was this a thing in past. I do not think so.

Nature, over time, destroys what is fragile. If your ancestors have been drinking milk for millennia, then it is probably safe for your body. In similar dosages. Eat what has been field tested by nature, not the latest voodoo food.

1000 years isn't long enough for evolution.

we're not talking about evolution

Oh, so you are talking about change of the species without evolution?

We're talking about giving time for harmful effects to manifest themselves. If you are going to eat a diet which does not resemble what the human body evolved to deal with, then at least follow something that resembles what has been available to your kin for countless generations. If you start consuming brand new diets (not just in terms of the substances and nutrients they contain, but the concentration and dosage and regularity) you're much more exposed to potential harm.

But we are doing a brand new diet. About 2000-10000 years ago human diet consisted of around 80% animal flesh.

Citation?

Besides, when I said brand new I meant things which have emerged in the last 150 years, especially highly processed foods.

For 3, there's evidence that very low carb diets will improve insulin response. Over time it seems plausible that your body will respond differently to food if your hormones stay out of balance, storing more of it as fat.

How we store energy also depends on what exercise we get and its timing. Carb back-loading supposedly doesn't have the same insulin response because the energy is used to replace sugar (can't remember exact name, too lazy to look it up, sorry) in muscles instead of storing it as fat.

The OP also links to a study that looked at several factors including microbiome. Genetically identical twins could have different response to the same foods. I'm pretty sure our microbiomes are very different than those of our ancestors, so we probably won't get the same results.

Doesn't (1) essentially boil down to a variant of low-carb diet?

> 1. As Taleb has often argued, you dont need to fully understand a problem, all the interaction effects etc., in order to understand that nature has already solved it. Eat what your ancestors ate.

Alas, my ancestors ate stuff they could catch by spending the day hunting and foraging. Very few of them spent their days sitting in front of a computer.

Not sure what your point is?

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