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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I would rather have 641mm people obese, and solve that problem, than the alternative (641mm starving people, and try to get them food).

The major concern, of course, is that "scientists" on this topic keep changing the advice they give to people, so by the time people finally absorb, and start practicing what they were told to do - the next set of guidance comes out, that is, in some cases, precisely the opposite of what they were told previous.

Here in Singapore, just today, the front page of the newspaper said, "White Rice causing Diabetes, 1 plate of rice = 2 cans of sugary soda." - while on the inside of the paper, there were talks about increasing taxes on soda, but nothing on white rice....

Hopefully, we'll eventually get some evidence/science based information, guidance, and policy, but I'm not optimistic.

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Referring to "scientists" that way is unfair.

Nutrition scientists and doctors are working with the human body and its surrounding environment, an exceedingly complex model. They publish their findings in journals with cautions and caveats and data.

A mainstream journalist with traffic quotas or column inches to fill on a slow news day then skims these journals for the next "X makes you fat" or "Y gives you cancer" headline without bothering to read the fine print.

That's an extremely low bar you set for scientists to exceed. I agree that mainstream nutrition science has a better track record than the Daily Mail.

Where should the bar be set for scientists to exceed?

In the current funding climate and the well known publish(fast and crazy)-or-perish 'incentives', I find it hard to find fault with the bar set for scientists. (Disclosure: I'm one. Although not in nutrition science.)

Their recommendations should be reliable in order to achieve some effect, and have some physical basis. Nutrition science has been terrible at this. They have generally been better at this than the reporters who read their breathless press releases, though. I'm a middle-aged man, and virtually everything they told my parents, and me when I grew up in the 70s and 80s was wrong, and some of it actively harmful.

I'm not referring to the journalists, I'm referring to the peer reviewed papers, and the scientific consensus regarding proper diet, that turned out to be not only false, but false in a way that likely could have been demonstrated with just a few, fairly straightforward research studies.

It starts, of course, with Dr. Ancel keys, but he wasn't the only person who signed off on the consensus that a high-carbohydrate diet was the right model for the American people.

I use the scare quotes, because what took place after that, was probably the furthest thing from science you could imagine - presuming we agree that the objective of science isn't to pile on the latest theory, but instead to strengthen those theories, by trying to disprove them.

I'm not sure where the line is between malnutrition and starvation, but the UN says "some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life." [1]

Your article [2] quotes, "while Asians, like the Chinese, had four servings a day of cooked rice, Americans and Australians ate just five a week". The fault for a change in advice is shared between scientists and the media for giving advice based on a western diet to people eating an eastern diet. I think this is a problem in general with English-language media. I see people sharing advice about high-fructose corn syrup, but in the UK it's ① legally called "glucose-fructose syrup", and ② rarely used, and thus irrelevant to most people I know. Similarly for hormones and antibiotics in beef, or added salt in some foods.

[1] https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

[2] probably http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/diabetes-the-ri...

Fat causes overweight and the diseases that go along with overweight. Nutrition science has never wavered on that. Fat goes to the lymph and the excess is dumped into the bloodstream, making the blood obviously cloudy and with fat separating to the top, which you can see if you ever see people get blood drawn after a heavy meal. Then the fat is taken up by fat cells. That's where the body load of fat comes from. That's science. They've measured that the sorts of fat stored are the same fatty acids as the fat eaten. It works the same in all animals. That's part of agricultural science too, not just human nutritional science.

The current majority of people who believe that high fat diets are good for something other than getting fat and that carbohydrates cause obesity is no more a sign of a change in science than any popular political or religious belief.

It's a very popular conspiracy theory that nutritional scientists and doctors who follow them are part of or corrupted by the powerful vegan lobby, while the meat and dairy and processed added-oil food and fast food industries have the ideal products for making you thin, as long as you skip the traditional starches in those products, because everyone knows that the all the world's old cultures that lived on potatoes or rice or corn or wheat were full of massively obese people, and it's not until they got modern food industry amounts of butter, manufactured oil, and soybean-fed chicken that they became the crowds of dangerously thin looking people that you see in old pictures.

(I'm going to get downvoted into invisibility for being right, but people's health is at stake, so I'm going to reply anyway.)

I'm curious - do you have any peer reviewed research papers in any of the well known journals, such as American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, to shine further light on this process of fat going to the lymph, excess being dumped into the blood stream, and cloudy blood after a heavy meal?

That information is very elementary. There are thousands of scientific studies where that information is the basis of what they're studying the details of. For an overload of articles on sorts of fat in the diet going into the lymph, you can just Google: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition lymph.

The following quote is some basic information about cloudy blood:

http://www.questdiagnostics.com/home/physicians/testing-serv...

TURBIDITY (LIPEMIA)

Turbid, cloudy or milky serum (lipemic serum) may be produced by the presence of fatty substances (lipids) in the blood. Bacterial contamination may also cause cloudy serum. Moderately or grossly lipemic specimens may alter certain test results.

A recent meal may produce transient lipemia; therefore, we recommend that patients fast 12-16 hours before a blood specimen is obtained.

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