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Comment by thisisnotmyname | Hacker News Reader

This has gotten a lot of upvotes in a very short time, so it must be ringing true with a lot of readers. I'd encourage some healthy skepticism.

1) It is really tempting to try to understand ourselves based on the assumed lives of our evolutionary ancestors, but the fact is we know almost nothing about their lives, and conclusions we draw from what we can guess are unlikely to be accurate.

2) There is not one citation in this entire article. This is all opinion, no matter how true it sounds.

3) He offers medical advice based solely on his personal experience. Sleep apnea may not be the same to all people.

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With all that "paleo diet" rage, raw-foodians etc, I think that pop evolutionary biology is the new pop psychology.

Nutritional science is friggin' hard. Extrapolating from biological reactions has to take a huge load of variables into account and empirical studies have to monitor a huge bunch of people over a long period of time -- and all of them are lying.

Do you know of any good nutritional science resources/explanations? I wish I knew where to find a readable overview based on careful research.

There was an article on HN about the subject a while ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....) that was quite interesting and modest.

That article is as much BS as the rest. Take the first line:

> Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Why should I eat "mostly plants"? He hands out a bunch of advice and never bothers to lay out a basis for his opinions.

He spent 4 books laying out the basis for his opinions, along with citations, medical research, and the like. That article is just a summary of a long body of work by Pollan.

Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories is quite good (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scienc...).

But it's on the internet. It must be true.

Also, it has pictures, some of which are attractive females. I'm sold!

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