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Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

I've read a lot of, often conflicting, dietry guidance. I have realised one very important thing: humans will very easily accept that something they enjoy is bad for them (see fat, sex etc.) So listening to what people say is bad for them is stupid.

Instead I have taken a simpler approach: I observe the lifestyles of people who are healthy and live a long time. I have observed that eating simply "good, old-fashioned" home cooked food is important. My grandmother lived into her 90s. Ate fat and carbs. Julia Child lived into her 90s. Ate fat and carbs. Edna Lewis lived into her 90s. Ate fat and carbs. I could go on. Just do what they did and you'll have as good a chance as any.

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The problem is that simple home cooked food can't be commercialized. So all advice that gets published will be for something where you can buy a product.

Same for exercise. We already know how to exercise but there are always people who want to make money by repackaging it.

I fear you may be correct.

I think those things can be commercialized but they have not been to the extent that Keto diets have.

I don't know why, but I always felt that there was a market for a no-bullshit movement, but I fear that the appeal of more money perverts the movement, and then it just becomes like every other commodity. I think most things probably start as well-intentioned, and whether it's money or power, something happens along the way and subverts the whole thing.

Selection bias is something worth avoiding in understanding health studies. It’s quite likely that you know about these folks because they had the right genetics to be healthy outliers, and by extension, famous. It’s no different than saying I know x people who didn’t die of lung cancer due to smoking, which doesn’t change the implication that y% of smokers will always get lung cancer, we just haven’t figured out what fully constitutes your risk ( genetics etc)

I have to agree. "Just do what they did and you'll have as good a chance as any." is very dangerous advice for many reasons. Besides selection/survivorship bias, you have NO idea what the true lifestyle of celebrities is outside of what you are shown.

People have survived smoking a cigar a day for decades, but that's a terrible reason to justify the habit, especially when information says otherwise in the other 99% of cases.

This is why it is better to look at long-term national data rather than selective studies (such as the one noted in the title) which fail to control for obvious discrepancies in their data which would contradict the click-bait headline. The populations that have the longest average lifespans seem to have a few things in common and carbs are one of those common factors.

Well my grandmother wasn't famous. I'm not limiting my experience to famous people, I'm just including them.

That's survivor bias. You're missing all the people that died eating fat and carbs at a statistically higher rate than those who did not.

I'm sorry - this is naive advice. Generalized, this would mean that we shouldn't innovate or develop anything new at all (if what's worked previously is the ONLY way it should work).

Especially, with something related to diet and nutrition, there is an ever evolving need to alter our habits with the way our lifestyles changed. The kind of life your grandmother led is vastly different than the way you do now.

Similarly, carbs were great when as a culture we embraced agriculture, started working the fields and were able to secure food supplies for emergencies and the next generation. Now, farm productivities have shot up, fewer of us are working directly on growing food and there's abundance of food choices all around. We no longer need the easy glucose that we needed earlier. So, it is important that we change our dietary choices if we want to lead healthier lives.

What do you suggest that I do then? Read each contradicting study and alter my habits? Or just do whatever I want and wait until there is some real, true, conclusive evidence that something other than what your grandma ate is better for you? I'll be dead by then. I eat every day. I need to choose what to eat now.

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