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Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

The nutrition space is filled with this shit too. I've had so many friends go "Gluten Free" with nothing at all to show for it, besides vague claims of feeling better.

There's a 65 year old guy that just finished his 30,000th big mac [1] and meanwhile people are trying to tell me that the piece of toast I had for breakfast is causing systemic inflammation and killing me.

SMH.

[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/wisconsin-man-eats-...

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I don't understand why you would dismiss someone's vague claim of feeling better so quickly. Your day to day subjective experience matters a lot. If a lot of people can follow a particular regimen and they say it improves their subjective experience, perhaps it has some value? I don't understand why we dismiss things just because the science hasn't caught up yet.

Because they're not using proper methodologies to validate that there has been a change.

Science based on feelings is pseudoscience and should be treated as such.

Shouldn't it depend on what your goal is? If your goal is to know exactly how something works, I agree with you. If your goal is to "feel better" along some dimension of your mental or physical health, then you don't need to know how it works, just that it works for you.

As long as they don't recommend it to other people then I'm fine with people doing whatever they want.

Big Macs aren’t particularly unhealthy. Bread, lettuce, tomato, “cheese”, beef... the sauce is the worst offender but there isn’t much of it.

Fries and sodas are much worse for you.

This is a common myth that comes down to "it has salad in it, how bad can it be?" The answer is pretty bad.

While there's only 540 calories in it that's really a function of the big Mac being quite small.

A burger isn't inherently bad but chain burgers are laced with oil and sugar.

What is wrong with oil and sugar?

Nothing that isn't wrong with metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

The person you're replying to specified that the sauce is where the bad stuff is, and I think basically all the sugar and most of the non-beef fat is in the sauce. Beyond the sauce, any fat in a Big Mac is just from the ground beef, right? Any burger you get from some non-chain place or make yourself is going to be a greasy mess, so how exactly is the Big Mac especially bad?

Not all fats are created equal but yea the guy seemed fine.

It's still just another "my grandpa smoked a pack a day for sixty years and he lived to be 91" story though. Irrelevant.

Yes, but it has gluten.

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