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Comment by blueblimp | Hacker News Reader

This list doesn't seem systematically constructed.

A more systematic way to rank vegetables is to look at the fiber content per 100 calories. You generally want this to be high, because a typical modern diet has too little fiber. USDA is a helpful source for this: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list.

For example, Asparagus has 10.5 grams of fiber per 100 calories. That's indeed very good. Sweet potato has only 3.5 grams of fiber per 100 calories. That's much less, though still better than you'll get from most grains.

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Does anyone choose a portion size of green vegetables (not tomatoes, root vegetables or grains) thinking about caloric content or caloric needs? I always take as much as seems tolerable, figuring that more is always better. I'd think that if one covered a salad plate with uncooked spinach to a depth of 2 inches, one would have fewer calories than in the small dose of salad dressing or bacon bits that a fastidious dieter might swallow as immaterial. Is that true?

FYI, that's getting to be a dangerous amount of spinach. You could die of oxalic acid poisoning. Probably 2 inches is OK if fluffed instead of packed, but at that point you ought to weigh it and weigh yourself and make sure you have excellent kidney function. You could also be setting yourself up for painful kidney stones if you make this diet a habit.

What if you cook the spinach, do you know if the oxalic acid less of a problem then?

I eat a zero fiber diet and I do just fine. It seems as if there is no need for fiber if you do not consume carbs.

Confirmed. I also don’t eat fibre. Also my friend had digestive issues all his life. He stopped eating veggies and it went away.

This reeks of pseudoscience and is terrible for the environment to boot.

The comment you're answering to wasn't posing as a scientific remark, it was just bringing up facts from direct and indirect personal experience. So it is weird that you see it as "pseudoscience".

I've also lately been drastically decreasing my fiber intake. To my surprise, it did not make my digestion worse (though I must say it has never been great).

Very likely that you either have a damaged gut or your gut microbiome is way out of whack. Fiber is extremely important for long term health.

Your saliva is full of enzymes to break down starches. Why would that be the case if carbohydrates aren’t meant to be part of our diet.

Its almost as if this was still an emerging science.

Got a source backing up your bold assertion that 'fiber is extremely important to long term health"? Because its not true at all in my understanding, or experince.

This “bold science” is nutrition 101. Let’s try the first google search result, from the Mayo Clinic.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

> You generally want this to be high, because a typical modern diet has too little fiber.

By this metric we should all eat grass.

Staples such as rice and wheat are, technically, grasses.

Don't think white rice is necessarily high fibre. I think a better option to make the point is that by this metric we should all eat celery? :)

My point about common grasses was if they don't supply the recommended intake of fibre, we might look to alternatives.

The article mentions 'inulin' - it's a form of carbohydrate that alledgedly doesn't cause the same spike in blood sugar levels as starch. With a family history of type 2 diabetes, I have thus wondered about growing Jerusalem artichokes (sunchoke) as an alternative to potatoes.

Or lettuce.

Fair enough, but there really is no need to be pedantic. In the context here, "Eating grass" had clear enough a meaning.

We're not ruminants. The amount of fiber in food can't possibly be a prime criteria to assess the quality of food. Fiber is, after all, not digestible by definition. It is absurd to think that can matter much.

Actually, fiber is digested, just not by us, by our micro biome. Even resistant starches. It’s converted to fatty acids by the inhabitants of your colon.

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