It's still a bit bizarre watching the western world switch form carbs good, fat bad to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade.
1) We talk about very broad macronutrient classes as though much could be said about them that is meaningful. Fats are not interchangeable; carbs are not interchangeable; proteins are not interchangeable. Talking about grams of fat doesn't actually tell you much (nutritionally).
On a related note, calories are also not nutritionally generic, and our bodies are not simple input/output machines. Calories in / calories out is a gross oversimplification.
2) A substance that is eaten, and the same substance elsewhere in the body, do not have a direct 1-for-1 relationship.
Dietary cholesterol, for example, is not directly deposited in artherosclerosis, and the pathology may have nothing to do with consumed cholesterol at all. (That is, the problem may not be how much you eat, but what causes it to build up as deposits that aren't cleared away.)
3) Measuring blood plasma is a poor metric for many, many things. Intercellular, extracellular, and stored elsewhere (liver, pancreas, bone, etc.) often have nothing to do with plasma values.
And we know this. But we still use it because it's all we can easily do for now. So when we measure your nutrition by comparing blood plasma values of magnesium, for example, we are using a metric we already know correlates poorly with actual magnesium status.
4) Environment matters. Cellular environments are extremely complex. Speaking about nutrition without discussing the thousands of other molecules and tissue structure it interacts with, and where, isn't very helpful.
These factors-- conflating macronutrients, conflating consumption with pathology, using bad metrics for nutrition, and ignoring cellular environment-- are much of what results in all of this nutritional confusion.
We substitute fads or the latest half-understood data for real knowledge, because we don't have much real knowledge. (Despite being able to fill textbooks with what we do know.)
Not at all. I remember it was a thing in the seventies. The low-carbs diet has been viciously attacked for many decades, so it comes and goes every few years. I first heard of it when Atkins popularized it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet
See how Wikipedia says it's "a fad diet" and its claims "questionable", implying that it doesn't work at all.
But now take a look at this other article, a couple links further:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis
"In glycolysis, higher levels of insulin promote storage of body fat and block release of fat from adipose tissues, while in ketosis, fat reserves are readily released and consumed.[5][7] For this reason, ketosis is sometimes referred to as the body's "fat burning" mode.[8]"
So it turns out it works?
Is it dangerous? Maybe, but I wouldn't trust the sources that I already know are lying to my face. Not to talk about my own experience, but that's valid for me, YMMV.
In HN there were some submissions past year about this guy that did the research in which Atkins based its diet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
Edit: I forgot to say what I started writing this comment for to begin with, that many millions did the Atkins diet at the time and vouched for it.
The top ten in order are: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, sassava, soybeans, sweat potatoes, yams, sorghum, and plantains. These are all carbs! If we accept that low carb diets are better for people, then we must either accept that we are going to feed humanity sub-optimally, or that humanity is well past the healthy carrying capacity of the planet. There is simply no way in hell we can get 7.5 billion people eating keto, or anything close to it.
Vegan activists are proposing a dietary future that is very much in line with the current global agro-industrial status quo. However low-carb proponents are proposing a diet that, if universalized, would necessarily put them in the camp of people like Pentti Linkola.
That's why "balanced diet" is an absurd recommendation for fat people. If you're following a balanced diet, you probably don't need to lose weight. Atkins himself recommended a balanced diet, just avoiding refined carbs, for most people.
One personal comment: I wouldn't follow any diet proposed by activists of any kind, specially when their main motive is their particular ethics that, at least for me, suggest a strong bias. Unless of course I share that same ethical vision. Edit: I actually wouldn't follow any life advice from activists of any kind, I'd rather have my own agenda.
However the current size of the human population is incompatible with anything other than the vast majority of people getting the vast majority of their calories from carbs. For that reason, people recommending a large reduction on carb intake across the board will almost certainly continue to be marginalized, pushed to the sidelines in most mainstream discussions.
Same thing about saturated fat. There are multiple articles that contradict each other, going as far as having a different selection of sources. One links only articles that support how harmful saturated fat is, while the other cites a some sources that say this, and some that say "there's no effect found".
It shows that trusting wikipedia might on something that's not physics or math might be losing proposition.
No idea what "keto" label currently means. If you take a moment to review my previous comment, you'll see what exactly I was responding to.
Edit: just to make it more clear, Atkins didn't tell how much proteins or fat you should eat, that's up to you, just that you must keep ketosis on so you need to keep carbs under certain limits and completely avoid sugars.
"Wait instead of feeling omnipresent urges to overeat and snack, my satiety system actually works? I stop getting dips in energy throughout the day?"
Said it before but a diet of bacon and eggs would be superior to the diets of most Americans.
I eat a pretty balanced diet that includes plenty of carbs. I also only eat once a day (at about 6-7pm). I get no cravings during the day until just before it's my regular time to eat. I should add, most of the carbs I eat are fruits, beans, whole grains, rice, quinoa, etc... not: white bread, juice, cereal, etc that digest quickly.
Edit: source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.
I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol. Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently. Whereas fatty liver caused by fructose is because of the quantity in a short period, overwhelming the liver.
If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs, sugar/sucrose, etc that are roughly half fructose, half glucose that are put into so much processed food with no fiber to slow digestion. A 12oz can of cocacola has 2-3x (39g) the sugar as a piece of fruit. Added sugars account for 14%[0] of the daily calories in the average american's diet (note, added means not natural sugars like that in fruit.. but sucrose, hfcs, etc). Any increase in fatty liver disease would be caused by the inordinate added sugar intake of american's, not fruit.
0. https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/know-your-limi...
I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says.
> Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.
True and false. The fiber aspect is true, and a strong argument to stay as far away from juice as possible, but the vitamins story is ... mixed. It depends on what fruit you're talking about, where it was produced, and how it was handled.
For vitamins and other micro nutrients I personally think organ meats are highly underrated.
> I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol.
By looking at my source.
> Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently.
This is also true of Fructose. Except unlike Alcohol 100% of it goes to your liver. Also unlike alcohol there are no obvious cognitive effects for fructose, so we're free to consume as much of it without suffering any immediate and obvious consequences.
> If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs ... processed food ... coca cola ...
Take a guess what I also recommend avoiding. But "avoid HFCS and processed food" is well into the "no shit" category of dietary recommendation these days, which is why I don't really bother to talk about it a ton. Whereas there are a large number of people who think that fruit and especially fruit juice is healthy, and I disagree.
To expand on this, what the hell is "balanced diet" anyway? In what sort of environment is fruit year-round "balanced"? In anything other than a tropical environment, fruit being part of a "balanced diet" is an ecological impossibility barring the modern global agro-industrial complex that ships you fruit from the other side of the planet no matter the season.
The idea of food even having seasons seems alien to most of us these days! At most whether a fruit is "in season" is a matter of how cheap it is, or whether the texture is precisely right. A food that is out of season might have a slightly undesirable texture and cost more, because it's been sitting in a warehouses and cargo vessels for too long.
The "balanced diet" as we know it today is a cultural artifact, not some biological truth.
Maybe balanced diet is a poor choice of words... Local diet? Seasonal diet? Cyclical diet? IDK.
Also, literally every religious tradition in the world follows the "keto" diet on a semi-regular basis: it's called fasting.
Just want people to keep things simple. That's why I was saying that stuff about cyclical dieting. In summer, there's a lot more carbs. In winter you'd change to eating more meat and fat. Since animals fatten themselves up for surviving winter. Eats what's currently in your environment. Prepare it properly. Move regularly throughout the day. Take time to relax and rest.
Examples:
The strawberries you and I eat are actually a hybrid species created in 1715. The wild variety, the woodland strawberry, is about 1/4 the size and much more tart.
Bananas largely come from one of two species, the main one having been domesticated 8,000 years ago. Humans of that era domesticated it for some reason other than the fruit, because the fruit was inedible, it took a few thousand years before we could eat it.
The lemon was hybridized citron and the bitter orange around 1100. Citron has a very thing rind, with the edible center part being typically the size of a golf ball. The bitter orange is ... not very sweet.
The oranges you and I buy in the store, tellingly called the “sweet orange” is a hybrid first mentioned in 314CE.
You'd genuinely be better off eating cheeseburgers for breakfast than most breakfast cereals.
What's the problem with that? They are not supposed to be your sole source of macro-nutrients. If you get your protein and fats in other meals during the day it's perfectly fine.
> They're so devoid of nutrition that they usually have to fortify it with vitamins and minerals just so that people don't end up malnourished from eating it.
You can't end up malnourished from eating cereals, you can only end up malnourished from not eating anything else. And no one is eating only cereals. Anyway, since you yourself said they are fortified with vitamins and minerals, it sounds like they are just fine after all.