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Comment by msiyer | Hacker News Reader

Elimination diets always show short-term results. If someone reduces burger consumption from 5 to 3 a day, he\she will definitely see good results. However, if we have to constantly trick our bodies (starvation) and walk a tightrope (need to avoid even the smallest amounts of carbs or else...) to just keep Keto on track, is it really natural?

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Define natural please. It’s my belief that industrialized food production has created unnatural availability of foods that largely use unnatural ingredients. Unnatural as in not found readily or at all in nature.

Are you defining natural as ‘conventional 21st century Western diet’? ie what everyone is doing around you.

Since everything is sourced from nature, for argument's sake, even plastic can be called natural. However, as far as food is concerned, I have started treating foods that have been manipulated in any way by a human or a machine as unnatural.

All I am saying is that in my opinion Keto does not fit the definition of natural. I eat mostly fruits while I feed my dogs raw meat and organs only.

Ironically such a diet in itself is deeply unnatural - hunter-gatherers would have starved if they attempted such a thing - there is a reason why they were nomadic and caused mass extinctions - they ate everything and depleted capacity to fuel their large brain and relatively big bodies. There is a reason cooking caught on and was used long before agriculture.

The point being that both natrual and unnatural are terrible heuristics. Your diet may be fundamentally good or deeply flawed but naturalness isn't why - nutrient balance, satiation, metabolic factors and similiar are why.

I have seen results that are nothing less than a miracle. I know what works. I do not need a bunch of metrics to see if I am eating properly.

I have never seen an animal refusing to eat because it could not calculate the calories or nutrient balance. It is sad to see that with all the great progress we have made, we are losing touch with nature.

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