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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

This upsets me to no end. When I was growing up in the 70s, we had a food pyramid that was based on carbohydrates, created by no less than the USDA - not the surgeon general. Then, in the late 90s, the establishment totally came down on the Atkins/Zone type diets as being inappropriate and foolish.

How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?

I also find it annoying that we continue to discuss a universal "Diet", when, in fact, different people react very differently to different types of food.

I sometimes think we're still in the dark ages in terms of certain fields of endeavors.

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If you're actually interested in what happened (you may just be venting, can't really tell) there's an excellent talk called "Big Fat Fiasco" on youtube that goes into the history of the lipid hypothesis (fat makes you fat) and how it got hold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exi7O1li_wA (it's about an hour long).

One of the most amazing parts for me was the video of the senate commission tasked with coming up with dietary guidelines (the commission that created the food pyramid) outright rejecting the majority consensus that it's foolish to publish guidelines at a time that so little is truly known and that, if anything, it's carbs, not fat that are the problem. (Yes, the scientific community back then was leaning towards carbs being the problem.) One of the senators has an amazing quote along the lines of: I don't have the luxury of waiting to make an informed decision like a scientist.

Anyway, long story short it was politicians blessing the lipid hypothesis and then later removing all funding from anyone with a contrary opinion. The nutrition "scientists" are almost all funded by the government and therefore started to self-censor and never publish anything contradicting the anointed hypothesis. If they did they were basically booted out and never funded again.

Finally it seems the breaking point has been reached and we might get actual scientific research done in nutrition science instead of the quack research that's been the norm for the past 40 years.

This sort of thing seems to happen a lot. Corn ethanol, anyone?

One of the senators has an amazing quote along the lines of: I don't have the luxury of waiting to make an informed decision like a scientist.

What is going on, such that there's so many Alpha males who seem to think this way?

This reveals a belief system so corrupted and jaded, the notion of truth is completely lost.

Global warming (* ducks *) ?

You are 100% right on. It is infinitely easier to test and isolate the variables that go into metabolism than it is to test and isolate the variables that go into global climate. Its infinitely easier because the later simply isn't possible.

"I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses" - Crichton

I am a practicing Endocrinologist and have been out in private practice for the last 5 years.I have been counseling diabetics and the overweight to keep carbohydrates in a low but still healthy range (about 120-180 grams daily) and to not follow the food pyramid.

What I generally tell people: Carbohydrates generally follow this pathway: carbs-> glucose-> used for energy vs stored (mainly as fat).

Eat less carbs, store less fat in general. Unless one is very active either growing or running marathons it is very difficult to burn through all of the energy in 300 grams of carbs per day (which is the RDA recommendation).

Eat protein with each meal. This will not get stored as fat and whatever is not needed is generally eliminated. It also keeps one full for a longer period of time by slowing digestion. It also slows the digestion of carbohydrates.

Get lots of fiber. This is an indigestible carbohydrate which again helps to keep one full, yet does not get moved down the sugar to fat pathway.

Therefore balance the meal:

Carbs (moderate to low unless very active), protein with each meal (lean meat, fish, chicken, nuts, eggs, cheese, etc), and fiber with each meal (especially green vegetables but also fruit).

Above all: All Things in Moderation.

Also things in medicine change all the time so good judgment and common sense always trump the latest "brilliant" scientific study or fad.

> Unless one is very active either growing or running marathons it is very difficult to burn through all of the energy in 300 grams of carbs per day (which is the RDA recommendation).

This is just incorrect. 300g of carbohydrates makes only about 5000kJ (1200kcal), a figure well under baseline consumption. About 2 hours of easy to moderate jogging or cycling would take care of it, too, depending on the person.

Moderation is indeed good. All this talk about specific food substances is just bullshit when the real problem is people stuffing their face with 2-3 times the calories they need.

If you do a bit of reading, you would discover that the reason why there is this "talk about specific food substances" is so that people don't feel the _need_ to stuff their faces with 2-3 times the calories they need.

In fact, the best diets are the ones where people are forcing themselves to choke down food they aren't interested in, because their appetite control system has basically said "No More." Upside - zero caloric excess. Downside - food becomes much more dismal/boring.

People almost never make a conscious choice about A) the amount of food they eat and B) how quickly they metabolize it. How much you eat really is not much more than a function of a fairly complex system of your hormones, stomach, and autonomic nervous system. Changing your specific foods is effectively "gaming" or "hacking" that system so you _lose_ the desire to eat. Almost nobody effectively sustains a diet through "willpower" beyond the initial 6-9 months of a sprint where they drop 30 pounds, and put it all back on.

I have a colleague at work who runs 5 miles in the gym at lunch, every single day, and is about 20-30 pounds overweight. He is a master of discipline, never misses a day - but simply can't drop the weight he's trying to. All that exercise simply results in him being hungrier, and eating more.

His diet must be horrific.

> I have a colleague at work who runs 5 miles in the gym at lunch, every single day, and is about 20-30 pounds overweight. He is a master of discipline, never misses a day - but simply can't drop the weight he's trying to. All that exercise simply results in him being hungrier, and eating more.

Yes. The problem is people eating too much (although 1h of exercise is not that much, and certainly not a marathon…)

Yes. The problem is people eating too much

Saying that fat people eat too much is like saying alcoholics drink too much or that insomniacs don't get enough sleep. It's trivially true, but does nothing to help solve the problem. In fact, it's harmful. To imply that a problem is trivial is to suggest that the solution is easy: just don't be stupid. That's far from the case with alcoholism, insomnia, or obesity.

> How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?

Funny. You really thought the government and industry were actually looking for the scientific truth, or otherwise had your health in mind.

Now that you have been disillusioned, you should start questioning other government policies. I'll spoil the fun and tell you what you'll find: It's all about commercial interests, and you can easily see which ones in retrospect by tracing where regulators go to work after they leave their government job.

> How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?

The government was involved?

How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?

Politics is only distantly interested in truth and widely interested in lobby parties.

Like they say, Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story...

> When I was growing up in the 70s, we had a food pyramid that was based on carbohydrates

Any wonder that America's obesity epidemic started around that time?

20/20 hindsight. Remember this when you feed your baby an "organic" meal, treat your cold with echinacea, or drink bottled water.

Yeah, eating plants produced without pesticides is going to kill us all.

Yes, they certainly can and frequently do kill. Multiple vectors, the most common of which is animal born E. Coli.

I don't know if anyone has done a toxicity study on organic vs non-organic vegetables, but, I think it would be a great area of research. Keep in mind, that if you aren't spraying on pesticides, you need to rely on "organic" methods to reduce crop loss to things like Fungi/insects/disease, etc... One of those "organic" methods is to breed (naturally) a hardier strain that is more resistant. That, in itself, can be dangerous - these new strains defend themselves with toxins. There are certainly records of amateurishly bred potatoes killing people.

See http://www.fao.org/docrep/T0207E/T0207E08.htm for some useful data on organic toxins found in vegetables.

There is something to be said about toxins that have a well documented and well-defined behavior versus whatever is being randomly grown in the organic farm.

Regardless - It would pay not to come to any conclusions before the traditional double-blinded statistically valid scientific studies are done, which was the point of the grandparent-post.

A good point.

I know this is not a good reply, but I have to say it. Why didn't humanity die off between when we discovered agriculture and before we invented pesticides?

They did not die off, but for several thousand years, they were barely able to sustain themselves, and quite a lot of them did die off. Where we have single-digit percentages growing our food today, they would have single-digit percentages not growing food.

Humanity didn't die off, but, life spans were shorter, it was _really_ hard to get enough calories to keep yourself alive, and there was a lot of starvation and hunger in the world. Even into the 20th century, not all countries were making effective use of pesticides, and some countries had starvation, not because of civil war or unrest (the major cause of starvation today) - but because they didn't know how to grow food efficiently. Then, in middle of the last century, we had the Green Revolution, and the quartet of artificial fertilizers, mechanization, high-yield varietals, and, yes, pesticides changed the equation and pushed Malthus back a while.

From a cost-benefit perspective, I'd be willing to wager that pesticides have saved on the order of 1000x more people than they've killed.

Best case scenario, I'd wager, is no toxins in our food at all. Most people aren't willing to pay the price for that type of low yield crop.

The US government does not have your best interests as a priority.

Especially the USDA who's mission is to promote our agricultural industries. For some reason, we have the agency charged with supporting the producers of food setting the official recommendations for what and how much you should be eating.

There was a great article in the New York Times about how the USDA is simultaneously trying to get people to eat more cheese while telling them that saturated fat is bad for them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html

I was trying to think of a good analogy before but just came up with this: imagine if the Minerals Management Service (theoretical regulator of the oil industry) was in charge of setting the fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.

The Minerals Management Service (now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement) is a pretty good example of that as it is. It's in charge of enforcing environmental regulations and such for oil companies, but it's also in charge of collecting oil and gas royalties for the government. This is part of why oil companies have historically been so friendly with it -- they are somewhat interested in avoiding regulation, but they are even more interested in minimizing their royalty payments.

Tobacco subsidies.

I would love to see the USDA subsidize organic farming.

The correct (average) recommendation might not be static. If people didn't sit still as much 40 years ago, maybe they could eat more carbs without getting fat.

Take a breath and a step back.

Now, ask yourself, is this an object lesson on having such a prominent role of government in everyone's daily lives? If so, what can we learn from it?

The food pyramid seemed to reflect what people ate, not what people should eat. Most people eat more carbs than protein, becuase meat, fish, and dairy are more expensive than cereal and bread. Obviously sugar was at the top. Vegetables and fruits were important, but you just couldn't get as many as carbs because again, they were expensive.

It seemed to work so that was the pyramid. I'm not sure they did studies comparing different diets to arrive at that conclusion, I think it was just "common sense" nutrition.

How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding?

"Tell us what you think: Are carbs to blame? Add your own comments to the discussion"

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