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Comment by Snoozus | Hacker News Reader

> Food is the number one physical measurable input into our bodies.

This is the single reason why everyone focusses on food.

It is not the biggest lever you have on your health / wellbeing. It is the easiest variable to measure and to play with.

From the research it is quite clear that apart from gross errors what you eat does not really matter to any outcome. Quantity matters, but eating more can be compensated by excercising more.

I think we have it completely backwards, the killers are: depression, burn-out and so on.

Their symptoms are : no energy to change the situation, loneliness, no motivation to move, eating too much/too many calories ...

This in the end leads to all kinds of physical diseases.

Maybe starting with what we eat is a good first step to regain control, but it is certainly not the most important part of the puzzle.

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As someone that loves doing research on this, you couldn’t be further from the truth. I agree the first priority is sorting out your mental health, but after that a quality diet has massive ramifications on your life.

>>> Quantity matters, but eating more can be compensated by excercising more.

A single donut can have as many calories as running for an hour. Unless you have fantastic genetics / young it’s incredibly difficult to out run a bad diet.

Then there’s the discussion of good calories vs bad calories. If your goal is to optimize well being, what you put into your body has an outsized impact on how you feel so it’d be crazy to not pay some attention to your diet.

If you have a cooperative microbiome, eating too much won't cause weight gain because you don't absorb it all. Eating too little of course is a better way to lose weight than exercise - that's required by thermodynamics.

> Quantity matters, but eating more can be compensated by excercising more.

Eating a little bit more can be. Eating an extra 1k kcal per day cannot be, especially as you get older. I’m in my 30s and relatively fit, and I can only burn 14 kcal per minute for 45 minutes or so. Maybe I can do an hour if I pushed it, but even Olympic level athletes top out at 20 kcal per minute.

How did you get the 14kcal number? Are there devices that measure this?

I assume exercise machines where you can not cheat by leaning on something or pausing are somewhat accurate, such as stationary bikes or elliptical or rowing machines. So my estimate is from experience with those machines over the last 15 years, and all 3 end up averaging me at around the same 14 kcal/minute. But I’m no athlete, although I do have a pretty low body fat percentage.

Also, I misremembered the Olympic calorie amount, according to this NYTimes article, Olympic cross country skiers can do 30kcal per minute:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou...

> A typical elite cross-country skier will burn about 30 calories a minute during training — by comparison, a 155-pound person on an elliptical machine burns about 11 calories a minute.

The food we eat has an immense impact on how we feel, and certainly has an impact on mental health issues such depression, attention, emotional regulation, etc. Every single thing you eat is the substrates from which all of your cells are made. The old paradigm looked at food as just units of energy, but that is not the new paradigm. What we eat, how we move, our sleep quality, how we manage stress - these things have enormous implications on pretty much every single health metric you can imagine.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/nutritional-psychiatry-y...

While I agree about other factors contributing, your missing how vital food is in the equation.

All of the things you mentioned are highly dependent on food. For example, high amounts of sugar will undoubtedly lead to depression and burnout, not to mention diabetes.

> starting with what we eat is a good first step to regain control

Yes, it is absolutely the first step. And it's one you have most control over. Focus on the things you can control.

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