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Comment by MengerSponge | Hacker News Reader

The only miracle drugs that I know of are sleep, water, and exercise. Even those have dose-related toxicities!

https://peterattiamd.com/metformin-and-exercise/

If you're healthy enough to exercise, that's probably more effective. Apparently (I haven't tested myself, and I don't know how thorough the literature is) metformin lowers your lactic threshold, which reduces the total amount of work you can do in that state.

Do cardio, sleep enough, avoid refined sugar and fats that are solid at room temperature. More than that... godspeed

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Avoiding "solid fats" aka saturated fats is bad advice. The science behind saturated fats being harmful has been debunked and even some government agencies have rescinded the recommendation to avoid them.

On the contrary, it's the liquid fats that are more often harmful, especially linoleic acid (aka omega-6).

Isn't it amazing how they can make such confident recommendations about these dietary issues without having the data (real data, not some bs study) to back it up? They end up reversing themselves over and over, utterly destroying societal trust in the field of dietary medicine.

> avoid refined sugar and fats that are solid at room temperature.

This leaves, what, protein and starch? And cooking oil, I suppose, but all forms of meat contain solid fats.

Some oils like rapeseed (canola) aren't that good for you either.

And coconut oil, which contains quite a bit of saturated fat.

Edit: apparently coconut oil is supposed to be solid at room temp. I should get an air conditioner

These articles always bring up a lot of comments that use the phrase "good for you" or "healthy", but in my experience most of the time a person saying "___ is good for you", they pretty much never quantify how or why.

Can you explain, in what capacity oils aren't "good for you" ?

I think the best talk of the health dangers of seed oils is in the following video:

Dr. Chris Knobbe - 'Diseases of Civilization: Are Seed Oil Excesses the Unifying Mechanism?' [1]

If you're short on time, you can skip directly to the trials data section [2]

1. https://youtu.be/7kGnfXXIKZM

2. https://youtu.be/7kGnfXXIKZM?t=2020

> in rats

So we're deriving that an entire class of foods aren't "good for you", because of a specific outcome in a study conducted on rats?

edit

Also, the effect produced on the rats was weight gain. Is all weight gain bad? Oils aren't "good for you" because "weight gain"? So, if a person's goal was to gain weight, would oils be "good for them"? And if yes, isn't this just way too broad a statement ("oils aren't good for you") to have any value?

Indeed, not all animal trials are valid in humans, and your skepticism is warranted.

In the rest of the video he discusses how it affects human health, along with the data to support that assertion.

It's seed/vegetable and hydrogenated oils that are bad for you and are correlated with obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Coconut oil, olive oil and butter are fine.

The dose makes the poison. Everything in excess is detrimental.

except excess, excess in low dose is still detrimental ?

Well, there's a bit more variety there than cooking oil - I think the "healthy fat" category usually includes nuts, avocados, olive oil, salmon, etc. I don't think chicken (including the skin) is supposed to be bad either. [1]

From my understanding of the available evidence, these fats are supposed to be more healthy than other animal fats / butter (saturated fat). [2] Whether saturated fats are bad or not depends on what you compare them to - they seem less healthy than say, olive oil, but might win out over refined carbs. And the most clearly bad one is trans fat which has the strongest evidence against it.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2012/06/21/ask-...

[2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...

>refined sugar

I wouldn't personally consider rolled oats, rolled barley, or rolled rye to be refined sugars, nor are they quite in the white rice, potato, corn, flour starch category, despite flattening a "grass seed/fruit" being a type of "processing."

Furthermore, oversimplifying food advice tends to leave out conversation of how food breaks down. The main ways are time, grinding, heat, fermentation. Fermentation gets a bit of an asterisk at the end of hard rules lists. They may say no dairy but then exempt fermented dairy. Lactofermentation of oats will be less starchy than uncooked oats.

after digging in pubmed I realized that just about every thing you can ingest is either good or bad :)

I ended up with small doses of simple natural (don't hit me, I know everything is natural in some way) stuff.

Side note: your social context is also hugely influential. A nice job can amplify every good dimension of ones life without you even trying ..

take care

> avoid refined sugar and fats that are solid at room temperature.

Why?

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