Small targeted dietary changes can yield substantial gains for human health | Hacker News Reader

Small targeted dietary changes can yield substantial gains for human health

nature.com

49 pointsingve24 comments

I'm pretty sure we all know what dietary changes will extend our lives.

Here are some of my small dietary changes that yield substantial gains for human health.

1. No process food. 2. Eat fresh. 3. Don't deep fry your food (PUFA's). 4. Olive oil, Avocado Oil, Coconut Oil are healthier choices. Stay away from all other oils. 5. Try to avoid eating out as much as possible. 6. Refrain from drinking sugary soda or juices. 7. Fruits are special, enjoy them sparingly. 8. Starches (potato, pasta, rice, etc) should not be staples. Enjoy on occasion. 9. Don't drink alcohol or smoke. 10. Try to take a 30 min walk everyday. 11. Once a month don't eat after dinner on Friday until lunch on Monday (48-72 hour fast).

Those are not small targeted changes.

> Fruits are special, enjoy them sparingly.

Imagine telling a frugivorous ape (which is what humans literally are) that fruit are to be enjoyed sparingly when our physiology and biochemistry has evolved over millions of years to eat exactly that. Then we wonder why there is all this sickness and disease.

How often do you think our ancestors ran across fruit? You basically enjoyed them once a year and even then they weren't the same kind of fruit we have today. What we have today is super fruit in size and sugar and availability 24/7/365.

Various kinds of fruits are actually available for quite a lot during the year.

I think it's more significant that wild fruits, grains, etc are quite different than what we have cultivated. I.e. wild strawberries are extremely small and many of the fruits still eaten by primates and other animals are really quite bland.

I find it a paradox that everyone seems to know our food is unhealthy for ducks..

Wild strawberries taste waaaay better then ones from store. It is actually our contemporary fruits that are super bland - they are cultivated for size and look. Not for taste and not for nutrition.

That being said, strawberries are absurd choice of fruit. They don't last.

Already apples last. You can even store them without that requiring anything modern. Bananas is another good example. In places with warm climate, you have fruits year round.

My ancestors died at a ferociously fast rate. Living the same life they did sounds like a bad idea for me.

Except modern fruit variants are not what we evolved to eat. Some zoos have stopped feeding fruit to some animals because they are too high in sugar. https://qz.com/1408469/humans-have-bred-fruits-to-be-so-high...

Could you list 10 things to eat here and their preparation?

The recommendations seem close to those made by advocates of the Paleo diet. Lots of cookbooks for which are available.

I personally have been experimenting with one (medium large) meal per day partly because it seems consistent with how hunter gatherers likely lived.

A common sense approach but a lot of folks are looking for the easy way, a pill, some magical food or a study that tells them that healthy choices along with normal proportions can be healthy. It takes some discipline and isn't easy to eat clean and take care of yourself. Sadly most folks aren't cut out for it.

> 5. Try to avoid eating out as much as possible.

This is based on the assumption that eating at home is better than going out without knowing what either are. My dining out diet (veggies or sushi) is better than my home prepared (starches).

List items 1-4* defined what the OP thought you should eat at home which wasn't high in starch. You can possibly eat healthy food at a sushi restaurant though many will be serving white rice and pushing sweet sides, etc. Veggies in a restaurant can have more salt and sugar than you would feel comfortable using at home. There are a few cities where restaurants need to list critical facts, everywhere else is an adventure of conman health food.

* And of course 8..

I don't know about sweet sides with sushi--it's low sodium soysauce, wasbi and ginger. Spinach salad seems alright and is something I wouldn't make at home. Assumptions.

Many vegetables served in restaurants are cooked in a lot of salt, fat, and (surprisingly) sugar. You may not be eating as healthy as you think.

Paywalled. You can't get past the abstract.

Sci-hub failed for me as well.

New article isn't yet in the database, pending Indian court is the last I heard.

I can’t read it due to the paywall but I heard it talked about on a podcast. It is one of the dumbest papers I could imagine. The conclusion is things like “you add 17 minutes to your life every cup of broccoli you eat” and “you lose 32 minutes every cheeseburger you eat”. Obviously that kind of data is ridiculous and can’t apply to any individual, human lives are never that simple.

This is a pretty dismal response to something we know has merit. While the human condition is complex we have data to support the habits of our eating. It's clear that many diesese are outcomes of poor nutritional choices. While calculations to the minutes are obviously a generalization at least it puts into perspective different choices.

Calling it a "one of the dumbest papers" seems overly dismissive with little to base it on other than subjective condideration.

Putting the calculation into minutes turns the paper into a farce. As you said, we already know eating broccoli is good, eating a burger is bad. We can also say eating a double cheeseburger is worse than eating french fries. What is dumb is trying to attach such precision to every item of food, which is the goal of this paper. Wouldn't you agree that there's some HUGE standard deviation on each food item (which isn't addressed in the paper). Some people can eat a cheeseburger a day every day and live to 100. Some people can eat vegetarian every day and die of coronary artery disease.

I think putting the calculation, even if not an exact representation, is much more valuable than someone blindly stating "this is dumb because it's not exact". The precision is not the point, but to make it consumable for a broader audience and to educate how you can potentially better your long term life.

Also, a vegetarian diet does not guarantee any level of health. This is just the same as saying cutting carbs is healthful. Both state nothing because a vegetarian diet can very easily be high in sugar just the same as cutting carbs is not representative of eating diets high in whole foods.

Conflation and ignorance aren't productive.

> I heard it talked about on a podcast […]

Do you remember which one? I'd like to get some more detail on this...

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