The older I get the more inconsistencies and instabilities I hear in dieting advice. I'm old enough to remember when fat was the bad guy and sugar was maybe ok
How? Aren't seed oils better than butter and palm/coconut oils due to their low saturated fat contents (canola oil or sunflower oil for example)
Seed oils are typically high in omega-6 which is bad because there's way too much omega-6 in the modern diet compared to omega-3.
I think you should prioritize adding omega-3s over removing omega-6s.
Maybe canned anchovies or sardines? Not everyone likes them (I do!) and I don't know if they're accessible to you, but they're a great source of omega-3s and are relatively low in mercury.
In fact, seed oils have a negative impact on health. Not only do they radically throw off the omega 6/3 balance, they are also inherently unstable in comparison to saturated fats, and they oxidize quickly. They also produce more toxic byproducts when heated.
The big farm / FDA unholy alliance that resulted in the modern western diet switching to seed oils, only made heart disease worse.
The tide has been turning for a while now, as the research has become more and more solid and obvious, but you still find plenty of farm, governmental, and medical blowhards ignoring the science, and promoting a seed-oil based diet.
A wide variety in your diet prevents potential harms from chronic exposure - if you eat the same things over long periods you can accumulate unintended adulterants. Your particular genetics might result in chronic inflammation from an otherwise innocent food item.
Diet should be approached as a game with unknowable hazards. Science is continually evolving, and the findings one week can be completely overturned the next, and so on. Your strategy in the diet game should be to imitate success, avoid harmful patterns, and seek variety consistently. One day we will have a thorough model for nutrition and genetics and we can use soylent style customized food.
Meal pacing depends on your lifestyle, what you eat, fitness, and a myriad of other factors. There will be no one size fits all answer - there are too many confounding factors to reach a sensible conclusion except at an individual level.
Someone sedentary has different requirements than an athlete who runs marathons, or a warehouse worker, librarian, or plumber. One big meal might be best for one, while munching all day could be best for another, and their colleagues might find variations more suitable to their context.
One strategy is to go through an elimination experiment- eat nothing but meat, for 2 weeks, and gradually add different foods one per week, keeping a journal of subjective effects, blood pressure, satiety, weight, bowel movements, and so on.
Following a fad diet
There is a huge variation in what our ancestors ate. But modern highly processed food would be alien to all of them - no tribe nor nation on the planet ever sustained themselves on a diet of salami, pizza, French fries and massively sweetened soft drinks.
This is a very recent sea change in nutrition, where I would expect a lot of unknowable hazards to lie.
There's not a whole lot of difference between humans now and humans 100,000 years ago. We have better tools and culture and knowledge, but we're physically identical - swap a baby in either direction and nobody would know the difference.
It feels to me like humanity as a whole hasn't necessarily properly figured all of this out, and might not do that in the near future.
Personally, i've found the advice of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." to be rather sensible and work for me, as far as general wellbeing is concerned. If you don't eat too many processed snacks and can have a bit of exercise daily, then you should be doing pretty decently.
Things like cheese or eggs invigorate me.
Personally it's also kind of why i wouldn't suggest that people go fully vegetarian/vegan either, except for maybe short amounts of time (e.g. should they desire to look into raising awareness, seeing what produce is sold locally etc.), since having a balanced diet can be challenging!
I occasionally get my bloodwork done and my doctor suggests that i should get a bit more vitamin D, as well as perhaps look into other multivitamin supplies during the winters, so i certainly do that (and try to eat more fish and so on).
While human diets can be slightly "experimented" with and various options be explored, i probably should add a disclaimer somewhere that the diets of pets probably shouldn't be - my dogs, for example, enjoy fresh meat pretty regularly as well as whatever the vets recommend.
I'd suggest that it can also depend on where one lives: the "optimal" diets of someone in Egypt, Norway and Australia might all differ as well, due to the different conditions in each place.
That said, it's not like we can't offer some general recommendations for most folk: someone who subsists off of processed foods with plenty of sugar/palm oil in them is unlikely to be that much healthier than someone who has a reasonable amount of vegetables/greens in their meals.
Though the more specific you try to get, the more curious things become: for example, the statement about eating more plant based stuff might have some opponents in the circles of people who are going for a keto diet - while i can't comment on how effective/healthy it is, i find it interesting and worthy of consideration as well.
And as person without kids I wonder what is good enough lifespan anyway if you are happy during it 40, 50 or 60 years? Or has it go to close to 80 or 90?
The downside I guess is that you always have some proportion of your body's energy working on digestion, which could lower peak performance. And obviously that it takes more time.
But sugar was never OK. That was pseudo-science.
A lot of dietary "information" is pseudo-science. It's not an area we've dedicated a lot of effort into because we came up with a food pyramid one time and that was that.
We're still learning how wrong we are, as is the case in most fields