> I think most of us would agree that makes sense? Eat like crap, feel like crap?
I’m just an average joe trying to figure out how to improve a diet, but I haven’t found much of a consensus regarding fats vs proteins vs carbohydrates.
I’m just an average joe trying to figure out how to improve a diet, but I haven’t found much of a consensus regarding fats vs proteins vs carbohydrates.
* On HN and other social media, "carbs" is a euphemism for sugar and cake rather than beans and vegetables, so people will talk about how carbs made them fat when you know they're not talking about slamming back-to-back cans of garbanzos.
And don't take any nutrition advice seriously that doesn't break fat apart into saturated and unsaturated.
Fruit and vegetables, go ahead. I just lightly pan fried some potato cubes and tossed in random veg for breakfast.
I don't want to do a whole diet breakdown every time I scrawl something about nutrition on HN. But more HNers should subscribe to evidence-based reporters on the topic like Simon Hill and Gil Carvalho rather than evidence deniers like most of the low-carb space and quacks like Eric Berg.
Become a HydroHomie today.
It kills me how many people don't know this, or worse think that juice is healthy.
Are you contesting that?
That's pretty settled science. Low-carb influencers don't even deny that, so they instead try to hand-wave that high LDL/ApoB aren't a problem. Usually with some quackery over how atherosclerosis works, usually claiming that lipids only pass through the arterial endothelium when it's inflamed (false, they pass through anyways).
The balance of evidence showing that LDL cholesterol and better markers like Apo B cause CVD and atherosclerosis is so huge I'm not sure where I'd start if I wanted to deny it.
What research do you think is so convincing that it supersedes this balance of evidence?
I see this all the time in nutrition “science”, and it is just bad science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...
We can actually wash our hands of LDL discussion because we have a better marker for atherosclerosis: Apolipoprotein B.
Even though LDL is a proxy for Apo B (you basically can't have high LDL and low Apo B nor vice versa), it's better to focus on Apo B which is carried by lipoproteins like LDL and is more causally linked in CVD.
As I get older, I find more enjoyment using my magnifying glass for discovery than burning
So, don't put that magnifying glass away too fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apolipoprotein_B#Role_in_lipop...
You seriously need to ask yourself that question before asking it of others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...
Show me evidence that replacing unsaturated fat with saturated fat improves human health outcomes. If you can't, then I have to ask you how your epistemology works if you don't need a mountain of evidence to surmount the scientific consensus.
You'll find that this "debate" cashes out into two sides: one side points to the balance of scientific literature on human health outcomes, and the other side hand-waves over mechanistic speculation.
For example, the latter side likes to blame seed oils when they actually improve human health outcomes: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
However, it is clear that dietary fat does not just directly go into your circulatory system.
Saturated fat is only solid at room temperature, not biological temperature. Put a tablespoon of coconut oil or butter in your mouth and see how it melts. More importantly, our body makes saturated fat. It's part of every cell's membrane. The science on which fats are good for us is still being debated, but I think the overall consensus so far is somewhat as follows: animal fats have more toxins (such as dioxins), and tend to come with cholesterol; non-animal fats are cleaner (whether saturated coconut oil or unsaturated types). Consuming too much fat blunts insulin sensitivity, but consuming too many carbs does likewise but in different ways. Carbs seem to be the bigger villain, but trans fats and low quality [rancid] oils are bad too. Having a good omega-3:6 ratio is anti-inflammatory and good for us. Eat lots of non-starchy vegetables, plenty of high quality protein, and reduce sugar consumption.
Data has been coming out over the past decade on how all the unsaturated fat touted as healthy is actually harmful, as it disrupts our hormone balance and increases inflammation. On the other hand, saturated fats are good for hormone balance, but I definitely wouldn't go out of my way to eat bacon or other high-toxin saturated fat. I'll just stick to the basics as stated in the previous paragraph.
The idea that saturated fats are better than unsaturated fats is a small minority opinion. It's all the rage with wellness influencer types, but it is currently supported by far less evidence than the consensus.
No.
> * On HN and other social media, "carbs" is a euphemism for sugar and cake rather than beans and vegetables, so people will talk about how carbs made them fat when you know they're not talking about slamming back-to-back cans of garbanzos.
Maybe that's because nobody wants to slam down cans of garbanzo beans. Garbanzo beans suck unless they're made into something like hummus, and eating too much of that results in gas and gastrointestinal upset. That doesn't mean it's good for you or optimal in any way.
> And don't take any nutrition advice seriously that doesn't break fat apart into saturated and unsaturated.
Don't take any nutrition advice from somebody saying there are "healthy" carbs. There is no such thing, except degrees of contraindication. Only endogenous carbs can be considered healthy in a human being, so long as the body is properly regulating it.
> No.
Let's make this simple: show me evidence that replacing unsaturated fat with saturated fat improves human health outcomes. Obviously we're not going to have this discussion in a dead HN thread, but you have to do better than that when challenging the scientific consensus.
It's trivial to find sources for the opposite. Just google "saturated vs unsaturated fat". Maybe consult the wiki entry for Saturated Fat.
You surely must at least be able to acknowledge that you're posting from a fringe position?
Also: to your "garbanzo beans suck" point- I actually love them—but not those awful canned ones! I enjoy raw sprouted chickpeas from our local farmers market on salads, or simmering some dried ones with onion, tomato, a bay leaf and some yogurt until they are just "al dente".
I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth ...
Highly recommend you try it. Get the Del Monte canned garbanzos if you live in North America.
If anything Ray Peat, a quack, says is true, then why do things like PUFAs improve human health outcomes in the literature? He says PUFAs cause atherosclerosis and SFA protects against it, so why does human outcome data show the opposite? And how many animal studies is he going to bring up?
Ray Peat is a good example of how far contrarianism will take you in the nutrition celeb space. Probably because we like to decide on what we want to eat first and then shop for claims that support it which is 10000x easier than deciding on what to eat based on the greatest evidence.
Here's a good post that summarizes some PUFA literature in response to the social media "seed oil" scare: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
Nutritional arguments usually turn into epistemological inquisition: how do we know anything about anything, and what do we purport to be our standard of evidence? Do our beliefs actually entail from evidence that reaches that standard? And if evidence isn't what matters, what does matter and why?
> whole ingredients
These are utterly meaningless terms. You "process" food by cutting and cooking it. Everything is processed. Everything is GMO -- have you seen what corn looked like before humans bred it? Everything is organic. Everything is "whole". Nutrition is too complicated and too individualized for these nonsense labels.
> I'm getting the maximum amount of nutrients from my food
This is utter nonsense. Some processing steps remove some nutrients from some foods. Other processing steps add nutrients that you need. Plenty of foods have nutrients that are completely unavailable for your body until you cook it (many veggies) -- PROCESSING! Other nutrients are destroyed by too much cooking (Vitamin C, I believe). You better be glad the salt you eat is "processed" by adding iodine to it. The water you drink is "processed" by adding fluoride to it. Those last 2 are some of the biggest public health successes in human history.
I'm glad you're feeling better, but it's 100% from paying attention to what you're eating, and 0% from this bullshit about "whole" or "unprocessed" foods with "maximum nutrients". Stop spreading this bullshit.
Looking at the entirety of your comment, you should really apply this advice to yourself.
Highly processed or ultra-processed food is absolutely a meaningful term. The United Nations published so-called NOVA food classification which divides food into four categories by the amount of processing it received.
Category 4 is what OP was talking about. Industrially processed stuff full of preservatives, artificial coloring, hydrogenated oils, protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar etc. Unlike the other three categories, this sort of industrial processing is a relative newcomer, it wasn't even a thing 100 or 150 years ago, so it is entirely plausible that our guts and our gut biome may not be happy about it.
And yet nobody said "avoid ultra-processed food as defined by NOVA". They said "avoid processed foods" and "eat whole foods". It's extremely generous to assume everyone reading the former translates that in their head to "avoid ultra-processed food as defined by NOVA". And the latter is meaningless.
Even if that is what they really mean, that's really surface-level advice. There are foods in Tier 4 that are just fine. There are foods in Tier 4 that are more nutritious than "whole foods" are. Note that if you add whey protein to your soy milk, you have just created an ultra-processed food!
Simple-and-implementable is something you can deploy in the moment without knowing things beforehand. If you're at a grocery store, you can ask yourself "is this really processed?" as a simple filter that will largely steer you right. Similarly, Michael Pollan's advice to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" resonates with a huge number of people because it's a simple, actionable, not very fussy way to approach eating.
Complex-but-accurate advice is stuff like 'let me look up if this follows the definition of tier 3 or 4 processed', or 'I have to have 5g net carbs today and this is 1.2g so I have 3.8g left'. This has a much higher cognitive load, requires a lot of research and pre-planning, and is unlikely to be implemented in the moment nor sustained long term. It's also a place where people can develop unhealthy psychological relationships with food and eating by being hypervigilant about complex rules.
Most people find their lives work best with simple-and-implementable rules of thumb for food.
No one means that cutting a carrot make it into “processed food”. You are changing a mostly commonly understood definition to a new wanna-be-technically-correct one you just made up only to suit your argument.
There is a grey area in the definition of processed foods, but it’s not close as large as your definition maintains.
Please show me I'm wrong and give a concise definition of what makes some food processed. The internet needs a good definition as these conversations always just end up with hand waving as there is no consensus of what food is what.
The issue is that the plastics and non-stick coatings leach off plasticizers and forever-chemicals which cause hormone and neurotransmitter disruption in humans, which cause obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, cancer and other serious disease.
[1] https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/CA5644EN.pdf
[2] https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3017620422003/nutell...
It's not until you get to Tier 4 (ultra-processed foods) that you start to see anything legitimately concerning. And indeed if the advice everyone was parroting was "avoid ultra-processed foods as defined by the FAO", then I'd care a lot less about it. Even still, the FAO says that ingredients added to ultra-processed foods include:
> varieties of sugars (fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, ‘fruit juice concentrates’, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose), modified oils (hydrogenated or interesterified oils) and sources of protein (hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein, and ‘mechanically separated meat’).
Avoid sugars and foods with high glycemic indices. Absolutely avoid high-fructose corn syrup. Avoid hydrogenated fats; there is clear evidence they are harmful. Those sources of protein? Health nuts add that stuff to their soy milk all the time! Details matter!
My point is that there are specific processing steps that affect specific foods. Advice on how to identify and avoid those foods is fine. But that's not what anyone is saying: they're saying "avoid processed foods" and "eat whole foods". Those terms are meaningless as they use them. It's non-advice. It's water-muddying bordering on misinformation.
I'm with you most of the way, but a lot of the long life prepackaged foods that are marketed to us are maximizing the bad and minimizing the good for the purpose of efficiency and profit.
Being forced to prepare foods from "wholefoods" (i hate this classification/tag as well) tends to make us more mindful of what we're eating and how much of it we're consuming.
I did a quick google search and found that some countries use "NOVA" groups to classify how processed a food is, and I think it's a helpful guideline. https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova
Since virtually all the food we get at our stores is processed in this way it is leading to serious widespread health problems.
It may feel like a huge sacrifice eating a hyper-restrictive diet for 2-3 weeks but you have thousands of weeks of life. Personally I feel pretty dialed in with a diet high in fatty meats (beef, salmon) fibrous carbs and cooked vegetables (raw vegetables mess my stomach up).
Currently I am playing around with my "default weight" and if it can be adjusted. There is a weight we all sit at if we eat a relatively healthy diet to satiety and I am wondering if it can be adjusted. i.e. if someone sits at 170-180 for years and then goes through some intense shift that drops them to 150, will they bounce all the way back to their old "normal" range or is a new lower one established where they can consume the same number of calories to satiety but their weight remains in the lower range.
A few decades ago food companies came out with "low fat" versions of snacks that had a lot of sugar in them. They still made people fat because people are more of them, since they thought the low fat versions were better for them.
And now there are a lot of people pushing low-carb or no-carb diets saying all carbs are bad. Your body does not process whole wheat bread the same way as a ho-ho. I knew a dietician who said being on a ketosis diet is as good for you as being on a cirrhosis diet. On the other hand, there are some breads that have high fructose corn syrup added, so you need to look out for that.
The same principle applies to fats. Omega-3 fatty acids are good for you, and other types of fats are not. There are saturated fats (aka trans fats, generally bad), polyunsaturated, monounsaturated (not as bad). Your body does not process these in exactly the same ways, so saying you are eating more or less fat than before is not really as useful of a statement as it seems.
So you cannot say that all fats are equally bad or all carbs are equally good.
I do not think the same principle applies to the other two macros. I think you can say alcohol is bad and protein is good and leave it at that.
Protein: Good, eat as much as you can
Fats: Some good (unsaturated), others less good (saturated), but mostly NBD. Eat whatever you want without regard to fat contents, but do make choices with less saturated. Your brain (aka your moods) will thank you.
Carbs: Some good, some bad. try to keep it under 35 grams per meal and 100 per day. Try to eat low glycemic/complex carbs. Avoid sugar and sugar equivalents.
The other angle to look at is satiety; good food should also have a satiety so you don't go back and munch. :)
There's a Stanford professor who did a study comparing low-carb vs. low-fat diets. The surprising result: both groups lost weight.
My take (speculative): both groups cut out a lot of processed food. It's the processed food that's making us fat.
Why? Because if it has that one ingredient (group) it's almost always a low quality product that will make me sick.
I haven't had the flu for over 20 years.
source: me, a guy who lost 50 pounds 5 years ago and hasn't regained it
A good starter is the BROAD study: https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20173