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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Who else has trouble interpreting these guidelines? What's 300g of fruit in practical terms? I ate a huge honeycrisp apple for breakfast. It probably weighed 400 or 500g. Is that a whole day of fruit? Or, does it not really count because of the water content? I also ate half a dozen dried apricots. Am I supposed to mentally rehydrate them to arrive at the serving size? And what about this use of the term "optimal"? The way they are using it is to mean "there is no risk associated with exposure beyond the optimal intake exposure level" which to me suggests a word like "sufficient" instead. Can you just eat as much fruit as you like?

I'm old and my eating habits aren't going to change but my children are both really interested in these topics and concerned about developing bad eating habits, even though I think I have given them healthy ones.

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>I ate a huge honeycrisp apple for breakfast. It probably weighed 400 or 500g

that is huge... a half kilo apple?!?!

And one bred to have extra sugar to boot

Yeah they are pretty sweet, why I didn't eat anything else at breakfast. I am fairly sure that an all-apple diet would kill a person.

Yeah, you can get cosmic crisp apples of around 400g

I had one in my fridge most of last week waiting for the right time to strike.

It was a serious apple and required a plan.

Really? I can eat like 3 cosmic crisps in one sitting.

I have a coring device (the T-shaped one with a red handle) and the plan is always - core the apple, swallow apple as close to whole as I can.

This one was bigger than my fist!

Volume of a water bottle or a little less roughly

It is unusual that it's so careless in its consideration of its audience and precision of its language.

- In lab work, "dry mass" refers to what's left when the water is removed. However, "dried" in food science refers to a product's water activity. Since neither 300g of hydrated or dry mass would seem an excessive amount, specifying "fresh or dried apple" would have been more useful.

- Concentrations and amounts vary per unit and variety, and recommendations vary by the individual. If the overall message is "consume fewer calories, especially calories from these compounds, to lower risks of diabetes and live a longer and healthier life", start with those and list common products that contain them - and that don't.

- A great failure in the US is the erosion of food traditions by "convenience"... and sometimes the interference of laws. People do not generally have the background to interpret the creative vocabulary used on food product labels. Even the FDA has trouble with this[1]. Giving clear examples of meals and recommendations for how to buy and store ingredients is helpful to people who have never consumed anything that was not a manufactured food product.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition

The focus of the cycle of food production is largely economics. I'll leave it at that.

Unless something drastic has changed in our understanding of diabetes, we don't know enough what causes T2DM to say that it's x% attributable to y amount excess/insufficient consumption of food z. Especially when a lot of the pathways are indirect (e.g. excess calories, visceral fat, fatty liver disease) and so the attribution to specific foods is shaky. Their risk factors literally read like the major calorie source for each region.

Best evidence right now says to maintain a healthy weight, that eating moderately of meats and fats is fine, that we should eat adequately of plant matter, etc. Limit highly processed foods, or foods comprised of large amounts of highly-processed ingredients. Probably because that tends to equate to large amounts of sugar and/or fat.

If your children are really interested and you think it's not going to lead to an obsession then a continuous glucose monitor can lead to fascinating insights about their individual response to specific foods, combinations thereof, the interaction with exercise, etc. If you really want to explore the rabbit hole there's a community of type 1 diabetic hackers; obviously the etiology and hazards are different but as far as collection and analysis of the data there's a lot of prior art there.

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