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Comment by gniv | Hacker News Reader

I never heard this before: "Plants produce toxins to avoid being eaten, such as psoralen, which is abundant in celery. Snacking at night introduces toxins that, at that hour, our repair systems are not ready to eliminate. There is also speculation that the major epidemic of epithelial cancers, such as colon cancer, in the U.S. is because of this."

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These "toxin" phytochemicals are often very healthy for humans in the levels found in typical foods and weird keto/carnivore diet nuts try to overstate their negative effects and minimize the positive ones. For example psoralen has "antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects" [1].

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2020.5715...

yea they love to cry wolf about "anti-nutrients" as well

Those bioassays are also uterly unreliable and are done in conditions, especially concentrations that are nowhere near what happens in a human body.

All vegetables we eat have toxins in them and it's precisely these toxins that benefit most of us when eaten periodically. Eaten daily, vegetable meals are probably unhealthy, just as eating meat daily is probably unhealthy. Mediterranean peoples figured this out a long time ago and expressed these findings in religious rituals and texts, with designated feasting and fasting periods, where a feast means lots of meat and cheese and wine, while a fast means humble meals consisting of bread and vegetables and water.

I'd imagine Northern Europeans would benefit from a similar arrangement, though they're likely better adapted to a different periodicity of feasting and fasting, given the climate and the longer periods where fresh food is unavailable.

of course - gotta get fasting into this fad diet thread

A several-thousand year-old diet is not a fad. This is the ancient expression of fasting, not a modern brand like intermittent fasting.

calling it "ancient" and putting it in italics doesn't change the reality

Ancient is what it is and fad is what it is not. That's the reality.

These same ancient diet experts did things like bloodletting. The ancients aren’t always rational.

Bloodletting is a valid medical procedure for hemochromatosis which presently affects around 1 in 200 of those with European ancestry. It's very possible the incidence rate was greater in the past when populations were more locally homogeneous.

It's exceptionally lazy and unimaginative to dismiss out of hand a procedure practiced globally for thousands of years.

What about divination? Water wishing? Human sacrifice? All practice for a long time to no effect. People are highly superstitious and rarely logical.

There’s a major epidemic of a specific kind of cancer, specifically in the US, because of this - as in, other countries don’t eat celery? Or don’t eat food later at night before sleeping?

I didn’t know either! On research, it appears to be highly toxic to DNA.

Stuff the food industry doesn't want us to know.

I have eliminated all plant-based calories from my diet and it is just incredible how much better it makes you feel.

What's that like? What do you eat?

I eat eggs, bacon, beef, and salmon. More than half my calories, maybe more than 75%, come from beef.

One thing you notice is that because there is no fiber or sugar (or carbs of any kind) in the diet, you end up basically never farting -- and the volume of your poop decreases by something like 80%.

You also hold a lot less water weight, your tolerance for alcohol decreases dramatically (although if you were strict about the diet you wouldn't be consuming alcohol anyway), you seem to have much less nasal congestion, and heartburn completely disappears. And your skin feels better.

I've looked into it, and this diet is nutritionally complete -- it is not lacking in any vitamins or minerals. Fresh meat even contains some vitamin C. You can eat some sardines from time to time for extra calcium.

On the whole I can't recommend this diet enough -- you end up in phenomenal shape.

On the other hand, global warming (methane emissions from beef), water crisis (water to grow feed, instead of water to grow food), and wanton animal cruelty (most meat and eggs are industrially farmed and ethically dubious).

It's a diet with lots of externalities, which really shouldn't scale up - Atkins and Paleo were disasters, really. (And it's worth reading about the long term research on the Atkins diet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet )

Worth considering whether you can get similar effects with, say, 50% of the calories coming from plants. It sounds like you're mainly after carb- or gluten-free, which is quite doable without resorting to an all meat diet.

Meh beef emissions are 3% of the emissions in the U.S. That and they could even be far lower with food additives. Globally it's higher but that is because of poor farming practices and very loose/negative regulation.

I did keto for 8 years and it was fantastic. I am no longer on it for other reasons that have nothing to do with the diet itself.

This can't be healthy, can it? Plants give trace minerals, vitamins necessary for life. Not to mention the high-cholesterol and high-blood pressure cauding diseases of the heart by eating a meat-only diet. It's good to cut down on carbs but this seems extreme.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/carnivore-diet#downside...

It doesn't seem healthy if you are accustomed to the standard American diet.

One overlooked factor is bioavailability of nutrients, not just how much there are in food. Lots of plants are high in X, but it's not very bioavailable, but nutrients in meat tend to be highly.

It doesn’t seem healthy from basically every diet across the world. The amount of cultures, in history, that consumed only meat is incredibly tiny.

Ignoring that, just the cost alone will be extreme. Oh it’s fine for you, you’re probably consuming garbage meat. Oh you only buy “grass fed” you’re probably buying grass pellet fed meat that has been shown to not have the nutritional diversity of actual grass fed meat.

How is, eat a balanced diet, mostly plants become so controversial.

It became controversial because Big Food co-opted "balanced diet" in the mid 20th century to demonize animal fat and lionize agricultural fat and sugar. All the extreme diets you see are a reaction to that. There is absolutely nothing wrong on a dietary level with the majority of "traditional" diets--whether that is the fish, miso, and rice of Japan or the English meat and two veg. The problems come when you get to introduce a million cheap, tasty calories in the form of added fats and sugars.

Prior to agriculture human beings got the vast vast majority of their calories from meat. We followed a carnivore diet as a species for about 200,000 years until basically yesterday.

This isn’t true. When you look at modern hunter gatherers who don’t practice agriculture today, the bulk of the calories still come from plants they forage rather than meat.

That's because we hunted all the megafauna to extinction during the Pleistocene. Modern hunter gatherers live in the modern world.

The megafauna extinction was in the Americas. Human coexist with megafauna in Africa: elephant, giraffe, hippo, rhino.

Megafauna don't make much of diet of African hunter-gatherers cause they are a lot of work to hunt. They hunt smaller game. Gathering is much easier and safer.

Elephants are easy to hunt — they turn toward you and easily fall into disguised holes. They’re now protected by governments, however.

> It doesn't seem healthy if you are accustomed to the standard American diet.

This is such a low bar that it's not really saying much at all. There are very real reasons why this kind of diet is almost certainly not healthy long term - risk of CVD being the main one.

> One overlooked factor is bioavailability of nutrients

This is not a significant factor that someone should be basing a diet on. Bioavailability is influenced by many factors and the vast majority of people aren't eating enough nutrient-rich foods, period. Optimizing based on bioavailability misses the forest for the trees.

"This is not a significant factor that someone should be basing a diet on."

Yeah it is, if you aren't eating meat and aren't getting the required nutrients, despite eating foods rich in them, but aren't bioavailable leading to deficiency.

Claiming the efficiency of a fuel (food) isn't important is pretty silly.

> if you aren't eating meat and aren't getting the required nutrients, despite eating foods rich in them, but aren't bioavailable leading to deficiency.

How many people do you think have this problem? Logically, it doesn't even really make sense: you would have to somehow be eating enough of a food that would, if "optimally bioavailable" (as in the best case real world scenario), give you enough of that nutrient but you are eating too little of it to overcome the lack of bioavailability and so little to result in deficiency (but again, still enough that deficiency would not happen with "optimal bioavailability"). What nutrient do you think has this issue and what is your evidence?

Again, far and away the biggest issue is people not eating enough healthy food period. Anyone who cares enough to eat sufficient healthy food (with little consideration for bioavailability) would be the kind of person who's diet would be overcoming any bioavailability issues anyways. Essentially the only people I see who nitpick bioavailability are those trying to convince others that their diet is the best one.

You’re begging the question. What is healthy food? In my view plant-based foods are not healthy. Red meat is healthy.

> In my view plant-based foods are not healthy. Red meat is healthy.

Luckily we don't have to depend on our "views". We have data to work through differing perspectives and there is no good data to support your conclusions (and much to the contrary)

There's a lot of false information out there. Many people on low carb find their cholesterol levels improve and blood pressure lower. Also organ meats are far more nutrient dense than plants and not only that they are more bio-available.

I like the flavor of plants, so I don't do carnivore myself. But you seem to be a few decades behind on the research.

Healthy for who? I have Inuit heritage (Sami) the Inuit pretty much 80 vegetables except for seaweeds. Our genetics have changed because of this diet and we’ve adapted to it to become our healthy diet.

It’s frustrating to me that there is zero talk about genetics when it comes to diet and specifically when it comes to keto because those of us who are carry genetic polymorphisms in our CPT1A gene that makes it harder for us to go into ketosis. Therefore, we do better on a higher meat diet.

The Inuit are distinct from the Sami. Different ethnicity, different language group and different region.

you sound no different than every other diet of the month fanatic - overselling the benefits while downplaying any downsides

That's mainly because any dramatic change feels like a change and they haven't seen the downsides yet. Some downsides take decades to develop with some diets.

And the argument of "now I feel so much better" I have heard it with absolutely every kind of diets. Vegetarians now eating meat. Meat eaters now vegetarians. Paleo. Gluten-free. Crude/Raw...

Atkins, low carb, paleo, keto, carnivore -- diet of the month. Sure but they are very close to the same thing and these have been rolling along for decades. Intermittent fasting and some new drugs are the only things in recent years that seem novel imo.

this is ill-advised and often actually dangerous over time - source: witness to similar approach and after several years an adult damaged their stomach and GI tract (at least)

Your microbiome diversity is not going to love this. You‘re killing off swaths of the strains your ancestors have passed on to you.

No, you are. I’m doing it right.

The problem is meat heavy diets then have increase in cardiovascular health problems.

What to do ? Eliminate plants and meat? Just eat oreos?

No, people who follow a meat-heavy diet simply have higher cholesterol, not an increase in cardiovascular health problems.

higher LDL cholesterol is causative of ASCVD[1] so no, that's not the case. Stop spreading dangerous, dogmatic, unsubstantiated claims.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoqlTVCWIAI81XY?format=jpg&name=...

Perhaps don't focus on cholesterol as the only indicator.

Because you have high cholesterol but have not yet died, does not mean it is safe.

There are countless studies that show meat based diets impact cardo health. That doesn't mean sugar doesn't also. Or if meat good, then carbs bad, or carbs good, meat bad.

It isn't all binary. Generally if you are throwing back a rack of ribs everyday to be 'low carb', then things aren't going to end well for you.

Higher cholesterol is associated with lower all cause mortality

man. i'd like to see what study you pulled that from. that is pretty much categorically un-true.

<EDIT>

I think I see. This claim was so out there I had to look it up. There is actually a 'U' curve. So very low and very high cholestoral is risk.

But think this goes back to my point. Health isn't about 'cholesterol' because there is good and bad and the relationship to cardo health isn't clear. You can have high 'good' cholesterol.

But, that doesn't mean you can eat ribs everyday. There are other factors.

Oreos are vegan -- they would count as plant-based calories in my system. I don't eat any calories that are not animal-based. That includes fruit, nuts, vegetable oils, etc, along with standard vegetables.

Food science is crazy and unreliable (difficult to perform relevant research, many confounding factors, often sponsored by groups with questionable motives, etc). But food anecdata seems just as crazy.

Do you eat fibre? Or do you shit literal bricks?

Doesn't the absence of fibre lead to the opposite: a pleasant stream out the ass?

Nnnno; lack of fiber leads to chronic constipation.

There was a period in my life where I experienced this firsthand. Do not recommend.

This is correct. The volume of your poop decrease by 80% and bowel movements become much easier.

Oh my god, I laughed so hard. Thank you.

I eat no fiber. If you would just try this diet for yourself then you would realize, just like tens of thousands of other people have, that it makes your bowel movements much smaller and much easier. Literally everyone who tries this diet notices this effect. You spend 80% less time in the bathroom.

What makes you think that smaller stools are somehow better? Smooth, bulky stools with a decent amount of fibre and moisture are ideal. Makes for easier travel, easier passing, and little (or no) wiping.

I'm not interested in spending 80% less time on the toilet (going from less than a minute to 10 seconds just seems like a pointless optimization). I'm also not too interested in the purported anecdotal experience of "tens of thousands" of other people. This diet seems like a terrible idea, both from a bowel health point of view, a climate point of view, and quite frankly a taste point of view.

Not eating vegetables/fibre seems like a miserable existence.

You think more crap is better. I think less crap is better. I rest my case.

I know two people that went this "all-meat" way for whatever reasons - one definitely damaged their stomach and GI tract in a serious way.

Been doing it myself. 12 years and counting...

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