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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine is a cardiac nurse and get massively frustrated by the overly complex regimens that people follow while ignoring the obvious stuff. e.g. going for low-gluten diets while drinking too much alcohol and not exercising enough. In terms of food I've always loved Michael Pollen's description of healthy eating as opposed to fad diets: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

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I think Pollen should have said "Eat real food", and stopped there.

Then our appetite will take care of itself, and won't require conscious - and ultimately - futile endeavour.

And eating meat's fine (from a health perspective, if not ethical necessarily). We've been eating it for a couple of millions of years.

> eating meat's fine... We've been eating it for a couple of millions of years.

The behaviour of ancient humans doesn't necessarily indicate what will keep us modern humans healthy into old age, though. Do we even know whether they ate meat everyday?

Personally speaking, I will generally put on too much weight if I follow my appetite and don't count calories or follow some kind of plan. That's true even if I eat "real", home-cooked food.

This is true. The early humans likely just ate one meal a day, and were moving a lot. They also ate when they got hungry and not necessarily when it's time for "lunch".

I'm almost certain that scheduled meals rose to prominence with the industrial revolution (aka, "clocking in and out".)

I’d roll back a bit on meat. It can be very fatty, particularly red meat. And it does significantly raise risks of various diseases, including cancer. If you’re going to eat it, I’d be very selective about the types and sources you consume.

Humans didn’t exist millions of years ago…

I'd say this is intentionally missing the point. Where you draw the line between homo sapiens and the previous predecessor is subjective and largely arbitrary. The point is that we and our evolutionary ancestors have been eating most edible things we could get our hands on for as long as we go back.

EDIT

You're fighting some pretty hard core straw men here. I haven't mentioned cardiovascular disease nor actually anything related to the good or the bad of consuming meat anywhere in my comment. HN is not the right place for flamebait.

Oops, replied to the wrong comment.

Think they replied to your comment accidentally

> I’d roll back a bit on meat. It can be very fatty, particularly red meat.

Fat is not bad. We decided it was on the flimsiest of evidence and suspect "plausbility" arguments (eating fat makes you fat, obvs) and the subsequent attempts to prove the hypothesis in large scales studies have come up empty-handed.

> And it does significantly raise risks of various diseases, including cancer.

I significantly doubt that, the evidence, such that it is, is only found in highly confounded epidemiology that does not allow you to make that claim.

> If you’re going to eat it, I’d be very selective about the types and sources you consume.

Fair enough.

> Humans didn’t exist millions of years ago…

Google "how long have humans been eating meat". Not saying it's right, but it contradicts your point.

Saturated fat (the most prevalent fat in meat) is causally connected to cardiovascular disease. This is based on a huge amount of evidence and, if you are going to discount it, I suggest you also should discount the whole field of nutrition, because this is the close to a scientific fact as we can get.

Saturated fat in excess. The dose makes the poison

For the record, I _do_ think that the whole field of nutrition should be discounted.

In the popular imagination we to tend blame journalism for the "one minute x causes cancer, the next minute x cures cancer" style flip-flopping, and I don't doubt some blame is due. However, the underlying science is hopelessly confounded and generates spurious small effects that are probably artefacts of the data than real effects. If this wasn't the case, how do you explain the constant self-contradiction and almost complete equivocality on every issue on these matters.

What is the causal connection you are talking about? I hope not the saturated fat, clogs the arteries, etc, etc. Everyone believed that 50 years ago, no one will in another 100 years. But persuade me; show me the unequivocal science and I'll change my mind. My understanding is that the efforts to show this effect have not worked.

> What is the causal connection you are talking about?

↑ Saturated fats > ↑ LDL > ↑ Cardiovascular Disease

We have mendelian (genetic) studies that attest the causality of this link, ie. people who are naturally born with low LDL have less CVD. Not sure why you think this is not a compelling narrative.

> And eating meat's fine (from a health perspective, if not ethical necessarily). We've been eating it for a couple of millions of years.

The current theory is that we developed sweating and bipedal walking to be endurance hunters, i.e. running after a prey animal until it is too exhausted to run any further. Tool use and development were also driven in part by hunting (spears, atlatl, bow and arrow, skinning knives etc.). Overall humans are omnivores, as evidenced by tooth layout. Some populations still manage to live on primarily meat-based diets (Inuit), albeit with some difficulties.

The main issue is the amount of meat: Hunting was difficult and dangerous, limiting how much meat we got. Being able to eat meat every day for almost every meal is a recent development and is a major difference to prehistorical diets. Plus, factory-farmed meat is significantly different from free-range animals w.r.t fat, hormone and antibiotics content.

I would assume the early diets would be feast and starve. You kill an animal and the entire tribe gets to feast for a few days, then you don't eat a whole lot until you kill another animal. Salt eventually flattened this out by being a preservative.

I'm sure there were gathering of berries and plants to fill in between the feast. I mean they were called hunter / gatherers.

I always find it baffling appealing to the fact that "eating meat is lindy" - i.e. something stone age humans and us did for hundreds of thousands of years, hence healthy, at least it won't kill you.

Because it ignores the fact that average life expectancy was significantly less than it is today - why would you want to take stone age humans as health role models? In fact average life expectancy almost doubled globally from high 40s to high 70s only very recently - well after we stopped eating meat all the time.

Average life expentancy is influenced by far more factors than just diet, especially in lawless times with minimal creature conforts.

In 1924 the President of the United States’s son died. A man with access to the best medicine and doctors of the time during an insdustrialized age was not able to save his 16 year old son. He died from a bacterial infection…on his toe…that he got from playing on the White House lawn barefoot. In 1924 they were not able to save him from such a “simple” ailment. We underestimate the advancements in modern medicine and how easy it was to die historically. You could be the fittest, strongest vegetarian in 300BC and bad piece of bread could end you. Correlating meat consumption with life expectancy is just foolish.

Life expectancy has historically been skewed downwards by terribly high infant mortality rates, not by masses of folks dying at say 40.

If half your population dies after 60, the lucky ones, and half before 2, your average "around 30 ish" life expectancy isn't particularly predictive.

> Plus, factory-farmed meat is significantly different from free-range animals w.r.t fat, hormone and antibiotics content.

A version of that argument applies to most things you would buy at a grocery store, e.g. modern apples are a lot sweeter than what our ancestors would've been accustomed to.

Yes. Curiously, it seems the Mediterranean diet helps you live longer, unless you are poor. The hypothesis is that poor people just eat a shitty version of the Mediterranean diet (think cheap fruit and veg, with less fresh) because they can't afford the decent one and so don't get the benefits. I think many of the studies are but sufficiently fine grained to pick out the nuances.

Monkeys and apes also have sweat glands all over their bodies and none of them engage in endurance hunting so that theory is very unconvincing

> And eating meat's fine (from a health perspective, if not ethical necessarily). We've been eating it for a couple of millions of years.

Our mouths are too small for the number of teeth we have. A few million years is a lot of time in evolution, but it's still catching up with the invention of cooking.

> Our mouths are too small for the number of teeth we have.

Is that a general thing?

I was under the impression those of us from the British isles had a problem because of mixed heritage due to repeated invasion: we've managed to inherit a tendency for smaller jaws from southern influences and bigger teeth from north/west Europe.

I've not heard of that myself, but it wouldn't take much evidence to convince me as that seems very plausible.

I read somewhere that modern jaws don't stick out enough because we don't chew enough tough stuff growing up. We were evolved to chew roots a fair bit.

> We've been eating it for a couple of millions of years.

My grandparents were farmers before farming became industrialized. If you look at how much meat they ate, it's very little compared to current generations.

Plus, what the cows and pigs ate in those days was very different than what they feed them today. I know of a farmer that raises a cow for his own consumption, and that one gets different food than all the rest. That should tell you enough already.

So the 'eat mostly plants' is very relevant for todays generation, even more so than before.

The premises of your argument, i.e. what your grandparent's did and animals dietary changes, are insufficient to justify your firm conclusion.

I was responding to another comment, so my conclusion was not fully stated in my comment alone.

I don't think there is much disagreement on how to be healthier.

The problem is how to be healthier without it costing too much in terms of effort, pain, sacrifice, etc.

Except that everyone's body is different, and sometimes you really should be on a particular diet of some kind. Ask your doctor what to eat, eat that. When they say "stop drinking", "cut back the salt", "eat more fiber", etc, do it.

The idea that you need a highly personalized custom diet is a lie peddled by everyone who profits from this

You do not need to see a doctor prior to eating kale

Your doctor is a person who uses WebMD to determine what prescription to write you as quickly as possible. Your doctor is probably unhealthy also.

My wife is a doctor, most of of our friends have at least one, often both as doctors. Most of them are living healthily, but that may be also due to location - Geneva, Switzerland which has strong French influence. Meaning good high quality food is default, portions smaller than US, tons of physical exercise is a default here, we have beautiful nature and mountains at our doorsteps so that helps. My banking IT colleagues fall into exactly same category.

But then there are the rest, which have various issues like eating crap, overweight, no sports etc. Yet they know fully darn well where it leads to. Either they make some mental bypass like smokers 'it won't happen to me', or they are at peace and enjoy themselves.

Proper knowledge of consequences is not enough to persuade everybody, regardless of their IQ. Also, even healthily folks that are say anxious go sometimes on regretful binging spree when things get tougher.

> Ask your doctor what to eat, eat that.

Ummmm ... maybe. I work in a medical practice, and I don't think the doctor's really have that great an understanding of nutrition. I'm not sure it's even something they study at med-school.

Med school gives you maybe a couple of lectures on nutrition specifically, and it's mentioned as a major risk factor when discussing many diseases. A doctor should be able to tell you the basics, but if you want detailed info you should really be speaking to a registered dietitian instead.

But that shouldn't be handled by jumping into random diets. Better approach is people think there is something wrong, is to start strict elimination diet and gradually add different food groups.

Honestly, our bodies are different but not that different. Barring digestive issues like celiac disease and allergies, the basic guidelines are pretty much the same for all of us.

What does gluten have to do with heart health?

Minimal, but that was not what OP said.

How is low gluten obvious?

The author was giving that as an example of a complicated diet that might not help as much as "the obvious".

The extreme all meat diet have only started gaining wide mainstream traction (as far as I can tell) only over the last 6-8 years (and for some reason seems to overlap strongly with certain segment of crypto and MAGA population).

So it will be interesting to track progress in the population who committed to it in the next few years since I think it takes a decade or so for a diet to start exhibiting long-term health effects in a significant sample.

Anecdotally from my small group of 10 friends that I know who committed to it, 3 quit it after a few months because they couldn't give up carbs, 4 still swear by it after a few years, and 3 said that it was causing them health problems around the year mark so they gave it up.

> The extreme all meat diet have only started gaining wide mainstream traction (as far as I can tell) only over the last 6-8 years

The extreme all meat diet was called "The Atkins Diet" 20 years ago, you might have seen it mentioned on a retro rerun of a tv show.

As with most things, and certainly everything to do with diet, excercise and fashion - there is nothing actually new.

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