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I remember reading studies about how parents diet had an impact on their kids through epigenetics.

While I have no proof of this, I suspect many of the Millenials' health problems are more mental (including psychosomatic) than dietary. To stereotype a bit, they generally seem less resilient and more prone to catastrophizing minor physical problems that older generations would have just dealt with.

Psychosomatic, and(/or) psychogenic. There comes a point where the influence of the mind actually makes things physiologically wrong, which becomes even harder to untangle.

They also barely move their bodies.

I think this is the elephant in the room that is generationally hard to address. At least in America, all demographics have gotten more sedentary over time, but Millennials in particular. To your point, it doesn't really matter what you eat if you live a sedentary lifestyle with more screentime and less physical activity than is ideal. To put it in a neutral way, I would not be surprised if many emergent cultural wars nominally about body acceptance are actually more a societal reaction to this root cause.

Some humour/sarcasm to illustrate your point:

"No better way to sum up the generations"

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/s4nbru/no_better_way_...

> All I know is that the boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style, and lived in decent health to a ripe old age

That's a data point.

> while the fair-trade free-range organic millennials seem to be falling apart at the seams.

That's not a data point. That's a broad statement that generalizes about a population, and yes: It would be a good to see a source that indicates that an entire generation is "falling apart at the seams" either as a result of their preference for "fair trade free range organic" food or their avoidance of fat and sugar -- if, indeed, that is even true of the population in question.

It is a data point because it is the same family, similar genetics, similar upbringing, similar socioeconomic status. One generation ate crap and did okay. Another was more cautious, but to no avail. As to whether or not that diet is causal, I made no statement or suggestion. I don't even have an opinion on it. I am merely stating that, according to the science of the day, they did "the right thing", but the situation did not improve.

Forgive me, I think I read you wrong. It sounds like you meant, "the millennials in my family". Which, yes: I see what you're saying.

When boomers were the age of millennials, they were eating foods that were just foods. They weren't overly engineered. The 80s came about, scientists decided that fat was a problem, and so they started removing fat from food. But in order to make those foods palatable, they needed to add a filler. They chose the cheapest one, most addictive one: sugar. Then when people got tired of eating oat bran with everything, they added the fat back but kept the sugar. So now you've got the very worst of both worlds. Likewise, when boomers were growing up, even the pre-packaged food they ate was packaged in wax paper and glass. Everything today is some form of plastic.

It's much harder to become obese if you aren't eating products that come out of food labs.

You would seem to have a valid point about the tendency for "pendulum swings" in diet trends (well, especially in fads), as well the additives that are seemingly much more common in processed foods made for the American market (I mean, if you simply look at the number of those additives that are specifically prohibited elsewhere, it can almost be alarming.)

However, when you say "boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style", 1) I'm assuming you meant "my family", and 2) the point of the link is that Boomers as a whole didn't eat a lot of sugar until fat was demonized by campaigns specifically intended to "downplay the risks of sugar and highlight the hazards of fat"†.

And I don't believe they consumed comparatively nearly as much sugar as their children. And let's not even get started on the topic of high fructose corn syrup (which is problematic for more reasons than potential negative health effects.) Seriously, if you look at just how many food products in a typical American supermarket have added sweeteners, it's can be staggering.

† https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

Another thing that’s changed since young boomers roamed the earth is soil depletion. Decades of farming the heartland in the US midwest have used up all the zinc and boron and other minerals in the soil. If you consult the USDA food tables, they list the nutrients in foods, but those measurements were done back int 1940s and 50s, and things have changed.

I’ve found in general (from a few years back, not based on this submission) that the arguments of the low-carb camp are very convincing. Fat is an essential macro. carb-sugar is entirely optional.

> With all of the keto grifters on the internet, I suspect this is merely a pendulum-swing to another mistake.

You suspect. In a vacuum (without data) this pendulum-swing argument is equally convincing as both carbo-macros-are-good and fat-macros-are-good. You don’t get any extra points for seemingly taking a step back and concluding it’s-all-the-same. Exactly because it’s just “I suspect”.

The grift in keto seems entirely optional. You can eat low-carb or keto based on things you get at the supermarket.

> Industry wants to move product.

We have to eat. So I guess anything but calorie-deficit or photosynthesis can be accused of being a grift?

> the arguments of the low-carb camp are very convincing. Fat is an essential macro. carb-sugar is entirely optional.

Why would this be convincing? We don't need antioxidants, polyphenols, fiber, nor all sorts of nutrients to survive, yet consuming those things improve our health outcomes.

Exercise isn't essential either for survival.

What I see is that the low carb community is full of story-telling sophists convincing people to give up "carbs" like beans and broccoli to eat foods full of saturated fats (usually avoiding unsaturated fats). And then weaving more convenient stories about how elevated LDL / ApoB isn't a concern when the saturated fat comes home to roost.

> Why would this be convincing? We don't need antioxidants, polyphenols, fiber, nor all sorts of nutrients to survive, yet consuming those things improve our health outcomes.

Seems like I was being coy again. What I meant was: some fatty acids are essential for us to function at all. Meanwhile there are no health benefits to carb-sugars. It’s only function is as an energy source. And then pile on top of that the documented drawbacks of carb-sugars. And this was just an off-hand example.

> What I see is that the low carb community is full of story-telling sophists convincing people to give up "carbs" like beans and broccoli to eat foods full of saturated fats (usually avoiding unsaturated fats). And then weaving more convenient stories about how elevated LDL / ApoB isn't a concern when the saturated fat comes home to roost.

Broccoli is entirely kosher. So are leafy greens, fish, nuts, eggs, salads, etc. as long as they don’t contain some glycemic sinners…

Academia pumped-out paper after paper--for over 50 years--on how terrible fat was for you, and now that it has become so very difficult to convince people that that emperor has clothes, they are pivoting to a different bogey-man. This was never the slow march of science, and it still isn't. One guy gets his money from Procter and Gamble, another gets it from publishing royalties, another gets it from youtube monetization. It is all a grift. The actual truth is probably hiding on some Peruvian amateur scientist's blog these days.

I never wrote "it's all the same". I did write that it may be something else entirely, and that some of the more likely suspects are not investigated with the same intensity--probably because a conclusive answer would upset many apple carts.

to ta988: for publishing royalties, i'm not talking about research papers, but popular books / articles. teicholz is a one-woman industry in that respect. not saying that she's right or wrong, but that she (like many others in this space) is both financially and reputationally locked-into a narrative, which is not really science.

To be fair, all the actual results of the studies that claimed bad effects of fat have been only about certain particular kinds of fat, i.e. either saturated fat or artificial hydrogenated fat or burned fat.

Unfortunately, such results about certain kinds of fat have been wrongly used to justify bad nutritional advice that any fat is unhealthy.

From my personal experience, I am convinced that eating the wrong kind of fat can be harmful.

For a large part of my life, I had been eating large amounts of dairy products. Some years ago, at a medical consult, I was surprised to learn that I show signs of atherosclerosis.

My best guess was that this must have been caused by eating excessive amounts of saturated fat. Based on this supposition, I have changed immediately my diet. I have stopped eating dairy products and from that day on about 90% of my daily intake of fat is provided by a mixture of vegetable oils, extra-virgin olive oil with cold-pressed sunflower oil in the proportion 5:2 (the latter is added for an adequate intake of linoleic acid and vitamin E). Typically about one third of my daily energy intake is provided by fat.

One year later, there were no longer any signs of atherosclerosis and there was a very noticeable improvement in my peripheric circulation. Since then, my cardiovascular health has only improved, so I presume that my guess about the saturated fat from dairy being the culprit must have been right.

You're probably the only person in the whole thread who is going to bring up saturated vs unsaturated fat which is always missing from the "they lied about fat" / "we need fat" story-telling.

It's (probably accidental) motte-and-bailey rhetoric where someone provides the motte "fat isn't bad for you" and then grants themself the bailey "therefore I can eat saturated fat ad libitum" when in reality you'd want to minimize saturated fats while allowing unsaturated fats in the diet.

Yet "low carb" is basically a euphemism for eating butter, eggs, meat, and cheese rather than unsaturated fats. The whole thing seems built on that motte-and-bailey.

Publishing royalties? For papers? There is no such thing. Even for most academic books.

Yo are somewhat correct but honestly you just must have become aware of keto after it had passed through the cultural meat grinder of consumerism. Back in like 2012, keto was extremely fringe, niche, and almost all of the keto literature online was genuine science/nutritional hobbyists who were enthusiastic about revealing the deception inherent in our nations nutritional guidelines as a result of lobbying. There was no grift there whatsoever.

Now theres lots of grifters, but the core idea of keto is an incredibly powerful dieting strategy for many people and has very positive effects on symptoms of a number of difference health problems.

I can’t help but feel like, while the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not’ data’, lots and lots of people make the same observation about “Boomers”.

The human body has been working with fat and sugar and such a lot longer than all the newer, more engineered stuff, making it seem even more reasonable.

It's been known for a long time that these things cause health problems especially among sedentary people, however. It wasn't uncommon for the rich to be fat and ill hundreds of years ago.

I was reading Emma by Jane Austen recently which was written in the late 1800s and the story opens with the main father going on a tirade about cake being bad for you and nobody else caring. It is a scene that would fit all over the place today. It feels as though abundant, cheap and rich food has simply been scaled up to the level where the damage it does has become too visible to ignore anymore. It's not just a few lazy rich guys getting plump, it's the entire population.

The human body has been working with fat and sugar

Most people didn't have much access to sugar until the sugar islands were cultivated a few hundred years ago. Before that it was just fruit which was probably less sweet, has fiber in it and was more rare.

all the newer, more engineered stuff

Like what specifically?

azo dyes (already banned in the EU), trisodium phospate (we used to use this to clean walls for painting, now we use it in noodle manufacture to keep the machine from clogging), titanium dioxide (colorant and possible carcinogen), plasticizers leached from the packaging (BPA [a weak synthetic estrogen], BPS, BPF)... the soaps, lotions, and cosmetics also have a number of novel (to human consumption anyway) components, which can enter the bloodstream dermally. One of my chemistry professors remarked that bodies take longer to decompose now due to the residual amounts of tetrasodium EDTA in our bodies from hair shampoo. For a while, many young men were getting gynecomastia from the lavender and tea tree oil in their shampoos and body washes. Many of the crops are doused in glyphosate during both growth and harvest, so there's weed killer in the cheerios now, and we're just supposed to accept that. Most of us do.

+ Brominated vegetable oil (also banned in the EU)

Pretty sure people eate rice and grains before few hundred years ago. They eate a lot of carbohydrates.

"Rice and grains" and the like contain only starch.

The physiological effects of starch, which is composed only of glucose, are very different from the effects of sugar, half of which is fructose.

Until about two hundred years ago, all the sources of concentrated sugar, i.e. honey, cane sugar, dried fruits and boiled fruit juice were very expensive in comparison with other kinds of food and very few people could afford to eat them more frequently than a few times per year, at more important holidays.

Almost nobody could eat food with high content of sugar every day, like most people do now.

The availability of sugar or glucose-fructose mixtures that are cheaper than almost any other kind of food, so they are now added to reduce the cost of industrially-processed food, is a very recent phenomenon.

Hunter-gatherer tribes such as the Hadza get a significant fraction of their calories from honey and other simple sugars. They don't seem worse off for it.

https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms4654

They also are so active that all the ingested fructose must be oxidized immediately, instead of being converted by the liver into fat, as it happens in the more sedentary modern people.

Historically, they would not had that many vegetables available to eat daily either. Likewise, meat was quite expensive. In quite a lot of places, beans and such vegetable proteins were not available all that much on regular basis. Majority of contemporary diets, including keto, vegan, vegetarian were impossible or expensive. Raising bees for honey is not a new thing by any standard.

Another thing is that historically, malnutrition was a thing, not just something rare. The people would be getting serious diseases or be dying because of this or that missing in the food, there were whole epidemics of diseases that basically do not exist anymore.

The context here is fructose, you're mixing it up with glucose. Both technically sugars, but very different effects. People have had access to lactose for a long time too, but fructose is the issue.

The context here is "fat vs sugar". To which reaction was "they were eating fruits not sugar".

The context here is that major food group that was pretty significant source of calories - complex carbohydrates was skipped creating dichotomy between sugar and fat.

Fresh fruits have only a low content of sugar.

The recommendations that I have seen are that up to around 50 g of sugar per day (25 g of fructose) should be fine.

Most fresh fruits have about 10% of sugar, so you need to eat more than a pound or a half of kg to reach levels of sugar intake that could be unhealthy.

Only a few fruits have more sugar, above 15%, e.g. grapes, fresh figs or fresh dates. Even with those you must eat an amount over what would satiate most people, in order to get too much sugar.

On the other hand, if you eat one chocolate (many of which contain 60% or more sugar) or a few candies you are likely to have already exceeded an acceptable daily intake.

Like, who cares. My argument was about potatoes, rice, bread, ... Sure if you eat full chocolate every day and are nor teenager or weightlifter you probably eat too much of it.

And still, that doew not mean you nmed to cut complex carbohydrates and go keto ... especially if argument is how people 300 years ago eate. It was not keto.

Again, sugar is a shorthand for fructose. Whenever this comes up someone muddies the water by saying that glucose is a sugar too but that isn't what is being talked about.

I never seen sugar used as shorthand for fructose. It would mean majority of candies dont have sugar in them - they dont have simple fructos

And it is not used that way by people who push keto and low carbohydrates diets on HN.

And again, it renders fat vs sugar dichotomy meaningless.

I don't know what you mean by 'simple fructose'. You're the only one who has said that. Candy usually has high fructose corn syrup which is about 60% fructose and 40% sucrose.