I read all sort of contradictory "scientific facts" about this subject.
By the end of the day, listening and observing your body will provide you the right answer.
Here's a paper that talks about the pathway: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4367209/
Specifically, I’m talking about when discussing extremely complex systems, ones that we don’t have full understanding of, there’s this tendency at a certain point of complexity to throw your hands up and say:
“because we can’t understand all of it perfectly then we can’t understand any of it and so just rely on these exceptionally loose grained impossible to define heuristics that have no comparability reference or baseline or anything meaningfully objective”
It’s like completely abandoning the concept of science measurement and just going full in with nothing matters we can’t measure it so do whatever you want.
Is it a failure of communication or is this an actual cognitive pattern that we can define?
It seems like a basic implementation of the all or nothing fallacy
That being said, listening to your own body is not a bad strategy. The nervous system evolved in tandem with this particular extremely complex system and is arguably purpose-built to keep it in good working order.
Is it this strictly true? Are people that are overweight not just "listening to their body" when they overeat? I feel its not as simple as that. If we always listened to our bodies we would never exercise beyond the first instance of becoming tired for example.
Specifically, I’m talking about when discussing extremely complex systems, ones that we don’t have full understanding of, there’s this tendency to ignore the huge gaps in our knowledge and deny that individuals can know anything objectively about how their body responds to things, even though science has no explanation for it…
>ignore the huge gaps in our knowledge and deny that individuals can know anything objectively about how their body responds to things, even though science has no explanation for it
You’re claiming that
There are “huge gaps in our knowledge”
And that (some group) denies that “individuals can know anything objectively about how their body responds to things”
Implying that the latter satisfies the first
This is precisely what I’m asking about
You’re suggesting that a less specific and less measurable vague notion is more predictive than the current state of the art in measuring bodily
On what evidence do you rest such a claim?
I spent over a year with daily terrible headaches. I suspected they were related to my thyroid medication not being correctly dosed, as they started immediately after a new bottle of medication arrived, and closely resembled headaches I had had related to dosing issues in the past. The measurements and latest “scientific" knowledge said my dose was fine, so various doctors had me try all kinds of different things. I even tried a chiropractor. (I’m not a fan of them in general. Mostly crazy kooks in my experience.) I finally found a doctor that suggested my dosing was wrong, changed my prescription, and the headaches went away immediately. This doctor (and many others), based on the experience of many thousands of patients’ experiences, believes the current scientific consensus on thyroid hormone dosing is wrong. And everybody knows there is a huge gap in our knowledge around hormones in general.
So there you have it. I could give other examples, but they would be second hand, rather than first.
Oh, and then a year after I finally got this solved, I got a letter in the mail that the batch of medication I had received at the start of this all was being recalled... for being wrongly dosed.
A pox upon it's house!
It's well and good to listen to your body. Observation and insight is humankind's great boon. But man, the science nihilism & belief you can just think about it and come up with better understanding than the world's greatest doctors & researchers is astounding & a massive boat-anchor that threatens to drag humanity down below the waves. Awful.
You have one complex adaptive system with a simplified interface to another complex adaptive system and you leverage that to understand the first, where trying to reduce it to a toolkit that you can internalize is impossible due to the finite nature of your cognition.
OP is like your ancestors trying to predict the arrival of game in the spring and relying on a certain flower blossoming.
Yours is trying to arrive at a working calculation involving the time from the winter solstice combined with the daily sun exposure, thermal gain, precipitation, and biennial changes in major weather patterns, etc, leading to the possible but not certain generation of a new complex system that must be sustained by a population of humans and might not ever work as well.
In many instances, your perspective is the more questionable one.
However you cannot know the relative brittleness apriori and you have to have a consistent measure that you’re comparing to
Like it seems that you’re suggesting a loose grained low variance forecasting model will only find high likelihood inferences and filter everything less impactful - making it more robust
However experiments regularly destroy previous concepts by the merging of conflicting variables - this is hegelian synthesis, or popperian falsification
So foundationally that thesis is flawed because it implies no system improves from additional observation - it gets more brittle. The entire theory of the firm, monopoly efficiencies etc… are a counter example disproving this logic
That said, all systems are coupled, so if a complex system is optimized around a narrow saddle point then it tipping into a new state may perturb other coupled models which cause cascading adjustments - that’s not more brittle by default. It means you have to observe more coupled interactions and not overestimate likelihood you can’t experimentally validate with a functional system.
I did not say things can only progress into brittleness, you invented that so you could have something to argue against.
What we call fasting today was the defacto lifestyle for hundred millions of years. The current three meals a day pattern doesn't even register on that scale
I do think trying to make sense of it is a great exercise in critical thinking. And I enjoy one thing about this: nutrition is about complexity. Trying to nail down a perfect diet or 'super food' is akin to looking for a silver bullet in software development.
Also a great opportunity to think about unintended consequences and consumerism. Think about the impact of quinoa fads on Peruvian farmer communities.
If anything, nutrition science is a masterclass in complexity. That's probably why these cliche 'oh nutrition science is so full of contradictions' rub me the wrong way.
Confusion is essential to the process and pretending like something hasn't been published because it contradicts previous results is... well, anti scientific.
Pointing out nutrition science is full of contradictions is kinda tired. Learning about research biases and epistemology is probably more productive.
Everything beyond how to avoid scurvy and the like is currently just noise. For every paper that finds an effect in nutrition, there is another paper that finds the exact opposite: so, there is no actionable advice to take from this. Maybe in 50 years when things have settled.
Edit: I don't mean to say that this isn't part of science. It's a normal part of the process. But when we're just starting to experiment scientifically in such a complex field, it's normal that we just don't know a lot and our theories are just bad at the moment. They will get better, but there's no point whatsoever in following a theory that is not yet well confirmed by experiment.
There's quite a lot we know about nutrition. You may be conflating the whole field with the type of studies that grab the attention of journalists.
Everybody talks shit about fasting but nobody even bat an eye at "you have to eat three times a day, every day, at the same time, everything else is obviously wrong", which is at least as ridiculous
On the other hand, I've been in a resort where they announced "merienda will be served between X and Y o'clock", which scandalised my local friends, who wondered aloud who'd ever heard of such sacrilege as eating merienda according to a clock and not your stomach.
My impression of historical practice is that people who had to go work in groups, in fields (or later in factories), tended to hew to traditional mealtimes. (there's a nice discussion somewhere on HN about how you don't want to stay in the fields between noon and one, or the "noonday witch" will get you...)
However, those who could afford it simply ate whenever they felt like (in at least two asian countries I know, it's considered a faux pas if there is ever a moment during the day when the main table doesn't have some sort of food on it).
The story I heard is that in the western context it was Louis XIV* who instituted mealtimes for rich as well as poor: his court was so large and so elaborate that logistics demanded the kitchen no longer be open, as it had been under previous monarchs, for courtiers to swing by at any hour they felt like grabbing some grub. True, or "Just So"?
* later, in the waning days of Austria-Hungary, the protocol at court dinners was that one did not continue eating dessert after the Emperor had finished with his. Of course, he had also been served first, so at some precedence level it must've always been a throw of the dice, whether one would even get served any Kaiserschmarrn before it was time to down forks.