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Comment by polmos | Hacker News Reader

I’ve long advocated for nutrition labels to include what I call “antinutrition” information.

Things like high oxalate content that, without hydration, can put you at risk of kidney stones.

As a ~vegan I once contracted gout!

What that taught me (via internet knowledge shares, the doctors were completely stumped) was an excess of nutritional yeast.

The daily recommended amount was 3-4 tablespoons per day. I was easily eating 15.

Apparently nutritional yeast has a thing called purines, also found in red meat, and is a cause for gout.

Cut it down to normal consumption levels, and the problem went away.

https://multimedia.efsa.europa.eu/drvs/index.htm

Some of the entries in this public nutrition database have daily maximum values.

That information needs to be more readily available.

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Apart from ethical or environmental concerns, one of the best decisions you can make nutrition wise is to vary your intake a lot and one of the worst is to try and subsist on a limited range of foodstuffs.

The paradox is that by restricting my diet, with an ethically, morally, environmentally and health conscious move to ~veganism, it expanded the variety of food I eat.

When you are unable to rely on old faithfuls, especially meat and dairy, you have to explore other possibilities and really dip into the weird.

I have zero intention to comment on vegetarianism or veganism with this observation, I am solely talking about seeking variation in whatever dietary spectrum you may choose to follow...

I absolutely agree.

One quick and easy trick is to eat “colorful food”.

Eating a meal that has lots of different colors increases your odds of getting a broader variety of nutritional content.

That is good advice, but I'd like to clarify that I meant variation over diversity. Eating the same 15 things every week is better than eating the same 5 things, no doubt. But changing it up over the week, month, is even better because is diminishes the chances you're getting too much of something that might be bad in great quantities and works with the adaptability of the body.

Fasting seems to be good for you, for example, because it stimulates the body to consume malformed proteins. Changing intake up from one day to the next also should help the diversity of the gut biome and the activation of several metabolic pathways without 'overheating' any of them.

Double that, restricting my food leaded me to explore new beans, roots and fungus.

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