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Comment by riku_iki | Hacker News Reader

> The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption.

my humble research found that diffs in nutrition between whole grains and refined grains carbs is very small compared to say whole grain to some complex carbs from leaf veggies. The same goes to glycemic index, satiety index, etc.

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Which leafy vegetables have carbs? Are you talking about fiber? Most leaf veggies like spinach, kale, greens don’t have hardly any carbs at all.

Fiber is a carb https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/carbohydrates/fiber...

Fiber is carbs, but unlike most of the carbs in the human diet, people cannot convert them into simple sugars.

The point is how much of the carbs are you actually getting. The fibers that you excrete isn't part of your net intake.

By definition, the human body cannot convert fiber into carbs the human body can burn (but microbes do turn some of the fiber into short-chain fatty acids, which is fuel for human colon cells). That is how "fiber" is defined.

Yes that is my understanding too. Short chained saturated fat to be exact, so don't tell any of the lipophobics or they will automatically add the prefix "unhealthy" to it as they are accustomed to.

In this thread, I was so eager to make sure you didn't have some wrong belief somehow that I didn't even notice you were agreeing with me (or concisely summarizing). I have a bad habit of focusing too much on any errors the other person might have made.

(Maybe we should think of a word that means "carb that the human body can efficiently convert into glucose or fructose" and try to spread that new word. "Insulinogen"?)

> Most leaf veggies like spinach, kale, greens don’t have hardly any carbs at all.

yes, because they consists of 90%-95% of water, then if you cook them, water evaporates and you get some amount of carbs.

But leaf veggies is one side of spectrum, with refined carbs on another, there are bunch of stuff in between.

In this comment there’s a link to a meta analysis of food groups and their effect on all cause mortality. A serving of whole grains would appear to be approximately twice as protective as either fruits or vegetables: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41965298

> A serving of whole grains would appear to be approximately twice as protective as either fruits or vegetables

this is not my reading of that study.

What’s your reading of that study and how does it disagree with the inference I’m making?

there was no control groups (veggies vs whole grains for example), they selected bunch of studies for metaanalysis with different goals and methodologies, no indications how balanced and what components where in diets in those studies.

This is exact example of junk science.

The control group is modelled from the different quintiles of consumption, so it’s false to say there’s no control group.

What differences in goals and methodologies have you identified that you believe renders them so different that they cannot be summated?

Not sure what you mean by “no indications how balanced and what components where in diets”, you’ll have to clarify.

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