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Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

From reading these comments, i wish nobody was allowed to post on threads like this without posting a pic of their body so we can calibrate their opinions

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Here you go: https://imgur.com/M3xoe2c

My opinions:

The amount of "processing" or "chemicals" is a red herring and it really comes down to prepared meals and snacks that have been engineered to make people want to eat more of them. We've gotten so good at this that it seems to override the natural hunger/satiety system which causes people to gain weight.

I eat a mostly vegetarian diet with lots of protein, massive amounts of sugar in the form of fresh fruit, and lots of whole grains.

A quick mention of your staple vegetarian protein sources ? :)

Cottage cheese, tofu, edamame, greek yogurt, seitan, whey isolate.

To circle back to your first assertion: tofu is also one of the most "processed" foods you can find. You go from beans to milk to cheese to solid cake, that's more processing for a single ingredient than you need to get from e.g. wheat to naan bread.

The whey isolate is also a super processed food product. I think the key is to ask "why was this processed?" Whey isolate is processed to make it easier to get quick digesting protein, Doritos are processed to make them more addictive, more shelf stable, and cheaper to produce; only one of these products will contribute to a tendency to overeat.

Agreed. It's clear that most people don't understand basic nutrition, and most people have a very distorted view of what the human body should actually look like. The average American is very overweight. If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.

> If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.

This is kind of an absurd metric. You can be at ~20% BF (which is by any standard a healthy percentage - some studies show best all cause mortality outcomes in men at 22%) and still not have visible ribs or lats with one arm above your head.

Different people carry weight differently as well, no visual test like this is going to be blanket accurate.

That is not health advice, that is "how to be anorectic" advice. If you are at the weight with longest lifespan, you are somewhere at the top of "normal" bmi range and wont see ribs. You wont seen them in the middle of "normal" range and plenty of thin wont see them either.

Otherwise said, for quite a lot of people accomplishing this would mean underweight.

Underweight is less healthy the overweight.

It’s unnecessarily crude heuristic but it’s not totally wrong. It seems like you can see ribs in adult men up to around 25% body fat which is around the end of healthy range.

And what will it tell you? Let's say you have one guy who is morbidly obese, another who is visibly in top shape, a seriously underweight fashion model, and an average guy. Who are you going to trust the most?

The obese guy obviously has some problem with nutrition, but he may also the one who is most interested the subject and the most knowledgeable. Obesity is also a mental disorder and while he may know a lot about nutrition, he has trouble applying this knowledge.

The guy who is in top shape most likely has good nutrition, but he may also simply have good genetics, do a lot of physical activity, and not care much about what he eats.

The fashion model probably knows how to lose weight, which may be as simple as not eating enough. But how much she knows about health is completely unknown.

As for the average guy, that's the most "no idea" you can get.

I think you're misunderstanding why posting the body would be useful. It isn't so we know who to listen to, it's so we know who _not_ to listen to

Smokers are often experts on why cigarettes are bad for you.

I don't meet smokers arguing smoking isn't actually bad though...

I haven't met one that argued it isn't bad, but many have certainly downplayed it, or they have wildly different standards.

Like...15 years ago, I dated a girl that smoked, but wouldn't eat anything with artificial Blue or Red color because supposedly those cause cancer. I said, "You know those cigarettes cause cancer, right?" and got met with a "yeah whatever".

That relationship didn't last (for many reasons), and I'll never again date a smoker. I always felt we were limited on the things we could do because she HAD to have that cigarette every ~30 minutes.

My mom switched from Diet Coke to full sugar Coke because she heard that Diet Coke causes cancer. All while being a pack a day smoker. It’s crazy out there.

Some smokers will tell you about one guy that drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney and still lived until 100 or something like that.

I have. You just haven't run into someone delusional enough. It's apparently a lie concocted by white people.

Do you need the picture of the person speaking in front of you to "calibrate their opinions" very often?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_personam

Just on this topic, it's a great filter to know whose opinion you can discard without consideration

edit: also posting a link to a logical fallacy on wikipedia really makes you look like a dork would recommend avoiding it

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