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Comment by baghali | Hacker News Reader

just eat alkaline and you will be healthy

I have never understood diets like this. They don't make evolutionary sense. There's only one diet logically that is ideal in my opinion, and I'd like to call it the food diet. Eat food. Eat natural, unmodified food. If its processed and has things that aren't food in it, don't eat it. It's worth making more frequent trips to the grocery store to buy food that's real than to eat the non-food additives that make other things stay longer.

Guaranteed, if everyone were to cut all non-food / modified food items from their diets, the only people that would be unhealthy would be those who have medical conditions. And we'd probably have way less of those too.

Oh, and none of this should negate the fact that eatthismuch.com is totally awesome. Keep it up!

> natural, unmodified food

ie whole foods, and yes this is pretty much the only dieting advise you need.

No. The only dieting advice you need is to keep your calorie content in a reasonable range (roughly equal to expenditure to maintain weight, less than expenditure to lose) and make sure you're getting enough nutrients.

It's possible to lose weight on a Twinkie diet. The person who did also improved his cholesterol levels: His LDL dropped, his HDL went up, and his triglycerides went down.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/06/health/la-he-fitness...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

I think it was Einstein who once said, "knowledge is not about what you've learned, it's about what you've managed to unlearn.". The old "calories in, calories out" adage is one of those things you have to unlearn, because as much as it seems to make sense, modern science has shown us that it's simply not true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5X0i92OZQ&feature=youtu...

most knowledgeable people disagree with him. for an intro look at his wikipage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lustig or i.e. http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...

Sure, some people disagree, but you'd be farfetched to find anybody in history who proposed a new way of thinking who didn't have people arguing against him.

Furthermore, something being "unproven" (which is what his Wiki says about his propositions) is very different from it being "disproven." Even the most brilliant scientific breakthroughs of our time were, at the time of their inception, unproven.

Whether or not you agree, I still highly recommend watching the whole video. It's rife with good material for discussion.

Your posts are not straightforward. Here's the wiki quote: "By contrast, such a conclusion has been deemed unwarranted by medical experts and not confirmed by clinical research. For example, in one meta-analysis giving evidence opposite to Lustig's opinion, fructose consumption actually reduced blood glucose levels with no effect on body weight."

It's not "some people" but instead the clear majority of nutrition researchers / specialists. Your argument about "unproven" vs "disproven" is a straw man. Having extensive meta studies that show no support for Lustigs thesis is as close to disprove something as it is possible to do so in nutrition discussions (even though most nutrition studies have major problems in their quality and samplesize quantity).

Further, in your original comment you wrote "modern science has shown us that it's simply not true." and your only support for this was the linking of Lustigs youtube-video (which, to say it nicely, is at least heavily contested). I agree with you that there are many open nutrition questions (and that it is important to keep an open mind for new concepts / ideas), but to postulate that science has shown that "calories in, calories out" is wrong, is untrue. I think this is definitely the wrong place to have an indepth discussion about the topic, but i just couldn't let your original statement stand by itself without a reply.

> modern science has shown us that it's simply not true

It's simple thermodynamics. It can't possibly be not true unless human bodies are magic.

Sure it's possible to lose weight on a Twinkie diet but who would actually recommend that instead of just plain, simple eating healthy through whole foods?

> who would actually recommend that instead of just plain, simple eating healthy through whole foods?

This sounds like the Naturalistic Fallacy, which is sadly common when it comes to discussing food.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adnature.html

It's also not entirely relevant, in that you're changing the topic: My whole point is that it's apparently possible to lose weight and improve your cholesterol on a Twinkie diet, not that it's necessarily desirable or anything else.

My larger point is that foods are not necessarily good or evil. Demonizing foods is idiotic. So is idolizing them. They must always be evaluated in context.

> If its processed and has things that aren't food in it, don't eat it.

This is wrong. It's nonsense, because humans aren't magical. We need a certain amount of nutrients, which we know, and calories, which we also know, and beyond that, we're fine, with rare exceptions. Anything else is unproven.

To be clear: No. This is wrong. Do not follow this advice. The 'alkaline diet' does not work.

http://www.skepdic.com/alkalinediet.html

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/coral2...

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