My Paleo Media Diet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan

I've got to work out a plan to deal with it productively. It's important and necessary, but carries a high potential for inefficiency if not managed well.

Planning: Determine in advance what you will consume and when.

Support: Find others like you that you can use for support (just not on Twitter ;).

Self-empowerment: 12-steps call this your "higher power", but I think that brings too many religious overtones (even though they explicitly say it's not meant to). Regardless, there is a power we have (or are given, if you are religious), but you have to dig for it. The journey is what provides the power.

Good luck!

>I wish the term gave more clues as to its meaning. Dozens of diets are about intentionally restricting foods for health reasons. Veganism doesn't have a monopoly on dietary restriction. Nor does it imply avoiding processed foods or additives. In fact, several other diets have those guidelines baked right into their core philosophies (e.g. raw diets). You're probably too invested at this point, but I think "infoforager" would be more indicative of the meaning here (carrying a lot less baggage too, but perhaps that is a disadvantage for you).

http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/why-infovegan

>Once that basic idea — that in the timeline of human history and pre-history we simply haven’t had time to adapt to our new circumstances — took root in my brain it seemed natural to apply it to other domains besides food.

Indeed, it's an incredibly powerful and flexible idea (exhibit A: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html)! Unfortunately, many circles (e.g. skeptical community) will dismiss it out of hand because it smells like the naturalistic fallacy... also because skeptics tend to treat anything other than unquestioning embrace of new technologies as anti-science.

I think as the ubiquitous network and personal clients become familiar, that there will be an adjustment so that it (and they) just shrink back into normalcy, and attention will be distributed between the network and other closer things.

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...

The central idea is that the china study showed correlations (sometimes), but not causation, and that it isn't supported by causal evidence.

I haven't read the China Study, or the critique in full, so I don't think I'm qualified to say more.

Denise is now a fairly central figure in the neo-paleo movement, so she may appear biased, but she started as a vegan whose particular inspection of the book played a big role in her conversion.

(On edit: yes, that link by Graeme.)

While I haven't looked at that particular study, the result you're claiming seems implausible; one would expect humans to be optimized by evolution for living on the ancestral diet. While there are specific reasons why certain parts of our traditional diet are unhealthy (e.g. the ancestral lifestyle burned far more calories than current), in the absence of a specific mechanism like that, "I like me therefore it's good for me" is a perfectly reasonable inference.

And if you're really only interested in health, it seems implausible that that would be 100% correlated with animal vs. non-animal. There are so many different possible food molecules and no reliable common factor that differentiates where they came from - even more so when it comes to the animal byproducts that make vegans different from vegetarians, such as honey.

I analyze data for several research departments of a large hospital and I would quite literally not trust 99% of the studies you read about. Even if we ignore all of the issues of statistics misuse, most studies in nutrition and similar areas have flawed designs to begin with. You can't just ignore what incredibly complex systems humans are and just study effects of a substance/action/whatever on the human body as an isolated thing, and that's precisely what most studies do. Frankly it's hard for me to think of a feasible alternative, would probably make a great HN thread ;)

Professors Frank B Hu and Walter Willett of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, wrote in a letter to the editor in 2000, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that the China-Cornell-Oxford Project did not find a clear association between animal-product consumption and heart disease or major cancers, although in 2010, in an article, "Healthy eating guide," Willet encouraged people to choose plant-based proteins over animal sources.[30] Willett is the principal investigator of the "Nurses' Health Study II" (established 1989). Campbell is highly critical of the first Nurses' Health Study (established 1976), calling it one of the chief sources of public misinformation about nutrition.[8]

In a written debate with Campbell in 2008, Dr. Loren Cordain, a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University, argued that "the fundamental logic underlying Colin's hypothesis (that low protein diets improve human health) is untenable and inconsistent with the evolution of our own species," and that "a large body of experimental evidence now demonstrates a higher intake of lean animal protein reduces the risk for gout, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, obesity, insulin resistance, and osteoporosis while not impairing kidney function." Campbell responded by questioning the implications of the evidence Cordain noted, and argued that "diet-disease associations observed in contemporary times are far more meaningful than what might have occurred during evolutionary times—at least since the last 2.5 million years or so."[31] Cordain's rebuttal countered that contemporary hypothesis regarding "what modern day humans should and shouldn’t eat must be consistent with the system and the ancient environmental selective pressures that engineered our current genes," and that "there is no credible fossil, archeological, anthropological, anatomical, ethnographic or biochemical evidence to show that members of our genus (Homo) routinely consumed low protein diets. In fact, without the inclusion of energetically dense animal food into the hominin diet, starting at least 2.5 million years ago, our large energetically active brains would not have evolved."

For example, a large portion of adult Chinese people likely experienced a calorie restricted diet for from 58-61 during the Great Leap Forward that was so severe that it led to millions upon millions of excess deaths. This was just one of the many things impacting diet that happened during the life of a 40-65 year old that would have participated in the China Study.

The China Study took place from 1983-2003, so it is likely that all the numerous food issues China experienced under Mao most likely impacted the study's results in ways that can't even be imagined.

IMHO at best it's a correlational study comparing apples and orangoutangs.

You may be interested in the work of doctors Caldwell Esselstyn, Joel Fuhrman, John McDougall, Dean Ornish, and their colleagues. Fuhrman's Eat to Live book is a good place to start; it cites thousands of studies for you to spend your hours in a university library reviewing. ;) It is a "diet" book but mainly because that is the format one must use to get a nutrition book published.

My health's improved. My psoriasis is going away.

Ditto my gf, a full vegetarian for years. Muscle pain and inflammation going away. Other benefits.

I'd probably be a vegetarian if I had more time. 9 cups of veggies per day is a lot of work. To completely give up meat, I'd have to work even harder to get the proper nutrition.

In all seriousness, the China Study has been lampooned widely for lack of rigor, selective sampling and overall poor study habits.

It has been proven to be the best diet for me. By a huge margin. I eat less, I have more energy, I can work and exercise for longer without feeling tired, I can write code (be in the zone) for longer and I help the local economy.

You make me remember Steve Jobs. Yes, the same one who died from pancreatic cancer and only believed in extreme vegan diets. The same diets that probably caused said cancer.

For a start, follow the money. Monsanto wants you to believe grains and legumes are the best food anyone can eat. And the Monsanto executives hold very important government positions.

Second, gluten is bad for you. It has been proven, that even if you are not celiac, gluten will cause inflammatory responses in your guts and the rest of your body. The more gluten you eat, the more stress your immune system gets, until it snaps at some point, and you become celiac, or worse.

Third, quinoa and potato peels have saponines, which basically means you are eating soap. And soybean has lots of estrogens.

Fourth, cooked eggs are very good for you. No other food will be absorbed as much by your guts (highest biocompatibility of all foods), which means we should be evolutionarily adapted to eat eggs (I think this applies to all mammals, not just humans).

Right now we are just tiny little specs of dust in the current ongoing grand internet debate about diets. Both sides have their blogs, studies, etc. The list is long.

Some links:

http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/2011/3/30/paleo-20-a-di... http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Challenging-Conventi...

There are some interface patterns that tend to heighten the sense of importance/urgency/novelty... without any real substance. Those help create the overstimulation-crash-craving cycle like dietary sugar binges.

The interleaved Twitter/Facebook streams are one form of attentional sugar. But the HN format is, too: mixed topics, jittery time-influenced rankings, random arrival of comments/karma-deltas.