Nutrition Science Initiative launched
nusi.org
nusi.org
One comment, the board of directors seem pretty top heavy with "big pharma" and VC/private equity types, which I find a bit hard to reconcile with the non-profit and independence aims of nusi. Surely the whole thrust of an organization like this is to promote health and this must be fundamentally against the interests of drug companies. I'd certainly be interested to hear what the board of directors hope to achive.
I was vegetarian for 7 years, an omnivore for 1 when I started weight-lifting, and after that I stopped weight-lifting and became a runner. It has been a year and am training for my first half marathon.
Compared to 10 years ago, I feel there has been an increase on food data-collecting and more rigorous scientific experiments that help build a database of bad foods and good foods. And I feel what NuSi is doing can be a good thing because it'll bring about talks and communication between big food corporations and nutritionists, "food scientists", etc.
However, the dilemma for me comes when trying to change the rules of what ingredients are allowed in foods (I'm thinking about the so-called 'soda pop ban'). I feel certain things ought to be banned, such as trans fats/hydrogenated oils. I think they are poisonous, but corporations, being as they are, are reluctant to change this because using them are so cost-effective and good for their pockets. To ban something that would decrease a company's profit and force them to effectively increase their production cost goes against their ideology.
I am optimistic that gradually we will see an improvement, but we are years away from it, simply because changing large companies's mission for a higher food standard brings about unwanted consequences for them, especially when change is abrupt.
So, of course, we're getting the wrong advice. It is a chain of connections. Some health advisers work for large companies and have their own agenda to push. Other scientists and nutritionists do not have the means to fund big experiments and collect more data.
My question is: who are these 'best scientists and universities' that are working on these 'risky questions'? Transparency would be nice, for sure.
You have my attention.
(My $0.02)
Yet I am a firm believer that when lives gets easier people get lazier. When they get lazy they do not make good choices because they do not have too. People do not even have to go anywhere or even outside for entertainment. The amount of physical labor, let alone activities in general, has vastly decreased. Then add in the fact that about any food you want is readily available, conveniently packaged, and having the means to keep most if not all of it for long periods of time and it looks like a recipe for disaster.
So absent some pervasive non-dietary effect, we should be able to stay thin by eating like our grandparents.
On the other hand, we don't want to be spending limited resources on things that don't solve the problem at hand. For instance, as the American Heart Association and American College of Sports Medicine stated:
“It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.”
If we tell people to go running during their lunch hour, and then they go eat at MacDonald's because they don't have time to cook, it's probably not helping the situation.
And i would rather eat a tablespoon of raw cane sugar than a tablespoon of bleached white sugar or laboratory grade high fructose corn syrup anyday. (we replaced white sugar with raw cane sugar in our house in spite of scientifically minded opinions that "it's till sugar")
In my worldview we were not dumped blindly into this world to use our senses and scientific knowledge to discover a better world. There is much traditional knowledge that is not discovered, but rather given to us that i am happy to follow instead of trying to discover the next best thing to hack my body.
I am not trying to be close minded, but I am doubting the efficacy of starting from scratch.
What the studies (should) be trying to do is figure out what our bodies are optimized to eat. Additionally, it would be helpful to know if certain genetics adapted to different environments (foods) or if everyone roughly follows the same "optimization".
Also, how long exactly does it take human digestion to adapt? Are there any studies about that? Bear in mind that not only the human genome is involved, but also bacteria and so on in the gut.
Who knows, perhaps part of the human success story is that they can adapt to lots of different diets quickly (humans living in the weirdest places with constrained food sources).
I've read that for example lactose tolerance (the ability to digest dairy products as an adult) spread relatively quickly through the population (can't find exact quotation right now, unfortunately :-( ).
There are no hunter gatherers because agriculture will guarantee a more prosperous and growing population. There is absolutely no doubt about that.
However, just because hunter-gatherers died off doesn't mean their average health was less than the average health of the agricultural population. In fact, the hunter gatherers that were proficient enough to survive were probably much, much healthier than agriculture population. (This is assuming both populations are getting enough nutrients that malnutrition is not a factor.)
Even though the average health of the agricultural population may have been lower, the methods allowed more in the population to survive. In a food constrained world, this is the optimal solution for health.
We don't have the problems of food constraint (at least in the first world provided you have an income). That is why now we can look back out or diets and selectively pick and choose the most optimal combinations because there is no longer a problem of food scarcity.
edit, yes i realized later also the evolutinites have a common ancestor theory, so I should say:
I don't believe that we evolved from a proto-mythical-man-ape, sorry.
Even if we were "created", I would assume we would be created with some kind of optimization for the environment we were created in.
In Vedic epistemology there are 3 ways to ascertain knowledge, your senses, inductive logic and hearing from an authority. There are detailed descriptions on the theory of food, medicine and the functioning of the body. The reductionist view of counting calories and chemicals in a laboratory will never come up to it's standard because the human body is far more complex.
Also, are there really just useless studies, or are they just not popular enough?
This almost cries out for a parody. Teleportation - we have waited long enough. Now we bundle the best scientists and we will deliver fast results.