When medicine ignores nutrition entirely, and nutrient supplements are still complete unknowns, you have to wonder who the FDA is working for.
1. Most people don't believe it anyway. People want to hear they can eat hamburgers and milkshakes and be healthy. Telling them "we know that gives you heart disease and cancer" does nothing.
2. Nutrition is complicated and different for every person, because everyone has different things they can tolerate. The "perfect" diet is actually worthless because it has a 0% success rate. Really, we have to optimize for how miserable people are willing to be.
3. Most people are unhealthy enough that nutrition is the least of their concerns. That sounds crazy, I know, but if you're obese (which most people are!), then priority is being not obese. Not your nutrition. I know those sound related but they're way less related than you think.
Maybe because so much of it is wrong, or (very charitably, as much is industry-biased) outdated?
Lifestyle modification is a definite challenge and I’m not dismissing it.
Still, hamburgers and milkshakes don’t give you heart disease and cancer. Overeating, oxidative stress from low-quality ingredients, etc might.
They absolutely do, particularly if you're getting most of your calories from them. If evidence-based medicine doesn't convince you, uh, hamburgers and supermarket milk tends to be processed.
Individual foods are—with some exceptions—neither bad for you nor good for you. A healthy diet can occasionally include doughnuts, and milkshakes. Your overall diet is what matters.
Messaging matters. When you tell people hamburgers and bacon and everything they love are bad, they stop listening, give up, or just eat some other junk that wasn’t prohibited. When you tell them some foods are good, they start buying into superfood marketing.
Diet is the only thing that matters. Lots of veggies are extremely useful because they add bulk without adding calories, and along with fresh fruits are great sources of fiber. Cheeseburgers can only come so often because they’re extremely calorie dense and send enormous reward signals to your brain.
Give people the tools they need to thrive, not just “don’t eat these specific bad foods, eat these specific good foods”.
Reading this chain of responses from the original is making my internal bullshit alarm (Brandolini's law) go "wee woo wee woo".
Not at all an expert, but from what I understood saturated fat isn't particularly good but it's not “no healthy level to consume” either (fortunately because you practically cannot avoid them).
I think you're confusing them with trans-insaturated fat (which I don't think are as bad as cigarettes either, but are still bad).
What? “Oxidative stress”? Oh come on, at least go full “seed oil” if we’re going to talk nonsense.
I don't know what else to tell you. Except maybe that if one gets this single concept, that quantities matter, it becomes immediately apparent why most of the "healthy eating" / fitness fads is just pure bullshit.
Seed oils are not as bad as painted but some caution is needed given for instance the industrial processes used to bring them to market sometimes. Plus the way the oils are cooked when they create free radicals. This is not nonsense.
In the drug division specifically, the number is about 75%.
When I brought it up with other physicians the answer was always that I probably get all the nutrients I need from regular food. Whatever that may be.
Dietary changes have helped me feel better and healthier and perform better, and a few vitamin and other supplements as well.
I’m not selling a lifestyle. I’m criticizing the foolishness of a food and drug industry based in the idea that preventing death or lifelong disability is sufficient.
> Nutrition is run on fads - see whole fitness and healthy food bullshit.
I wonder what will come after the protein boom? My guess: Fiber is back because you need to "fibermaxx" when taking GLP-1 antagonists. I can remember some of the funny adverts in the 1980s of old people taking fiber supplements to "stay regular". (See SNL comedy skit "Colon Blow" for a good laugh.)
And it shows on the research: e.g. does creatine help muscle building? No.[1] But cue some anecdote from someone where they also changed a dozen other things at the same time but are sure it was that.
[1] https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/03/sports-supplem...
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12665265/ - Meta analysis results; "after intervention, the Cr group exhibited significant strength gains"
[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/17/2748 - "A total of 69 studies with 1937 participants were included for analysis. Creatine plus resistance training produced small but statistically significant improvements... when compared to the placebo."
And doctors are not dietitians.
Doctors in the US receive an average of under 20 hours of training in nutrition over four years of medical school. What little they do receive is often focused on nutrient deficiencies rather than on meal planning for health and chronic disease prevention. Less than 15% of residency programs include anything on nutrition.
To become a registered dietician requires at least a Master's degree in dietetics or nutrition or a related field, and at least 1000 hours of supervised internships.
PS: before any Europeans hold this up as an example of the poor US health care system, doctors in Europe average 24 hours of nutrition training.