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Comment by goldmab | Hacker News Reader

It took me a little reading to figure out the agenda, but some key phrases like "obesity is a growth disorder" tipped me off. This is a Gary Taubes project. He is a writer of books in favor of low-carbohydrate diets, and he often badly misinterprets the scientific literature. He has a selection bias about which studies he thinks are worth talking about, so as to make it appear that low-carbohydrate diets are the answer to everything. No actual nutritional scientists think his "alternate hypothesis" is credible.

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I wish I had seen your comment earlier. The "what is healthy food" discussions are just as bad as language- or editor-wars.

And they totally ground these discussions. Instead of offering a bunch of options of cheap food, the various posters insist that you have to follow their whatever-plan first or else fuck everything else.

Cheap foods: Bananas. Eggs. Brown rice. Brown pasta. Red beans. Carrots. Sweet potatoes. Peanut butter. Whole-wheat bread.

There are some foods on there that aren't allowed under certain diets. That's okay.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-789X.2012.... , the one I'm linking to is a preprint but it was published in Obes Rev. 2012 Aug 21.

The latest review of all major trials of low carb diets show improved weight AND improvement of all major risk factors for heart disease.

There is no accepted explanation to why as of yet.

But the bottom line is that the advice on healthy food that "actual nutritional scientists" readily hands out today have very little real scientific support in clinical trials.

I think nusi has an approach that most of us will find acceptable. First we do real scientific experiments and then we base our recommendations on what is healthy food based on the data and knowledge we gather.

If you think there are literally no legitimate nutritional scientists that agree with Taubes then you are woefully misinformed.

Thanks. I think a lot of them agree that low-carb approaches work for weight loss and some other outcomes, since that's what the science shows. But his "insulin hypothesis" is pure pseudoscience and I'm not aware of any papers about it.

Unvalidated/untested hypothesis are not "pseudoscience".

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