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Comment by al2o3cr | Hacker News Reader

(in re people with hereditary fructose intolerance) "And they’re among the healthiest people on the planet. "

FFS, The Atlantic should be embarrassed to publish articles with "correlation is causation" fallacies of this magnitude in them. This is standard food woo thinking: "people who heavily scrutinized and evaluated everything they ate because they have a strong adverse reaction to X means that not eating X will make YOU healthy too!"

Not considered: that maybe the simple act of THINKING before shoving whatever's handy into one's maw might be the health-inducing factor.

See also: "It has been found that laboratory research causes cancer in rats." Which, as it turns out, may actually hold some non-snarky truth - http://www.nature.com/news/chilly-lab-mice-skew-cancer-studi...

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Personally I think it's an acceptable observation. Even if reduced levels of dietary fructose are not directly responsible for their health, it seems extremely feasible that an ordinary person could elect to follow the model of avoiding fructose, and expect to benefit, because they will replicate the patterns of fructose avoidance, healthy-food-selection and all.

Do you see what I am saying? The two unique features of these people are fructose intolerance, and avoiding fructose. Unless fructose intolerance confers health, the act of avoiding fructose must aide in health. The precise reason for the improvement in health isn't important, if all you (on an individual basis) desire is to replicate their healthful results.

Objectively speaking, that is unlikely a valid observation. Anyone with any dietary intolerance is more likely to read product labels, and thus more aware of what is in their food. It is not necessarily true, then, that avoiding fructose alone is making a label-conscious shopper healthier.

But someone with a fructose intolerance reads labels to avoid fructose. If you are tolerant of fructose, but decide to eliminate it from your diet anyway, how would you not start reading labels and becoming conscious of the ingredients?

> FFS, The Atlantic should be embarrassed to publish articles with "correlation is causation" fallacies of this magnitude in them. This is standard food woo thinking: "people who heavily scrutinized and evaluated everything they ate because they have a strong adverse reaction to X means that not eating X will make YOU healthy too!"

You basically just described all of epidemiology and why it has been so bad for nutritional research.

That's not completely fair. There are at least 4 or 5 good epidemiologists publishing high quality research out there!@

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