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Comment by bronbron | Hacker News Reader

Not to sound like a dick, but:

> Neither of which have any direct or consistent correlation to physical activity or food consumed.

is almost always bullshit. People who truthfully track their calories and err on the side of caution (did I eat 1 cup of yogurt or 1.5?) rarely end up surprised.

Sure, some people have thyroid conditions. If you do, you're the minority and you should get it treated. Otherwise, your body is pretty much the same as everyone else's with respect to metabolic rates (when age is factored in).

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Nutrition isn't exclusively (or even primarily) about weight loss. To say that all of the health effects from everything we consume are well known and settled is silly.

edit: I shouldn't even say "health" effects; just systemic effects period. Not only is nutrition not exclusively about weight loss, it isn't even about self-improvement. Rather, it's about a basic understanding of the construction and functioning of the human body.

> Nutrition isn't exclusively (or even primarily) about weight loss.

Maintaining a healthy weight is the primary health problem for the vast majority of people concerned about their personal nutrition.

Fair enough, but the article isn't about weight loss and a lot of research is done on how X food affects the chances of getting Y chronic condition later in life or how to best feed your children so they grow up to their full potential. It's pretty uninteresting to reduce nutrition science to simple dieting.

Sure, you're right that the article isn't about weight loss, but the original comment I was responding to was:

> Because a lot of people are suffering and dying of poor nutrition

In the developed world, they're mostly suffering and dying because of overconsumption (or reasonable consumption of really high-calorie food).

I'm not trying to say that I think it's as simple as 'put down the fork fatty!' or 'put the twinkie down!'.

I'm saying that instead of focusing on 'oh don't eat too many carbs' or 'lower your salt intake' as a silver bullet to 'why is our nutrition shit?', we should maybe be asking those harder questions: why is it so hard to put down the fork? how can we make it easier to be conscious of our caloric consumption?

Not all of the questions that we ask about digestion should be related to figuring out how to get people to lose weight.

Keeping weight low is the primary metric that people currently track and associate with their health, but that doesn't mean weight is the primary problem, just that people think it is.

> Keeping weight low is the primary metric that people currently track and associate with their health, but that doesn't mean weight is the primary problem, just that people think it is.

It absolutely is the primary problem for most people concerned with nutritional issues in developed nations. Obesity (which is quickly becoming the epidemic it's made out to be) carries all sorts of nasty side-effects that are well documented.

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