I feel like I'm letting a secret out, but if there's any crowd that we want to be healthy and productive, it's HN. Eat fat. It's great for you. What's important is to remove sugar from your diet in all its forms.
Omnivores like humans evolve with broad, shallow nutritional optima. Humans are happy with a diet of simple starches (metabolically almost indistinguishable from refined sugars) or a diet of fatty meat, and do pretty much the same on almost everything in between. There are statistically measurable variations, but the optimum is so broad and shallow--as our evolutionary history would predict--that it is full of really shallow local optima that are due purely to noise. Crypto-creationists glom onto these shallow local optima and make out like they have incredibly deep minima hidden in their midst, which is utterly implausible unless you reject evolution as the force that shaped us as species.
In fact, Jared Diamond quite convincingly demonstrates that hunter-gatherers, with their meat-and-vegetable diets, were far healthier than their agricultural cousins. But the abundance that resulted from agriculture (along with the perils of nomadic hunting) allowed farmers to have far larger families and eventually drown out hunter-gatherers through sheer demographic superiority. It doesn't mean that grains are ideal for human consumption, only that agriculture allowed population growth and urban density that eventually crushed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
We could live on Twinkies if required. We are, as you pointed out, omnivores. The relevant question is what diet is most optimal for human health.
Everything in moderation is probably better advice than a single fact.
A lot of nutritional fads are indistinguishable from religion. Scales are always balanced, not necessarily visibly.
Wholemeal toast would he a complex carb. White bread would be a complex carb in the form of a refined starch - still not a simple carb.
If I had to guess, your family's health problems weren't with lard -- they probably resulted from the companion toast and french fries. Any calories you eat will be directed to storage if your insulin is spiked... which happens when you eat carbs like those found in wheat and potatoes.
That's not to say that glucose, which you find in potatoes, is necessarily awful. I don't eat it, but Dr. Robert Lustig (an incredible font of knowledge) thinks glucose can be a valuable part of a diet. What's particularly important is to eliminate fructose and sucrose. They're toxins with no redeeming qualities except making fat-free foods palatable.
eliminate fructose
I'm not opposed to the occasional fruit. But given your tone, I rather suspect you think Jamba Juice is healthier than a steak. Go ahead, I'm not here to save your life... but you may want to read a bit on the subject. I'd start with Gary Taubes, Peter Attia, and Robert Lustig.
No their problems weren't just the lard. It was derision pointed at the unfounded basis of your analysis and the complexity of the human diet, metabolism and relatively limited knowledge of nutrition we have.
/r/keto isn't a valid citation, well no more than /r/spacedicks (NSFW) or the pope. Neither is you losing weight.
Eat sugar, dude. I'm not here to save your life. But if some of the awesome nerds who read HN decide to get healthy, I'd really recommend eliminating sugar from your diet. Life is so much better without it.
Recommended introductory reading would be Gary Taubes, Robert Lustig, and Peter Attia. The history of nutrition over the past fifty years is absolutely shocking.
However, I rode 59 miles from London to Brighton on my nice Dawes Ultra Galaxy a couple of months back without any trouble. Last month I had a medical and am, according to doctor "in wonderful shape". Go figure.
Oh right, everything in moderation. That's the win. I eat that stuff when I need it.
I wouldn't cite a bunch of random popular reading health authors and an endocrinologist incapable of using the scientific method in his work. Go read some Feynman and apply some critical thinking and get back to me.
Dude, your antagonism has no place here. You're not helping your argument, you're just making HN worse.
I'm calling up hokum and bad science, nothing more.
i'm not sure if i'm interpreting this correctly, but it sounds like you essentially admitted that you're really fat, despite being active. while i agree that the BMI system is very flawed especially when it comes to measuring the health and fitness level of active people, but for the typical non-active keyboard warrior (which statistically HN would probably have a very high percentage of relative to the whole userbase), the BMI is a decent gauge of health.
simply put, what i'm saying is, unless you're telling me you're in fact a massive 250-lb muscle-bound beast, the BMI reading is probably quite accurate that you're overweight and not healthy at all.
you can convolute the argument as much as you want, dropping names and terms like "critical thinking" and "Feynman" etc, but ultimately there is no denying the reality that is your body.
I'm an outlier. I'm well built but thanks to BMI, I'm classified as obese. I eat a lot of crap as well, probably more than most. That doesn't affect my general health at all.
I'm referring to scientific integrity and application of the scientific method which this entire thread is devoid of. One poster posted with citations from known crackpots and a reddit group of obsessive religious dieters.
Nutrition is complicated. Everyone has an answer. I'm saying there isn't one. Life is a race to the finish line. Whoever gets there last with the most bits still attached wins.
Great to hear that you feel well though. But please avoid the opportunities to convert heathens on the Internet, if you can. Some of us are skeptics by nature and will never be persuaded by anything less than full scientific studies (especially with areas as complex as the human physiology).
Being healthy and athletic in the short-term is one thing, living a long and happy life is another. I always feel that the Paleo/low-carb communities focus on the former, but if you can believe the gist of The Blue Zones, then happy centenarians have very "boring" eating habits (statistically speaking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648
If you say "eating fatty things will give you heart disease", most people will blindly agree with you. In actuality there is very little valid basis for making that claim.
(Edit, and this is a parenthetical because I do not believe anecdotal evidence is useful for arguing for general cases: My personal n=1 experiment: I have comprehensive blood panels done every three months. Over the past four years I adopted a diet that is high in healthy animals fats and proteins, high in vegetables, low in fruit, and devoid of grains. As in: 3 eggs plus sausage or bacon and a salad for breakfast. Every day.
Prior to starting, I had mediocre to bad cholesterol. My numbers are now: 105 LDL, 70 HDL, 52 triglycerides. Superb by all measures.)
Given you eat sausage and bacon every day, I wonder what you'd classify as an unhealthy animal fat or protein and what your rationale is?
Grassfed beed, pasture raised pork, wild caught seafood.
So has the belief that all fat is all good for you, to put it lightly. Human nutrition is a lot more complex than that. Unless you like experimenting with yourself for the sake of it, go with a balanced diet.
Despite this we've been strongly indoctrinated with the idea that fat == unhealthy. It has caused us to change our behavior by avoiding foods that our parents and grandparents have been eating down through the generations. We've moved away from the default "balanced diet" on bunk data.
I think we don't really know enough about health to have a comprehensive answer, sp. regarding long term effects, so the best thing may be just to be conservative.. i.e. don't each much of anything that our body may not be wired to (like you said, processed sugars, but also deep fried precooked bacon)
Obviously don't do sugars, but a piece of bread or pasta is just going to give you energy. Which you will use in your exercise. Do eat fruit and plenty of vegetables. They have different types of fiber which does different things to your intestines.
I have been lardon myself most of my life and now I am going thru a change. Took me years, took me meeting some very smart people whose only hobby besides technology/work is exercise. I have also met some crazy illuminati believing, LSD loving, psychedelic trance vegans who spend most of their day looking for healthy stuff. Met overweight vegetarians, some of who only ate fruit.
For some reason people think food is the only saint thing they are allowed to imbibe on. The disappointing truth is that you have to be starving a bit. That's it.
What was even more shocking was recent article about how fasting forces revival of your immune system. Or that yoga moves some of the muscles that normal exercise wouldn't move, hence removing more toxins from there. Or that meditation is one form of natural high and there is nothing esoteric about it.