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Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

Whatever, I give it at most two years before some other study directly contradicts this one (just as this one directly contradicts conventional wisdom based on other studies which themselves contradicted the generally-accepted status quo before them).

Nutritional science is just insane.

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I would take that bet. Phinney and Volek have a long history of doing pretty good science. I haven't seen any of their work directly contradicted over Phinney's 35+ year career[0]. Also, there is scant evidence that this is actually showing a different result than other studies. The diet-heart hypothesis never had good, controlled studies[1] to back it up; we are just now seeing the good science testing it, and it's not holding up well.

I will agree that nutrition science has been, and, in many cases, continues to be, lacking. It is getting better, though. We are moving past epidemiology being the be-all-end-all and starting to see well controlled trials asking interesting questions. Unfortunately, those are really expensive and hard to do.

0. I could be wrong here; I've read a lot but not everything. Still, they've had enough detractors that I'm sure people would have trumpeted it.

1. Lots of epidemiological studies, but causation shouldn't have ever been inferred from them. Unlike with smoking, risk factors were never 20x, more like 1.2x.

You basically nailed the problem: the generally-accepted status quo is based on flimsy evidence. Our metabolism is complicated and it will likely take decades before we fully understand it, not to mention that different people process calories differently.

Luckily, it's very easy to detect when your diet is having a negative impact on your health and you have time to make changes before heart disease or type 2 diabetes strikes. There's no excuse for not keeping track of your weight and not getting regular blood work to look for risk factors. When these risk factors emerge, very simple changes like eating more vegetables and spending more time walking can be enough to reverse them. Easier said than done of course, but we do have reliable science that shows this.

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