[HN Gopher] The humble egg is an example of what's wrong with nu...
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The humble egg is an example of what's wrong with nutrition studies
(2019)
Author : Tomte
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-08-04 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (undark.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (undark.org)
| spicymaki wrote:
| Industrial egg production is bad for the chickens, especially
| male chicks. I consume egg alternatives such as Just Egg and use
| alternatives (e.g. tapioca starch) for baking and no one notices.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Industrial _anything_ production is bad for the _thing_.
| jtdev wrote:
| You can find locally raised free range eggs in almost any
| city/town in the Americas... Egg alternatives are nutritionally
| inferior to real eggs.
| [deleted]
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Industrial egg production is bad for the chickens
|
| Most successful bird in the planet. Almost 26 billions of
| chicken lives in this planet because egg production. But yeah,
| farming is bad. Dodos are fortunate to live such wild and happy
| lives currently.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| You'd be wishing for the fate of the dodo if you were trapped
| inside a cage 1.5x your volume for your entire life, your
| only consolation being there's another 100 billion of you.
| "How successful of me," you'd be saying to yourself?
| tersers wrote:
| The concept of sticking to one particular form of eating has
| always bothered me. It's always felt like an attempt to find a
| panacea that doesn't require much analysis by the person of what
| they input to their bodies. Realistic eating is a lifelong
| responsibility of paying attention to what you're eating and the
| effects it has on your body. Perhaps what we need is a faster
| feedback loop of what the current state of your body is so you
| can make an adjustment.
|
| There are definitely some foods that are better than others, but
| choosing a diet because it'll solve all your problems is the
| wrong way to address health.
| lmilcin wrote:
| And the egg and cholesterol example is even more complex.
|
| Because the cholesterol that is ingested does not necessarily
| increase amount of cholesterol in your body. Because body
| produces cholesterol on its own and when you ingest cholesterol
| -- it just produces less of it.
|
| At least assuming you are healthy person. If you are not and your
| body already has problems regulating cholesterol - adding more
| cholesterol might actually be a bad idea.
|
| This shows how important it is to actually _understand_ processes
| and relations and not just rely on correlations.
|
| Studies are flawed because we are looking for correlations and
| then immediately try to look at study result as a general rule to
| guide our decision process.
|
| What we should do instead, we should still do these studies, but
| then we need to follow with more research to actually understand
| where these correlations come from exactly. Like understand
| actual biochemistry of what is going on.
| nedludd wrote:
| "Dr. Mehmet Oz even touted it on his television show." Yeah, no.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| There is also this
|
| "Other nutrition research critics, such as John Ioannidis of
| Stanford University"
|
| There is a good appeal to authority for you.
| nradov wrote:
| John Ioannidis is a critic of bad clinical research in
| general, not just nutrition. This is his most widely cited
| paper on the topic.
|
| Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are
| False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo.
| ..
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I remember him initially being sort of balanced and reasonable
| then he started pushing supplements etc. Then a few years
| later, he started showing up in infomercials pushing all sorts
| of crap.
|
| I liked his cookbook, I presume it was ghost written.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| His usual shtick is to have a guest on who promotes quack
| notions and he just sits there pitching softball questions
| without challenging the BS coming from their mouth. That
| gives him cover when Congress calls him in to testify about
| misleading the public.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| 50% of what he says is wrong or fake...
|
| https://futurism.com/50-dr-oz-says-no-evidence-
| contradicted-...
| yboris wrote:
| Nutrition Science is broken because of the financial incentives
| of companies to fund sham research to get their products sold.
|
| I strongly recommend going to https://nutritionfacts.org/ for
| your information -- a nonprofit that never sells anything or
| promotes any products, just tries to distill research on
| nutrition in easy-to-understand videos and posts.
|
| Here's an example: "How the Egg Board Designs Misleading Studies"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s25RaOZsFM
| ooyy wrote:
| Nutritionfacts is ideologically driven operation. They only
| present one side of the argument. Plant based diet first, facts
| second. Being a nonprofit doesn't make you immune from bias.
| It's not just money perverting the field, but also ideology.
| The whole field of nutrition is divided into camps, when they
| conduct meta-analyses of all the literature, they pick
| inclusion/exclusion criteria so that the side that they are
| championing wins.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Politics in everything, the world feels broken. What
| happened?
| beagle3 wrote:
| Politics was always in everything.
|
| The internet happened, and now you can discuss things and
| get facts and opinions from sides you previously couldn't,
| with not much more than a click.
| mping wrote:
| Where should one get the other side? Genuinely interested
| suresk wrote:
| Misaligned incentives are certainly part of the problem, but
| this article points to it being more than just that - even if
| you _want_ to run a good study, it is incredibly difficult to
| do so.
|
| I have spent a bunch of time on that site and read Dr. Greger's
| book "How Not to Die". He certainly works hard to understand
| how studies could be flawed, but he is still limited by the
| fact that really good underlying studies are hard to come by.
|
| A few things stood out to me reading that book:
|
| 1) So, so many studies are hopelessly flawed.
|
| 2) Even ones that seem relatively good often have other studies
| showing the opposite result.
|
| 3) The evidence for a plant-based diet seemed fairly
| overwhelming, but some of the specific recommendations felt
| more questionable.
|
| 4) If you combine all of the claimed increases/decreases in
| disease risk for a given set of foods, you can fairly quickly
| get to a ridiculous result where you have something like a 1 in
| a billion chance of getting a relatively common ailment or are
| almost guaranteed to get 3 different cancers tomorrow.
| slibhb wrote:
| There are paid-for studies but the studies that aren't paid for
| don't seem to have a lot of predictive power either.
| bigcorp-slave wrote:
| It would be great if this website answered the question "what
| is a healthy diet", instead of trying everywhere to get me to
| watch some of its hundreds of videos.
| beering wrote:
| I feel like this attitude is part of why nutrition science is
| the way it is.
|
| People are boxed into this "healthiness is a one-dimensional
| scale" thinking. Are eggs healthy or not healthy? Are
| potatoes healthy or not healthy? Is pizza healthy or not
| healthy?
|
| But reality is way more complex and nutrition science knows
| very little about "healthiness" (to the extent that you can
| distill diet into a one-dimensional scale). Scientists only
| claim, "X is maybe correlated with Y (in Z population)".
|
| So this simplification, plus the lack of definitive known
| truth, leads people to latch onto B.S. like "eating eggs is
| unhealthy because eggs have cholesterol".
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't think it's an attitude problem that people expect
| nutritional advice to be actionable in some way. Because at
| the end of the day the only decisions I'm able to make is
| choosing to eat or not eat something. If you can't write
| down a set of rules for me to follow that eventually halts
| and resolves to a "yes" or "no" then there's no point.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Here you go, best TL;DR he has:
| https://nutritionfacts.org/2021/07/29/dr-gregers-daily-
| dozen...
| nradov wrote:
| I don't want to go through a bunch of training to learn how
| to write good software. It would be great if a website just
| told me which buttons to press on the keyboard.
| [deleted]
| ipsi wrote:
| Isn't that literally impossible, because there are so many
| different things that a subset of people need to avoid
| eating? e.g., if you have a nut allergy, your healthy diet
| can't include nuts; if you're lactose-intolerant your healthy
| diet shouldn't include lactose; if you have coeliac disease,
| your healthy diet can't include gluten; if you have IBS your
| healthy diet shouldn't include anything that triggers it
| (which is different per person); if you have diabetes (type 1
| or 2) your healthy diet can't include sugar; etc., etc. And
| god forbid you have 2 or more dietary issues...
|
| Plus different activity levels make different diets healthy -
| if you're a professional athlete needing 6,000+ calories per
| day, "healthy" for you is very different to healthy for me,
| who sits at their desk all day.
|
| This isn't even accounting for personal preferences like
| being vegan, or religious restrictions.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding the claim. It's name _a_
| healthy diet. A single one. A diet which followed to the
| letter for the time span its prescribed will not cause any
| health problems traceable back to it. Make whatever
| assumptions about the hypothetical person you need and
| assume that they follow the diet for only as long as those
| assumptions hold.
| danaris wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding the response.
|
| There is _no_ "healthy diet" that is universally
| applicable. Go back and look at the list of different
| possible restrictions in the parent post.
|
| Then add the fact that many people are allergic to _all
| kinds_ of different things.
|
| Then add to that the fact that people of different ethnic
| backgrounds are adapted to do better with different
| balances of nutrients.
|
| Any "hypothetical person" such as you describe would,
| fundamentally and inevitably, "normalize" one _specific_
| type of person and "other" everyone else. Claiming that
| "this is a healthy diet" in such a way would be grossly
| irresponsible, even if you then went on to list the
| features of a person it is "healthy" for.
|
| Finally, even if you _wanted_ to make such a description,
| the whole point of this thread is that we do _not_ have a
| scientifically-rigorous-enough idea of what it would be
| to be able to do so with a high degree of certainty, even
| for a clearly-defined set of parameters for who would be
| eating it.
| Spivak wrote:
| I didn't ask for it to be universally applicable, or even
| broadly applicable. Or even applicable to more than the
| person the question imagines. I asked if we have enough
| information to know one single example of a healthy diet
| for one imaginary person who you are allowed to assume
| has no complicating factors.
|
| Because if we can't answer this much much simpler problem
| then we have no hope of giving nutritional advice to a
| population that is as varied as you describe.
| joshe wrote:
| The non profit university researchers do just as bad, the whole
| field is one where good research is very very rare.
|
| To be a little fair, we don't really understand much about
| nutrition or have easy ways to do high quality studies. A "gold
| standard" study is just the best of a bad lot. It's the rarest
| of humans that can say, "I spent 3 years of my life doing a
| study and didn't find anything significant".
| abfan1127 wrote:
| he sells and promotes his book.
| notJim wrote:
| This is definitely part of it, but I feel like it underplays
| the fundamental difficulty of studying nutrition.
|
| Put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to study this,
| and you rapidly see the problems. Effects of nutrition take
| many years to show, so you're generally going to need to track
| people for years. People move, get bored of talking to you,
| die, etc. Their diet also varies greatly over time. They don't
| always remember what they ate, and certainly can't quantify it
| with any degree of accuracy.
|
| If you perform some intervention, it's hard to know that the
| people actually complied with it. You can do it in the short
| term by having an in-patient setting, but again you miss the
| long term effects, which are really what matters to most
| people.
|
| I feel like people reach too easily for conspiracy theories
| these days...
| legerdemain wrote:
| The venal, profit-driven corruption in academic nutrition science
| is exactly why we should stop paying attention to it and start
| paying much more attention to philosophies of health that
| humanity has tested over decades and centuries: ayurveda, TCM,
| and osteopathy.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| "the study tracked participants' health outcomes over periods
| ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and participants were
| queried about their diet only once, at the beginning of the
| study. Can we assume that the participants gave a reliable
| depiction of their diet at the outset, and then that they
| maintained that same diet for the years -- in many cases, decades
| -- that followed?"
|
| That seems like an awful way to design an experiment.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I was going to say something defensive about the science, like
| it's really difficult to do a double-blind large randomised
| diet study over decades, but then I read this bit. It is beyond
| bad science. If someone makes an error in statistics, well,
| happens, we can't all be experts. But this is almost taking the
| mick.
| Graffur wrote:
| I eat 3 eggs a day - I hadn't heard of that study that more than
| 2 would kill me!
|
| In general I aim for lots of protein, a good bit of fat and less
| carbs.. with a specific aim to avoid carbs from bread, fries,
| cakes, chips/crisps
| the-dude wrote:
| IIRC in the 80s, the Dutch Nutrition board said max 1 egg a
| week. They just discovered Cholesterol or something.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Part of the problem is that nutrition is incredibly nuanced and
| unknown, but people want simple, absolute answers.
|
| Different people have much different bodies: they react to foods
| differently, have different metabolisms (at least based on
| sex/age/height/weight/bodyfat/exercise), and different
| preferences. Bodies are also complex, and there are 500 different
| causes that can all lead to you feeling like garbage.
|
| But that wouldn't sell papers, there wouldn't be much to write.
| So people make blunt statements. Most of what I see online seems
| to be geared towards the "average American". Which ironically
| means, the people reading these articles who actually care about
| their nutrition, most of it doesn't even apply to them.
|
| And this isn't even getting into another factor, which is that
| people get particularly defensive about nutrition. So others take
| these blunt, over-generalized statements as fact and double down
| on them. I see this in-person by people who are otherwise really
| smart.
|
| Examples: "eat less salt and more fiber" - you don't know how
| much salt / fiber I'm eating. "Almonds keep you full" - idk some
| people eat loads of almonds. "Keto changed my life / I hate keto"
| - that's your anecdote, it only applies to you.
|
| Specifically, for eggs: if someone has high cholesterol, it will
| show up on bloodwork, and if the eggs raise their cholesterol,
| cutting / reintroducing them will show up too. If I eat 6 eggs a
| day and have great cholesterol, some study that says on average
| people who eat eggs die of a heart attack, that means nothing to
| me. If I eat 6 eggs a day and have terrible cholesterol, and
| after I stop eating eggs my cholesterol lowers, some study that
| says eggs usually don't spike cholesterol, that also means
| nothing.
| drdrey wrote:
| > Most experts recommend avoiding processed foods as much as
| possible and sticking with a Mediterranean-like diet because it
| makes intuitive sense. It is not too restrictive. It is heavy in
| fruits and vegetables. It has the right kinds of fats and some
| grains. It includes fish and generally lean proteins.
|
| But that's the point of the article, who's to say what the right
| kind of fats are? Or if grains should be part of your diet, etc?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
|
| Side note: Why do we constantly cry about recommendations from
| the 1970s being different from today's recommendations? That's a
| lot of time. Over time we tend to figure things out. It doesn't
| mean that in 40 years today's recommendations will be overturned.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The reason we cry about it is because they were extremely
| confident in their conclusions then, although in retrospect the
| evidence was terrible, and half of it even apocryphal. There's
| no break in continuity from the experts then to the experts now
| that I'm aware of.
|
| The problem is not the gradual improvement through study, it's
| the cargo-culting, "common sense" that became prevailing
| consensus, and political motivations from the funders of
| research.
|
| Science seems to know a lot about poisons, but not a lot about
| nutrition. It's like how neuroscientists know a lot about the
| results of ablations, but not a lot about normal function.
| dotcommand wrote:
| > Side note: Why do we constantly cry about recommendations
| from the 1970s being different from today's recommendations?
|
| Because hardly anything in nutrition "science" has proven to be
| predictive. It's all junk. Most of it intentional junk pushed
| by political and business interests.
|
| For example, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." is just
| nonsense based on junk "science" funded by vegan/vegetarian
| aligned interest groups. I'm guessing with major multinational
| corporations peddling veganism, we'll get more junk nutrition
| science.
|
| Considering life expectancy, health and development has
| increased with more meat consumption. This is true of the
| countries with the highest life expectancy - japan,
| switzerland, spain, etc.
|
| Since we are omnivores, perhaps we should eat a variety of
| everything in moderation.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Since we are omnivores, perhaps we should eat a variety of
| everything in moderation.
|
| That's even worse. Moderation is meaningless except in
| retrospect - in this context it just means _the correct
| amount._ It 's not even the moderation fallacy - if I eat
| from 1-3 hamburgers every day, moderation doesn't tell me
| that I should be eating 2 because it's in the middle.
|
| At least the "mostly plants" part of the yuppie diet cliche
| takes some sort of falsifiable stand. I can know for sure
| that I eat mostly plants, I can never know when I'm eating
| "moderately," or "not too much."
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That is not a vegan take. I am not vegan.
|
| >perhaps we should eat a variety of everything in moderation.
|
| That's what the quote means?
| dotcommand wrote:
| > That is not a vegan take. I am not vegan.
|
| Didn't say you were vegan. Just like mothers telling their
| children "eat your veggies" makes them vegan. But the
| prevalence of that saying today is due to the vegan lobby.
|
| > That's what the quote means?
|
| Nope. A balanced diet perhaps, but certainly not your
| quote. Your quote part of vegan propaganda. Sneakily get
| the naive to accept "mostly vegetables" and then "why not
| only vegetables".
|
| You see it everywhere on social media. It's a propaganda
| campaign funded by the largest corporations in the world
| and the vegan fanatics teaching kids/people a toxic and
| unnatural diet to humans.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I disagree. I think it's helpful because many eat too
| much meat.
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| The point is that in the absence of really solid evidence we
| should make no recommendations at all rather than having
| recommendations that change over time.
| azinman2 wrote:
| N=1. I was eating eggs daily. My cholesterol was high and my doc
| wanted to put me on statins. I said let me try diet and exercise.
| I changed it what I was eating (no more daily eggs) and 6 months
| later I dropped 50 points in bad cholesterol.
| jbotz wrote:
| Did you do the exercise as well? There is a lot more evidence
| that exercise lowers your cholesterol than that eating eggs
| raises it.
|
| Not only is your anecdote N=1, but you also probably changed
| severak variables with controlling any of them.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I did do the exercise. I'm not sure of the exact timeline,
| because part of it was me eating heavy breakfast ham & cheese
| croissants, but I also was eating eggs leading up to my
| wedding as part of the slow food diet to lose weight. I don't
| remember at which points my cholesterol was measured, but I
| did stop doing the daily eggs.
| rednerrus wrote:
| My experience with this is that you have to take a n=1 approach
| to nutrition. You need to figure out what works for you by
| experimenting.
| tus89 wrote:
| Do researchers even get taught about the difference between
| correlation and causation? People who eat large numbers of eggs
| probably also eat large amounts of bacon (compared to others),
| and bacon as a highly cured meat with high levels of salt and
| other toxic compounds, could easily explain the results. And then
| there is this:
|
| > But on the other hand, the study tracked participants' health
| outcomes over periods ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and
| participants were queried about their diet only once, at the
| beginning of the study.
|
| Wow I don't know what to say.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Yeah, I had a hard time believing that. Surely there's no way
| you could publish a paper purporting to be about health affects
| of what people ate if you only asked them once what they ate
| and used that to evaluate a multi-decade time frame. That
| hardly seems better than basing your findings on intuition.
| zz865 wrote:
| Another article recommending Mediterranean diet. The healthy
| Greek and Italian people I know seem to have coffee and a
| cigarette for breakfast. It seems traditionally food was tight
| and often in the winter they'd skip meals and go hungry, so Med
| diet is probably closer to intermittent fasting.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| my own observation is that when money is tight, sugar based
| products tend to disappear. When money is loose, they appear.
| The hitch is that industry has found a way to produce highly
| refined carbs cheaply.
| robocat wrote:
| Yeah - the bullshit of attributing differences to diet, and
| ignoring lifestyle differences. For example cars per capita:
| US=0.8 Italy=0.7 and Greece=0.5 (so Greece has more than twice
| as many people without a car - ignoring distribution).
| mekoka wrote:
| Complex synergistic systems are notoriously challenging to
| understand. They can have multiple moving parts, with various
| intertwined causes and effects. But with our limited tooling, we
| often have to isolate a part from the whole to get but a glimpse
| at how it works. The approach is scientific, often clean and
| elegant. It's quite tempting. It also gives the illusion of
| predictability. I wish scientists would realize that sometimes,
| all they've actually discovered is exactly that, how the part
| works in isolation, with no guarantee that the sum of the set can
| predict the outcome of the whole.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Even if eggs are somewhat unhealthy you also have to balance that
| with the fact that they have every possible nutrient and
| micronutrient needed to create a living animal.
|
| You could be getting trace nutrients we don't even know we need.
| mcguire wrote:
| Ya know, technically,...
|
| " _Nutrition research tends to be unreliable because nearly all
| of it is based on observational studies, which are imprecise,
| have no controls, and don't follow an experimental method._ "
|
| You could say the same things about astronomy.
| jessaustin wrote:
| In 1695 Edmond Halley predicted the return of his comet in
| 1758. That was one of the first astronomical experiments, but
| it was hardly the last.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| But observation is the point of most astronomy. Determining
| causatiom is usually not the goal.
|
| Observing people's weight over time is ome of the reliable and
| useful things nutritiom research has accomplished. But the goal
| of the kind of research being discussed here though is to study
| causation.
| beiller wrote:
| Ya if astronomy was done by taking photos of the sky 30 years
| ago, erasing them, and only using their verbal descriptions
| after 30 years to draw a hypothesis.
| 1_player wrote:
| Imagine how rigorous nutritional science can be when state-of-
| the-art double-blind scientific tests are pretty much impossible
| or extremely expensive to do, and when there is a lot of $$$
| interest and lobbying in presenting one outcome or the other.
|
| Nutrition is not rocket science, we are all expert in eating and
| especially in how our body reacts to certain food types, yet we
| take studies of abysmal quality for granted and preach them to
| our fellow human as if they were the ultimate truth.
|
| I can say I'm going to run a marathon naked in Antarctica and
| everyone would cheer me, but if I mention I'm going vegan,
| carnivore or adding some butter or tofu to my cheeseburger,
| everyone, from both camps, is ready to point out why I am killing
| myself and on the way to premature death. Yet they are not
| speaking from experience, but mostly from hearsay from their
| favourite echo chamber.
|
| I've stopped caring what common wisdom around nutrition is, and
| since I've started listening to how my body reacts I feel much
| better, healthier, and I roll my eyes every time I read the
| latest "nutrition" article or comment thread posted on here or
| anywhere else.
|
| We're still in the middle ages of nutritional sciences.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Honestly I expect diet doesn't matter that much unless you are
| trying to lose weight, except that eating lots of sugar is
| probably not good for you. Exercise is probably more important
| for long term health than what particular kinds of animals or
| plants you eat.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| my experience has been exercise moderately, avoid sugar, and
| life is good.
| dalbasal wrote:
| So... I think I have 3 points.
|
| First is worst. Looking back over a few generations, standard
| nutritional advice informing doctors, institutions and the public
| have been poor. Not only inaccurate, but de facto pushing people
| down bad paths. Low fat & low cholesterol labels led to foods,
| with processed foods with high sugar & many additives. Cereal
| instead of a boiled egg.
|
| Second is that many norms, like the food pyramid hanging in
| classrooms during the 80s & 90s were based on long forgotten,
| often arbitrary decisions. Self correction was fatally weak.
| Challenging norms had a higher burden for proof than the norm had
| faced. Proof is really hard, it turns out.
|
| Third is that _" what's a healthy diet?"_ was never answered
| better by science than book gurus or old cultural understandings
| of nutrition. That is, a practicable, science based understanding
| of nutrition wasn't achieved. Lots of things _about_ nutrition
| have been learned but it doesn 't really add up to a Big Theory.
|
| I think the real issue here is "what to do when we bust." Science
| doesn't predictably produce answers to questions we think it
| should answer. We discover what we discover. But, what do you do
| when hospitals, health ministries and such need scientific
| guidelines? IDK is not an acceptable answer. I do know is not a
| scientific one. _" Lets not do science "_ doesn't (didn't?) work
| either. The only choice left is between a lie and a delusion.
| Postmodernism is inevitable.
| minikites wrote:
| >Self correction was fatally weak. Challenging norms had a
| higher burden for proof than the norm had faced.
|
| This is the biggest problem, in my opinion. People don't want
| to look foolish, so it's difficult to change. Doubly so if you
| made it part of your identity, as diet so often is. It's also
| why obstructing progress is much easier than creating the
| conditions for progress. If the status quo serves the powerful,
| it's going to be difficult to change, because they have more to
| lose by looking foolish.
| ska wrote:
| > like the food pyramid hanging in classrooms during the 80s &
| 90s were based on long forgotten, often arbitrary decisions.
|
| The food pyramid was not arbitrary, it was the result of highly
| concentrated lobbying.
| colordrops wrote:
| You are leaving out one of the biggest reasons "science" has
| failed us - big food industry has been heavily influencing
| politics, public opinion through PR campaigns, and even science
| by funding their own studies.
| FredPret wrote:
| Actually, IDK is a great answer if it's true
| dalbasal wrote:
| In theory, sure. In practice, skepticism can be impractical.
| The guys printing the food pyramid postor needs science's
| guidelines. The hospital director wants to provide guidelines
| for the catering contract. Etc. IDK is fine, but they'll just
| ask the next guy until they get an answer. What do you mean
| science doesn't know what we should eat? Oh FredPret, you're
| such a contrarian. Don't be difficult.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I eat astonishing numbers of eggs, and salt nearly everything
| heavily. My N=1 study shows its all good for you, letting you
| stay active for life with low cholesterol and no health issues.
|
| It reminds me of the 100+ year old lady asked "What do you
| attribute your advanced age?" and she replied "Whisky and a cigar
| every day!" I wonder if she was in this study?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Another anecdote: My grandma lived to 98, and only couldn't get
| around so well and lost mental sharpness around 96. She grew up
| on "southern" cooking, complete with lard at almost every meal.
| She refused to eat anything green. Most of her diet in her
| later years, when she just didn't feel like cooking any more,
| was KFC chicken, Papa John's wings, and Domino's pizza, and
| always a sugary dessert. Her joke was the grease kept her
| lubed. She never went to the doctor for checkups, and the only
| time she set foot in a hospital was when she had a cancer on
| her neck in her late 80's. The doctors asked what she did to
| stay so healthy for so long, and she said, "I just keep
| breathing". She died of nothing more than old age. I hope I got
| most of her genes.
| bserge wrote:
| Some people are obsessed with diets and risk factors that
| amount to pretty much nothing over the course of one's life.
|
| There's heavy alcoholics and smokers living to 90, then
| there's the poor sods doing everything "right" and dying of
| cancer at 50. Nutrition is just a very small, imo
| insignificant, part of it - assuming you're not starving or
| eating the _exact_ same thing every day for years.
| cko wrote:
| Many years ago my uncle told me eggs were bad because
| cholesterol. So naturally, I ate 6-8 eggs a day for a few
| weeks, then went for a lipid panel. My HDL went from 50 to 60
| and my LDL went from 80 to 70. I think I had two ramen noodles
| right before that too. Granted, the initial readings were from
| a year before, so maybe it wasn't the eggs.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| It's been awhile since I went down the cholesterol rabbit
| hole, but there was this guy out there claiming he could
| control his colesterol, and unless he was lying, the
| measurements back him up. He'd check his cholesterol daily
| and could influence which direction it was headed with his
| diet.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Yeah my total cholesterol has always been between 120 and
| 140. Not sure what the details are, but it seems to work for
| me.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| the answer to your question is why cholesterol exists. why
| does your body produce the majority of cholesterol? If your
| body produces the majority, why would diet (the minority)
| make an impact?
| spidersouris wrote:
| Eggs could easily be replaced with salt. Consuming too much salt
| (more than 2g a day) is heavily discouraged by some because it is
| said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases as well as
| increase blood pressure to a dangerous level, but others
| repudiate these claims and assert they are untrue, and that salt
| has positive health benefits above this limit.
|
| Even if we take a group of people, put them in a closed place and
| strictly control what they eat, it is extremely difficult to say
| if a certain food has had a particular impact on X or not. There
| are some many elements which are unrelated to nutrition at play
| that X could decrease or increase for any reason other than what
| one ate: stress, tiredness, physical activity, mood...
|
| Now, I reckon the wisest thing to do is to follow what the author
| concludes with: eat moderately and have a balanced nutrition. I
| doubt we'll ever get concrete and truthful research on nutrition
| soon enough. We first need to learn more about the extremely
| complex system that is the human body.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I constantly see people suffer through painful cramps after
| exercising because they refuse to replace the salt they lost
| through sweating due to salt being bad for you.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Agreed. The thing that irritates me so much in all these
| studies is how they conflate correlation and causation. Studies
| to truly isolate just one ingredient would be both time and
| cost prohibitive. We are better served by just eating as varied
| and unprocessed a diet as possible.
| jonasmerlin wrote:
| Relevant Scientific American article about the dubious
| scientific foundation the general vilification of salt is based
| on: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-
| end-t...
| caeril wrote:
| I think the issue with salt and eggs is that we talk of humans
| in the aggregate.
|
| For eggs, there is some small percentage of the population that
| passes the cholesterol into actual high levels of serum LDL.
|
| For salt, there is some small percentage of the population that
| reacts to high sodium levels with hypertension.
|
| And these subsets of population studies skew the results to a
| degree that adversely affects the conclusions for the median
| case.
|
| For most of us, dumping salt onto a plate filled with eggs is
| not only fine, but healthy.
|
| Medicine deals in aggregates, averages, and statistical
| variation, which is to _some degree_ useful. But it does
| precisely nothing to offer testing to tell you if you are in a
| reactive or nonreactive group to stimulus X, which would be
| _extremely_ useful.
|
| We do this with allergies - stick 50 different allergens on a
| grid pattern into your back to determine your precise
| reactivity. But with nutrition? Haha, go screw yourself, all
| humans are the same, eat your 14 servings of grains, regard
| bacon and eggs as poison, and we'll medicate you for your
| resultant metabolic syndrome.
| bserge wrote:
| Pretty much. Same with humans with a "leaky" blood-brain
| barrier. They can actually get GABA and other amino acids
| from the stomach to the brain, leading to vastly different
| effects than the majority of people get.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > it is said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases
|
| How? Salt is a convenient bogeyman, but nobody can demonstrate
| what it role it plays as an agent of disease. Every cell in
| your body regulates isotonic balance and excess sodium is
| rapidly excreted. Complex lifeforms wouldn't exist without this
| fundamental ability.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| It is very simple. If you suffer from high blood pressure
| (above 140/90mm Hg) and your sodium intake is considerable,
| your blood pressure rises even more. You can easily set up a
| study with a control group and test it repeatedly, the
| results will be the same.
|
| However, the mitigating factor is potassium. If you consume
| an adequate amount of foods rich in potassium, the negative
| effect of sodium on your blood pressure is neutralized
| somehow. The exact behaviors depend on the amounts of each.
|
| And here's the problem: in salt, sodium is very concentrated.
| You would have to eat a large amount of foods considered rich
| in potassium, such as tomatoes, in order to neutralize a
| teaspoon of salt.
| danaris wrote:
| > If you suffer from high blood pressure (above 140/90mm
| Hg) and your sodium intake is considerable, your blood
| pressure rises even more. You can easily set up a study
| with a control group and test it repeatedly, the results
| will be the same.
|
| How do you square this with jonasmerlin's sibling post of a
| Scientific American article, pointing out that the
| foundations of this belief do not stand on rigorous
| science?
| sithadmin wrote:
| You don't even have to have high blood pressure for above
| 'normal' (~2000mg/day) salt intake to create the effect.
| It's observable in people with normal blood pressure as
| well, and pronounced in a subset of the population with a
| gene that appears to worsen the effect.
|
| The potassium factor is why many doctors often recommend
| sea/himalayan salt -- these salts usually have a bunch of
| other minerals, including potassium.
|
| For anyone wondering, no, it's not a good idea to try to
| self medicate the combination of high blood pressure + a
| sodium heavy diet with potassium supplements. Do it wrong
| and you'll end up with hyperkalemia, which is both very
| uncomfortable and potentially life-threatening.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > If you suffer from high blood pressure
|
| People who _already have_ a disease that requires salt
| regulation doesn 't prove any causative role.
| nomel wrote:
| > Every cell in your body regulates isotonic balance and
| excess sodium is rapidly excreted.
|
| If I eat something salty for dinner, I wake up with swollen
| eyes, with others in my immediate family doing the same. My
| family uses very little to no salt. My wife can eat as much
| salt as she wants, without any visible effect at all. Her
| family uses, in my perspective, extreme amounts of salt. My
| naive assumption is that salt sensitivity is somewhat
| genetic, with research suggesting the same [1]. Maybe
| related, near hypotension runs in my family, while
| hypertension runs in hers.
|
| 1. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180705115632
| .h...
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| "Nobody" but countless doctors and scientists of the AHA.
|
| _" The AHA recommendation to reduce salt intake is based on
| strong science, not just extrapolations or complex math,"
| Sacco says. "There have even been randomized trials, the
| strongest evidence we have that show people who follow lower-
| sodium diets have lower blood pressure and fewer heart
| attacks and strokes."_
|
| https://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/20110504/study-
| show...
| Justin_K wrote:
| EXCESS salt raises BP, which raises the chances of a cardio
| event. Excess sodium is not rapidly excreted, in fact the
| body requires far more hydration to balance it out.
| https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-
| eating/eat-s...
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| It was demonized because of the vast quantities contained in
| many processed foods but you're right and to add to that
| you'll die much quicker from a lack of salt than from excess
| salt.
| wins32767 wrote:
| Higher salt levels raise blood pressure. High blood pressure
| leads the body to strengthen blood vessel walls, which make
| them less flexible. Less flexible blood vessels put more
| strain on the heart, which in cardiac patients (who are
| operating with a damaged heart) is obviously suboptimal.
|
| There is a ton of studies about this and heart patient life
| expectancies have been going up for the last several decades
| because we have figured this (and a few other things) out.
| sithadmin wrote:
| The link between high sodium intake and elevated blood
| pressure is well documented. This is mostly _because_ of the
| attempt of body systems to maintain isotonic balance.
|
| There's also a signficant portion of the population with a
| genetic predisposition to have above-average increases in
| blood pressure shortly after consuming large amounts of salt,
| to the point that it will even cause hypertension in some
| people that had otherwise normal blood pressure.
|
| Salt -> elevated blood pressure -> complicating factor in
| pulmonary and cardiac disease.
| sorenn111 wrote:
| I'm having deja vu. We had a top story on HN recently where
| either the article or the consensus of the comments was "you
| pretty much cannot believe any studies about food or nutrition."
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| The problem is that humans are incredibly complex and diverse,
| react to stuff in wildly different ways, and you cannot A/B
| test on the same individual, as you cannot reseg it to the same
| starting state, you cannot run two experiments on them, and you
| cannot get two completely matching people.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| And it's somewhat-to-entirely unethical and logistically
| impossible to conduct even uncontrolled studies over a
| human's entire lifespan, which is really what we're talking
| about here. I don't think anybody is worried that eating eggs
| every day will cause health problems for an otherwise-healthy
| 25-year-old.
| ssivark wrote:
| Most "science" that denies the reality of studying complex
| systems is broken. The concept of studying strength of
| correlations, even applied in the context of randomized
| controlled trials is only really effective in low dimensional
| spaces and linear dependences (I'm being very loose here, for
| brevity). But complex systems break all those assumptions.
|
| To steal a quote, researchers use data/statistics like a drunkard
| uses a lamp post -- for support, rather than illumination.
|
| This applies to nutrition, medicine, ecology, economics, etc. I
| wouldn't be surprised if their experimental arms run largely on
| confirmation bias.
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