Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
michaelpollan.com
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
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Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#2Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities.
We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy".
Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a useful dietary recommendation.
Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#3Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward thing…
"Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. In the 50 years between now and your hypothetical in which nutrition is "solved", advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt.
Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#4The first time I saw this quote was at our local Mod Market which has become our goto for a quick, healthyish meal. I wish there were more chains that shared a similar philosophy.
Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#5Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward thing…
Medicine, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing treatments, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities.
We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about how each and every person should be treated, except for fairly straightforward things like "cut out a tumour".
Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a new, synthetic digestive tract.
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To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science or don't think the science is moving fast enough for your liking isn't helpful. Science is science. We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too.
Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#6Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward thing…
Sure, nutrition is littered with crackpot theories, voluntarily misleading research funded by corporations, smoke and mirrors, and so on. And if you only look at stuff that hits the news, then yes, things will change drastically every few years, probably forever. That's because people like sensationalism.
However, there are reasonable diets that don't make the news, for example the "Mediterranean Diet". While it doesn't come with any extraordinary claims, it seems to have endured with a good reputation from the onset (it was invented in the 70s and first gained popularity in the 90s) (also note that this article awkwardly mentions it in a way that seems to ignore most studies on it, but that's not the point). Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is.
Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#7Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward thing…
"Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. In the 50 years between now and your hypothetical in which nutrition is "solved", advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt.
> "Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science.
I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."?
The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write.
> science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is.
No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true.
> advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt
Much of the advice in the article is too specific and based on weak evidence. For example, the suggestion not to eat much meat; there are huge amounts of research suggesting that eating mostly meat is a very good approach. I'm not going to claim this is true, because as I said, it's actually pretty weak evidence, but there's certainly no good justification to authoritatively claim the opposite.
Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#8Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward thing…
Sure, nutrition is littered with crackpot theories, voluntarily misleading research funded by corporations, smoke and mirrors, and so on. And if you only look at stuff that hits the news, then yes, things will change drastically every few years, probably forever. That's because people like sensationalism. However, there are reasonable diets that don't make the news, for example the "Mediterranean Diet". While it does…
> for example the "Mediterranean Diet".
The irony here is delicious. You've gotten sucked into yet another evidence-free fad diet, but you're lecturing me on only listening to fad diets.
And no, it's not a matter of "only looking at stuff that hits the news"; the FDA and FNS, which should be following strong scientific principles, change their dietary recommendations and rules all the time, without particularly strong evidence for doing so.
> Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is.
Do you make this claim based on strong evidence, or does this just sound like good Common Sense (tm) to you?
Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#9The first time I saw this quote was at our local Mod Market which has become our goto for a quick, healthyish meal. I wish there were more chains that shared a similar philosophy.
Looks like a lot of processed meat and cheese to me.
Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)
#10Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward thing…
Medicine, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing treatments, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about how each and every person should be treated, except for fairly straightforward…
> To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science
What makes you think A) that's my motivation or B) I don't understand the science? I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm well-versed in statistics and hypothesis testing, so I am at least equipped to make general observations about the predictive power of the field.
> or don't think the science is moving fast enough
When did I ever say anything to that effect? The hard biological sciences are moving extremely quickly, and soon nutrition will be subsumed into computational chemistry like the rest.
> Science is science.
And some fields of science have very low predictive power, like current nutrition. Do you really put psychology on the same ground as particle physics?
> We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too.
This is pretty much exactly what I'm saying about nutritionists, but for some reason you appear to be mad at me about it.