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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

michaelpollan.com

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Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#51

Post by cmrdporcupine »

umberway wrote: post #42
talktime wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get high on carbs or alcohol sure enough. Try getting high on protein or fat though. Telling carboholics they need to eat less food is like telling alcoholics they need to drink less liquid. It doesn't work - you've got to be more specific.

It's complicated. If I gave an obese person a bag of sugar or a kilo of lard she probably wouldn't enjoy these things. On the other hand some folk can eat luxury foods regularly without ill effect. It depends on personality and intent as much as upon specific foodstuffs and substances. And are you sure about protein? Personally I experience a strong desire for meat if I haven't had any for a few days. The fulfillment…

If you go keto/atkins/etc for a while you get sick of meat. At least I have. It becomes tedious to eat and my portion sizes have dropped. I end up eating more vegetables than I ever did before, and take more pleasure from them.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#52

Post by xaviers »

ENTP wrote: post #28

When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#53

Post by dualogy »

wyager wrote: post #2

Nutrition, 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…

> except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy".

Even that's a myth, funnily enough. You don't need ascorbic acid per se, you just need.. ascorbate. With the acid we can synthesize the ascorbate our cells can work with. But we can also eat it directly pre-formed by other herbivores, contained in medium-rare meats or not-cremated-for-hours livers, or soft-boiled egg yolks etc.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#54

Post by oculusthrift »

charlieflowers wrote: post #27
umberway wrote: post #24

Nutrition, medicine, psychology are beset by empiricism : trying to find facts without having theories to support them. Journalists then make hay with the results, hinting at conclusions and advice for the public, using the authority of Science, but really bringing it into disrepute. An awful lot of research money has been wasted in this way and of course much of the work is not reproducible.

>> Nutrition, medicine, psychology are beset by empiricism: trying to find facts without having theories to support them. Really? Seems to me there are a ton of theories but precious few facts. Atkins, low carb, high carb, gluten free, etc. Theories everywhere. But science simply cannot tell us what foods to eat and what to avoid. It's very frustrating to me how limited our knowledge of the human body is.

i disagree. it really isn't hard to follow what science says. problem is there is a lot of money to be made peddling bullshit. it's a lot like finance where 99 pct of stuff out there is garbage but there does exist fundamental guiding principles that exist as fact.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#55

Post by wruza »

Freestyler_3 wrote: post #47
ENTP wrote: post #28

When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.

I can eat anything and wont gain weight. It really seems like there is too much diversity in how we handle food inside our body. The best diet is to try some things(experiment) and do whatever works best, not what feels best. Too many of these diets read like they are the most fun thing to do in the world. Also a lot of people have the tendency to get their goal and then stop the diet only to gain weight again (then…

This worked for me too, I could eat any amounts of anything and weight even less than normal. Then I realized (well, my gastroenterologist did) that my liver had a pretty common pathology all that time and it started to make harm. We quickly fixed that and now I have to choose what to eat, because gaining, say, 5kg in one week is a no-brainer now. This is the story of one specific issue with a human body, that has tens if not hundreds of them.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#56

Post by legulere »

xaviers wrote: post #52
ENTP wrote: post #28

When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

This is true, but it ignores a lot of other things that are going on:

Absorption and digestion can greatly vary between humans. (A Common example are algae).

What kind of micro and macronutrients you eat will directly and indirectly affect your metabolism.

What you eat will affect your hunger.

Those and other complex interplays lead to things that are counterintuitive. For instance there recently was some study that drinking soda with artificial sweetener also leads to obesity, if I remember correctly.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#57

Post by DanBC »

problems wrote: post #31

Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like "avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" and a lot of "avoid processed anything". While I'm sure there's some arguable benefits to these things, I think it's paranoid or stupid to dismiss something just for being "processed". What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more process…

> What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more processed necessitates any loss.

I hope it means something like:

Take a chicken and roast it, with potatoes and vegetables. Add some gravy.

Now take the same chicken. Remove most of the meat and sell it. Mechanically recover the rest of the meat, and form it into small popcorn size bites. Bread those, deep fry them, serve them with a sugar sauce.

The roast chicken is a good meal. It's healthy, it's slow to prepare and slow to eat.

The popcorn chicken? It's hyper-palatable. It's been engineered to be cheap to make, and to hit all the points of salt, fat, and sugar that humans seek out in food. It's not a satisfying meal because it lacks the fibre from the vegetables. And it's very easy to eat. It's a much worse choice, but it's a much easier, and more tempting, choice.

> products that taste worse or equal and spoil quicker

We see that (in the UK) with ketchup. People used to keep it, opened, in a cupboard and it would last for months. But now you're supposed to keep it in a fridge and use it within 8 weeks after you've opened it. The modern version has much less salt, and doesn't have sodium benzoate.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#58

Post by tinbucket »

dualogy wrote: post #48
tinbucket wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet. You jump pretty readily to a conclusion that isn't in what's said. "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us. You can eat nothing but potatoes, which are filled with starch, but a diet filled with plants is much more likely to involve a rich variety of very healthy foods. So…

> "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us. That's some meme. Which ones exactly? The most nutrient- dense foods (per gram / per kcal) available to us are livers, other organs, eggs and ruminant meat --- even before accounting for the latters' vastly superior digestability and bio-availability , and even before accounting for the formers' countless antinutrien…

At no point did I state that any of the foods you mentioned were nutrient poor -- I just said that some plants are among the most nutrient dense foods available. This can be true without dismissing other foods as nutrient poor. That even fits in with Pollan's maxim, which simply states most of the food you eat should be plants.

Since you asked, here are some nutrient rich plants from memory: kale, spinach, blueberries, garlic, lead, raspberries, asparagus, lentils.

All of these make great additions to any diet, aren't loaded with toxic levels of sugar and starch. They go great with liver, eggs, fish, or meat. I don't really understand where your hostility comes from, or why you simultaneously try to downplay the nutrients available in plants as some kind of conspiracy against other forms of food.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#59

Post by ivanhoe »

xaviers wrote: post #52
ENTP wrote: post #28

When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

> if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight

This is the key point and it makes all the difference. You need to be able to stay on the diet for a sufficiently long time, and that's why different approaches are needed fro different people. If you eat carbs you need to measure carefully every meal and calculate the calories, which to many people very quickly gets extremely annoying. On low carb diets you don't have to. Also there are mood changes depending on the taste of the food that you eat. If you like eating meat and veggies, low-carb diets taste great, you enjoy every meal. It makes it much easier to abide the rules. Also general mental state is important, high stress and depression will sabotage your efforts.

Diets are not just about nutrition, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. Psychology and physical activities play equally, if not more important role in dieting.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#60

Post by maccard »

oculusthrift wrote: post #54
charlieflowers wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Nutrition, medicine, psychology are beset by empiricism: trying to find facts without having theories to support them. Really? Seems to me there are a ton of theories but precious few facts. Atkins, low carb, high carb, gluten free, etc. Theories everywhere. But science simply cannot tell us what foods to eat and what to avoid. It's very frustrating to me how limited our knowledge of the human body is.

i disagree. it really isn't hard to follow what science says. problem is there is a lot of money to be made peddling bullshit. it's a lot like finance where 99 pct of stuff out there is garbage but there does exist fundamental guiding principles that exist as fact.

If it's not so difficult to follow what science says, can you sum it up for us here?
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