Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

michaelpollan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 191 posts

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

#101

Post by igravious »

to3m wrote: post #88
dualogy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important What a joke, the only thing that's known for sure about "polyphenols" (and practically all non-vitamin "antioxidants", that was the previous hype) is that a healthy human body rapidly excretes them, as well it should. The rest is hype, speculation, and the everlasting quest for the next "superfood".. Carotenoids, okay, anything that's in egg yolks g…

Carnivore meat you can eat: cat, crocodile, alligator. I'm sure there are others. Not very common in the west - if nothing else, herbivores and omnivores are easier to factory farm - but people do eat them. What about fish? Tuna, salmon, shark - they all eat meat.

Come on. Who eats cats? Dogs yes, but cats?

Crocodile and alligator I can imagine that that's a thing.

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

#102

Post by tallanvor »

ENTP wrote: post #79
xaviers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't speak for anyone else but in my case, an excess of calories usually results in me being an awful lot hotter as my body burns off the extra energy. I'm not a biologist but I was under the impression that a release of insulin was required to store excess energy as fat? That would suggest it's more related to blood sugar spikes than actual energy consumed.

There are absolutely different ways bodies can handle excess calories, and it's pretty clearly documented.

For some people, their body will try to burn the extra calories - this in part may be due to the amount of brown fat, which is one of the mechanisms the body uses to generate heat. For others, their body will store as much energy as possible as fat, and they need to increase their activity level to compensate.

In addition, your body can become more efficient, using less energy based on the calories you consume. This is one reason that it can be very hard to keep weight off after you lose it.

Metabolism is an incredibly complex process, and while we understand a lot of the pieces, we do not yet have a full understanding of how those pieces fit together, and how to use that information to help people change their metabolism beyond more than very general advice (build muscle, be more active), and some things were sort of taken for granted - such as how it used to be thought that lactic acid was responsible for muscle soreness in the days after workouts, when more recent research has shown this isn't the case: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.htm....

Maybe in another 50 years we'll have people who can really understand this stuff.

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

#103

Post by dualogy »

igravious wrote: post #97
dualogy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important What a joke, the only thing that's known for sure about "polyphenols" (and practically all non-vitamin "antioxidants", that was the previous hype) is that a healthy human body rapidly excretes them, as well it should. The rest is hype, speculation, and the everlasting quest for the next "superfood".. Carotenoids, okay, anything that's in egg yolks g…

Anybody who eats shark or eats any other sea creature that eats fish.

True that! That last bit of my post was quite thoughtless

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

#104

Post by raverbashing »

thomasahle wrote: post #100
raverbashing wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> vegetables with no carbs Unless you're eating something that's (almost) 100% cellulose, that's not correct. Most plants have carbs

Cellulose is a carbohydrate too.

Chemically I'm not sure, but it amounts to dietary fiber as it's not digestible by humans

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

#105

Post by didibus »

wyager wrote: post #21
novia wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while since I've read Michael Pollan's book, An Omnivore's Dilemma, but if I am remembering correctly, there are several locations in the world where people live an abnormally long time, with good quality of life. Researchers went to those places and found out what people usually eat there. Then, comparing the diets of the different qualifying populations, the diet advice Pollan came up with to live a lon…

> there are several locations in the world where people live an abnormally long time, with good quality of life There are many equally likely explanations that don't involve whatever those people happen to be eating. Regional genetic tendencies, slightly elevated levels of background radiation leading to radiation hormesis, a social tendency towards exercise, etc. It could be all in their diet, but then again, we don…

I think this is the primary criteria, do you care enough about your health to modify your diet even if the health benefits might be minute or null?

If you do, then some diets have better odds, like the Mediterranean diet.

It seems to me you don't care enough, or believe a random diet or one selected by the food industry will give you better odds.

Sure, diets are not miracle life extenders or cure for disease. At least none of the known diets have been able to confidently show they are. But a diet is not like sending someone to the moon where you need very close to 100% confidence in your technique. A diet just needs to beat the odds of your current diet. In that sense, most diets, even fad ones, probably beats the average American diet odds.

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

#106

Post by Illotus »

ivanhoe wrote: post #59
xaviers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> 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.

This. With the addition that psychology is hugely affected human bodys tendency to defend agains weight loss. One good recent paper on the subject how much weight loss increased hunger: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21653/abstrac...

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

#107

Post by coldtea »

sametmax wrote: post #99
coldtea wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again I tested it on myself. It doesn't matter, it's still not true. And there are tons of ways the measuring can go wrong or be misleading.

In the bottom comment I provided links to resources dealing with food toxicity. Part of them deal with toxicity and weight. Would you provide the resources to counter examples ? It's only fair to have literature to compare the 2 point of views.

>In the bottom comment I provided links to resources dealing with food toxicity.

You just provided general resources about food and nutrition (based on the links I'm familiar with -- others could be pseudo-science). Give some specific excerpts about "toxins" and we can discuss them.

All food has side effects (e.g. too much sugar and diabetes, micro-allergies, cured meat and cancer, etc). This is not the same as some unspecified BS "toxins".

It also has nothing to do with "I eat less calories and I get fatter compared to eating more" which was the original claim we disputed -- which is absolutely incorrect.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-detox-scam/

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/colon...

https://sciencebasedpharmacy.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/the-de...

http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/12/sorry-but-theres-no-such...

http://www.livescience.com/34845-detox-cleansing-facts-falla...

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-detox-scam-how-to-spot-...

http://skepdic.com/detox.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detoxification_(alternative_me...

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

#108

Post by sametmax »

snaily wrote: post #75
sametmax wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not exactly true. Yes, there is a big variance in the way people process food. But people also usually exhibits common characteristics: - they don't eat that much on average. While they may sometime eat a lot, if you what the quantity during one week, you'll see they eat less than most people. - they eat slowly. Those 2 things alone allow you to process a certain amount of unbalanced diet. BTW, if anybody wan…

Do you have a citation for your assertions - perhaps one with more specifics than unnamed "toxins"?

Again I'm not a native english speaker, "toxins" is just a generic world I used to try to convey "anything the body can't process right now, how that is destroy it".

"Some molecules are things that have nothing to do in the body (Maillard reaction output, antibiotic in the meat, pesticide in fruits, etc). Some are just regular things we can process but in a greater concentration that is healthy. Some are just natural waste of our regular body processes, but in a greater quantity than we can manage in our current health."

I gave references on studies in another comment.

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

#109

Post by coldtea »

raverbashing wrote: post #96
coldtea wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. I doubt so. If you stick to protein and vegetables with no carbs and sugars in general, you get lots of filling fiber, and fewer calories, unless they consume huge quantities of lard or bacon every day, or drink sugars (e.g. in juices or sodas), etc. So those people are doing something wrong.

> vegetables with no carbs Unless you're eating something that's (almost) 100% cellulose, that's not correct. Most plants have carbs

Hah, I didn't meant it as: "vegetables with no carbs", but "stick to protein and vegetables, with no carbs and sugars in general".

That is, no carby foods, carbs like pasta, bread, et al.

I painfully know how many carbs are in each vegetable (and net cars, minus fiber etc), as I've followed some low-carb diets.

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

#110

Post by didibus »

wallace_f wrote: post #26
wutbrodo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> 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. I think it's a pretty important concept for people to keep in mind that if you're not verifying your guesses with experimentation, you're fundamentally not doing science.

I disagree. Doing science involves a mix of observation and experimentation. A lot of diet recommendations often do both. They've observed eating habits of healthy people over less healthy people, and then they've experimented by having a bunch of people try the diet, and after some years, they've observed again what was the effects.

Some diets don't do that. They're sometimes based on a type of "that makes sense" intuition, like, our ancestors used to eat mostly meat, so we should eat like them. Or, this substance is known to absorb toxins, so obviously eating it will clear your bloodstream of them. These I admit aren't scientific. Though often those intuitive catch phrases are thrown on top of scientific dietary ideas as a way to convince people to it and sell a bunch of books and products.

Post reply on HN