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Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

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Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#1
Given amount of information on nutrition it is hard to wrap your head around it. On top of that, I constantly question the veracity of claims that are being made [0]

Which sources do you use to learn more about health & nutrition (anything from podcasts to papers will do)?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html

Re: Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#2
I listen closely to my body, my parents and my doctor in roughly that order.

Old knowledge is better than new when it comes to health - statistically too it has "survived" longer without being debunked.

Forget fads and realize there are always economic incentives at play to promote information on health.

Excessive attention to health could be called stress, which itself is horribly bad for health.

Re: Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#4
As a long time DIY Soylent aficionado I use examine.com[0] as my go to source on supplements and USDA Food Composition Databases[1] to look up nutrition info on food. When and if I need community input on stuff, I usually go to the DIY section of Soylent forum[2].

[0]https://examine.com/

[1]https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/

[2]https://discourse.soylent.com/c/diy

Re: Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#5
I went to several nutritionists with a similar quest after watching a video that explained all foods only have 7 things in them. It was money poorley spent. None of them could answer my simple questions. And all of them wanted to develop a meal plan for me. This was a classic buy what I'm selling not what you're asking for situation. I was going to go to the local college bookstore and get a book on it.

Re: Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#6
Harvard's Nutrition Source web site [0] is the best source I've found. It has a wealth of evidence-based information. The accompanying book "Eat Drink and Be Healthy" discusses what features make a study reliable or not. The web site will be more up-to-date on specific dietary advice.

The Harvard School of Public Health are behind 2 of the biggest ongoing studies on diet, the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study[1], which has followed 50,000 men for over 30 years, and the Nurses' Health Study which has included 275,000 people over 40 years.

[0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpfs/

[2] http://www.nurseshealthstudy.org/

Re: Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#7
If you want a reputable look at health stories in the press (admittedly with a strong UK focus), the NHS website has an excellent section called 'Behind the headlines'. It looks at health stories in the news and examines them in more detail, debunking misleading claims. You can trust that the information is reputable and there is no commercial conflict of interest.

The health articles are written for the layperson and go to the source of the research - explaining the methodology and limitations of a particular study.

It's an excellent resource and one that deserves a wider audience in my view:

http://www.nhs.uk/News/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx

Here's how they reported on a recent story about bread: Is white bread just as healthy as brown?

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2017/06June/Pages/Is-white-bread-just...

And here's one from 2015: Sugar intake should be drastically reduced, says report

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/07July/Pages/Sugar-intake-should...

Re: Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#8
http://dietdoctor.com/ is my primary source of information on both nutrition and health. zaptheimpaler makes a good point to listen to your own body. Some years ago, I wasn't, and I felt like crap a lot of the time, with something that sounds a lot like IBS.

I switched my diet over to something more closely to what diet doctor advocates, and have gotten slighly more strict with every year, becauase I _feel_ a little better. To me, the "proof" that the information is accurate is that I feel good.

I have the impression, though this may be dated information, that a lot of science on the topic has been primarily focused on measuring the number of calories in/out, because that's easy to measure. When you try to measure _quality_ of your calories, everything becomes magnitudes more complicated to prove, so there's far less reliable science on the topic.

Re: Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#9
I'm trying to solve this exact problem, since I had/have it too. Not just for nutrition but for all habits.

I read directly from scientific articles. And I'm also trying to come up with a methodology to select the best and most useful ones, that can provide actionable guidance in terms of which lifestyle changes to adopt.

You can find more about my habits and the papers I've selected in one of my answers on reddit [0] or you can also check a prototype I created to help me find which lifestyle changes would most improve my health/longevity [1]

Let me know if I can help in any other way

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/5isp2r/what_thin...

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.healthylab...

Re: Ask HN: Where to get reliable information on nutrition/health?

#10
The author Michael Pollan summed it up fairly well with "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

When in doubt, try to think what humans evolved to do and to process, and try to mimic that.

For nutrition, did we evolve with enormous servings of fast food, donuts, and spend millions of years eating highly refined highly concentrated packaged garbage packed full of preservatives, chemicals, and mystery substances, all consumed in absurd quantities? Or did we evolve to eat a diverse range of plants with occasional proteins and meats?

For health and exercise, did we spend millions of years sitting around watching TV and being screen sloths? Or did we spend millions of years walking dozens of miles every day, with near constant physical activity in some form or another?

As for studies and raw data, NIH pubmed https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/, NHS, EU, all have interesting raw largely non-opinionated information to scan through.

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