Ask HN: What should we eat?

The USDA recommendations are almost universally considered wrong, perhaps even exactly backwards.

You have people like Michael Pollan saying we should eat traditional foods, mostly plants, and not too much.

Gary Taubes says we should eat meat, lots of it. Red meat.

The prevailing wisdom from nutritional science is--well, I have no idea what it is. I guess it's to eat foods high in polyunsaturated fats, avoid red meat, and avoid refined starches and sugars, but I'm not sure.

I hate that I get anxious when trying to decide something so simple as a shopping list for groceries.

Based on my experience in fields where I have a measure of expertise, the difference between a persuasive bunch of garbage and the truth can be incredibly hard to discern until someone contextualizes it all for you.

Does anyone have any suggestions for books or articles that cut through these various arguments in an authoritative way, explain shortcomings and virtues, and makes a straightforward recommendation based on a full appreciation of the all the arguments involved?

I personally believe we should be eating raw food. (plant based foods etc) and not meat, although I still do :|

Some great points are:

+ Look at our teeth, they are made for eating plants/veggies and not meat, unlike lions etc.

+ Cooked foods kill the nutrients, unlike eating raw organic food.

+ Our digestive tract is long, apparently to process plant based foods, compared to a meat eating anmial like a lion, they have a short digestive tract, so they can process raw meat quickly.

+ Animal meat is the only food that gives us colesterol.

Get this movie and watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZmV8b1wr10

This is tangential, but does anyone know of a field of study that specifically investigates traditional dietary frameworks in different parts of the world? Not what people actually eat per se, but what local tradition advises? The comparative philosophy of food, the anthropology of normative diets?

In China, for example, some foods are considered "heating", while others "cooling". Based on the time of year and your own condition, you may be advised to eat this set of foods, and avoid that.

If one could compile a set of such recommendations, cross reference them, and control for variations in climate, soil and whatnot, perhaps some interesting patterns might emerge.

Lions are carnivores, their teeth are specifically targetted at tearing and eating meat, which is why they have large incisors. Cows are herbivors, their teeth are flat, and have no incisors at all.

Humans have a combination of the two, and also the rest of our digestive system is also built to makes us omnivores.

Cooking food is a form of external pre-digestion that actively increases the effective nutritional content of most food, especially vegetables, which are otherwise too hard to break down (have you tried eating raw potato?).

Some evolutionary biologists believe that learning to cook food was crucial in providing us with the extra calories required to fuel our gigantic brains.