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Ask HN: What should we eat?

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Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#41

Post by lionhearted »

thesnark wrote: post #29
lionhearted wrote: post #23

Start by trying to identify some foods that are clearly good for you and increase how much you eat them. EX, oatmeal - fantastic food, almost universally agreed to be healthy, and has no real potential downsides. Then find foods that are clearly bad for you and decrease how much you eat them. EX, Coca-Cola - pretty much no micronutritional value, all you're getting is sugars and bad stuff. That's the way forwards. Th…

I would just like to point out that oatmeal has a glycemic index of about 50 (out of 100). That's for plain oatmeal with nothing added, not the instant stuff or the sugar laden version most people end up with.

Ah yes, use whole oatmeal instead of instant oatmeal - it actually doesn't take much longer to cook. Definitely stay away from the sugary junk.

The real advantage to oatmeal is that the fiber is quite high - this has many advantages, a big one being that you'll feel full and satisfied for the first part of the day. Also, 300 calories of oatmeal is 56 grams of carbohydrates, but only 1 gram of sugar [1]. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I think oatmeal is pretty much all glucose-based carbs and fiber, which is the healthier form of carbohydrate. (Fructose/sucrose/sugars being the worse form)

[1] http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/breakfast-cereals/1597/2

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#42

Post by rubashov »

jvdh wrote: post #7
babyboy808 wrote: post #3

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 ha…

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.

This is a ridiculous point because for over two million years human related hominids have been using stone tools to kill and butcher meat.

Humans have massive predator fangs that look like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Bifaz_de_...

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#43

Post by modeless »

shib71 wrote: post #36
modeless wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, but personal diet anecdotes aren't what eavc is asking for. What trustworthy sources are these decisions based on?

Unfortunately I have the same problem with sources as the original poster. Nutrition science has become so sensationalized that it's hard to take any of it seriously. I take my cue mostly from an instinct developed over years of paying attention to how my diet makes me feel. Stuff like CSIRO's book [ http://www.csiro.au/science/TWD.html ] do influence that instinct - I feel that their research is somewhat removed fro…

I prefer science to instinct. One human lifetime doesn't provide nearly enough opportunities for diet experiments to determine all the correct answers for yourself, even if you could separate real diet effects from personal bias, the placebo effect, and other influences in your life.

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#44

Post by yason »

The difficult thing is that it depends completely on the person.

Some might thrive on meat and vegetables while bread and wheat makes them lose energy. Some really need the grain and the crops and meat makes them feel ill. Some need something in between and some people balance themselves on a totally different axis. Moreover, anything you crave for is probably bad for you at that time.

Eating vegetables seems pretty universal. I've never heard of a person who couldn't eat vegetables, sans extreme cases of sensitivy or allergies with regard to specific produce. So, start with vegetables and add what you feel like.

Personally, I buy fresh ingredients and cook most of my own food. Organic, if available. Very little bread and if so, it's 100% rye: this one is easy in Finland. No processed foods unless I'm enjoying the occasion of eating out and can't really control where the stuff originally comes from.

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#45

Post by rubashov »

briandw wrote: post #6
babyboy808 wrote: post #3

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 ha…

This is incorrect and naive. Our teeth evolved to eat a wide verity of things, molars to chew plants, and incisors and canines to rip meat. Look at the diet of chimps, they eat whatever they can get their hands on, meat included. "Cooked foods are bad" is a crock. You can over cook foods, and maybe cooking some foods is bad, but cooking increases the nutritional value of many foods. Processing makes more nutrients av…

> Processing makes more nutrients available to the body.

This is certainly true, but it's just as important that processing eliminates toxins. Despite the moaning you hear about processed food, a major problem is that our modern diet is under-processed.

There are many foods that used to universally be soaked & aged, sprouted, fermented, or treated with lye, or a combination of these steps, in order to eliminate anti-nutrients and allergens. This is rarely done on the modern industrial scale for reasons of cost. Modern flour is not the same thing as people were eating 150 years ago. The native americans always treated corn with lye. The settlers didn't and consequently got pellagra, and we continue to eat untreated corn.

Read Stephan Guyenet and the Weston Price Foundation have literature on various traditional processing steps and chemically what they were achieving.

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#46

Post by anthonyb »

samstokes wrote: post #14
leif wrote: post #2

http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/

I guess this is getting downvoted for being frivolous, but I think it's actually relevant (as well as pretty funny). Cooking for yourself is a lot healthier than always eating restaurant food, ready meals or takeaway. Of course you have to cook balanced, healthy dishes; the linked site seems to link mostly to such dishes.

Actually it mostly seems to link to "Sorry There has been an error processing your request. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later."

Could just be recipe.com though...

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#47

Post by Devilboy »

donaldc wrote: post #19
Devilboy wrote: post #15

I figure if you eat things that's been around for thousands of years you'll probably be OK. It seems that everyone agrees on: - Lots of fruit and vegetables - Legumes - Fish twice a week or more - Red meat but not for every meal - Avoid highly processed foods - Avoid dairy products There doesn't seem to be any consensus on wheat products. Rice seems fine, and potatoes too if you don't deep-fry them. Of course nobody…

Avoid dairy products is not something everyone agrees on.

Not 'everyone' agrees but most experts seem to.

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#48

Post by jscore »

shib71 wrote: post #10

My tendencies, which seem to work well: - Foods with less processing - more fresh stuff, less stuff that needs preservatives - High ratio of vegatables/fruit to meat - Less high-carb stuff, and always the low-gi versions (e.g. wholemeal/rye bread, brown rice) - Eat what you enjoy. Find a balance between healthy and tasty you can live with. - Indulging in stuff not on this list is serious business - it has to be reall…

Enjoying food is a tricky thing.

People love the taste of sweet and companies have engineered such foods so people eat it, but it doesn't mean it's good for you.

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#49

Post by plesn »

My personal first "contextualisation" about the food industry was a book called "A Diet for a Small Planet" (the reedition, not the original one). I liked it because it was the first time I saw some data and graphs about how and why (hint: profit) our food production is plain wrong.

Now, I try to be as cheap and sane as I can, mostly by cooking more stuff myself and eating more vegetables (non-industrial whenever possible).

Re: Ask HN: What should we eat?

#50

Post by sliverstorm »

seldo wrote: post #11
shib71 wrote: post #10

My tendencies, which seem to work well: - Foods with less processing - more fresh stuff, less stuff that needs preservatives - High ratio of vegatables/fruit to meat - Less high-carb stuff, and always the low-gi versions (e.g. wholemeal/rye bread, brown rice) - Eat what you enjoy. Find a balance between healthy and tasty you can live with. - Indulging in stuff not on this list is serious business - it has to be reall…

The last is probably the most important. A snack should a treat; not a thing you do every day at 4pm.

What are we defining as a snack? My 'snacks' are whatever I can find in my house, which basically means sugar snap peas, cereal or a sandwich.
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