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

The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

undark.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 136 posts

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#101

Post by danaris »

Spivak wrote: post #56
ipsi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that literally impossible, because there are so many different things that a subset of people need to avoid eating? e.g., if you have a nut allergy, your healthy diet can't include nuts; if you're lactose-intolerant your healthy diet shouldn't include lactose; if you have coeliac disease, your healthy diet can't include gluten; if you have IBS your healthy diet shouldn't include anything that triggers it (which…

I think you're misunderstanding the claim. It's name a healthy diet. A single one. A diet which followed to the letter for the time span its prescribed will not cause any health problems traceable back to it. Make whatever assumptions about the hypothetical person you need and assume that they follow the diet for only as long as those assumptions hold.

I think you're misunderstanding the response.

There is no "healthy diet" that is universally applicable. Go back and look at the list of different possible restrictions in the parent post.

Then add the fact that many people are allergic to all kinds of different things.

Then add to that the fact that people of different ethnic backgrounds are adapted to do better with different balances of nutrients.

Any "hypothetical person" such as you describe would, fundamentally and inevitably, "normalize" one specific type of person and "other" everyone else. Claiming that "this is a healthy diet" in such a way would be grossly irresponsible, even if you then went on to list the features of a person it is "healthy" for.

Finally, even if you wanted to make such a description, the whole point of this thread is that we do not have a scientifically-rigorous-enough idea of what it would be to be able to do so with a high degree of certainty, even for a clearly-defined set of parameters for who would be eating it.

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#102

Post by danaris »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #34
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases How? Salt is a convenient bogeyman, but nobody can demonstrate what it role it plays as an agent of disease. Every cell in your body regulates isotonic balance and excess sodium is rapidly excreted. Complex lifeforms wouldn't exist without this fundamental ability.

It is very simple. If you suffer from high blood pressure (above 140/90mm Hg) and your sodium intake is considerable, your blood pressure rises even more. You can easily set up a study with a control group and test it repeatedly, the results will be the same. However, the mitigating factor is potassium. If you consume an adequate amount of foods rich in potassium, the negative effect of sodium on your blood pressure…

> If you suffer from high blood pressure (above 140/90mm Hg) and your sodium intake is considerable, your blood pressure rises even more. You can easily set up a study with a control group and test it repeatedly, the results will be the same.

How do you square this with jonasmerlin's sibling post of a Scientific American article, pointing out that the foundations of this belief do not stand on rigorous science?

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#103

Post by [deleted] »

nradov wrote: post #58
bigcorp-slave wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great if this website answered the question “what is a healthy diet”, instead of trying everywhere to get me to watch some of its hundreds of videos.

I don't want to go through a bunch of training to learn how to write good software. It would be great if a website just told me which buttons to press on the keyboard.

[deleted]

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#104

Post by Spivak »

danaris wrote: post #101
Spivak wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding the claim. It's name a healthy diet. A single one. A diet which followed to the letter for the time span its prescribed will not cause any health problems traceable back to it. Make whatever assumptions about the hypothetical person you need and assume that they follow the diet for only as long as those assumptions hold.

I think you're misunderstanding the response. There is no "healthy diet" that is universally applicable. Go back and look at the list of different possible restrictions in the parent post. Then add the fact that many people are allergic to all kinds of different things. Then add to that the fact that people of different ethnic backgrounds are adapted to do better with different balances of nutrients. Any "hypothetica…

I didn’t ask for it to be universally applicable, or even broadly applicable. Or even applicable to more than the person the question imagines. I asked if we have enough information to know one single example of a healthy diet for one imaginary person who you are allowed to assume has no complicating factors.

Because if we can’t answer this much much simpler problem then we have no hope of giving nutritional advice to a population that is as varied as you describe.

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#105

Post by pvaldes »

reducesuffering wrote: post #87
pvaldes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Industrial egg production is bad for the chickens Most successful bird in the planet. Almost 26 billions of chicken lives in this planet because egg production. But yeah, farming is bad. Dodos are fortunate to live such wild and happy lives currently.

You'd be wishing for the fate of the dodo if you were trapped inside a cage 1.5x your volume for your entire life, your only consolation being there's another 100 billion of you. "How successful of me," you'd be saying to yourself?

> You'd be wishing for the fate of the dodo if jailed

Not, I wouldn't.

To be alive and bored is better than to be dead and rotten. Rethink your priorities.

Chicken are equal to humans only in totalitarian dreams

And by the way only idiots and cowards choose suicide when life is not so good as the expected

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#106

Post by spfzero »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #21
spidersouris wrote: post #3

Eggs could easily be replaced with salt. Consuming too much salt (more than 2g a day) is heavily discouraged by some because it is said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases as well as increase blood pressure to a dangerous level, but others repudiate these claims and assert they are untrue, and that salt has positive health benefits above this limit. Even if we take a group of people, put them in a closed…

> it is said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases How? Salt is a convenient bogeyman, but nobody can demonstrate what it role it plays as an agent of disease. Every cell in your body regulates isotonic balance and excess sodium is rapidly excreted. Complex lifeforms wouldn't exist without this fundamental ability.

Salt is something regulated well in all higher organisms. Probably dating from when we evolved in a salt-water ocean. That said, in a modern diet with lots of sodium, but also lots less of other important minerals like magnesium, potassium, etc., who knows?

Probably depends on the totality of the diet, for instance if you are getting a lot of salt "artificially", and eating an otherwise nutrient-poor diet, maybe lowering salt intake is a good thing. But if you are eating a varied and mostly natural diet, so that you're getting a wide variety of vitamins, minerals, sun-exposure etc., your absolute sodium intake may not matter much.

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#107

Post by bigcorp-slave »

nradov wrote: post #58
bigcorp-slave wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great if this website answered the question “what is a healthy diet”, instead of trying everywhere to get me to watch some of its hundreds of videos.

I don't want to go through a bunch of training to learn how to write good software. It would be great if a website just told me which buttons to press on the keyboard.

Don’t be snide, it’s unbecoming.

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#108

Post by bigcorp-slave »

beering wrote: post #45
bigcorp-slave wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great if this website answered the question “what is a healthy diet”, instead of trying everywhere to get me to watch some of its hundreds of videos.

I feel like this attitude is part of why nutrition science is the way it is. People are boxed into this "healthiness is a one-dimensional scale" thinking. Are eggs healthy or not healthy? Are potatoes healthy or not healthy? Is pizza healthy or not healthy? But reality is way more complex and nutrition science knows very little about "healthiness" (to the extent that you can distill diet into a one-dimensional scale)…

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that there be a landing page that says “most healthy people should follow a Mediterranean diet” or similar.

Sure, there are food allergies - I have some myself - but this site seems like it’s trying to get me to buy the book and give the video views. I want information in text quickly. Then if I want to learn more, more information in longer text. This is how almost all valuable information is conveyed across all topic areas.

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#109

Post by rafaelero »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #15
sorenn111 wrote: post #4

I'm having deja vu. We had a top story on HN recently where either the article or the consensus of the comments was "you pretty much cannot believe any studies about food or nutrition."

The problem is that humans are incredibly complex and diverse, react to stuff in wildly different ways, and you cannot A/B test on the same individual, as you cannot reseg it to the same starting state, you cannot run two experiments on them, and you cannot get two completely matching people.

That's too dramatic. If we were that different, research into medications would be a waste of time.

Re: The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

#110

Post by rafaelero »

I think these types of takes are too harsh on nutrition. Nutrition are not only observational studies, you know? For example, we know that LDL is causally connected to our killer number one (atheroschlerosis). We are pretty pretty pretty sure that it is true (both clinical interventions with statins as well and mendelian studies confirm that). So, if that is the case, we can just split people into groups that consume one pattern of food and another one that acts like control. What happens to their LDL after some weeks? See, not that hard. There are a bunch of other biomarkers as well that can be used to do experiments like that. There are of course always a possibility that these changes on biomarkers don't mean anything at all, but this is something that will eventually show up on data. So... I don't really understand all these skepticism about nutrition as a field. People are too dramatic and react weirdly with all this "omg they are lying to me! I can't trust anyone" and go on to trust bro science. Grow up. Obesity epidemic is very real and somewhat there is this idea that we don't know anything about what a healthy diet is. This is ridiculous and shouldn't be that hard to discredit. Tribalism perpetuates that shit.
Post reply on HN