USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets • Hacker News Board

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#141

Post by sph » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:32 AM UTC

strken wrote: post #109

I'm not convinced by some of the common beliefs about low-carb diets either. They seem to be good for weight loss[0] but bad for all-cause mortality[1]. If you're making dietary recommendations, it's hard to justify choosing a diet that makes the people who eat it skinnier and less diabetic but also kills some of them. I'm also not convinced that "low-carb" in the literature means you can draw conclusions about ketog…

"Our meta-analysis supported long-term harm and no cardiovascular protection with low-carbohydrate diets. However, the observational studies were limited and moderately heterogeneous. Our findings underscore the imminent need for large-scale trials on the complex interactions between low-carbohydrate diets and long-term outcomes."

From your second link. Also not a surprise when many research about low carb diets is refined carbohydrates + unspecified oils.

"Low carb" studies are as interesting as "high carb" studies. High carb is a Mediterranean diet or is the Twinkie diet, just like keto can be meat and vegs or low carb pizza and processed meat. Lumping everything under one very generic name is not very good science. The whole dietary world is made of bad science and repeated by bad journalists.

The scientific jury is still out, as your very source stated, yet every HN thread the top voted comment is "low carb kills some people." Seriously?

I am still waiting for someone to show me a long-term study based on low carb meat, nuts, fruit and vegetables, unrefined oils and fats diet. Even an observational one. Oh wait, there's none!

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#142

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

I would be satisfied if the USDA recognized fructose as a toxin, and required labels to say how much fructose is in everything.

We might then start seeing the things pumped full of sugar having glucose/dextrose instead. And, the greatest health crisis the UK and its former colonies has ever seen might then start winding down.

If we can institute emergency measures for COVID-19, it seems like we ought to be able to do a little something about a cause of overwhelmingly worse mortality.

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#143

Post by gumby » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:34 AM UTC

darzu wrote: post #96

BoorishBears wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the extra money from labeling it organic didn’t come close to covering the extra effort. And this right here is why people are skeptical about organic produce. There seems to be two kinds: - The kind that doesn't scale (so any would be environmental benefits would stop existing if it became more than a niche) - The kind that scales because they're abusing loose definitions of "organic" to charge the end custome…

Our vineyard didn’t make as much money as surrounding vineyards but it was still self sustaining. More robust demand for organic wines would have made it even more so. Organic farming has external benefits as well, or rather the absence of negative externalities like harmful chemical run off and less water usage. These aren’t as easily noticed by just looking at market dynamics currently. All that being said, my unde…

I hope that robots can eventually make organic practices more widespread. Instead of spraying pesticides (some of which are permitted under organic rules in the US and Europe) have robots come by continuously and pluck each weed as it appears. Pluck the pests from The leaves and stems. Water each plant individually per its need, etc. There should be no need to sacrifice a human on backbreaking and fiddly labor.

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#144

Post by gumby » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:39 AM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #80

bryans wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rarely shocked by the ingredients of food anymore, but I was looking at a packet of "honey sauce" from KFC the other day, and couldn't help but laugh at the things we're doing to ourselves. There are 11 ingredients and 5 of them are added sugar. All to recreate something resembling honey, at approximately 2/3 the cost of real honey. "High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Sugar, Honey (7%), Fructose, Contains 2% o…

I’ve noticed that sometimes a snack food will have 3 different kinds of sugar as the 2-4th ingredients. I’ve wondered if they break it up like that so that the first ingredient isn’t sugar, even if there is more sugar-type-ingredients than there is of the first-listed ingredient. It’s possible they use multiple types for flavor/texture reasons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some foods where it could be ac…

Yeah, I saw some soy milk at Whole Foods marked “no added sugar”. I was surprised that sugar might be added at all but I don’t drink the stuff. Anyway, I looked at the label and the #2 ingredient (after water) was “dehydrated cane juice” (i.e. sugar).

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#145

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:41 AM UTC

triyambakam wrote: post #126

acje wrote: post #112

In the western world the default is a high-carb diet. Moving away from that i probably beneficial to most people. My personal journey has been from a rather normal western diet towards more vegetarian, but i still don't mind a little bit of bacon on top. The effect was OK, but not spectacular. Now in my mid-40 (25ish BMI) I started walking 2-3 times weekly about two years ago and have advanced to running about as oft…

Carb is too broad of a term. Though it generally seems to mean "processed wheat with added refined sugar and oils". Yeah, processed foods aren't healthy. But fruits and vegetables are, and they have carbs (mostly simple, i.e. sugars)

Fruit (except grapes!) has enough fiber to delay the sugar absorption for long enough that your gut biome gets first crack at it.

"Metabolic disorder", aka "fatty liver disease", "processed-food disease", is a product of stripping the fiber out of almost everything.

Of course juice has had its fiber stripped out.

The illnesses that are killing people are products of excess uric acid that the liver emits after processing fructose.

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#146

Post by andreareina » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:42 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #98

andreareina wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't finding a diet that works: anything that reduces calories below maintenance does it. The problem is what a person will stick to . Different people find different diets to be easier to stick to. If they're luck they find one that leads to a spontaneous reduction of calories consumed and don't need to count.

The "calories-in" approach sets minima and maxima, nothing else. For one thing we still are very bad at determining how much energy an individual will actually extract from a given food. We still get calorie counts from setting food on fire.

That's mostly only an issue with an open cycle approach. If intake is titrated according to how the scale moves[1] individual variation in digestive efficiency, activity levels etc is handled.

[1] on an appropriate timeframe to reduce noise

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#147

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

kif wrote: post #138

triyambakam wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carb is too broad of a term. Though it generally seems to mean "processed wheat with added refined sugar and oils". Yeah, processed foods aren't healthy. But fruits and vegetables are, and they have carbs (mostly simple, i.e. sugars)

Eating fruits is actually good for preventing type 2 diabetes [1]. In my personal experience, I've found that following a keto-ish approach for my diet by decreasing processed carbs, as well as increasing fruit intake, has had a positive impact on my weight/fasting blood sugar. [1]: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/eating-whol...

Just so long as you are getting whole fruit, not juice...

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#148

Post by tomp » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

mtsr wrote: post #111

jokethrowaway wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, with ageing, I started having tons of small health issues + diarrhoea and blood in my faeces. I tried removing milk (I was eating milk with cereals in the morning) - which appeared to improve the situation (becoming less frequent) - but it turned out it worked only because I got rid of eating cereals in the morning and I can drink milk just fine. The doctor said nothing was wrong and that it was just stres…

Only meat diet has some very serious downsides, though. It’s very environmentally unfriendly and because of the high cost it’s available to a very few people. That makes it rather hard to recommend, regardless of potential health upsides.

"meet" isn't environmentally unfriendly

some methods of meat production are

but you can focus on environmentally friendly methods instead

don't hate the product, hate the process

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#149

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:48 AM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #123

darzu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citations needed. I worked on an organic vineyard for a summer and I can tell you it took a lot of work to get that label. Non-organic vineyards in our area had barren earth or gravel under the stalks as they used weedkillers regularly. In contrast, we practiced “turf flipping” where we would, with clever machine and hard work, turn the soil over to smother weeds. The soil was alive and rich with the longest earthwor…

>> Organic food itself is a fraud as it doesn't actually mean anything. > Citations needed. Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#Health_and_safety Quote for you: There is little scientific evidence of benefit or harm to human health from a diet high in organic food, and conducting any sort of rigorous experiment on the subject is very difficult.

That quote does not not support the assertion.

And personal health was never the point of organic farming.

Re: USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets

#150

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 10:55 AM UTC

kikokikokiko wrote: post #51

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's completely false. While the label "organic" may have been hijacked and rendered largely meaningless by government agencies like the FDA and their corporate masters, there is indeed a difference between food produced using chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones (among other things), and food that is produced naturally without these drugs, poisons and other additives. That some people dispute the…

Sri-Lanka decided to only produce food "without drugs, chemicals and poisons". Now they're starving. You're lucky 99% of the organic labeled food you consume were in fact produced using the same things all of the vegetables in the world use, but anyways, if you prefer to pay double the price for smaller carrots, who am I to stop you.

That is not in fact what they decided.

What they decided was to ignore every detail of well understood methods to manage transition from one system to another. Their failure is wholly a product of that choice.