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

Salt, We Misjudged You

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 165 posts

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#101

Post by westicle »

drostie wrote: post #70
mkoivuni wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, nutritional "science" and conventional wisdom has become a joke.

I just wish we could see more directly a sense of how little we know about good nutrition. My favorite example is Vitamin B12, mostly because I learned the story when I reduced my meat consumption to about once a month. So there's this family of massive molecules containing the metal cobalt which we can't make on our own because we're not adapted to eat cobalt, and they're all called "Vitamin B12". It helps in the la…

As an Australian vegetarian I can recommend "marmite" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmite) as a good source of B12.

It is perhaps ironic that marmite is also loaded with sodium. So... if we take this article at face value it's win/win!

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#102

Post by jswinghammer »

psykotic wrote: post #60
jere wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong, but I don't think we disagree. However, I think most of the book is still worth reading, especially the history behind the demonitization of fat and the uselessness of "calories in, calories out." Taubes is at his best as a science historian and, obviously, not a scientist.

> the uselessness of "calories in, calories out." There's nothing useless about energy balance. It can be misinterpreted and misapplied, but Taubes throws the baby out with the bathwater and pretends it doesn't apply at all. For example, classical low-carber mythology is that on a low-carb diet you can eat virtually unlimited calories (as usually defined) and maintain weight, if perhaps not lose weight outright. As a…

Yeah calories matter but processed foods seem to be the real culprit. They make it easy to eat too much and get addicted to the fat salt sugar combo that leads to problems.

I hate how grains make me feel so I am not going back. Losing weight is a side effect of having more energy via cutting out food that was toxic for me to be eating. This isn't religion but just empirical testing on my part. If it didn't work I wouldn't do it.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#103

Post by rubashov »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #92
jswinghammer wrote: post #7

As someone who has lost around 40 pounds of fat switching to the high fat paleo diet I'm not at all surprised that the current state of the conventional wisdom on food is wrong in any number of ways. It is funny that we really have no idea what we should be eating naturally at all. Grains were making me sick and I didn't notice for years. It wasn't until I read a book listing side effects of grain consumption that I…

I believe that we all have unique metabolisms and the real "science" is the personal study of how we feel physically correlated with what we have been eating, amount of exercise, lack of tension, etc. I ended up as a vegetarian (with a little fish) because I kept track of how I felt and compared with recently eaten food. I have friends who thrive on high meat diets. We are all different.

A lot of people "feel" fine but blood work shows they're insulin resistant, have various deficiencies, or are loaded with cortisol. Going by "feeling" really doesn't work. Also, the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#104

Post by niels_olson »

arn wrote: post #25

So, I always cringe a little when I read medical conclusions in the mainstream media. And I'll be upfront. I'm probably biased on the side of medicine on this one. I'm a former nephrologist. The one study this person mentions by name (and dismisses) is the DASH-Sodium Study. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH_diet#Study_Results "Like the previous study, it was based on a large sample (412 participants) and was a multi…

arn, thanks for leading this one! Let me chime in that salt no doubt drives caloric intake. One need look no further than chefs and fast food to figure that out. So, in my mind, salt is a double whammy: BP and a secondary cause of weight gain, cholesterol, and everything else that comes with weight gain.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#106

Post by mikeash »

aero142 wrote: post #21

There was an idea in 'Fat Head' where the narrator pokes fun at the idea that we are a species who's evolution has made us so that we crave foods that are actually killing us. It's not proof that we can't crave foods like sugar, fats and salt that might be harmful to us, but I think it sets up a health amount of skepticism towards the idea that our innate cravings are in fact harmful.

Our bodies are full of feedback systems that only work in our natural (i.e. pre-civilization, pre-agriculture, hunter-gatherer, nasty, brutish, short) environment. It should be no surprise that our food cravings are among them.

There are other fun examples. One is that our breathing reflex is based on CO2 concentration being too high rather than O2 concentration being too low, even though O2 concentration is more important! Breathe into a closed system with a CO2 scrubber in it and you'll quickly get loopy and then pass out from lack of oxygen (and then die, if nobody disconnects you) all the while feeling fine. Another is that the iris of the eye responds to visible light but protects against more. Looking at the Sun is normally OK (uncomfortable, but tolerable) because the feedback is set up properly, but during the totality of a solar eclipse (which of course occurred back then, but not often enough to matter, apparently) your iris will crank open and let in tons of UV from the Sun's still-visible corona, frying your retina if you look at it.

It makes a great deal of sense that we'd evolve strong cravings for things which are good for us in small quantities but bad for us in large quantities when those things were scarce in the distant past, and death came early by other means for other people, well before a bad long-term diet could kill. That doesn't mean this must be what happened, but given how much humans love sugar, and how rare concentrated sugar would have been for our ancestors, it's no surprise if sugar turns out to be bad for us when consumed in the quantities we really want.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#108

Post by Evgeny »

psykotic wrote: post #60
jere wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong, but I don't think we disagree. However, I think most of the book is still worth reading, especially the history behind the demonitization of fat and the uselessness of "calories in, calories out." Taubes is at his best as a science historian and, obviously, not a scientist.

> the uselessness of "calories in, calories out." There's nothing useless about energy balance. It can be misinterpreted and misapplied, but Taubes throws the baby out with the bathwater and pretends it doesn't apply at all. For example, classical low-carber mythology is that on a low-carb diet you can eat virtually unlimited calories (as usually defined) and maintain weight, if perhaps not lose weight outright. As a…

The main benefit of low-carb diets for weight loss is that they spontaneously reduce calorie intake by cutting out whole groups of foods (by looking at studies it's been shown that any diet that restricts food choices like this will tend to induce weight loss but is usually unsustainable)

Another benefit is that the low-carb diets provide better satiety. In studies, if people were advised to eat ad libitum, those who had to choose from low-carb foods eventually consumed less calories than those, who could choose from "regular" food.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#109

Post by subsection1h »

rubashov wrote: post #103
mark_l_watson wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that we all have unique metabolisms and the real "science" is the personal study of how we feel physically correlated with what we have been eating, amount of exercise, lack of tension, etc. I ended up as a vegetarian (with a little fish) because I kept track of how I felt and compared with recently eaten food. I have friends who thrive on high meat diets. We are all different.

A lot of people "feel" fine but blood work shows they're insulin resistant, have various deficiencies, or are loaded with cortisol. Going by "feeling" really doesn't work. Also, the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming.

    Also, the evidence against a vegetarian diet is
    overwhelming.
If the totality of evidence currently available clearly indicates that vegetarian diets result in premature death, it should be very easy for you to link to a dozen or so clinical studies that have produced such evidence. Please proceed.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#110

Post by juliano_q »

jere wrote: post #58
juliano_q wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a long debate over this post. I personally found the best answer to the matter here: http://paleohacks.com/questions/49970/how-do-we-reconcile-st... Taubes also responded to Guyenet: http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%E2%8...

It's a long running debate in general and I think I followed the whole damn thing (it officially started at the Ancestral Health Symposium 2011): http://youtu.be/4hzoFgwFeMQ I find Guyenet's arguments much better researched and more convincing. Taubes usually admits he doesn't have time to keep up with the research lately.

I follow Taubes, Sissons and Robb Wolf approach (paleo in general) because it just works for me and I love the food. I am thinner, stronger and with much better health eating tasty food and doing minimal exercise. I think Guyenet's approach may work too (maybe there is not only one right answer) but I think low-carb is easier to me and I dont see a reason to change it. My life is much better after limiting (almost banning) grains and refined sugar.
Post reply on HN