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People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

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Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you can't exercise out of a bad diet You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_ often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of reach. I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a day for a while to try to maintain weight.

I really can't imagine having the energy to burn 10k a day - what kinda workload were they doing?

If you have a real chance to win the gold in the Olympics in most events you have to be working out that much. Even if you end up coming in last of the serious competitors just the workload to be a serious competitor will be 10k+ per day.

At that level training is your full time job though.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, though I suspect there are probably a lot of laws around what you can and cannot do so better get several good lawyers to check what the laws really are around this. Drug treatment programs often work like this so that is the first place to look for laws to watch out for. I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very remote location by bus…

Can't we just use literal prisoners? That's what I always thought about the kind of research RFK Jr is always talking about. Normally it's not ethical to do food / medicine trials with prisoners, but these would be trials like giving regular food to one set of prisoners and food without dyes or chemicals to the other. The "test group" would just be getting healthier food. Seems like just radically measuring portion s…

You can use prisoners and it has been done. However there are enough differences between prison and normal life that it is questionable if your results apply outside of prison.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been diabetic for 20 years. I have tried every method, app, plan, and tool, including systems falsely marketed as "smart." No method works or delivers decent results except for using a scale and weighing ALL the ingredients. For a diabetic, eating "out" is always a roll of the dice. The "fun" feedback from post-meal blood sugar is always a reminder of how "eyeballing a plate" is utterly useless.

That sounds really hard. Is the purpose of determining the amount of food so you can adjust the amount of insulin? Sorry, I don't know about the day to day of living with diabetes.

When you eat, depending on the glycemic index of the food you're consuming your blood sugar starts immediately going up and can quickly peak at dangerous numbers if the food is sugary.

A diabetic will want to take dose of insulin a bit before eating in order to send their blood glucose level on a lowering trend. If you dose it right the two waves semi cancel each other out and your blood sugar goes up some, but hopefully not a huge amount.

If you get the dose wrong, it drops dangerously or rockets up and you have take correction doses.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#354

For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you manage ?: - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat…

Depends what your goal is. My suggestion is if your goal is weight loss, don't think about calorie tracking at all. Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight. It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing your…

You are onto something. If you maximise fruit and veg then you are also maximising phytochemicals, and that means having a nice skin tone.

I really like this aspect, the inside-out skin care, and I now see little point in eating something such as a huge bowl of pasta or rice because of a lack of phytochemicals. I need green veggies, orange ones, red ones and the phytochemicals that make them so.

I think that 'nutrition experiments' are what you need, so, as you say, small changes. This means discontinuing things as well as adopting new things. With an 'experiment' in can be for a month. I quit processed foods, dairy and much else in this way, to note the improvements to things like oral health, joint pain, digestion and so on.

You are right about changing the palate, it actually takes about ten days for the taste buds to be replaced.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#355
post #346

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In the EU, food manufacturers are required to label macronutrients (and salt) in mg/100mg or mg/100ml for fluids. Easy to compare, works great.

This makes so much more sense than the labels in the USA.

US food labelling is insane.

For example - lactose-free yogurt is often just regular yogurt with lactase enzyme added.

If that's what I wanted, I'd buy regular yogurt and take a lactaid supplement.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#356
post #344
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also when figuring out how much insulin is needed for a given amount of carbs you need to factor in the type of carbs, your individual response to that type of carbs, what fats/protein/fiber you eat with it (fats and fiber tend to slow down the BG rise from carbs, protein can cause a rise when eaten on its own but can also slow down the rise from carbs), what time of day it is (I need around double the amount of insu…

For my wife (type 1 diabetic), physical activity is the big one that throws off her calculations as a walk in a hilly area makes her blood sugar drop like a rock. Of course she always has something with sugar with her but then she has to figure out how much to consume.

Yea, as a T1D myself the amount of insulin I need is massively different from days I'm arguing on the internet compared to days I'm up doing physical exercise. Things get concerning really quick when you're a distance from anything and your glucose starts dropping.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#357

People are bad at reporting ANYTHING. Exercise, food, sex, grooming. Just ask a lawyer or anybody trying to get a story out of somebody. This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.

Generalising, this is one of the lessons of the past ~2 centuries in which we've had for the first time reasonably objective analogic recording capabilities: photography, phonography, cinema, and the like. Until their emergence, human testimony across a wide range of phenomena was the only way to transmit information and, due to its low fidelity, low information density, unreliable interpretation and unreliable reproduction, that was at best only modestly reliable. A fantastic example of this (in numerous senses) is Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros (1515), made from second-hand reports and sketches. On the one hand, it doesn't look true to life, but on the other, specific features of the animal are recorded with remarkable accuracy --- the segmentation of body plates, horns, toes, and aspect of the eyes for example. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros>.

And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop, photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually all still and video images are at least somewhat processed, and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone, layperson or expert.

Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability fabulated reporting even or exspecially when mediated by our technologies, which had previously offered a solution to that problem.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#358
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been diabetic for 20 years. I have tried every method, app, plan, and tool, including systems falsely marketed as "smart." No method works or delivers decent results except for using a scale and weighing ALL the ingredients. For a diabetic, eating "out" is always a roll of the dice. The "fun" feedback from post-meal blood sugar is always a reminder of how "eyeballing a plate" is utterly useless.

I’m rather unknowledgeable on diabetes, so here’s a question that may seem basic: does choosing healthier meal, a salad instead of sweet ribs, not suffice for a good blood sugar?

>does choosing healthier meal,

For a type 1 diabetic, no (gets more complex with type 2).

Your body produces insulin at a basal rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_rate

If you're healthy between the pancreas and the liver you maintain homeostasis and things are fine.

As a T1D you don't get that base rate, so your blood sugar will mostly trend up and stay high, even without eating anything. You simply have to get more insulin to avoid burning out all the systems in your body and dying slowly.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the whole sugar vs. sugar alcohol nonsense, which I still don't completely understand.

IANA nutritionist or expert at all in this area so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding from looking into it is that the sugar alcohol doesn't break down in digestion and isn't absorbed, that's why the "carbs" from sugar alcohol "don't count." I would recommend taking it easy on the sugar alcohols even though they "don't count" because they can cause significant gas ;-)

And some like xylitol are highly toxic to dogs, must be careful around them.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#360

I try calorie count with My Fitness Pal and holy shit it’s a lot of effort. Eat out and you’re screwed (estimated at best). When you include sauces and oils etc it’s really hard to be accurate in the best of times, and it’s just a pain to keep on top of. Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count. I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.

These apps also lack stuff besides common American/European dishes. Most of my food is healthy homemade food and entering them is an absolute pain.

Eating homemade stir fried celtuce [1]? Homemade steamed marble goby [2]? Nope, out of luck. They only have nutrition info for packaged mac and cheese.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtuce

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyeleotris_marmorata

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