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The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

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Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#31

Post by casca »

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #13
casca wrote: post #5

TL;DR: guy gets a comment downvoted on HN and responds by accusing the downvoters of having an unhealthy lifestyle. Is there any evidence that the average geek is less healthy than the average person? Here's a link to the comment in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763106

Instead of seeking that "evidence," consider this: is the average geek not supposed to be smarter than the average person? (Is this generality more acceptable because it's flattering? For that matter, is there any evidence of this, either? But for now, let's assume it's true.) So on that assumption, which we grant temporarily, why then should we not expect these smarter people to make smarter lifestyle choices? Shoul…

My point was that your premise is based on something that we don't know. Perhaps the average geek is smarter than the average person (for some definition of smarter), but perhaps they're also healthier. We just don't know.

While I believe that you were genuinely trying to be helpful to the community by offering an easy way to be healthier, we are generally a suspicious bunch and when there are a number of claims made based on unsupported hypotheses, there's going to be complaints.

It's one thing to say: "I do this and it seemed to do good things for me". It's another to say "I do this and so should you".

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#32

Post by mkal_tsr »

Oh, we're going to play this game of "I post something, people critique it, I respond by being butthurt and missing the point of the downvotes because I couldn't hear a differing opinion" ? Because that's how it looks.

This just in, if you tell someone to eat/drink/consume a specific thing in their daily diet, they start to monitor their intake more closely. gasp. You also claimed it as fact, yet couldn't receive skepticism without needing to call attention to it (re g+ post).

I could throw the same argument back,

> The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Ego Obsession of the Average Geek

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#33

Post by safeaim »

mapleoin wrote: post #6
spingsprong wrote: post #2

Just to pick on a tiny part of that post, consuming anti-oxidants hasn't been reliably shown to have any health benefits. If consuming anti-oxidants has any effect, it's not necessarily a positive one, since the body uses oxidation for various processes, for example the immune system. You might be consuming anti-oxidants aiming to benefit your health, yet be negatively impacting your immune system's ability to fight…

I hope you're being ironic, because this attitude is exactly what the article is declaiming.

I'd suggest you to review the current science literature on this subject as it so far it's starting to look bad for proponents of the "You need more vitamins"-campaign.

Antioxidants Could Spur Tumors by Acting on Cancer Gene http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6170/477.summary

Supplement Alert: Antioxidants May Protect Cancer Cells Instead Of Protecting Us From Them http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2014/02/08/suppleme...

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#34

Post by DanBC »

slavoingilizov wrote: post #23
Liesmith wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would he be ironic? Consuming too many antioxidants have been tested and turn out to have some pretty ugly negative effects, just like too much of anything else at all.

Care to show us such a test or study?

http://www.badscience.net/2008/04/cliff-richard-gloria-hunni...

That links to a 2008 Cochrane review.

Here's the updated review: http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD007176/antioxidant-supplemen...

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#35

Post by Evgeny »

This is a video where I show how to use real food--fruits, vegetables, flax seeds, etc

One thing I do not understand is why would one take perfectly fine real food, such as fruits and vegetables, and then artificially blend them ... if the goal is healthier diet, please eat real food!

I'm not going to try the smoothie, but I guess that for me it would be a step down from a healthier diet to a less healthy one.

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#36

Post by dasil003 »

I don't have much to add, but I wanted to register my support for the author as a counterpoint to the wave of hate he is sure to receive here for posting such a squishy complaint that's not backed by "evidence". I believe truly that he's right that a lot of geeks are in denial about their health and effects of there lifestyle. Of course this is probably true of most people in modern industrialized society, but the thing that's pernicious about geeks in this case is their power of rationalization is so well-honed. Plausible deniability is pretty easy with something as complex as health, but so is it with climate change as well. It's interesting to see how the personal factors affect the relative reaction to both of these subject matters by the general HN population.

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#37

Post by joel_perl_prog »

mef wrote: post #9

A link to the post in question https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763106 If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the downvotes are more for the claims of a miracle cure-all smoothie than for some sort of perceived self-promotion.

I guess I'm not allowed to participate in the discussion, I've had to delete several comments already that were getting steadily down-voted.

It's not a claim to be a miracle or cure-all. This is exactly the type of cynical, know-it-all bullshit that frustrates me so much. It's nothing else but a claim, based on years of my own personal experience, to the benefits I myself have experienced, and the benefits others have experienced. And they've been more than happy to share with me.

I brace myself now for more down votes, since here I reply in a reasonable and conversation-furthering manner. =/

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#38

Post by oxymoron »

spingsprong wrote: post #2

Just to pick on a tiny part of that post, consuming anti-oxidants hasn't been reliably shown to have any health benefits. If consuming anti-oxidants has any effect, it's not necessarily a positive one, since the body uses oxidation for various processes, for example the immune system. You might be consuming anti-oxidants aiming to benefit your health, yet be negatively impacting your immune system's ability to fight…

Anti-oxidant supplements are now generally believed to provide no real benefit, and might even have detrimental effects. See http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=709255 This research is about _supplements_, though. It doesn't say that it's a bad idea to consume vegetables and fruits where the anti-oxidants occur naturally, which is what OP was referring to.

That said, the real gain of eating vegetables is probably not that they happen to contain anti-oxidants. Rather, they contain any number of things that are good to us which are hard to quantify individually but has been observed to do us good as a whole. To attribute the positive health effects of something as complex as an apple to a single class of components - such as anti-oxidants - is most likely cargo-cult science in its purest form.

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#39

Post by aaron695 »

For starters your original post should have been down voted because you originally went on about being down voted.

This site specifically asks you not to do this.

If you can't honour the sites basic rules, perhaps it's not your crowd anyway.

It's ok to make a mistake but to be up in arms about it shows this is more than that.

Re: The Hacker News Sacred Cow: The Unhealthy Lifestyle of The Average Geek

#40

Post by rtpg »

thisone wrote: post #24
etfb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logic says that someone who spends more time in front of a computer is less healthy than someone who spends less time in front of a computer. I think it's solid enough logic that the onus is on you to provide evidence to the contrary. But hell, geeks should be able to find actual evidence; that's what geeks do.

person A uses a computer for 6 hours a day, person B uses a computer for 30 minutes a day, ergo person B is healthier. This logic doesn't seem to be very "logical"

everything else being more or less equal , the person with the lifestyle of 6 hours a day will probably be less healthy than the person on 30 minutes a day
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