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Eat Real Food

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Re: Eat Real Food

#251

Speaking from personal experience, this is consistent with multiple doctors over the years recommending high-protein, low carb diets. (Clarification: low does not mean no carb.) I don't understand people freaking out over this - outside of a purely political reflex - hell hath no fury like taking away nerds' Mountain Dew and Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP -…

A lot of red meat is probably one angle I can’t get behind. They are very high in cholesterol and triglycerides which are deadly for the heart over the long haul.

Re: Eat Real Food

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the zeitgeist is starting to turn on the high-protein diet recommendations: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/looking-to-bu... There was a story about this in the NYT recently (can't find it) and IIRC, it basically said protein is out and fiber is in. It wasn't that simple, but that was my takeaway.

Honestly, you can find studies to prove just about anything when it comes to nutrition. Too much money involved. Sometimes you have to use common sense or try different diets to see how your body reacts. I find "high fiber" and "low protein" to be a suspicious suggestion though. Protein generally has a small insulin response, your body actually needs protein, and if things like the "protein leverage hypothesis" are c…

Unless you're doing something blatantly wrong or have a very specific disorder like coeliac, diet just doesn't have very much influence on health. There are a very wide range of diets that are more-or-less equally healthy, within a margin of error. Humans are highly adaptable omnivores that have evolved to survive and thrive on a broader range of foods than pretty much any other species. The data seems so mixed because the effect sizes of reasonable interventions are so small - a tiny signal drowned out by noise.

The entire problem is that most people in high- and middle-income countries are in fact doing something blatantly wrong - they are consistently eating vastly more calories than they use. Some of those people are ignorant of what 2000 to 2500 calories actually looks like, some are deluded, but a very large proportion know damned well that they're eating far too much and do it anyway.

The obesogenic environment that we now live in is partly due to the influence of the processed foods industry, but in large part it's simply a product of abundance. Before the late 20th century, it was simply inconceivable that poor people could afford to become morbidly obese. Agricultural productivity has improved beyond all recognition and the world is flooded with incredibly cheap food of all kinds.

We've spent the last few decades trying to push back against that with all manner of initiatives intended to endgender behavioural change, with very little success. It doesn't really matter what guidance we give people when they have shown a consistent inability or unwillingness to follow it.

If we're actually serious about the effects of diet on public health, I think there are only two credible options - extremely heavy-handed regulation, or the mass prescribing of GLP-1 receptor agonists. All of the other options are just permutations of "let's do more of the thing that hasn't worked".

Re: Eat Real Food

#253
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mostly because of the destruction of American science, public health and public safety the admin pushed through in order to publish this set of guidelines, instead of just hiring a professionally trained RD to write it up.

Didn’t those professionals give us the original food pyramid that told us to stuff our faces with bread? Weren’t they the same people that told us not to eat eggs because of cholesterol? And tell us to limit our fish consumption? Maybe different areas of expertise aren’t equally valid, and even good experts often can’t see the forest for the trees in terms of developing actionable advice.

This is incorrect reasoning. Science is advancing. It is like saying we should not listen to physicists because "Didn't those physicists gave us the original heliocentric system?"

Re: Eat Real Food

#254
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mostly because of the destruction of American science, public health and public safety the admin pushed through in order to publish this set of guidelines, instead of just hiring a professionally trained RD to write it up.

Didn’t those professionals give us the original food pyramid that told us to stuff our faces with bread? Weren’t they the same people that told us not to eat eggs because of cholesterol? And tell us to limit our fish consumption? Maybe different areas of expertise aren’t equally valid, and even good experts often can’t see the forest for the trees in terms of developing actionable advice.

And tell us to limit our fish consumption?

The only recommendations to limit fish that I have seen are due to mercury exposure risks:

https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/advice-about-eating-fish

Coal burning and incidental industrial releases drastically increased the amount of mercury in surface waters over the past century. The released mercury gets transformed by bacteria into organomercury compounds which are lipophilic and concentrate up the food chain, meaning that predator fish like tuna and swordfish can contain orders of magnitude more mercury than the water they live in.

There are plenty of fish with much lower mercury levels (like salmon, trout, and sardines):

https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/mer...

You can eat all the salmon you want without worrying about mercury, and I haven't seen government advice to the contrary.

Re: Eat Real Food

#255

Of note: the US's per capita consumption of meat has increased by more than 100 pounds over the last century[1]. We now consume an immense amount of meat per person in this country. That increase is disproportionately in poultry, but we also consume more beef[2]. A demand for the average American to eat more meat would have to explain, as a baseline, why our already positive trend in meat consumption isn't yielding p…

I'd strongly prefer the government just not try to tell people what to eat, the incentives will always be perverse and nutrition science is anything but science in most cases.

EDIT down-thread to prove my point you'll see people citing studies in favor of and against the new recommendations. The studies are almost always in animals or use self reported data with tiny sample sizes.

Re: Eat Real Food

#256

For all the lunacy of RFK this somehow is actually a really good set of guidelines? Certainly better than the previous version. I didn't expect that to be honest.

The man is stark raving bonkers mad in that head-in-the-sand, if-I-ignore-science-then-it-can't-hurt-me way but (and OMG I think I'm going to throw up a little in my mouth even coming close to agreeing with anything that come out of his mouth) isn't that basically what we've been doing with dietary guidelines since the 80s?

Like, don't get me wrong, RFK will kill N*10^5, N*10^6 people with his outlook on diseases, but....how many people have had their lives wrecked by "fat makes you fat", "ketchup is a vegetable", and "eat a balanced diet composed entirely of sausage, flour, and sugar"? As a GenXer I've been dealing with the echoes of this for a long time.

Re: Eat Real Food

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says 1.2-1.6 grams of protein and healthy fats per kilogram of body weight, from animal and plant sources (including milk). Is that really advocating for more meat?

90g of protein, what is recommended for me, is like 4 hamburgers or a 16oz steak per day ...

Doesn't make sense to me that a 400lb obese person would need to consume the same amount of protein as a 400lb lean muscle bodybuilder.

All of the protein recommendations I've seen were for lean mass. You don't feed fat.

Re: Eat Real Food

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says 1.2-1.6 grams of protein and healthy fats per kilogram of body weight, from animal and plant sources (including milk). Is that really advocating for more meat?

90g of protein, what is recommended for me, is like 4 hamburgers or a 16oz steak per day ...

do you think that's a lot or a little? does that sound realistic or unrealistic?

Re: Eat Real Food

#259
post #194

For all the lunacy of RFK this somehow is actually a really good set of guidelines? Certainly better than the previous version. I didn't expect that to be honest.

What lunacy?

Listening to him talk about the Spanish Flu, and clearly not understand why secondary bacterial infections killed more people than the flu itself, was my personal point of "wow, this guy is an idiot".

Re: Eat Real Food

#260
Nothing wrong with grains as long as they aren't the processed GM'd ones you find everywhere. Bake wholegrain spelt bread at home and you can make that 70% of your diet no problem. People used to only eat bread before, they were fine
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