Thanks for the heads up, since you've told me that all food is equal I'm going to switch my diet to only include Soda, Doritos and Hotpockets. I'm sure my body will adapt amazingly.
What do you honestly think would happen if you did, assuming that your calories were limited to an amount that kept you at a consistent healthy weight for your size?
Restricting calories for weight control works as well as restricting lines of code for bug control. At a high level, it works. Especially if you have quality lines of code.
However, consider the trivial case of your calories coming from poison. Not shockingly, strict equivalence is out the door.
Which is not too say it is a worthless proxy. It is quite good, actually. But it is just a proxy.
Headaches from too much sodium, acne breakouts, blood sugar crashes, poor mood, high acidity in stomach, digestive problems, bloating, etc. Eating nutritionally-poor food has immediate consequences.
Not to say this is a myth like Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, but there is honestly a lot of evidence either way so we can't make establish a causative relationship for everyone. It is quite possible for people to have a short term reaction to salt because the hormones in charge of water and sodium balance can take several days to stablise, but again, we are unsure of long term consequences especially on an individual level.
The rest of your symptoms suggest that you are either eating too much like the guy from Supersize Me, or have more underlying health issues that require a better designed diet to heal. It's not food but how you eat.
They are equal, as anybody with rudimentary knowledge of biochemistry can tell. Modern processed food have the added benefit of micronutrient fortification so your need of vitamins should be met mostly in case you actually plan to follow that diet.
The appeal of a "balanced and natural" diet has a mostly puritan origin but its benefits are far from clear. The only proven method to delay the onset of aging is caloric restriction. Kale and supplements are mostly placebo.
You claim they are equal but also benefit from added nutrients, which hinges on them not being equal.
As I said in a sibling post, restricting calories works. But, so does restricting grams. The same way not writing code prevents bugs. It also prevents features, so is a somewhat worthless endeavor.
Unlike software, we don't need more nutrients than the baseline to function lest it is prescribed to treat an illness and eating more of the same thing don't magically makes you more healthy. For example, 10mg of vitamin C per day absolutely prevents scurvy, most dietary guidelines recommend much more but there is no proven benefit of a larger dose.
Indeed. Glycemic index is fairly idiosyncratic (varies from person to person) and generally a poor indicator of insulin response anyway, especially the overall amount of calories consumed ia not taken into account. It's just another pointless metric invented to sell quinoa.
