The problem before (and I think what is still the problem):
1) We talk about very broad macronutrient classes as though much could be said about them that is meaningful. Fats are not interchangeable; carbs are not interchangeable; proteins are not interchangeable. Talking about grams of fat doesn't actually tell you much (nutritionally).
On a related note, calories are also not nutritionally generic, and our bodies are not simple input/output machines. Calories in / calories out is a gross oversimplification.
2) A substance that is eaten, and the same substance elsewhere in the body, do not have a direct 1-for-1 relationship.
Dietary cholesterol, for example, is not directly deposited in artherosclerosis, and the pathology may have nothing to do with consumed cholesterol at all. (That is, the problem may not be how much you eat, but what causes it to build up as deposits that aren't cleared away.)
3) Measuring blood plasma is a poor metric for many, many things. Intercellular, extracellular, and stored elsewhere (liver, pancreas, bone, etc.) often have nothing to do with plasma values.
And we know this. But we still use it because it's all we can easily do for now. So when we measure your nutrition by comparing blood plasma values of magnesium, for example, we are using a metric we already know correlates poorly with actual magnesium status.
4) Environment matters. Cellular environments are extremely complex. Speaking about nutrition without discussing the thousands of other molecules and tissue structure it interacts with, and where, isn't very helpful.
These factors-- conflating macronutrients, conflating consumption with pathology, using bad metrics for nutrition, and ignoring cellular environment-- are much of what results in all of this nutritional confusion.
We substitute fads or the latest half-understood data for real knowledge, because we don't have much real knowledge. (Despite being able to fill textbooks with what we do know.)
...to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade
Not at all. I remember it was a thing in the seventies. The low-carbs diet has been viciously attacked for many decades, so it comes and goes every few years. I first heard of it when Atkins popularized it:
"In glycolysis, higher levels of insulin promote storage of body fat and block release of fat from adipose tissues, while in ketosis, fat reserves are readily released and consumed.[5][7] For this reason, ketosis is sometimes referred to as the body's "fat burning" mode.[8]"
So it turns out it works?
Is it dangerous? Maybe, but I wouldn't trust the sources that I already know are lying to my face. Not to talk about my own experience, but that's valid for me, YMMV.
In HN there were some submissions past year about this guy that did the research in which Atkins based its diet:
The notion that low-carb diets are superior has deeply unsettling political implications, for exactly the same reason that low-meat diets don't: what are the staple crops of humanity?
The top ten in order are: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, sassava, soybeans, sweat potatoes, yams, sorghum, and plantains. These are all carbs! If we accept that low carb diets are better for people, then we must either accept that we are going to feed humanity sub-optimally, or that humanity is well past the healthy carrying capacity of the planet. There is simply no way in hell we can get 7.5 billion people eating keto, or anything close to it.
Vegan activists are proposing a dietary future that is very much in line with the current global agro-industrial status quo. However low-carb proponents are proposing a diet that, if universalized, would necessarily put them in the camp of people like Pentti Linkola.
Please, understand that Atkins diet is not a diet recommended for everybody. It's a diet created to help people that suffer an imbalance in their diet (or worse, in their metabolism) that has made them get fat and they want to lose weight.
That's why "balanced diet" is an absurd recommendation for fat people. If you're following a balanced diet, you probably don't need to lose weight. Atkins himself recommended a balanced diet, just avoiding refined carbs, for most people.
One personal comment: I wouldn't follow any diet proposed by activists of any kind, specially when their main motive is their particular ethics that, at least for me, suggest a strong bias. Unless of course I share that same ethical vision. Edit: I actually wouldn't follow any life advice from activists of any kind, I'd rather have my own agenda.
There are people who recommend obese people adopt diets that induce ketosis. These people are not suggesting diets that should be followed by everybody. However there are also people who say that carb intake should be greatly reduced across the board for everybody, that even something seemingly extreme like a 90% reduction of carbs in the average diet wouldn't be enough to induce ketosis but would nevertheless be far healthier.
However the current size of the human population is incompatible with anything other than the vast majority of people getting the vast majority of their calories from carbs. For that reason, people recommending a large reduction on carb intake across the board will almost certainly continue to be marginalized, pushed to the sidelines in most mainstream discussions.
It's interesting how the two articles differ. The article about low carb diet is written in a very hateful style, while the one on Ketosis is very technical and includes no judgment on "fadness" or whatever.
Same thing about saturated fat. There are multiple articles that contradict each other, going as far as having a different selection of sources. One links only articles that support how harmful saturated fat is, while the other cites a some sources that say this, and some that say "there's no effect found".
It shows that trusting wikipedia might on something that's not physics or math might be losing proposition.
However, while both are low carb the ketogenic diet and the atkins diet are different. Keto generally refers to a diet very low carb, protein as needed, and higher fat (generally most calories come from fat). Atkins was a low carb, high protein diet.
Atkins diet is a ketogenic diet. First week is next to zero carbs. Then slow carbs are introduced gradually, always trying to keep the ketosis, that stops around 60 or 70 g of carbs a day.
No idea what "keto" label currently means. If you take a moment to review my previous comment, you'll see what exactly I was responding to.
Edit: just to make it more clear, Atkins didn't tell how much proteins or fat you should eat, that's up to you, just that you must keep ketosis on so you need to keep carbs under certain limits and completely avoid sugars.
I find when you make major changes to your diet, your urges to eat, cravings, etc adjust to the new diet after a couple of weeks.
I eat a pretty balanced diet that includes plenty of carbs. I also only eat once a day (at about 6-7pm). I get no cravings during the day until just before it's my regular time to eat. I should add, most of the carbs I eat are fruits, beans, whole grains, rice, quinoa, etc... not: white bread, juice, cereal, etc that digest quickly.
I think fruit, especially the modern stuff, is bad for you. In particular the stuff you want to avoid is. fructose, which is toxic for humans. Fructose is harder on the human liver than alcohol on a gram by gram basis, and over consumption of fructose can cause cirrhosis and fatty liver disease.
I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing.
Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.
I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol. Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently. Whereas fatty liver caused by fructose is because of the quantity in a short period, overwhelming the liver.
If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs, sugar/sucrose, etc that are roughly half fructose, half glucose that are put into so much processed food with no fiber to slow digestion. A 12oz can of cocacola has 2-3x (39g) the sugar as a piece of fruit. Added sugars account for 14%[0] of the daily calories in the average american's diet (note, added means not natural sugars like that in fruit.. but sucrose, hfcs, etc). Any increase in fatty liver disease would be caused by the inordinate added sugar intake of american's, not fruit.
> I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing.
I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says.
> Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.
True and false. The fiber aspect is true, and a strong argument to stay as far away from juice as possible, but the vitamins story is ... mixed. It depends on what fruit you're talking about, where it was produced, and how it was handled.
For vitamins and other micro nutrients I personally think organ meats are highly underrated.
> I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol.
By looking at my source.
> Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently.
This is also true of Fructose. Except unlike Alcohol 100% of it goes to your liver. Also unlike alcohol there are no obvious cognitive effects for fructose, so we're free to consume as much of it without suffering any immediate and obvious consequences.
> If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs ... processed food ... coca cola ...
Take a guess what I also recommend avoiding. But "avoid HFCS and processed food" is well into the "no shit" category of dietary recommendation these days, which is why I don't really bother to talk about it a ton. Whereas there are a large number of people who think that fruit and especially fruit juice is healthy, and I disagree.
> "I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says."
To expand on this, what the hell is "balanced diet" anyway? In what sort of environment is fruit year-round "balanced"? In anything other than a tropical environment, fruit being part of a "balanced diet" is an ecological impossibility barring the modern global agro-industrial complex that ships you fruit from the other side of the planet no matter the season.
The idea of food even having seasons seems alien to most of us these days! At most whether a fruit is "in season" is a matter of how cheap it is, or whether the texture is precisely right. A food that is out of season might have a slightly undesirable texture and cost more, because it's been sitting in a warehouses and cargo vessels for too long.
The "balanced diet" as we know it today is a cultural artifact, not some biological truth.
In an ideal world, a "balanced diet" would mean eating only locally, in season and have none of this fad diet nonsense (vegetarian, vegan, carnivore, keto, etc). This would produce a universal diet that adapts to environment, wild life and the success and failures of local agriculture. It would be a cyclical diet, ever changing.
Maybe balanced diet is a poor choice of words... Local diet? Seasonal diet? Cyclical diet? IDK.
I do get annoyed about the definition of keto as a "diet", especially a "fad" diet. Ketosis is a biological process, and the "keto" diet is just designed to produce the state of ketosis on purpose. As such there really is no "keto" diet, as there are a pretty wide range of dietary choices that could produce the state of dietary ketosis.
Also, literally every religious tradition in the world follows the "keto" diet on a semi-regular basis: it's called fasting.
I'm not knocking ketosis itself. Just the absurd hoops people jump through to pretend their doing keto... how about just stop eating for a bit and you'll get a more robust ketosis. No need for hundreds of recipe books about keto desserts, keto friendly cakes and breads.
Just want people to keep things simple. That's why I was saying that stuff about cyclical dieting. In summer, there's a lot more carbs. In winter you'd change to eating more meat and fat. Since animals fatten themselves up for surviving winter. Eats what's currently in your environment. Prepare it properly. Move regularly throughout the day. Take time to relax and rest.
We’ve selectively bred our fruit for a millennia or two to make it significantly larger and sweeter than the versions we evolved with. The advent of pesticides as exacerbated the problem, as pesticide sprayed fruits produce a much lower level of useful anti-oxidants.
I guess it depends on the country. Fruit and vegetables in the US have had most of the taste bred out of them in favor of produce that can survive transportation while still looking good and will last a long time on the shelf and fridge.
America probably goes the furthest in this regard, but the trend is also older than America the country.
Examples:
The strawberries you and I eat are actually a hybrid species created in 1715. The wild variety, the woodland strawberry, is about 1/4 the size and much more tart.
Bananas largely come from one of two species, the main one having been domesticated 8,000 years ago. Humans of that era domesticated it for some reason other than the fruit, because the fruit was inedible, it took a few thousand years before we could eat it.
The lemon was hybridized citron and the bitter orange around 1100. Citron has a very thing rind, with the edible center part being typically the size of a golf ball. The bitter orange is ... not very sweet.
The oranges you and I buy in the store, tellingly called the “sweet orange” is a hybrid first mentioned in 314CE.
Breakfast cereals are about one of the worst things you can actually eat for breakfast. At best it's just a bowl of wholegrain carbs (e.g. oatmeal, muesli), and at worst just a bowl full of refined carbs and sugar (frosted flakes, Froot Loops). They're so devoid of nutrition that they usually have to fortify it with vitamins and minerals just so that people don't end up malnourished from eating it.
You'd genuinely be better off eating cheeseburgers for breakfast than most breakfast cereals.
> Breakfast cereals are about one of the worst things you can actually eat for breakfast. At best it's just a bowl of wholegrain carbs (e.g. oatmeal, muesli)
What's the problem with that? They are not supposed to be your sole source of macro-nutrients. If you get your protein and fats in other meals during the day it's perfectly fine.
> They're so devoid of nutrition that they usually have to fortify it with vitamins and minerals just so that people don't end up malnourished from eating it.
You can't end up malnourished from eating cereals, you can only end up malnourished from not eating anything else. And no one is eating only cereals. Anyway, since you yourself said they are fortified with vitamins and minerals, it sounds like they are just fine after all.
They are only fortified with a couple of vitamins that society has decided is the most important for not causing the whole population to end up with scurvy. If you eat a balanced diet, you will eat a random selection of everything. All things contain different nutrients that are important for us and since we don't know exactly which ones, we say balanced diet when we mean everything.
I suspect it's the result of adding iron to flour. For many peopel it irritates their gut and may have a whoel host of negative effects. There is no reason why it should be neccessary to add it into all food, it made flour based products basically toxic, since the body has no way to get rid of iron. Eating grains never had any negative effects before this "fortification" began.
It's just the meat industry copying big tobacco's playbook. Whole carbs are fine and an important source of other nutrients and fiber. Refined carbs and sugars are the problem. The scientific evidence that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you is overwhelming.
I suspect it's the result of adding iron to flour. For many peopel it irritates their gut and may have a whoel host of negative effects. There is no reason why it should be neccessary to add it into all food, it made flour based products basically toxic, since the body has no way to get rid of iron. Eating grains never had any negative effects before this "fortification" began.
