It's an interesting well-written article, but you realize that their main point was that it contradicts the earlier calorie-restriction study: "The Nature authors found no increase in lifespan; the calorically restricted animals lived no longer, statistically, than their well-fed cousins."
They try to reconcile the studies: maybe it's the natural-ingredient foods vs the refined foods, maybe it's the generous diet vs the more-than-generous free-feeding, or conceding that the monkey's don't live longer, but they live healthier.
IMO, the best paragraph from the article was this: "Many of us simply roll our eyes and click away when yet another medical study contradicts the last study—so what else is new? Coffee’s bad for you, until it’s good for you—and so is red wine. Antioxidants are essential, or they’re useless. And so on."
Other than some very basic common sense things -- like don't eat rat poison -- I never find that these kinds of studies lead to correct and actionable information about how to slow down aging or how to lead your life. And it's extremely frustrating to even try.
To even try? To try to exercise and not drink sodas is extremely frustrating? Living a healthy lifestyle is about simple choices like going to the gym or adding broccoli to your meal and avoiding junk food.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant, to even try to keep up with the contradictory medical studies.
Yes, you should exercise; that's a common sense thing I'm referring to. But trying to decide if things like calorie restriction really work in the face of conflicting studies is frustrating.
nutritionfacts.org is an extremely biased site that has been created by a vegan who built his whole career on speaking about health issues. While it has the word "facts" in its title nothing prevents them from cherry-picking studies to support their original views.
If you cherry-pick different studies you might actually find that consuming large amount of plants stresses our digestive system way more than a fatty steak with potatoes.
> If you cherry-pick different studies you might actually find that consuming large amount of plants stresses our digestive system way more than a fatty steak with potatoes.
You really, REALLY, believe with all information being out there nowadays that a diet of only "fatty steak with potatoes" will be healthier for humans that the "balanced WFPB diet" that is nutritionfacts.org claims is scientifically proven to be the healthiest?
I think you have nothing to back that up. Please cherry pick how you please and present your evidence.
Dr Greger, who started the non-profit nutritionfacts.org, is often attacked for being an ethical vegan. Since people reason that would impair his ability to present unbiased evidence. Though no-one has ever gotten beyond claiming he's cherry picking. I wish someone would describe a different diet that is as well supported by scientific evidence, as what nutritionfacts is doing for WFPB.
There is some scientific evidence building up in for the Keto diet. But that is --as far as I know-- not a diet for life.
On the other hand there is the raw diet movement (basically an uncooked WFPB diet), but that has little scientific and mostly anecdotal evidence.
The keto diet's main difficulties are the prevalence and preponderance of available sugary foods, the near inability to eat socially, and the extreme difficulty in adopting the diet in the first 3 weeks for people regularly consuming 200g+ of carbohydrates a day.
The raw diet is mostly a trendy thing people write about. The bioavailability of nutrients in many raw foods is just too meh.
We know what the best diet is. A plant and fish based diet with small amounts of other meat. Meat that doesn't subsist on a diet primarily of corn or other, less edible things. This diet is completely unsustainable on a global scale and would result in even more ecological havoc.
The discussion between plants or plants + meat is complicated, but for now I'm going to ignore it because there's more important considerations:
- Companies are making our produce harder to digest as they try and make products with a longer shelf life.
- Eating industrially produced meat (of any sort) is very unhealthy and in many ways unsafe.
- This entire discussion removes dairy from the equation, which is a large part of the puzzle for most people.
- The low-carb vegan and the low-carb omnivore are far better off than anyone consuming 200g+ of carbohydrates a day.
> We know what the best diet is. A plant and fish based diet with small amounts of other meat.
Nope. Fish (most fish) as a central part of diet, will contribute a lot to build up of heavy metals in humans. And what is "small amounts of other meat"? 3x per week? This is basically an omnivorous diet. Compared to the SAD is probably just the junk cut out.
This, SAD-processed, is a very unhealthy diet, compared to a balanced WFPB diet. There are lots of studies to back this up.
> - Companies are making our produce harder to digest as they try and make products with a longer shelf life.
Yups.
> - Eating industrially produced meat (of any sort) is very unhealthy and in many ways unsafe.
Not a problem for those eating WFPB.
> - This entire discussion removes dairy from the equation, which is a large part of the puzzle for most people.
The site you linked is thick which propaganda which makes me doubt your bias and arguments. Choosing your sources is important for making a compelling argument.
One man's truth is another's propaganda, what are your sources? (I've shown mine, and I must say it's pretty convincing and lines up with what I already knew about the human body)
I'm not at all saying there's no use for keto, I just think it should never be a mainstream diet (but something applied in specific cases, under medical supervision). As far as sci evidence goes, WFPB seems to be the "best" diet for the human species as a whole.
This website is seriously one of the best places to find science backed nutrition info. The advice comes down to: eat a balanced Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB) diet with a minimal supplementation regimen:
I think that individual genetics and behaviors are very important for these kind of health studies. Some things are quite clear and apply to all humans. For example: you need vitamin C in your diet or you will get scurvy. Then less general rules that might not apply to you given your genetics and behavior. Vitamin D supplements? Maybe, but probably won't hurt. Drinking Milk? Very variable on its benefits and costs to different people. Down to things that some people should do and others should not do depending on genetics and behavior (most studies these days).
Massive individual genetic testing and constant cellphone behavior monitoring might be able to produce decent studies in the future for your specific attributes, but for now advice from parents and grandparents may be the best you can do.
Most studies use self-reported behaviors for how people behave. More invasive studies (as some people have mentioned in this comment section) show that self reporting is inaccurate and, for example, people eat many more calories than they self report. If you have some system of automatic recording of behavior, which smart-phones might be able to do, and individual DNA results, then these large scale studies might be able to tease out what is healthy behavior for people with specific DNA.
Googling "problems with self-reporting in diet studies" gives a good listing of scientific papers for me. Of course such a search is screaming out "confirmation bias", but it is still useful I think. This[1] is one study that seems to cover what I was talking about, although I have not read it in full.
If you want to take a deep dive into a subject, search for a recent paper on the subject and as you read it the paper will reference other papers, especially in the introduction. Here is where you can find possibly a more relevant paper on the subject. Read that paper and repeat. Soon you will have a decent idea of what is going on in the field. Hard to do if you don't know the jargon and the mathematical methods though.
I don't know about the other studies, but I assume they were short-term? I think I remember one of them being only 3 months. That could have been the issue, as I believe calorie restriction leads to a slower metabolic rate. So if you need 2,000 calories, but eat 1,500 for a year, your body should get used to eating 1,500 and maintaining your weight (after losing some initially before it adapts to fewer calories).
But I believe intermittent fasting where you eat the same 2,000 calories but just shorten the window of eating to allow your body to crank-up the growth hormone and start autophagy does have long-term benefits, that should lead to prolonged life.
And of course, a calorie isn't a calorie. If you eat 200g of net carbs a day, intermittent fasting probably won't prolong your life too much, but it's also going to be more difficult to do IF when you're body is used to having high-levels of blood sugar and insulin in it.
>I never find that these kinds of studies lead to correct and actionable information about how to slow down aging or how to lead your life.
I think the modern life has maxed out as much life extension as we are going to get from our nutrition and lifestyle. We need to do interventional genetic modification to see any further improvements.
A single study will almost never be actionable, but a series of studies, accompanied by systematic reviews, could be the basis of such recommendations.
>I never find that these kinds of studies lead to correct and actionable information about how to slow down aging or how to lead your life.
Don't salt your food _at all_ to maintain a healthy blood pressure.
>Furthermore, it also found that populations with low average daily salt intakes had low BP (blood pressure) and very little or no increase in BP with age. INTERSALT study indicates that BP increases with age only if accompanied by increased salt intake.
They try to reconcile the studies: maybe it's the natural-ingredient foods vs the refined foods, maybe it's the generous diet vs the more-than-generous free-feeding, or conceding that the monkey's don't live longer, but they live healthier.
IMO, the best paragraph from the article was this: "Many of us simply roll our eyes and click away when yet another medical study contradicts the last study—so what else is new? Coffee’s bad for you, until it’s good for you—and so is red wine. Antioxidants are essential, or they’re useless. And so on."
Other than some very basic common sense things -- like don't eat rat poison -- I never find that these kinds of studies lead to correct and actionable information about how to slow down aging or how to lead your life. And it's extremely frustrating to even try.