"Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing. After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless."
While I fully agree withtthe gist of this quote, I think one major point is wrong: the idea of an optimal ratio between the macronutrient is probably bullshit in itself. In fact, the idea of categorizing food into such simple categories (three macronutrients + vitamins and minerals) at all seems wrong. Fiber plays a major role, different fats and different carbs have widely different effects, probably different proteins too.
Note: the source of the quote for anyone curious to read more:
Aside from macronutrients being too broad to be entirely meaningful. The underlying assumption that there is an optimal ratio already seems naïve.
Humans probably have wildly different nutrition needs depending on how physically active they are, how hot it is in their part of the globe, which foods are available in their area, their gut microbiome, etc.
Alternatively, I think the idea that outside some extremely broad parameters (not eating a diet lacking essential vitamins, under-eating to the point of malnourishment or over-eating to the point of severe obesity, etc) there are no particular nutritional needs is under-examined.
Nutritional Science seems based on the idea that relatively minor tweaks to diet can influence health outcomes. After several decades of failing to find what those tweaks might be, it always seems strange to me that people don't seem to consider that they might just not exist, and that the human body is fine with whatever food it gets, within some broad range.
Hence my including "a diet lacking essential vitamins". But nutritional science figured out stuff like "preventing scurvy" pretty well several decades (or in some cases, centuries) ago. It's further attempts to refine diet to promote health that don't seem to have really led to any really actionable results, to the point that it seems worth considering that it might just not be possible.
Not something proponents of Orthomolecular medicine would agree on. That entire branch exists soly becuase of failure of standard medicine to use required doses. Ignoring those researchers doesn't make entire thing untrue. As an example, vitamin C level for optimal health is vastly higher then vitamin C levels needed to prevent scurvy (which is total meltdown of the organism).
Replacing nutrition science with some quackery is not any better - even quackery supported by one of the fathers of modern medicine.
The metabolism of vitamin C in particular is pretty well understood, and no magical benefits of getting huge doses has ever been proven to have any of the claimed positive effects (despite many prominent supporters' efforts, including Mr Pauling).
Except we continue to see population-wide trends in health that are surely linked to changes in average diet over the last 100 years or so.
But it's certainly possible it's far less to do with ratios of simple/complex carbs, protein & fat than widely seems to be believed and indeed linked more to either micronutrients (or lack thereof), or worse, industrial chemicals that have made their way into the food chain. Either way, even accepting variation between individuals, it's surely worth understanding better what general principles can guide how to advise on what diet and food industry changes are necessary to address public health concerns.
You surely can say some things about "average". But someone working physical still has greatly different food needs, than someone only working in an office and being a couch potato afterwards.
Or for example I usually avoid sausage and fat meat as it is heavy on the stomach and weight. But the last days I have been in the mountains, walking over ice and snow. Fat meat was excellent, because with the cold, I burned lots of energy.
>Humans probably have wildly different nutrition needs depending
Also might have something to do with how many tens of millennia some peoples' isolated ancestors spent surviving on relatively limited local items available or cultivated, compared to what is now considered mainstream.
In my case I lowered my metabolism considerably so I could thrive in Texas without air conditioning in the summer. When everyone else was complaining about the heat this week, all I could do is remind them "it's not even summer yet".
Definitely was not as much progress during the first decade.
Those categories cannot be “wrong” as they are based on the types of molecules.
I think what you mean is they are not meaningful to guide health decisions as they are too broad and can be further subdivided into more specific categories.
"We don't understand how the body metabolizes what it ingests, and what is healthy and what isn't! Every theory is wrong and has been overthrown! Therefore it's impossible to say whether eating this arsenic pill will be bad for you!"
My impression is that there is pretty solid evidence that eating highly processed foods correlates with worse health outcomes.
> My impression is that there is pretty solid evidence that eating highly processed foods correlates with worse health outcomes.
That is the conclusion of the Nutrition piece as well. But, crucially, it's important to recognize that we don't really know why that is, and we don't know many of the particulars. To take just two examples:
- Even our distant hominid ancestors had discovered fire and were using it to heat food, so it seems very unlikely that eating raw food would be significantly better for us than eating cooked food (by evolutionary arguments)
- Cutting food is often not even considered processing, and yet it's something which has a clear negative effect on our teeth at the very least (and is a much much more recent innovation than cooking)
So yeah, don't eat a Mars bar or a Chicken McNugget if you can at all help it - and gods help you if you like Spam. But beyond the worst of these foods, the story is actually quite unclear.
Edit: the specific quote about the exact point you're making:
> One of the trial new messages being tested by the nutrition establishment is “avoid processed food,” which has the big advantage (for their future credibility) that no one is likely to adopt it. Cooking has become an unacceptable hassle.[9]
> [9] Disclosure: I do avoid processed food, and most of what I eat I cook from scratch. This is not advice.
We do know why. Hyper processed foods are stimulants the same way that drugs are and can be equally addictive. We’re getting a whole food like beets and purifying it into a single substance, sugar. That is no different than how cocaine is purified from its respective plants, forming an addictive substance.
There is no evidence that this is specific to highly processed foods, as opposed to any delicious food. It is true that highly processed foods tend to be more delicious food their price than other foods, but that's about it.
What food do you have in mind that is delicious but not ultra processed? I don’t think any whole food gets even close to competing with foods such as pizza, French fries and ice cream. I think the addictive component is one aspect of it, but I also personally believe the body has a internal mechanism that keeps track of its micronutrient and macronutrient deficiencies and induces cravings to obtain those nutrients, regulated by the memory of past foods in the microbiome, so that also can trigger overeating.
Well, cheese is quite delicious and is not highly processed. Many kinds of seeds are delicious after a simple roasting (peanuts, sunflower seeds, pine seeds, hazelnuts, pistachio etc). Walnuts are delicious even raw. Sweet fruit such as bananas, cherries, raspberries, blueberries, mangoes, etc. are delicious. Honey is also delicious even completely unprocessed. Edit: forgot to mention steak, another lightly processed food that is one of the most delicious things you can eat.
Not to mention, there are processed staples eaten all over the world for hundreds or thousands of years without leading to widespread obesity or addiction - bread and beer being some of the oldest such examples.
Depends who you ask. Literally, yes, it is extremely highly processed: separating wheat grains from the seed pod, then turning them into a fine powder, then combining with water, yeast, and oil (which is itself a processed food, mechanically processing some seeds) then fermenting it, adding salt, adding other processed ingredients on top (mechanically processed tomatoes, cheese obtained by fermenting milk, often cured meats etc), finally baking the whole thing.
This is one of the problems of this idea of processed foods - many things which don't actually seem to be a significant problem are in fact highly processed, we just don't tend to think of them like that.
It’s not cos it’s processed but cos it is usually low on fat high on sugar.
Not everything that is processed is poisonous, and most “fresh” food today is full of chemicals or lacking in nutrients, so most food you would eat is not that healthy.
Obesity, longevity, and hormonal research are actually aligned on many points. Nutritional science, which is primarily built upon epidemiology, has caused a lot of confusion as seen in the article, and this is the reason that the quote exists. However, other sciences do use mechanisms of action.
So, it's not hopeless; any emergent system that is as flexible as the human body will be really complex, with balances, counterbalances, and even counter-counterbalances. It's built to survive almost any climate and adapt to changes in climate within a short time span.
Be aware that bodybuilders have been using different metabolic states since the time of Vince Gironda, around the 1960s.
The human body is made for many ranges, contexts, and different diets. So searching the best diet won't yield much.
Wow, that is odd. Shouldn't it have been the other way around? Anyone can create a diet (everyone has _a_ diet!), but you need to study nutrition to understand it.
The article is about the science of (human) nutrition, which dietitians practice. Dietitians are actually good experts on certain medical aspects of food, but know as little as anyone else about what constitutes a generally healthy diet.
This article reveals how Scientific American has declined over time.
It has become a mere shadow of its former self, resorting to sensationalism for online engagement.
I understand the need for the magazine to cater to an audience, but how was this article even approved? It lacks specifics, relies on common knowledge, lacks relevant studies or investigations. It's nothing but clickbait.
If it's accurate and has higher readership, what's the harm? I found it useful.
Re topics, it is a shame for the regular readers if they have limited themselves to the short list of high SEO performing topics. But it would be hypocritical to complain about it from a link aggregator site where the article has only reached the front page due to this choice of a popular interest topic. When did you cancel your subscription?
> If it's accurate and has higher readership, what's the harm?
The other commenter argued that it relies on common knowledge as opposed to scientific knowledge. That's the harm. Especially for a journal claiming to be scientific.
Unless they actually paid for Scientific American when it was "good", they have little standing to complain if it is still producing accurate and informative content.
“Each metabolic activity or system in the body is interconnected, and [if] you start exercising more, over weeks and months, your body adjusts and starts spending fewer calories on overall tasks and resets back to where it was,” Urlacher says. This energy compensation may explain why simply adding more miles a week can yield fitness and other gains but has little effect on weight. People who exercise also tend to increase caloric intake to compensate for the additional energy expenditure.
damn. turns on its head the common notion exercise is good for weight loss. maybe instead of making exercise predictable and routine, it should be done randomly to prevent this adaptation from occurring?
Anyone who has tried to lose weight can tell you that. Exercise is extremely important for your health, but it doesn't significantly help with weight loss (assuming you're not doing professional sports levels of exercise).
On the other hand, over the long term, more muscle weight will passively consume more calories and thus can help maintain your (lean) weight, especially for people who like eating a lot.
>On the other hand, over the long term, more muscle weight will passively consume more calories and thus can help maintain your (lean) weight, especially for people who like eating a lot.
This is misleading - the amount of additional energy passively consumed by muscle mass is pretty insignificant - 10-15 kcal per kilo of muscle mass.^[1]
Resistance training is still good, but definitely not good for this particular purpose.
I'm not sure what this article is, but BMR is most highly correlated to lean body mass, and it varies by a pretty large margin between individuals (e.g. Men are typically quoted as requiring ~2000Cal/day, vs women requiring ~1200, and much of the difference is actually attributable to lean body mass).
Diet control is the most effective way to lose weight, though not necessarily easy for people and exercise is the best way to improve health and fitness. Strangely, I find my appetite is suppressed immediately after doing a bit of cycling, but I'm sure I make up for it the following day.
When I started ADHD meds I lost like 10lbs in a month due to eating way less. I think I'm now 20lbs under where I started after 3 months or so and I think that's where it's going to stay.
I'm not one to worry too much about my weight, it's just something my doctor told me because he weighs me every appointment.
Yes, various mental conditions and drugs can significantly affect our weight through poorly understood indirect means. A common example is lithium, often given to people who suffer from bipolar disorders - it has a significant effect on weight, typically causing many kilos of weight gain.
It's very funny to see people then claim that the story stops at CICO or that your calories in and/or your calories out are entirely within your conscious control.
CICO is what matters for weight. But CICO is obviously not entirely under conscious control, and there are a ton of factors that change it.
One of the easiest ways to increase basal metabolic rate is to be colder. But it's not that much easier than being hungry. It's so easy to "cheat" and put on a sweater, or turn the HVAC to a higher temperature. Just as it's easy to serve a slightly larger portion, or have a snack.
Technically of course the correct formula is: weight = starting mass + mass added - mass lost.
And just as it's completely obvious, I also think it's completely useless for understanding how to live a good life at a desired body weight. There is clearly a lot more going on, as can be seen by the plethora of different medications, organisms and substances that cause weight change in every conceivable direction.
> or that your calories in and/or your calories out are entirely within your conscious control.
Yeeeep. Stimulants make me lose track of time and also forget to eat. Even when I start getting hungry, I don't feel the actual urge to eat anymore.
and there's also the thing where putting a certain amount of stuff into your mouth doesn't necessarily guarantee a corresponding CI, and CO varies based on basically anything you do.
The evidence of anything other than simple CICO is marginal in both quality and impact. Sure, all sorts of things might make you feel hungrier or make you want to eat more or less but whether you actually gain weight or not is a product of how much food you put in your mouth and how much you move. But this is not a popular fact when everyone wants an excuse for failures of attention, discipline and willpower. Only real exception here are medications that affect water retention, but that is entirely separate to fat gain/loss.
CICO itself is actually at best an approximation, since neither CI nor CO are measurable, especially in any kind of real-world setting. Eating less and working out more will lead to reduced weight loss, but how people may be able to achieve this, especially on the long term, is unclear.
The evidence for any kind of nutrition finding is slight. CICO has the advantage that it matches very basic thermodynamic principles, so it has to be true to some extent. But beyond this basic level, all you get in reality are some broad strokes. We know how much calories maximum can be extracted from a piece of food. We know how much energy minimum you need to consume to perform a particular excercise. But no one really knows how much calories one particular person will actually get from eating one particular piece of normal food, no one knows how much it will actually vary between people, no one knows what might affect that difference. No one also knows how much energy you'll actually use for doing a particular exercise given efficiency losses from your movements; and no one actually knows how much energy your body is passively consuming - nor everything that affects both of these.
Beyond the problem of actually measuring CICO, there is the additional problem of treating humans as fre will agents when it comes to food, when we know full well we are biological machines that have biological imperatives. We may be able to suppress our base instincts to achieve longer term goals, but this ability is obviously limited. Things like appetite are not within our control, and our ability to prioritize the longer term goal versus the short term need that our body is signaling is also obviously limited.
And not only are these limited, we know very well that they are affected by all sorts of internal processes. There are many psycho-active medications that are very very strongly proven to have an effect on appetite (lithium, SSRIs), as are certain diseases (thyroid issues for example).
But sure, keep blaming people for their diseases. It worked great for curing AIDS, so I'm sure it will work on obesity any day now.
While I believe this to be technically correct, this approach to diet and weight is like saying “poor people just need to make more money, or spend less”. It misses a lot of important nuance.
I would recommend you check out a book called” The Hungry Brain“ by Stephan Guyenet. It changed my perspective on this topic and made me much more empathetic to people who struggle with weight issues.
No. The evidence largely points to CICO being harmful bullshit.
Reducing things to thermodynamics is not useful to people trying to lose weight. Any more than talking about the speed of light is useful to people trying to run faster.
Metabolism influences passive weight loss. Fiber influences caloric absorption. Muscle mass influences calorie burn. Gut microbiome impacts fat and caloric absorption by the body. Food quality and type influences all of the above.
Say it with me: CICO is harmful, reductive bullshit. If it helped you lose weight, great; it doesn’t help most people though and there is an obesity epidemic to handle.
1. The broad idea that your weight loss/gain is affected by the caloric content of the food you eat and the amount of excercise you get. This is almost trivially true from simple thermodynamic arguments, and no one contradicts it.
2. The specific belief that weight loss is completely reducible to using your free will to eat less calories and do more sports, and that there is no further discussion to be made on how to help someone lose weight (e.g. no medical checkups for hormone issues, no therapy for mental health, no look at the fattening effects of medication or pollutants, no caring about microbiomes, etc.). This part is what is harmful bullshit, since it posits that human beings of strong moral character should not let their basic biology affect their behavior.
Just because it’s technically correct doesn’t make it useful or helpful.
It’s technically correct that computer instructions are all in binary. Yet learning binary is not useful to people trying to code in Python.
If the python community started to tell learners “it’s all binary in the end”, it being true wouldn’t make it any less of an unhelpful reductive bullshit claim.
Calories In, Calories Out - a way of describing what affects weight. Depending on context, it can either refer to the general idea that weight loss/gain depends ultimately on how much you eat vs how much exercise you get, OR to the more specific idea that nothing except calories really matters and factors like medication, psychology etc are to be ignored, since you can always just decide to eat less.
Exercising to lose weight is a myth and this is well known in all circles relating to fitness, sport, etc. The main question is why is this idea so prevalent in the mainstream if more or less everyone who's even a bit educated on the matter agrees that it's bogus?
For all practical intents and purposes it is bogus though, we're talking about an order of magnitude of a difference between what your eating accounts for and what working out accounts for for an average individual. You can easily consume more calories by having a sandwich or two than you burn in a gym session. Saying that losing weight is simply a matter of working out more is highly misleading and sets people up for failure. Saying people should work out to lose weight is like saying people should avoid avocado toast to get rich — yes, every little bit helps, but it really misses the real point.
You make it seem like people can't reason for themselves about it. If you go on a 3 mile run, people will burn about 300-400 calories and is immediately available if you use a watch or even just your phone to track.
Then you can walk into Chipotle and see a burrito is 900 calories and do the math that you'd need to run 3 times a week to burn off an extra burrito.
But yes, most fitness proponents will almost always say that weight is controlled in the kitchen. Where do you see that people say you should only workout to lose weight?
There are other benefits from exercising other than the calories burn during it. Increases to both short term metabolism and longterm due to higher muscle mass do add up.
> Saying that losing weight is simply a matter
I never said that. But yes if you’re at a stable weight adding regular exercise to your routine might be enough to tip the scales. It’s not going to be simple though.
> s like saying people should avoid avocado toast to get rich
