The point is we don't know, which is the case with most lifestyle/diet choices that aren't obviously bad in a vast majority of cases, like smoking and overeating.
> study after study after study shows that "diet and lifestyle" are major factors in every deadly disease from cancer to diabetes to heart disease
As true as that is, it is remarkably hard to get evidence-based, clear guidance on what to eat and not eat. Instead, it's a bunch of competing camps, with none having comprehensive evidence.
We're not far out of the caves when it comes to nutrition.
I'm not saying I agree with the premise (that we really have no idea what a healthy diet looks like), but given the situation where are all diets are equally likely to be healthy, picking a cheap one makes sense.
Thanks. I didn’t care at all about this until close people started to do random diets they see on instagram. Every single one of those were rooted on pop science, garbage studies and very shaky foundations. That got me to look a lot more on a regular basis into what we actually know, and the answer was “very little”.
I think it’s fine for us to not know much about something. We don’t have all the answers in the universe, we’re just hairless monkeys after all. I just wish more people would be accepting of a “that’s complicated, nobody really knows and you’ll have to try a bunch of stuff to see what works for you specifically” approach.
To your question, I am slightly above the prescribed line in a lot of metrics and don’t really do anything special, I am lucky enough it doesn’t have any impact on my life in general.
I'll agree that there are certainly different types of diets that we'd have to examine more closely. But what this does seem to tell us that there is basically no diet that really works for most people most of the time.
It's possible that a) diet isn't that hard to figure out and b) gamifying, quantifying, testing, and over-extrapolation from isolated scientific results make people confused and much less effective at making the right decisions consistently, which is the part they really need help with.
That's one part of the problem, but we also don't have great data in the first place on what diets should be stuck to, especially when it comes to solid evidence of long-term outcomes. We have better data about short-term weight or muscle loss/gain, but whether some diets result over a lifetime in higher or lower rates of heart attacks, or other organ failure, has little solid data, with the exception of a handful of clear carcinogens. A lot of arguments end up extrapolating from a few observed patterns of variation (e.g. what seem to be positive effects of the "Mediterranean diet", which might also be conflated with non-diet lifestyle factors), then attempting to figure out what factors explain those observations.
> It doesn't seem healthy if you are accustomed to the standard American diet.
This is such a low bar that it's not really saying much at all. There are very real reasons why this kind of diet is almost certainly not healthy long term - risk of CVD being the main one.
> One overlooked factor is bioavailability of nutrients
This is not a significant factor that someone should be basing a diet on. Bioavailability is influenced by many factors and the vast majority of people aren't eating enough nutrient-rich foods, period. Optimizing based on bioavailability misses the forest for the trees.
Yes but there are a lot of people out there (like me) who live to eat and don't want it to be true that diet is important. We humans are masters at dismissing facts that don't fit our agenda. It also doesn't help that even simple "cheats" on a diet can render it ineffective, which we then tend to interpret as "diets don't work for me" rather than "you can't 'cheat' on your diet"
I agree. It’s true of many (all?) diets that its proponents tend to overestimate the applicability of any one diet to all people.
Dietary science is at its infancy. Contrary to what most people would assume, we have mountains of anecdotes, mountains of opinions, and very few hard facts. Navigating diet from a fact-first, science-first perspective is deeply frustrating.
And? What's your point? Many of us are worried about this, there's no guidance from our overlords, and there are some very obvious differences between diets today and diets $REFDELTA years ago. Speculation about microplastic, chemicals, lack of fiber, etc... is perfectly reasonable.
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