Not to say that it is easy in absolute terms, but I'd argue that true/false'ing a statement, e.g. "humans should eat 1 rock a day" is a categorically easier problem than answering "What should humans eat"?
For fun/example I asked gpt3.5 "What percent of dieticians would suggest eating one rock a day is good for your health?" And got a pretty solid if wordy 'none'.
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.
I think the original comment was pointing out that our discussion of diet and nutrition is overly complicated. Not that it's easy to make the right choices, but that it is easy knowing what those right choices are.
I hear you on how difficult it is though. People who are able to manage it confuse the simplicity of knowing what to do and the difficulty of actually achieving it.
Imagine a world where the government came out and said: for optimum health eat nothing but meat, fish, poultry and lots and lots of vegetables.
How in the world would you feed a population of 300+ million eating this way? You can't.
For this reason, we're encouraged to consume things that are easy to grow: wheat, rice, etc.
That was just a thought experiment - I am not trying to have the debate here of what the optimum diet is. I am just trying to provide a little perspective as to why under some circumstances the advice we're given may not always match up with research.
That statement is much too reductive to be true. Yet it might still be closer to the truth than the old belief that it's best to avoid fats and eat loads of grains.
The more specific you get about a diet, the more specific you need to get about the person eating it. So long as most dietary advice is designed and tested at population scale, it's going to be fuzzy and inconclusive.
Even the most basic advice we can give today comes with asterisks.
It's bizarre how many people seem to think that "eating a good diet" is easy. They may be under the impression that "easy to describe" and "easy to implement" are the same thing.
How would you approach trying to determine a good approach to healthy eating for most people then? Even breaking it down into 27 different groups requires an average of each particular group.
I didn’t ask for it to be universally applicable, or even broadly applicable. Or even applicable to more than the person the question imagines. I asked if we have enough information to know one single example of a healthy diet for one imaginary person who you are allowed to assume has no complicating factors.
Because if we can’t answer this much much simpler problem then we have no hope of giving nutritional advice to a population that is as varied as you describe.
Pollan's advice is so simple, but like many simple things it can be really hard for people to follow in practice. Sometimes it seems like we are way too good at out-smarting ourselves rather than keeping it simple. Food is really the simplest thing in the world - humans survived on this earth for tens of thousands of years before anybody knew anything about gut bacteria, vitamins, macronutrients, etcetera. I think it's best not to overthink nutrition and just try to eat good, whole foods like our ancestors ate. It also so happens that those foods are the most delicious and satisfying. I like Pollan's other principle of, "If your grandma wouldn't recognize it, don't eat it!".
I think few people would disagree with the statement, but the real questions are how many grams of veggies per day? How many different veggie types per week? How do I know if it's enough to actually reduce my risk? etc.
> Remove potatoes, rice, and bread, and you'll win with a super majority.
My problem with simplistic "rule of thumb" advice like this is that people will still eat a bunch of "healthy whole foods" like peanut butter and wonder why they aren't losing weight. Also, potatoes are practically a superfood - full of vitamins and minerals - and people should eat them (in moderation), not completely avoid them.
Knowing and tallying the caloric content of all the foods you're eating, either directly (by weighing your food) or indirectly (through a proxy like Weight Watchers points) seems to yield the best results.
Yes, this requires more effort than just "don't eat white bread."
It's simple because it's a heuristic. I'm pretty comfortable with my nutrition, but when friends ask me to summarize it it's very difficult for me because I've spent an unholy amount of time researching it. Things like Pollan's famous quote or "avoid man-made things" are targeted at the 99% of people who aren't as obsessive about it as I was at one pt, but still very much want to eat healthy. It has its false positives and negatives obviously, but it has a pretty great trade off between correctness and complexity.
If you consider it as a heuristic instead of taking it literally, your objection about artificial selection of produce is also more or less irrelevant. Man had a hand in shaping those plants' current genome, but if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making (most of) them. It's still easy to distinguish from, say, donuts and still useful as a heuristic.
Again most people aren't trying to engineer their diets, what they need is simple concepts that provide a good outline of what they need to do to meet their goals. Self-monitoring and self-correction are far more useful than knowing a precise formula of how much meat, dairy, fruits and veggies one should be eating.
I find research that starts with the assumption that humans require identical amounts of anything to be absurd. People are metabolically different from each other - the optimal average has no bearing on what I should do, it only indicates the course that is most likely to be correct, ignoring all specific information about myself.
I have a lot of information about myself that differentiates me from the aggregate (and so should most people), so this recommendation is more dangerous than it is useful.
For fun/example I asked gpt3.5 "What percent of dieticians would suggest eating one rock a day is good for your health?" And got a pretty solid if wordy 'none'.
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