Currently the best way to consume food is to avoid addictive and highly processed food products and then trust your gut with the rest. Eat what you like and avoid what causes problems. Use salt to taste, most likely it won't kill you - else we would have found out already.

But strangely those weird diets never center around cutting salt out (and some of the meat-only diets are also deliberately heavy in fats). My intuition is that this is because salt is almost addictive, because it is so tastey, and it is very, very difficult to get people to reduce salt in their diet, despite the damage it can cause.

Anyway it's still the case that none of my doctors or nurses have advised me to cut down on oxalate-heavy foods to avoid kidney stones, so I don't think you need to worry that much. If there is a risk, it's a risk only when considered at a population level and probably very low at an individual level.

Not that it will harm you to eat fewer potatoes. They're mostly starch anyway and I think at this point everyone agrees that too much starch can be a problem (because gaining weight is all too easy even without excess starch).

Don't eat too much food. Limit processed foods. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Eat a large variety of foods. Be active.

These rudimentary guidelines are clearly difficult for a lot of people to follow, but I think it's pretty easy to avoid negative diet effects by just doing what most people intuitively know as the right thing, even if we consume some of all types of food. It seems to me this is more about self-control and effort level than any scientific knowledge, at this point.

I see several themes in the advice on this thread - don't eat too much, eat whole foods, and drink water. I have to say that this is probably the most scientific advice you will find.

  1. Eat food.
  2. Not too much.
  3. Mostly plants.

Our knowledge of more than coarse grained dietary needs and effects is grossly overestimated. That vacuum is exploited by commercial interests that typically vilify any form of consumption moderation, and focus instead on promoting one (over)consumption pattern over another.

"Eat lots of different things in moderation because honestly we do not know in enough detail what we need" is sound advice, but sadly just benefits the "patient" and not some profit maximizing economic lobby group.

Any dietitian will tell you, the key to a healthy diet is moderation and variety.

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.

It's my go-to essay on dietary science, and still holds up extremely well ten years after it first came out.

There's a reason why we have chi-squared and T-tests, and an entire branch of math dedicated to statistical analysis for empirical studies. (And please don't quote Mark Twain, someone always does...)

That being said, I think the meta-analysis of decades of research is showing diet science is complicated a/f. It would not surprise me of we ultimately can create bespoke diets since we all are complex machines and different environments.

For anyone who's never heard, Michal Pollan has 7 great rules, but there's one golden rule:

"Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants."

Here are the more "controversial" 7.

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.

2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.

4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.

5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"

6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.

7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

That's in part because food is extremely complex, so it's hard to isolate nutritional factors.

It can be done to some degree, but it's hard. There are some best practices for how to pursue it, but it tends to not get recognized as a legitimate approach because it falls outside the way science is typically done.

But if you wanted to study something out and make your own decision, you should be free to do so.

I think nutrition is a great example. Despite decades of research, there appears to be no one single answer as to what constitutes a healthy diet, or what the most important aspects of a healthy diet are.

Low-calorie? Low-carb? Dairy-free? Meat-free? Low-sodium? Low-fat? High-fat?

As an individual, you have lots of choices, including eating whatever you want with no particular dietary plan at all. But if you want to read a book or read research papers and change your diet, you can.

For biologists and doctors, it might be fun/interesting to study but for the rest of us I think we should just use common sense and listen to our bodies. I personally abhor these "fads".