I went crazy and wrote an essay on someone elses wall, in response to their frustration about diet fads and high-pressure diet fadsters. Reproduced here for your pleasure. -- I have a couple big issues with dietary advice, regardless of who its from. First, my general disdain for what Ill call mainstream science these days. This is science practiced for a particular result, and usually performed specifically to target certain bad guys and support some cause or other. (Hint: this isnt real science. This is rationalizing. See Global Warming in addition to all the Food Fads.) Second, the history of the past 50 years of dietary science is bad. Really bad. So bad, in fact, youd be better off flipping a coin than taking for granted what these people say about anything you eat. They were wrong about animal fat, they were wrong about salt, they were wrong about a good goddamn many things that were shown later to be very different than originally preached and advertised. And that brings me to my third complaint: the media helps take results like salt is bad, turn them into a crusade, turn the scientists behind that research into celebrities, and thereby corrupts the whole process. Add in politicians and it gets even worse. Take salt for example. Originally: SALT IS BAD! THOU MUST NOT EAT SALT! EVERYTHING MUST BE LOW-SODIUM OR YOU SHALT HAVE HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE! Decades after the massively-hyped salt scare, much more research is done, and the conclusion is that ** 10% ** of people react to high salt with higher blood pressure. 30% react to high salt with ** lower ** blood pressure. And 60% are not affected at all either way. And this was already known when asshole Bloomberg banned salt in New York restaurants. Never let the facts stand in the way, I suppose. If youre one of the 10%, yes, you should moderate your salt intake. But that does not apply to 90% of people. So I want my damn fried chicken with damn extra salt, please. My point in this is that with diets, in particular, there are simply too many variables. There are probably thousands of micro-evolved dietary adaptations and, as omnivores, our bodies are a giant mass of compromises. Throw in the fact that very few people any more are of pure stock - i.e. most of us are mutts - and even if there is truth to the idea that you can have an optimal diet based on your DNA, it is something that is simply going to have to be read from your specific DNA and probably experimented with on your own. Were a LONG way from being able to convert a DNA sequence into knowing how your body will react to food. So anyone who tells you there is a magic diet or some true diet or other such is full of crap. Now there are of course people with specific food responses - which is to say, reactions to certain foods that are so intense we call them allergies. Of course, these people (such as those with Celiac disease) should indeed avoid those things. But for most people, I believe there is a lot of merit to the food pyramid - eat a modest, balanced diet of a variety of things, just as most folks have been doing for the 10,000 years since the adoption of agriculture, and youll probably be just fine. The rise of many of the diseases of diet such as heart disease, obesity, diabetes, etc. come from excessive consumption combined with a complete and total lack of exercise. Most people now spend almost their entire lives indoors in a chair, and I guarantee you that is precisely the change in lifestyle that correlates over the past 100 years to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, etc.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 06:28:31 +0000
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