Post: #1

Fascinating blog post :

https://meaningness.com/nutrition

Here is a sample :

"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.2 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.

Nutrition is now both scientism and pseudoscience. This is a somewhat rare combination; cognitive science is another example, as I pointed out in “Perfection Salad.” Scientism—the eternalistic distortion of science into an authoritative source of meaning—is most harmful when the science is bogus. Pseudoscience is most harmful when it gets the support of the state and other powerful institutions. Food and theories of the mind probably both strongly affect human well-being, so they are particularly bad subjects to have turned into scientism or pseudoscience.

My point is not that nutrition is bad science. Unquestionably, it is bad science; a competent statistician, looking at the design of most experiments, will immediately say “this is meaningless; you can’t learn anything this way.”
It’s worse than just incompetence, in two ways. First, as the “resignation letter” noted, even the best studies have been useless. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, such that doing the same sort of science better wouldn’t help.

The second, still worse implication is that worthless pseudoscience can get treated as authoritative for a century, and even now. This is partly due to rationalist eternalism, and partly due to institutional imperatives produced by malign social dynamics."

Post: #2

I think it's more that nutrition science is hopelessly compromised by vested interests in the food industry. The first example is the food pyramid, which for a good forty years or so reflected bald-faced lies mainly because the milling companies wanted people to eat shitloads of processed carbs.

Every time someone starts identifying some level of consumption of sugar, salt or fat in the diet as a bad thing, research is deployed to shift the focus to one of the others. We keep running around from one poison to the other because nobody has an institutional memory longer than about 10 years or so anymore and nobody can do unbiased research in this area.

That said, there are elements of nutritional science which are terrifyingly accurate. It's those elements of the science that relate to our insatiability for sugar/salt/fat, which are relentlessly tested and retested by the food companies in search of the bliss point. They work - as demonstrated from the fact most of the West is obese.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #3

Nutrition is far from perfect, but it is not pseudo-science. If you eat a ton of simple carbs like soda and sugary candy, you'll be a fat ass. You aren't going to be a fatass by eating kale.

Post: #4

I'm glad the first two replies mentioned carbs. I've lost 45 pounds over the last eight months on an ( imperfect, I'll admit) following of a low carb diet.

Fat is your friend, it's really carbs in particular processed grains and especially sugar that are the real junk foods.

Conventional nutritional science has still not caught up with this. ( In my blue pill, game naive days I did for a while date a fat nutritionist- she did at least have nice tits). If nutritional science knew anything, how the fuck can a fat nutritionist even exist??

Post: #5

Guitarman there are also numerous tribal societies that are healthy eating predominately carb based diets.

Humans and the environment are both complex dynamic systems and there are too many interacting variables to make such a simplistic statement as "fat is your friend" or "carbs are junk food."

Different people have different genetics for example some people's bodies have the necessary genetic adaptations to process dairy properly and other people's bodies do not and so they show various intolerance/inflammatory responses.

Also the way foods are prepared is very important for example fermented soy products e.g. Tofu have very different properties to un-fermented soy products. Traditional European bakers leaving their dough to sit overnight so the yeast breaks down compared to many anglo-sphere bakeries not doing this (they might only let it sit for 3 or 4 hours). Do you eat your steak rare medium or well done? This affects the properties and nutrition of the meat.

Also the interaction between foods and balance is very important for example Chinese people eating greasy fried food and then eating green tea after their meal to aid digestion, Iranians eating a bunch of fresh herbs with their meat and rice, etc.

Besides quality of ingredients matters just as much as the type of ingredients. What is healthier eating steak made from a GMO grain fed cows pumped full of antibiotics and then laced with preservatives or eating natural carb/sugar heavy fruit that you hand picked from the Amazon jungle?

If you look at human history humans in different parts of the world adapted to different types of food/diets due to what was available to them.

Of course some foods are obviously bad for you e.g. Ice-cream , Coca-cola, donuts, etc but beyond the extremely obvious things like that its very difficult to say as a blanket statement what is the right or wrong way to eat. There are just too many variables involved.

I think people need to experiment with different diets/eating philosophies and when they find one that gives them overall good health stick to it.

Post: #6

Fuck the Pseudoscientists and do your own testing.
A matter of fact, I have done it for you.

Meat + Vegetables + Nuts + Intermittent Fasting = Shredded
The longer you maintain this, the leaner you get.
You can obtain a Frank Zane level bodyfat % on this plan.

Meat + Vegetables + Nuts + Fruits + Intermittent Fasting = Maintenance
You can sustain whatever your current bodyfat % is with this nutritional plan.

Meat + Vegetables + Nuts + Fruits, Without Intermittent Fasting = Lean Bulking
Gain pure muscle, albeit slowly

Add Grains to the above = Dirty Bulking
Gain muscle and fat, at a faster rate

For all plans, simply eat until full, do not overeat unless Dirty Bulking

Post: #7

There is definitely a extremely strong connection for me between the way I eat and how I feel, even barring any current or future health effects that are very hard to measure.

That's as empirical as it gets and more than enough for me.

Post: #8

Thanks for the excellent summary ScrapperTL. I've been waiting longer between last and first meal and definitely notice easier fat burning and overall less hunger.

Research Dr Joel Wallach, Dead Doctors Don't Lie, Somebody needs to go to Jail, Epigenetics, Immortality, and watch the '12 bad food to avoid' video in my signature. Wallach understands science-based, clinically verified nutrition and supplementation better than anyone on the planet. He has investigated the basis for the longest lived societies where people routinely reach 100+ years old. He has fought and won lawsuits against the FDA, including requiring that selenium be included in baby formula. WINNING!

Nutrition matters. Humans are not robots so variability exists from genetic and environmental factors. Our soil no longer contains much of the minerals we need and our health suffers as a result. The government knew about this soil depletion since the 1930s, before the big pharma kabal gained a foothold.

You want to be healthy? You need experiment on and educate yourself. You need to determine your baseline health and see what additions or eliminations are needed to improve your health. Nutrition will do this, not the reductionist, western, ad hoc "let's cut out part of an organ! That's fix the problem! Whoops, it didn't work! Let's cut more, beam deadly radiation, and put toxic chemical into the body!" approach which is the ACTUAL pseudoscience, stone knives and bear skins approach at play here.

"Let food be thy medicine and thy medicine food." - Hippocrates

Post: #9

I think we are getting an influx of Industry Public Relations people into the forum trying to see if they can shape opinion.

First we had that dude who started a thread about how smoking every day was light smoking and good for you:

/thread-63579.html

Now we got someone trying to dismantle the idea of eating healthy foods.

It is working, I find myself wanting to guzzle some corn syrup straight from the bottle, and chase it with a spoonful of lard.

Post: #10

(07-06-2017 12:12 PM)Truth Tiger Wrote:  Research Dr Joel Wallach, Dead Doctors Don't Lie, Somebody needs to go to Jail, Epigenetics, Immortality, and watch the '12 bad food to avoid' video in my signature. Wallach understands science-based, clinically verified nutrition and supplementation better than anyone on the planet. He has investigated the basis for the longest lived societies where people routinely reach 100+ years old.

TT, Wallach has been exposed as a bullshit artist. For example :

"Wallach falsely claims that there are five cultures in the world that have average life spans of between 120 and 140 years: the Tibetans in Western China; the Hunzas in Eastern Pakistan; the Russian Georgians and the Armenians, the Abkhasians, and the Azerbaijanis. He also mentions the people of the Vilcabamba in Ecuador and those who live around Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia. The secret of their longevity is "glacier milk" (water full of colloidal minerals). The basis for these claims seems to be Wallach's imagination."

http://skepdic.com/wallach.html

Post: #11

Nutrition is a perfectly valid science subject to empirical evidence, it's just tainted by the presence of scam artists, shills for agribusiness, and retarded doctors who cheated their way through med school and form the bulk of HMO hires. You'd get the same effect in other hard sciences if there was some way to make money off people with say physics. Actually that does happen, considering the number of scam inventions being pushed on kickstarter that claim to be capable of performing magic laws of thermodynamics violating feats with just one dinky solar panel.

Post: #12

The key to eating carbs is blood sugar control. Australia sucks is correct when he says that some tribal societies eat high levels of carbs, but maintain good health levels. However, there are many cases where societies that formerly ate like this started eating a lot of sugar, and became some of the fattest people in the world (such as the Pima Indians). The tribes eating high carbs are eating mostly healthy, non-sugar, low glycemic index carbs, and are getting enough exercise to burn them off.

The key with carbs is the mixture of carb intake and carb burning. If you are active, you can burn more carbs, and therefore can eat more without causing high blood glucose levels. If you eat lots of carbs and don't burn them off, then you can begin to develop insulin resistance in as little as a few weeks of excess carb intake. Once you start down this path, it creates a vicious circle of weight gain, messed up body chemistry, and messed up appetite signals, that is very hard to undo.

Most modern obesity is due to some combination of eating too much sugar and eating more carbs in general than they are able to burn off without raising blood sugar levels. For people who are not fat yet, they should minimize sugar, and make sure to keep their exercise levels and carb intake in check. For people who have already become fat, some level of carb restriction and carb burning exercise are needed to get back to a healthy weight, and once get back to a healthy weight, you'll still have to control carbs more strictly than someone who has never been fat. Most people require a lot of will power to achieve this, because your whole body and psychology are hamstering to try to convince you that you can diet tomorrow, and this chocolate chip cookie right now will be alright.

As for the OP, I agree that much of nutritional science is bullshit. However, I think what I have written above can be considered scientifically true, and this is enough for anybody in any level of body fat to know what to do.

Post: #13

Many years ago, I attended a lecture given by Linus Pauling. He was giving a college lecture tour to promote his new theory that people should take mega doses of vitamins. Experts in the science of nutrition have all rejected his theories and claim they are false. If Linus Pauling, the greatest chemist of the twentieth century, can put out nonsense about nutrition that should give you pause for thought. My belief on nutrition is that the best thing you can do to keep healthy is not to eat too much. I strictly control my weight and don't allow myself to get fat. Be really stingy about adding any other rules to that basic rule.

https://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRel...uling.html

Post: #14

Its not pseudoscience. Its a science that is daily assaulted with billions of dollars by major corporations looking to alter scientific fact to protect their business interests, who also influence government policy, influence media coverage, influence press coverage, all to protect their market share.

Post: #15

(07-09-2017 11:26 AM)Vaun Wrote:  Its not pseudoscience. Its a science that is daily assaulted with billions of dollars by major corporations looking to alter scientific fact to protect their business interests, who also influence government policy, influence media coverage, influence press coverage, all to protect their market share.

Post: #16

BB1, you are either too much a 'skep-DICK' or a pseudo-intellectual shill. Nice way to present no evidence at all. You're doing no one any favors except proving how well the big agro/pharma/multinational have brainwashed people. So kudos for that! You're on my growing ignore list.

Thanks for the pointing out the truth, Vaun and debeguiled!

Post: #17

This is not a problem isolated to nutritional science.

In general, we are currently being swamped by fake science.

There have been papers published on this topic (this is the famous paper that got the ball rolling: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ )

Biomedical research follows Sturgeon's law: 90% of it is junk science.

The worst research I've seen personally is in exercise studies. Anyone with a little bit of understanding of statistics would throw out almost all exercise study papers.

Medical studies are improving slightly but pharmaceutical companies are still burying a lot of results they don't want the public to see.

The next revolution in biomedical science will be the establishment of a new lower p-value, as recommended by NN Taleb. This will upset the old order a lot, and will lead to a lot less research that will be a lot more useful. It might take decades though.

Post: #18

Another example of fake science is the whole man made global warming scam.

In MMGWS CO2, a naturally occurring and vital to nature gas has been unfairly vilified.

In modern nutrition Fat has been unfairly vilified. We need fat to survive. The real culprit in the obesity ( and associated disease) epidemic in the western world is sugar and carbs ( particularly processed carbs and grains).

The planet needs MORE CO2 for the health of nature and humans need to eat fat rather can carbs for the health of our bodies.

Post: #19

(07-10-2017 02:14 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:  The worst research I've seen personally is in exercise studies. Anyone with a little bit of understanding of statistics would throw out almost all exercise study papers.

Could you elaborate?

Post: #20

(07-10-2017 07:08 AM)asdfk Wrote:  

(07-10-2017 02:14 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:  The worst research I've seen personally is in exercise studies. Anyone with a little bit of understanding of statistics would throw out almost all exercise study papers.

Could you elaborate?

I was not able to come across any exercise study that was adequately powered, used the appropriate statistical test (they all heavily relied on ANOVA - because ANOVA tends to give positive results when fed junk data), or had a clearly random sample. A lot of them also had obvious fudging of the results.

Maybe I just didn't read enough exercise studies, but there was a point in my career that I was being exposed to a lot of them and they all sucked.

Post: #21

Fad, extreme diets are what gives nutrition a bad name. Most traditional diets like the Japanese or the Mediterranean diets are healthy, common sense diets (high fruit and vegetable intakes, lots of nuts, seafood, leguminous, greens and varied diets with lower meat content and few processed foods) and the people who practice them are healthy people. More often than not the food is great as well, you don't have to deprive yourself too much to eat well.

Post: #22

Bodybuilding proves you wrong.

Post: #23

(07-10-2017 02:14 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:  This is not a problem isolated to nutritional science.

In general, we are currently being swamped by fake science.

There have been papers published on this topic (this is the famous paper that got the ball rolling: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ )

Biomedical research follows Sturgeon's law: 90% of it is junk science.

The worst research I've seen personally is in exercise studies. Anyone with a little bit of understanding of statistics would throw out almost all exercise study papers.

Medical studies are improving slightly but pharmaceutical companies are still burying a lot of results they don't want the public to see.

The next revolution in biomedical science will be the establishment of a new lower p-value, as recommended by NN Taleb. This will upset the old order a lot, and will lead to a lot less research that will be a lot more useful. It might take decades though.

I stopped paying attention to "studies" and "papers" as soon as I knew a little bit about the lies of feminism. They love to say things like "studies have shown that only 8% of rape accusations are false". How is it possible to do a study on this? Did they survey the accusers and expect them to admit to a false accusation?

I don't want to derail the thread but Thomas The Rhymer makes a great point that much of the information coming from science and published papers is incorrect - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

Post: #24

Watched a good film last night: That Sugar Film, an Australian piece of work by a guy who'd gone sugar-free and then back on the sugar diet that most people in the West consume (40 tablespoons per day) using no junk food, no obvious sweets, etc, just the stuff that comes with all the processed shit in our diets. Quite an eye-opener, worth the watch, even if it's a bit like Super Size Me. Key insight was that he didn't much change his calorie intake but still put on about 5 to 6 kilos in about one month. Have a look.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #25

(07-10-2017 02:59 PM)911 Wrote:  Fad, extreme diets are what gives nutrition a bad name.

Nutrition has given Nutrition a bad name. Look at the food pyramid. The US has gotten fat on it.