
You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition - keithpeter
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/
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JohnJamesRambo
When I worked in a nutrition department it was common knowledge that people
are awful at recalling and reporting what they eat. Obese post-menepousal
women in the study would, with a straight face, tell you that all they ate
that day was a half cup of green beans. You'd look at their food records and
it was physically impossible for them to be alive much less obese on the food
they reported they ate. Humans are not only awful at reporting what they ate,
they have difficulties even seeing it through the distortions of what they
want to see. These are the difficulties associated with nutrition research and
one of the reasons why there is so much confusion about what we should eat.

~~~
keithpeter
My thinking was that by, say, taking a phone snap of your plate at each meal
(some chap in the UK did this a few years ago to convince himself to eat
less/better) you could produce a more objective record.

Challenge: can you calculate approximate calorific values from images of food
on a plate?

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dpatrick86
Interestingly, this has been the approach of a dietary study being conducted
by a group doing research on a circadian-focused pattern of eating. The study
uses a mobile app as part of their distributed clinical trial design.
Participants take pictures of their food with only the option of further
journaling. Kind of cool.

Here's the website for the trial (& app)...

[http://www.mycircadianclock.org/](http://www.mycircadianclock.org/)

Here's a video of the principal investigator (Satchin Panda) talking about his
research...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-eqJDQ2nU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-eqJDQ2nU)

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bodhibyte
For those interested in evidence-based nutrition, I highly recommend
[https://nutritionfacts.org/](https://nutritionfacts.org/)

P.S. Dr. Greger's book is a great resource as well. He does a really good job
of checking and referencing quality articles from peer-reviewed journals while
looking at the balance of the evidence:
[https://nutritionfacts.org/book/](https://nutritionfacts.org/book/)

~~~
bigbetsbigmoney
first link on there is about cholesterol, and is completely incorrect. they
are going back and forth between talking about dietary cholesterol and
cholesterol levels in the body as if they are interchangeable. this is an
incorrect understanding of human biology.

for anyone looking at this site, i'd be very careful about believing anything
it says without doing further research for yourself.

~~~
projectorlochsa
Not really "incorrect". Dietary cholesterol does effect cholesterol amounts in
the body, in addition to other food intake, hormones etc.

~~~
krageon
"Might be true given a million other factors" isn't really the sort of truth
you're looking for when trying to get advice.

~~~
projectorlochsa
There aren't million other factors. Saying that cholesterol is affected only
by saturated fat is not true. just like saying it doesn't affect it at all.

there is no coherent nutrition advice available at the moment, other than
observational evidence of various diseases forming when a population is fed an
improper diet.

for example, if starchivores like apes are given huge amounts of sugary foods,
they will develop atherosclerosis, the same happens if they're given huge
amounts of fatty foods. if carnivores were fed huge amounts of fatty foods,
they don't get atherosclerosis, only if you do not remove their thyroid gland,
if they on the other hand are fed sugary foods, they develop atherosclerosis.
so the mechanism involved in absorbing fat and using it (through various types
of cholesterol - lipoproteins), seems to be different between the herbivores,
omnivores, carnivores. interesting thing about this is that the discrete
classification is faulty and that different hormonal balance can give rise to
no or different disease.

there's plenty of examples like this one. but it has nothing to do with the
individual as population statistic is quite different from needs of an
individual.

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hd4
If we're having a thread on nutrition, I want to ask HN about Kefir (fermented
milk/yogurt from Russia/East Europe), whether they have tried it, and why
there isn't more interest in it considering it has a lot of health benefits?

