I think after the last few years of these kinds of things coming out, the takeaway is pretty simple: be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.
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.
Yeah. But humans haven't had fresh fruit available all year round until recently. Similarly, there was never a wide range of foods available. I'm not sure we've got enough evidence to say that changing our diet to include lots of fruit and a wide variety of foods is safe. The encouragement to do this is coming from large governing bodies.
I'm off to eat nothing but turnips for a year and get scurvy :-)
not to mention most fruits have been selectively bred/genetically engineered to have much higher sugar content than they did when we evolved to eat them seasonally
Indeed. And Food Unwrapped (UK TV programme) explained how the supermarkets don't need to say how much sugar is in those ultra-sweet Piccolo tomatoes because they vary and it's impractical to measure. In fact, it's worse than that because mostly they do display the sugar content in the Nutrition Information but it was found to always be a huge underestimate (like 3x lower than the real value).
Still, they're much nicer than the old tomatoes. At least I'll die happy. There are too many humans in the world anyhow.
> be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.
I agree with the latter part, but what's wrong with health institutions recommendations? they look pretty sensible to me. I'm much more skeptical of advice from 'health gurus' that seem to have increasing influence.
“be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible”
That's terrible advice. "Common sense" is what happens when popularly accepted ideas escape proper scientific scrutiny, and that's exactly how we wound up here.
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.