It's complicated because people don't want to cook. If you eat freshly cooked vegetables and WHOLE grains, what problem will you have? Another silly attempt at "hacking" our bodies. Spare me.
So Michele Obama's attempt to counter obesity with exercise for children and healthy fresh cooked food needs to be examined rigorously through the lens of a nutritional science initiative? We might discover that exercise makes you more fat or fresh vegetables contain an unknown chemical which makes kids fat? Again people don't want to cook simple healthy food and are more interested in the next four hour body guru telling them that they can eat lots of meat and no grains or some other crazy thing.
I agree with your comments on the benefits of cooking as many meals as possible from scratch, and on the idea that it clearly was possible for people decades and centuries ago to avoid getting fat.
So absent some pervasive non-dietary effect, we should be able to stay thin by eating like our grandparents.
On the other hand, we don't want to be spending limited resources on things that don't solve the problem at hand. For instance, as the American Heart Association and American College of Sports Medicine stated:
“It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.”
If we tell people to go running during their lunch hour, and then they go eat at MacDonald's because they don't have time to cook, it's probably not helping the situation.
Whole grains aren't good for you, no matter how many companies promote it on their packaging. Grains cause insulin resistance, damage your gut, sap energy, and provoke your immune system. Yet, they are still in the USDA food pyramid, which is why research like this is so needed.
Maybe you can now tell from the responses: diet is complicated and there are open issues to resolve. Diet experimentation tends to attract money with an agenda. Some organization needs to try reproducing results from influential studies at the very least. I'd like to know if eating cholesterol is bad or if inflammatory foods is the actual culprit in plaque buildup in the arteries. I'd like to know if low carb diets are better or whole-grain diets. Both of these topics are debatable in the scientific community. Why do you think what you "know" is actually correct, and more importantly, why do you care if real science is done to prove you right (or wrong)?
Again spare me, someone has just 'discovered' grains are bad for you? What will they 'discover' next in the laboratory of nutrition? I'll take traditional ayurvedic knowledge over this 'rigorous nutritional science initiative' chaired by the four hour body guru.
And i would rather eat a tablespoon of raw cane sugar than a tablespoon of bleached white sugar or laboratory grade high fructose corn syrup anyday. (we replaced white sugar with raw cane sugar in our house in spite of scientifically minded opinions that "it's till sugar")
In my worldview we were not dumped blindly into this world to use our senses and scientific knowledge to discover a better world. There is much traditional knowledge that is not discovered, but rather given to us that i am happy to follow instead of trying to discover the next best thing to hack my body.
I am not trying to be close minded, but I am doubting the efficacy of starting from scratch.
The reason why your argument doesn't make sense is because of optimization. Evolution is a process that has optimized our bodies to certain conditions. So, in theory, learning about traditional eating sounds like it would be the perfect answer. However, what we think of as "traditional" eating is not what our bodies are optimized for. Agriculture, grains, and cooking are a really new thing in the scale of human evolution. Thousands of years ago, humans started doing things and eating things that they hadn't before.
What the studies (should) be trying to do is figure out what our bodies are optimized to eat. Additionally, it would be helpful to know if certain genetics adapted to different environments (foods) or if everyone roughly follows the same "optimization".
And yet, where are the hunter gatherers? Seems the agriculture people won, for the most part.
Also, how long exactly does it take human digestion to adapt? Are there any studies about that? Bear in mind that not only the human genome is involved, but also bacteria and so on in the gut.
Who knows, perhaps part of the human success story is that they can adapt to lots of different diets quickly (humans living in the weirdest places with constrained food sources).
I've read that for example lactose tolerance (the ability to digest dairy products as an adult) spread relatively quickly through the population (can't find exact quotation right now, unfortunately :-( ).
"And yet, where are the hunter gatherers? Seems the agriculture people won, for the most part."
There are no hunter gatherers because agriculture will guarantee a more prosperous and growing population. There is absolutely no doubt about that.
However, just because hunter-gatherers died off doesn't mean their average health was less than the average health of the agricultural population. In fact, the hunter gatherers that were proficient enough to survive were probably much, much healthier than agriculture population. (This is assuming both populations are getting enough nutrients that malnutrition is not a factor.)
Even though the average health of the agricultural population may have been lower, the methods allowed more in the population to survive. In a food constrained world, this is the optimal solution for health.
We don't have the problems of food constraint (at least in the first world provided you have an income). That is why now we can look back out or diets and selectively pick and choose the most optimal combinations because there is no longer a problem of food scarcity.
Ok, then let's take that part out of the argument. Either way, for a LONG time, humans ate one way. Once humans discovered agriculture and processing, they started eating completely differently. Most "traditional" knowledge comes from the latter period.
Even if we were "created", I would assume we would be created with some kind of optimization for the environment we were created in.
I don't agree with your version of human history in this ancient past of being of primitive's who 'discovered' agriculture. The knowledge of ayurveda (vedic health texts) and other vedic texts don't suggest they were primitives but rather people with advanced knowledge.
In Vedic epistemology there are 3 ways to ascertain knowledge, your senses, inductive logic and hearing from an authority. There are detailed descriptions on the theory of food, medicine and the functioning of the body. The reductionist view of counting calories and chemicals in a laboratory will never come up to it's standard because the human body is far more complex.
Yes because from my comments it is obvious I am delusional. I'll be sure to make sure my views coincide with your accepted world view before commenting next time.
