|
Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 9
|
 |
|
Author
|
Topic: Nutrition (Read 13626 times)
|
Zanthius
Enlightened
 Offline
Posts: 941
|
Currently taught nutrition advice is not based in science; it's instead based on decades-old bureaucracy. But yes. We do learn the nonsense about how salt is bad for you, meat is bad for you, fat is bad for you, and that we should shove bread and pasta down our throats and drink more water than we actually want.
I don't think the problem is just decades-old bureaucracy, I think there is also a problem with the nutritional sciences themselves. There are actually several contradictory studies regarding for example if red meat is carcinogenic or not, so you could say that "all of these scientific studies" show that red meat is good for me, while another guy could say, yeah, but "all these scientific studies" show that red meat increases the risk of getting certain types of cancer. The same is true for saturated fats and cardiovascular diseases. Regarding salt, I think there actually is a broad scientific consensus that you shouldn't eat too much salt (NaCl), especially large amounts of sodium ions are linked to high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases.
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: June 26, 2017, 08:57:29 pm by Death 999 »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Julie.chan
*Many bubbles*
Offline
Posts: 130
Sharing is good.
|
Nutrition science is just weak across the board, because it's hard to study nutrition in humans. This is the full extent of what we know:
1. Sugar is bad for you.
2. We need to get enough of various nutrients. We have a rough idea of how much for many of them.
3. Some people respond badly to some kinds of foods. We don't really know why.
Regarding salt, research is more in support of too little salt being bad for you than too much. Only certain people appear to be affected at all by having too much salt, and it is consistently shown that too little salt is worse for everyone. That "too little" amount? Higher than what all the various health agencies are suggesting is too much. Healthcare Triage did a couple episodes on this (on YouTube).
Salt is an essential nutrient, and keeping a proper water/salt balance is so essential that our bodies are highly effective at controlling it even though they are completely incapable of managing any other nutrient. So the idea that we need to ignore our instincts in this department is frankly absurd.
For everything else, we just have to eat a variety of foods, hope we get the nutrients we need, and figure out what works best for us individually.
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: June 26, 2017, 08:57:41 pm by Death 999 »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Zanthius
Enlightened
Offline
Posts: 941
|
1. Sugar is bad for you.
As in table sugar, or sucrose? Yeah, probably. I almost never drink liquids with added sucrose, but mostly because of the high amount calories. I do eat dark chocolate with some added sucrose, because there are lots of health benefits associated with cacao. The best would of course be to eat cacao without any sugar, but that tastes very bitter. Or maybe mix it with chili peppers like the Aztec and Maya did.
As for more complex carbohydrates, with a low glycemic index, there is again a lot of conflicting research regarding how much you should eat. I know there are several scientific articles that support the Atkins diet, but I also know that there are several scientific articles that support a much higher intake of carbohydrates.
Only certain people appear to be affected at all by having too much salt
Really? Never heard about salt poisoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_poisoning). Everybody will die from having too much salt in their bodies, and not just humans. Other animals too. Try eating a few spoons of NaCl (don't worry, you are not going to die, you will just feel horrible and vomit).
, and it is consistently shown that too little salt is worse for everyone.
You will die both from having too much salt in your body, and from having too little salt in your body.
That "too little" amount? Higher than what all the various health agencies are suggesting is too much. Healthcare Triage did a couple episodes on this (on YouTube).
Okay, so why do you trust Healthcare Triage more than the various of health agencies? You don't think they might also have tons of scientific articles supporting their dietary recommendations?
Also, the average salt intake in the United States is probably way higher than their dietary recommendations, because NaCl (just like sucrose), is added to lots of different foods today.
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: June 26, 2017, 08:57:48 pm by Death 999 »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
Zanthius
Enlightened
Offline
Posts: 941
|
Nutrition science is just weak across the board, because it's hard to study nutrition in humans.
In order to know if a certain type of food is causing a health condition, or if it is just correlated with a health condition, we need to gather a lot of information from each person that is in the study. Today, lots of information about each individual is available somewhere on the Internet, but it is often protected by privacy laws. Still, if we could gather information like this from the Internet, and use a Bayesian computer algorithm to correlate health conditions with different types of food, we would probably become much more aware of how different types of food affect our health.
Some of you might object that I might be purchasing food that I am not eating. I might for example have kids, and some of the groceries I buy might be for them. It is therefore necessary to mainly look at single individuals living alone, because they will usually consume all the groceries they buy.
One can also look upon families as units. If we analyze large amounts of families as units, we can also get a better idea about how groceries typically consumed by children are affecting their health.
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: June 26, 2017, 11:02:39 pm by Zanthius »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
Zanthius
Enlightened
Offline
Posts: 941
|
You can't just solve the problems with correlative studies by getting all the data, even if that were a reasonable endeavor. We will always have to treat correlation with caution. Always. You could probably fill a textbook with the possible ways you could be misinterpreting a given correlation.
Bayesians can never be 100% sure of anything, but we can use this technique to at least exclude foods that only correlate with other foods that correlate with a health condition (I just translated this text from my native language to English, so the language is probably far from perfect):
http://archania.org/groceries_and_health.html
We can also collect data from millions of people in this way, which is far more than in the older nutritional studies. If North Korea decided to implement this system, they would probably become world leaders in nutritional science, almost instantaneously. Almost all the old nutritional studies would become obsolete, since they are based on so few individuals and haven't analyzed everything the individuals in the studies are consuming.
Kim Jong-un could probably without too much trouble, analyze what the entire North Korean population is consuming, and correlate it with information about their health. Those studies would be based on 25 million people, since it lives approximately 25 million people in North Korea.
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: June 27, 2017, 01:20:55 am by Zanthius »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Death 999
Global Moderator
Enlightened
Offline
Gender: 
Posts: 3874
We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
|
You can't just say Bayes and become immune to sample bias etc. Coming up with correct hypotheses is the hard part.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
Julie.chan
*Many bubbles*
Offline
Posts: 130
Sharing is good.
|
N... North Korea doesn't have 100% complete records of everything everyone eats. The NK government doesn't even have any influence on the poor there, only the (compared to other North Koreans) well-off Party members in Pyongyang. Outside there, most of the poorer NK population lives in ghettos which are essentially cut off from the government, and they have to buy illegal food on the black market to survive, food that even includes human flesh labeled as pork, according to some rumors.
Plus, there's no way the NK government would be honest about this. They would just pretend that all of its people are in perfect health and spout propaganda about how the DPRK is doing such a perfect job with its citizens' nutrition, or some crap like that.
The only way North Korea, one of the poorest countries in the world, I might add, is in a situation to advance nutrition science is that it is so authoritarian and free of ethics concerns that the NK government could imprison a large segment of the population for a randomized controlled nutrition study. But they probably wouldn't do that, either. What benefit would that be to NK leaders? Certainly not enough to justify the cost.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Scalare
*Many bubbles*
Offline
Posts: 245
|
Nutrition science is just weak across the board, because it's hard to study nutrition in humans.
In order to know if a certain type of food is causing a health condition, or if it is just correlated with a health condition, we need to gather a lot of information from each person that is in the study. Today, lots of information about each individual is available somewhere on the Internet, but it is often protected by privacy laws. Still, if we could gather information like this from the Internet, and use a Bayesian computer algorithm to correlate health conditions with different types of food, we would probably become much more aware of how different types of food affect our health. Some of you might object that I might be purchasing food that I am not eating. I might for example have kids, and some of the groceries I buy might be for them. It is therefore necessary to mainly look at single individuals living alone, because they will usually consume all the groceries they buy. One can also look upon families as units. If we analyze large amounts of families as units, we can also get a better idea about how groceries typically consumed by children are affecting their health.
If you want 1984 to happen please send all your data to the federal statistics bureau. It will be used to refuse health insurance and to tax the fat people, like is currently happening in japan already.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
Scalare
*Many bubbles*
Offline
Posts: 245
|
You must mean hashing. that could work.
But then again, what's a federal statistics bureau? Is that an american concept?
Imho you're better off having a worldwide controlled neural net figure this out than some bureaucrats in an american govt office.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 9
|
|
|
|
|
