Comment by schmuckonwheels
2 days ago
Speaking from personal experience, this is consistent with multiple doctors over the years recommending high-protein, low carb diets. (Clarification: low does not mean no carb.)
I don't understand people freaking out over this - outside of a purely political reflex - hell hath no fury like taking away nerds' Mountain Dew and Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.
> I don't understand people freaking out over this
Personally I'm not a fan of any diet that recommends high meat consumption and I say that as someone who eats everything.
Cattle outweighs the total livestock on this planet by a 10 to 1 factor.
While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment, they seem to always ignore the extreme cost on the environment and pollution caused by cattle. Even focusing on CO2 emissions by industry avoids the elephant of the room of the insane levels of methane produced by cows, a gas that's 200 times more harmful.
There is little evidence that a meat heavy diet is good for people, but there's plenty of evidence of the contrary.
So, to be honest, while I don't freak out and I'm all for freedom, there has to be also some kind of consciousness into how do we use the resources on this planet, and diet is by far more impactful than the transport of choice.
The livestock industry is an ecological disaster of unimaginable proportions. 50% of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that land, 83% is used for livestock, despite the fact that it only provides 18% of the calories consumed worldwide.
> While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment, they seem to always ignore the extreme cost on the environment and pollution caused by cattle.
While governments and politicians generally like to portray themselves as being driven by morals, they are actually driven almost entirely by economic interests.
> So, to be honest, while I don't freak out and I'm all for freedom, [...]
Well, I would like the freedom to live on a planet with an intact ecosystem. I also think that animals would like the freedom to live a life free from unnecessary exploitation.
> [...] and diet is by far more impactful than the transport of choice.
Both are high-impact areas, but changing your diet is much easier than changing your choice of transport - in some countries. Transport emissions account for about 25% of all emissions, 60% of which are caused by individuals' use of cars.
And after all of this, we haven't even touched on what fishing is doing to our oceans.
> While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment,
Not the one that put out that statement
Very reasonable but it could not be more unpopular right now to tell people to stop eating meat
It’s maybe unpopular, but people should feel bad about it, especially they should feel shame. I don’t feel it either, who knows this for decades, and even tried a few times. But I should. There is exactly zero pressure regarding this.
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> it could not be more unpopular right now to tell people to stop eating meat
If we phrased it from a carbon perspective that would probably help it be more popular, at least for beef which is a huge methane emitter.
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Yeah, the meat industry has successfully tied meat consumption to the American ideal of masculinity and there is an endless supply of insecure men that buy into the world of bro-science.
“If the entirety of the US were to go vegan for a year, the reduction in GHG emissons would be 2.6%”
https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g?si=yFnHO9cX3apu1yBh
I think cows get to much blame
> I think cows get to much blame
I think that incredibly biased channel and extensively criticized video gets too much credit
> Cattle outweighs the total livestock on this planet by a 10 to 1 factor.
It seems odd not to include cattle in total livestock.
The point is to emphasize that there's more cows on this planet using more resources than all of the other animals combined (excluding fish and water mammals).
You could add all the squirrels, elephants, lions, cats, birds, all of those, and you're not even at a fraction of mass of the cows we grow.
Yeah that seems phrased wrong, but here's xkcd visual: https://xkcd.com/1338/
> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible
The issue is that "Ultra-Processed" does not mean "candy and sugary drinks" and even "sugary drinks" is overly broad. Can SNAP pay for sugar-free Coke but not classic coke? What about Gatorade?
SNAP already had reasonable restrictions. This very much feels like a "middle management style" project. Dedicating resources to a nebulously defined BIG project regardless of whether or not it actually improves outcomes.
Sugar free coke is not as bad as sugar-ful Coke but it's still bad. Many of the cheap sweeteners have been linked to cancer. They still fuck with the brain and hormones and make you want salty foods and/or more sweet tasting things.
So yea, how about drinking water as your primary source of hydration?
If you are poor, the last thing you need is Diabetes, Cancer, Hypertension, Cardiovascular disease, etc.
The problem also is there is a huge amount of fraud with SNAP with people claiming benefits for multiple people and then reselling their SNAP cards to just make cash. The people buying the endless cases of Mountain Dew often have just bought a 50% discounted SNAP card off some other person who isn't starving at all.
There is not a huge amount of fraud with SNAP and obviously what fraud does exist should be investigated, resolved, and prevented.
You are proposing eliminating fraud by eliminating the system. "You can't have failing tests if you have no tests"
You're going to get very bored just drinking water all day every day. Why can I buy coffee to make my water more interesting? Why can I buy Kool-Aid and pour 12 tablespoons into a glass, but I can't buy a Coke? What about a diabetic who is out and needs a quick sugar fix?
Might as well tell people they also just need to eat plain rice for every meal too.
I get there is some fraud on SNAP. I know people on SNAP. Most of them use every single cent on decent food. I've seen fraud, though. In Chicago I would place a bet that most non-chain convenience stores will sell you cigarettes on SNAP. Some of them absolutely sell weed on SNAP.
Pure partisan spite. The gov't not spending money on candy and sugary drinks is good. Just like when Michelle Obama pushed for better school lunches.
When Michelle Obama pushed for better school lunches she was excoriated for trying to get healthier foods into the hands of children. Glenn Beck's response was "Get your damn hands off my fries, lady. If I want to be a fat, fat, fatty and shovel French fries all day long, that is my choice!". Seems partisan spite cuts both ways.
I'm glad to see this announcement and despite the leadership in Washington right now I don't think these adjustment will be seen as too controversial by the American public. The recommendations are based on a lot of good nutritional science that's been out there for years, but the buck seems to stop at the conversation around fat.
They went to great lengths to remove the debate around good fat vs bad fat from this discussion. Even reading the report, emphasis is put on the discussion of why we use so many pressed oils in the food chain, but not why we phased lard and shortening out of the American diet.
"Eat real butter" is ostensibly a recommendation presented at the bottom of the webpage, but butter is not a healthy fat. Same with some people's obsession with frying in beef tallow, but the report doesn't want to dig into this distinction for obvious self interested reasons. They even recommend:
> When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil. Other options can include butter or beef tallow.
Which is a good recommendation. But no, you don't want to replace olive oil with butter or beef tallow. There's a lot of good nutrition science to back this up, but the report would prefer to not go there. Maybe "eat some butter" is appropriate, but unless the FDA wants to have an honest conversation around HDL and LDL cholesterol and saturated fats, I don't see this inverted pyramid doing too much good for overall population health (besides raising awareness)
Partisan spite does cut both ways and should be seen as such and ignored on either side.
Regarding fat I think "eat real whole unprocessed food" is a simple way to cover it. These guideliness recommend using less added fat including avoiding deep frying, and if one must use fat to use a minimally processed (i.e. pressed or rendered) form like olive oil or coconut oil or butter or animal fat. Though they failed to mention the distinction between refined and unrefined olive oil - today much of it is refined i.e. highly processed.
One of the best litmus tests for Democrat or Republican I have found is "Should people on food stamps be able to buy mountain dew / candy / etc with them?", very low false positive rate in either direction.
But regardless I have it on very good authority that with the BBB some within the Republican party wanted to limit EBT to only be able to purchase healthy food. No soda, no candy, no chips, etc. A couple calls from Coke, Pepsi, etc lobbyists shot that down.
People should be able to get cash transfers to buy goods on the general market. There shouldn't be food stamps.
The success of SNAP comes despite its inherent inefficiency, friction, and the indignity of its limitations. We structure the program the way we do in order to mollify voters who twitch at the idea of the poor ever enjoying anything.
Inequality isn't just about healthcare costs, biological metrics, etc. It is also deeply corrosive socially and psychologically, and this side of things is systemically underappreciated in policy circles.
To be sure, our food and diets are bad. Americans broadly should eat healthier. But are society's interests really better served by insisting that a poor child not be allowed to have a cake and blow out the candles on his birthday, the way all of his friends do?
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> A couple calls from Coke, Pepsi, etc lobbyists shot that down.
Fucking hell, if this is true, I don't know how those people sleep at night. Really, It's a failure if my imagination, but I don't imagine how people like this function. I'm sure I've done my share of indirect harm in this world, one way or the other, but being so on the nose about it would make me absolutely nauseous.
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I would say that a short answer that implicitly accepts the framing of the question is a flag for someone without well-considered political views.
I'll bite. I think there is a difference between "should they" and "should they be able to."
Most liberals I know think they shouldn't but that its stupid to police this aspect of people's behavior if they are on EBT. Most liberals might even feel more comfortable regulating everyone's behavior by taxing unhealthy foods than they would just bothering poor people with it.
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In my experience the reason Republicans are so interested in what people can buy with food stamps is that they want very much to punish people who are on food stamps. If they truly cared about the health of needy Americans there are a lot of other things they could do, or even a lot of things they could stop doing like making it more difficult to access health care, quackifying vaccine recommendations, holding press conferences in which they say nobody should take Tylenol under any circumstances, making dubious assertions about AIDS; the list goes on and on.
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Why should they not, what is with this parental-ism? Should Social Security recipients be able to buy candy? Should my employer get to choose what food I can purchase?
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A poor kid on food stamps should be able to get a birthday cake on their birthday. Anyone that believes otherwise definitely should never have kids or work with kids.
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I go on HN to read thoughtful non-partisan commentary but the general mood seems to be "everything is bad" in certain threads even if that contradicts a previous popular HN consensus.
Lol I forgot about that. What was it? Pizza is a vegetable?
Pizza as a vegetable (because of tomato sauce) was California under Reagan. Michelle Obama said to eat healthy and exercise more, though "eat healthy" still used the MyPlate guidelines.
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The negative reactions to the new SNAP restrictions are because much of it make no sense. In the states that have implemented there has been mass confusion at many stores as people can't figure out what is eligible and what is not.
For example at one store there was confusion as to why a ready to eat cup of cut fruit packaged with a plastic spoon from the store's deli department was ineligible, but a slice of cake packaged with a plastic fork from the store's bakery was eligible. Apparently the cake being made with flour makes it OK, regardless of how much sugar is in the cake and the icing.
> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.
I can think of one issue here. Ultra-processed foods, candy, and sugary drinks are cheap and shelf-stable. They're cheap because they're subsidized. Fruits and vegetables are more expensive, and they don't last very long. So a person on a very limited SNAP budget will get less food under the new restrictions.
The answer, of course, is to make it so that fresh produce and other healthy options are cheaper than the junk food. I have a hard time seeing that happening, given how susceptible the administration is to being "lobbied".
The actual issue is that "Ultra-Processed" is EXTREMELY broad and vague.
For example, hot dogs are ultra-processed. Obviously hot dogs are not the healthiest food but also obviously "franks and beans" is a pretty good meal for a tight budget and is something you should be able to get with SNAP.
Franks and beans are not the best meal on the cheap. Sounds more expensive than cooking fresh and you're missing out on better nutrition.
For the most bang for your buck you want to be eating less expensive real protein like chicken and pork and filling up on salads. Limit carb intake from beans and other starches. Prefer fruit for carbs because it has fiber and vitamins you can't get anywhere else.
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I think you answered your own question with the last sentence. Have cattle ranchers, chicken farmers, vegetable and fruit farmers lobby for same or higher subsidies than grains.
For what it's worth, meat is insanely cheap in the US due to lobbied subsidies as well. The produce is what we really need to subsidize.
> a person on a very limited SNAP budget will get less food under the new restrictions ... make it so that fresh produce and other healthy options are cheaper than the junk food
I'm confused by these statements. How are you deciding to measure the quantity of "food"? If you see food as a means to deliver nutrients, fresh produce is already far cheaper than junk food.
From the perspective of your body, you can sustain yourself much better on a smaller amount of nutrient dense calories than a larger amount of empty ones. Obesity is not merely an overconsumption of calories or a measure of food or body mass.
Restrictions on SNAP are tricky business. You can't ask someone on SNAP to spend time preparing food. Prepared meals are expensive, often not accessible, and sometimes difficult to prepare for people with certain disabilities. It might seem strange, but I have known people, very poor people, who rely on "foods in bar and drink form" out of necessity. I have known poor people for whom eating fruit is physically challenging.
SNAP changes like this may be better on a population health level, to be sure. On this I have no evidence. But each restriction placed on food for people living in destitution may mean some people go hungry. (And this excludes issues of caloric density.) I would like to see better data, but sadly, there is none.
+1 – it's all well and good for me to buy just some vegetables this week, because I have a pantry full of hundreds of dollars worth of basics, spices, a herb garden, bulk (more expensive) rice/pasta, etc. I also have a single 9-5 job so can spend an hour each day cooking.
But if I had an empty kitchen, lacked the funds to invest in bulk purchases, and had 30 minutes to cook and eat, I'd be eating very differently.
> Prepared meals are expensive
I'm not sure if you mean buying pre-prepared meals is expensive. If that's what you are saying, I agree.
But if you're stating that preparing meals (at your own place from raw ingredients) is expensive. That's simply not true, at all.
I would hope that it is clear from context that I mean purchasing pre-prepared meals is expensive.
Sounds farfetched. Especially if restriction is on candy and sodas
As others have pointed out, that's not what the restriction seems to be limited to. The distinction isn't based on sugar content but the amount of "processing", which rules out quite a lot of things beyond just candy and soda.
Nutrition science has come up with acceptable macronutrient distribution ranges (AMDR). The recommendation for adults is 45-65% of total calories from carbohydrates, 20-35% from fat, and 10-35% from protein. That is definitely not low carb.
The sources of those macronutrients also matter. The ideal range for saturated fat is 5-10% of total calories. Meat consumption, especially red meat, is associated with higher risk of colorectal cancer. Dairy consumption is associated with higher risk of prostate cancer.
I haven't read the new guidelines in detail but if they're recommending red meat and whole milk as primary foods, then they are not consistent with the research on cancer and cardiovascular disease risk and I doubt that people following them would meet the AMDRs or ideal saturated fat intake.
To be fair, those macronutrient guidelines were established not because of any special properties of those macros (give or take the nitrogen load from protein) but because when applied as a population-level intervention they encourage sufficient fiber, magnesium, potassium, etc. You can have 50% of your calories be from fats and still live a long, healthy life, and you can do so as a population (see, e.g. Crete and some other Mediterranean sub-regions in the early/mid-1900s). You can have a much higher protein intake and have beneficial outcomes too.
Your point about the sources mattering isn't tangential; it's the entire point. The reason the AMDR exists is to encourage good sources. A diet of 65% white sugar and 25% butter isn't exactly what it had in mind though, and it's those sources you want to scrutinize more heavily.
Even for red meat though, when you control for cohort effects, income, and whatnot, and examine just plain red meat without added nitrites or anything, the effect size and study power diminishes to almost nothing. It's probably real, but it's not something I'm especially concerned about (I still don't eat much red meat, but that's for unrelated reasons).
To put the issue to scale, if you take the 18% increased risk in colorectal cancer from red meats as gospel (ignoring my assertions that it's more important to avoid hot dogs than lean steaks), or, hell, let's double that to 36%, your increased risk of death from the intervention of adding a significant portion of red meat to your diet is only half as impactful as the intervention of adding driving to your daily activities.
The new guidelines seem to be better than just recommending more steaks anyway. They're not perfect, but I've seen worse health advice.
Well, there are two factors that go into the recommendations. As you mentioned, one is adequate micronutrients. The other is chronic disease risk reduction. The 5-10% of total calories from saturated fat recommendation falls into the latter category. The risk of meat and dairy is not just cancer, but saturated fat.
I would agree that with proper knowledge and planning, it's possible to reduce carbs and increase protein/unsaturated fats while maintaining adequate fiber and micronutrients. But in practice, I think it's much more common to see people taking low-carb diet recommendations as a license to eat a pound or more of meat per day, drink gallons of milk per week, and completely ignore fiber intake, which is objectively not healthy.
mostly because of the destruction of American science, public health and public safety the admin pushed through in order to publish this set of guidelines, instead of just hiring a professionally trained RD to write it up.
Didn’t those professionals give us the original food pyramid that told us to stuff our faces with bread? Weren’t they the same people that told us not to eat eggs because of cholesterol? And tell us to limit our fish consumption?
Maybe different areas of expertise aren’t equally valid, and even good experts often can’t see the forest for the trees in terms of developing actionable advice.
And tell us to limit our fish consumption?
The only recommendations to limit fish that I have seen are due to mercury exposure risks:
https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/advice-about-eating-fish
Coal burning and incidental industrial releases drastically increased the amount of mercury in surface waters over the past century. The released mercury gets transformed by bacteria into organomercury compounds which are lipophilic and concentrate up the food chain, meaning that predator fish like tuna and swordfish can contain orders of magnitude more mercury than the water they live in.
There are plenty of fish with much lower mercury levels (like salmon, trout, and sardines):
https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/mer...
You can eat all the salmon you want without worrying about mercury, and I haven't seen government advice to the contrary.
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This is incorrect reasoning. Science is advancing. It is like saying we should not listen to physicists because "Didn't those physicists gave us the original heliocentric system?"
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The food pyramid was the result of intense lobbying and political processes, not scientists and doctors.
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No, that was the US Dept of Agriculture. You need to talk to an actual RD.
It was pushed by food lobbies, like a lot of topics in current admin
"The professionals" produced 2.5-3 laughably bad food pyramids depending on how you count. Of all the things this administration has done to "run around" the system on this or that issue, this is not gonna be one I'm gonna get pissed off about.
Food pyramid is a US Dept of Agriculture thing, not from any professional RD
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Are you talking about "professionally trained nutritionists"?
Those people are worse than Astrologers.
At least astrologers stick to their fantasy, while, since I remember being old enough to count, I already lost track of how many times they've told us that "eggs are bad" and then "eggs are good" again, and then bad, and good, and... I've lost track.
Then they told us to eat cereal at breakfast, and that bread and potatoes are the basis of a good diet, then that fat is the killer and then that we should replace butter with plant based alternatives and the list goes on.
Nutritionists aren't scientists. They aren't even good at basic logic and coherence. So, no, I don't want them in charge of dictating policies.
That sounds more like the fad Atkin's weight loss diet that said you could eat unlimited meat/fat/protein, but no carbs.
This new JFK Jr diet has something in common with the Paleo "cave man" diet, which at least makes some sense in the argument ("this is what our bodies have evolved to eat") if not the specifics. I'm not sure where the emphasis on milk/cheese and eggs comes from since this all modern, not hunter-gatherer, and largely unhealthy, and putting red-meat at the top (more cholesterol, together with the eggs), and whole grain at the bottom makes zero sense - a recipe for heart attacks and colon cancer.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/07/rfk-jr-nutrition-guidelines-...
Eggs are very healthy. There's a lot of nutrients that are hard to get from other sources that eggs have in abundance. And it makes sense in just a common-sense sort of way -- if you're a chicken you want to surround your offspring with the best possible food you can as they grow.
With regards to dairy, it's more about a person's individual reaction to it. It's a similar argument with nutrient density (since milk is intended for growing offspring, obviously it's going to be very nutrient dense). The downside is potential inflammation or not having the enzymes to process it.
I would definitely not lump eggs and dairy as "bad" in any way though.
Also, the "cholesterol" thing is a very bad thing to focus on. Cholesterol is not bad! You need cholesterol. (What do you think cell membranes are partially composed of?
Whole grains are not as good as you think. Often, they're made from strains that are optimized for growing and robustness not nutrition. Also, unless you're exercising a lot you really don't need much in the way of carbs.
> Also, the "cholesterol" thing is a very bad thing to focus on. Cholesterol is not bad! You need cholesterol. (What do you think cell membranes are partially composed of?
There is also not a very strong connection between dietary cholesterol and serum levels, anyway.
There's certainly a difference between modern and ancient grain varieties, but OTOH whole grain bread is basically what fed at least the western world for the last 2000 years - bread was the center of the roman diet and also of the medieval diet, which seems more than long enough (~100 generations - evolution is fast) for this to be the natural "our bodies evolved for this" diet that we should be targeting!
As far as eggs and dairy go, sure they are healthy for who is meant to be consuming them - baby chickens and baby mammals, but that doesn't mean they are good for us in excess.
There have been, and continue to be, so may flip flops in dietary recommendations and what is good/bad for you, that it seems common sense is a better approach. All things in moderation, and indeed look to what our relatively recent ancestors have been eating to get an idea of what our bodies are evolved to eat - whole foods and not processed ones and chemical additives.
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> You need cholesterol.
Your body produces cholesterol naturally, without any meat or dairy. In my case it actually produces way more than I need, even on a vegan diet, because of genetic factors. People should test their LDL and evaluate whether eating cholesterol is healthy _for themselves_ as it’s different for everyone.
Common sense says that adults are not embryos and humans are not chickens, so if eggs are nutritious for adult humans, it's more of a happy coincidence.
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Dietary cholesterol does not affect blood serum cholesterol and recommendations to limit cholesterol intake were removed from AHA and ADA guidelines in 2011 and 2013 respectively... the fact that this "common knowledge" still persists is disappointing.
The Paleo diet is utter nonsense. Human gut biome and ability to process different foods evolves far far far faster than that. We are nothing like our paleo ancestors.
This new pyramid is obviously FAR healthier than the previous one. The reason it's being opposed is partisan politics.
the reason it's being _changed_ is obviously partisan politics.
Nah, probably just shifting fronts of lobbying. That said new recommendations match way closer what I consider to be a good diet for myself (more calories from fats, less from carbs). Of course everything in moderation.
I think the zeitgeist is starting to turn on the high-protein diet recommendations:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/looking-to-bu...
There was a story about this in the NYT recently (can't find it) and IIRC, it basically said protein is out and fiber is in. It wasn't that simple, but that was my takeaway.
Fiber is stupidly easy to supplement, something that’s not talked about enough.
A glass of water with psylium husk a day and you solve a lot of modern diet problems.its also super cheap,a $20 bag can last you a year.
Supplements don't seem to work as well as getting fibre from your diet.
Supplemental fiber is mostly worthless.
Honestly, you can find studies to prove just about anything when it comes to nutrition. Too much money involved. Sometimes you have to use common sense or try different diets to see how your body reacts. I find "high fiber" and "low protein" to be a suspicious suggestion though. Protein generally has a small insulin response, your body actually needs protein, and if things like the "protein leverage hypothesis" are correct it can also help with satiety. Fiber, on the other hand, is literally food stuff that can't be digested. It can be helpful for your colon bacteria, but that's about it.
Just because an article comes from Harvard doesn't mean it's correct -- Harvard scientists were also behind the original food pyramid, and were likely paid off by the sugar industry.
Fiber greatly lowers your blood sugar response because you can't digest it. It also lowers your blood cholesterol for the same reason, so it's often recommended for those with a risk of CVD to eat more fruits and vegetables. It also protects against colorectal cancer for similar reasons.
Turns out just slowing down digestion can have a lot of benefits.
Also, most Americans eat very, very little fiber. Anything is an improvement. I believe the FDA recommendation is 30 grams a day, and most Americans eat, like, 2.
However, most Americans are not deficient in protein. They eat lots of meat, and very little veggies.
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> Sometimes you have to use common sense or try different diets to see how your body reacts.
I sometimes wonder if the complexity of the human body doesn't stop us from seeing things that can have great positive effect on a set of people because it's counteracted by the effect on another set of people so the result in the whole is cancelled out. I now wonder if the statistic methods used in these studies take this into account.
All this to say that I approve of controlled self-experimentation, but you need to be very rigorous and brutally honest. Most people are not.
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Too much protein is bad for your kidneys.
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Beyond the protein insulin response... when you have protein with sufficient fat, the insulin effect is much, much lower still. I tend to suggest that people try to get about 0.5g fat to 1g protein (which is slightly more calories from fat than protein). I think the aversion to fat is problematic and likely a lack of sufficient well rounded fat intake is likely a factor in the fertility and other hormonal issues in western society today.
The recommendation wasn't for high fiber, low protein. It was moderate protein and higher fiber.
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Fiber also gives your colon material to push against, adds volume to poop, and helps clean and clear you out when you poop.
If you're on a low-carb diet you should supplement fiber.
Unless you're doing something blatantly wrong or have a very specific disorder like coeliac, diet just doesn't have very much influence on health. There are a very wide range of diets that are more-or-less equally healthy, within a margin of error. Humans are highly adaptable omnivores that have evolved to survive and thrive on a broader range of foods than pretty much any other species. The data seems so mixed because the effect sizes of reasonable interventions are so small - a tiny signal drowned out by noise.
The entire problem is that most people in high- and middle-income countries are in fact doing something blatantly wrong - they are consistently eating vastly more calories than they use. Some of those people are ignorant of what 2000 to 2500 calories actually looks like, some are deluded, but a very large proportion know damned well that they're eating far too much and do it anyway.
The obesogenic environment that we now live in is partly due to the influence of the processed foods industry, but in large part it's simply a product of abundance. Before the late 20th century, it was simply inconceivable that poor people could afford to become morbidly obese. Agricultural productivity has improved beyond all recognition and the world is flooded with incredibly cheap food of all kinds.
We've spent the last few decades trying to push back against that with all manner of initiatives intended to endgender behavioural change, with very little success. It doesn't really matter what guidance we give people when they have shown a consistent inability or unwillingness to follow it.
If we're actually serious about the effects of diet on public health, I think there are only two credible options - extremely heavy-handed regulation, or the mass prescribing of GLP-1 receptor agonists. All of the other options are just permutations of "let's do more of the thing that hasn't worked".
If the current government gave me 500 dollars and told me the sky was blue I'd start checking to be sure it wasn't a scam, yeah? Even if they say something that sounds true you want to look for the trick.
Yep. I switched to this sort of diet a few months back and there's been no downsides. I've gotten needed weight loss, more energy, better skin, and better mood.
There was a temporary period where I had some GI issues from changing what I ate very abruptly, but that wore off as my gut bacteria adapted
This is not consistent with multiple doctors over the years recommending eating less meat (specially beef), less cheese. The only part that is consistent with most doctors is the base thesis of eating more whole foods.
Based on the science appendix it seems like the inclusion of a "low carb diet" is more toward disease treatment and not health promotion. This would be antithetical to the DGA in years past and is kind of useless. The appendix itself acknowledges that the long term effects of a "low carb diet" are muted in the long term, which is probably why you would never hear it hawked by a nutrition professional as a healthy eating pattern.
The restrictions on SNAP are insidious because SNAP is supposed to enable one to live a normal life -- and that includes occasionally buying things that are not "healthy" in a bubble. The mantra that many health professionals will use is "there are no unhealthy foods, only unhealthy diets". Combine all that background with traditional stigma associated with SNAP/food stamp benefits and a picture starts to emerge of why policy was to embrace more foods and how this administration is often called the "administration of harm".
> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.
Because poor people should be allowed to enjoy some of life's pleasures as well.
> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible
My understanding is that it adds a complex layer of regulation where one did not previously exist. Large retailers and grocers have the systems that can accurately track this. (Essentially: does your POS have the ability to sync with the Federally Approved Foods For Poors list or not.)
Smaller convenience stores (more common in places where poor people live) are less likely to have the resources be able to comply. Rather than get sanctioned for accidentally selling a Gatorade on SNAP, they will simply pull out of SNAP altogether. This means that even the non-sugary foods they have will no longer be available to people on SNAP.
The net effect is expected to be to remove SNAP purchasing ability from entire geographies. I understand the effect is expected to be most pronounced in rural and dense urban areas.
There is no public health consensus advocating for widesoread adoption of the diet RFK Jr is pushing here. There are significant parts of this that if anything the consensus suggests is unhealthy.
It's a fad diet being recommended, and parts of the advice being good don't make it good overall.
I freaked out when I realized I had to change my diet. "What do I eat then?" was my constant mantra for six months. Looking back, it wasn't that bad but something in me really freaked out at having to change a habit (that I wanted to change...)
> I don't understand people freaking out over this
Its not like it is a tan suit.
This department is led by an insane person who constantly says ridiculous things. It's not a "purely political reflex" to have an initial bad reaction to anything he puts out. The fact that this is fairly sensible is quite surprising. I'm sure it won't last, and we'll soon be back to saying Advil causes schizophrenia or whatever the next round of madness is.
A lot of red meat is probably one angle I can’t get behind. They are very high in cholesterol and triglycerides which are deadly for the heart over the long haul.
Is pretty clear that eating cholesterol doesn't lead to higher blood cholesterol. It just doesn't matter.
No, doctors still recommend limiting the intake of cholesterol in food, and also saturated fat. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol#Medical_guidelines...
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2023/08/25/heres-the-latest-on...
Its actually not "pretty clear"—about 25-30% of people are hyper responders who are impacted by dietary cholesterol.
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From ://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-guidelines-eat-as-little-dietary-cholesterol-as-possible/
"Most studies regarding cholesterol are bought and paid for by the egg industry. "
One of those Egg Council creeps got to you, too, huh?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuojmEoI51w
The problem is that when people say "red meat" they're almost always referring to the modern "hamburger-like substance" which almost certainly high on the ultra-processed scale.
An actual steak or hamburger ground at a butcher would be a pretty gigantic step up for most people.
No it’s just the contents of regular red meat. But there’s also a genetic component to it. Some people are more negatively affected than others.
Your colon doesn't care how expensive the beef was.
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I think it's just what democracy does, make people to turn off their brains and instead decide if something is good/bad, right/wrong based on whether they like the person saying it.
All you have to do is look at this food pyramid and the old food pyramid and ask "if I had to feed one of these a week to my kid which would I pick".
It's clearly superior and it's just sad that people are so just defiant to good, for who knows what reasons.
While I despise this administration, as a celiac I’m very hopeful for any cultural shift away from grains. People truly do not realize how often they will reach for some processed bread for nearly every single meal.
"hell hath no fury like taking away nerds' Mountain Dew and Flamin' Hot Cheetos"
Its an addiction. Try taking away an alcoholic's alcohol and sit back and enjoy the infinite rationalizations about how its heart healthy and lowers stress and its just a couple a night, etc etc.
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The mythical "doctors" recommending high protein.. Yeah okay bud.
I think this is at least better than the old food pyramid, though not perfect. It's a step in the right direction.
What I hate, and react against, is the package deal. We get a better food pyramid, but we also get antivax imbeciles and a resurgence in easily preventable diseases. We get an official nod of approval given to idiots who think you can treat cancer with "alternative" treatments. We get blaming autism on Tylenol with incomplete and inadequate data or, wait, maybe not, or maybe, or whatever that was.
I think it reflects a deeper problem though. The "crunchy" "natural" alt-med orbits have usually had better ideas about nutrition. They've historically been right about whole vs. processed foods, more protein and fats and less simple carbs, sugar being bad, etc. Unfortunately they've historically been wrong about most other things. They're wrong about vaccines, wrong about just how powerful and effective diets can be, mostly wrong about psych meds, and wrong about giving the nod to unmitigated quackery like homeopathy.
I also think that tends to be a common problem with any and all populism, whether left or right. The present establishment may be corrupt or broken, but replacing it is hard, especially when it tends to have a talent monopoly. "Serious" people who go into medicine go to college, then grad school / med school, then get licensed, etc., and pick up establishment views. The people who want to do medicine but don't take this path tend to be amateurs and quacks and weird ideologues.
Venezuela's been in the news lately. My understanding of what happened to their oil industry is: they had it working okay with professionals doing it, and then there was a populist revolution. Then they kicked out all the professionals. Then they had no idea how to run an oil industry. The professionals were linked to a foreign power and probably taking too much profit at the expense of the Venezuelan people, yes, but they also knew how to extract petrol.
Edit: You see more sympathy here than many other educated places for this stuff, and there's a reason for that.
I think CS people are extremely open to autodidactism, probably too open, and I think that's because CS and programming is one of the few serious fields where it is actually common for an autodidact to equal or exceed a trained professional.
The zero capital cost near-zero real world implication nature of computational experimentation facilitates this. You can just read open literature and sit and play until you get good and it harms nobody and costs almost nothing. Math is another field where there have been genius autodidacts that have made huge discoveries. The arts are obviously mostly like this, excluding those that are very hard to learn alone or have capital costs.
Medicine is definitely not a field like this. I don't think you can autodidact medicine. As a result, doctors outside the establishment are usually not good. There have been historical examples, but few, and most of them came up through the ranks of real medicine before pushing a radical idea that turned out to be right.
Also note that even in CS and math, most outsider ideas are wrong. Outsider ideas are kind of like high risk / high reward investments. It's very hard for anyone, insider-trained or not, to formulate a deeply contrarian or wholly original idea that is correct, but when someone does it makes the news because it's both rare and often high impact. The hundreds of thousands to millions of deeply contrarian or original ideas that were worthless or wrong don't make the news.
I think you're worried too much about specific tribes and groups, and less about what information is good or bad. End of the day almost any source is going to tell you some things that are useful, some things that are useless, and some things that are actively harmful. I'm not trying to say all sources are equal, but mainstream medicine has a lot to answer for in terms of giving bad advice for decades (both now and historically). For a long time mainstream medicine also thought smoking was healthy and bloodletting was a way to treat infections. I don't say that to mean "don't see doctors" or "get your nutritional advice from chiropractors", I just think it's worth pointing out that with ANY source you need to wary. Autodidactism is a very good thing IF you use critical thinking when evaluating your sources.
I think the point being made is that the challenge is when it comes to medicine, lay people can't even begin to understand the research and can't form their own opinion. So for those of us without MD's, we HAVE to trust someone to tell us what works and what doesn't. Giving mixed signals really screws that up as I can't personally assess what is good medicine and what isn't.
Regarding, smoking and bloodletting, the former was bought and paid for by industry, that is just fraud. For the latter, there are cases where bloodletting actually works. Medieval medicine isn't the backward thinking we often ascribe to it and many would argue that it wasn't a "Dark" ages at all. There are even modern instances where maggots are the best solution for cleaning wounds. Even given that history, the recent advances by people whose jobs I can't even begin to understand, can nuke my entire immune system to treat a cancer and bring me back to full health. That is not something an autodidactic can do.
Just for anyone reading - the food pyramid was canned over 15 years ago. MAHA promotes it as absurd in order to criticize it even though food guidelines have been evidence-based and extremely reasonable since the early Obama years. Their entire grift is built on deceit.
> What I hate, and react against, is the package deal. We get a better food pyramid, but we also get antivax imbeciles and a resurgence in easily preventable diseases.
Clearly if you eat a T-bone steak and half a dozen eggs daily combined with 25 pull-ups, you don’t need any vaccines.
You're getting downvoted for snark, but that's exactly what a lot of layperson MAHA people think.
Frankly I just don’t trust federal health info while RFK jr. Is at the helm. 2 days ago they reduced the recommended scheduled vaccines from 19->11 with absolutely no evidence or process. All vibes and conspiracies.
Why should I trust them with the food pyramid? How do I know if anyone who actually has expertise was consulted when his signature move has been axe experts and bring in “skeptics” with no actual background since day 1?
I’m supposed to play ball and accept health advice from the antivaxxer who has led to countless unnecessary deaths? Who walked up with the president and said “Tylenol is linked to autism” with no evidence?
No way.
Edit: it’s worth mentioning that he and a bunch of “MAHA” proponents cite the natural and healthy food in Europe but never want to use the dirty word that makes it happen: regulation. If we are serious about unhealthy additives and other food concerns, then we need robust regulations. They aren’t serious about change. It’s easy to go “we’re gonna have everyone eat healthy and natural stuff” but when it counts they won’t do what is necessary. [also toned down my heated language]
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What corporate interests are pushing against a meat centric diet that have any actual traction or power in the USA?
If you look at the actions of most of the heavily processed food product companies, they treat it as a zero sum game and are finding profits in working against meat.
Kellogs was founded by a Seventh Day Adventists, you can also look into Adventist Agricultural Association, though they don't list associated members directly.
Almond/Oat/Soy milk costs a fraction of what whole cow milk takes to produce and charge much more... the fats and sugars in the product are emphatically worse and it's treated as a health food with higher margins, with concerted efforts to remove/restrict/eliminate animal products from availability. Similar for advocates of meat alternatives.
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I agree. This is nearly the exact diet anyone with credibility has suggested for a long long time. If you get into the bro-science(which I believe tends to front run mainstream by a long ways), this is the diet every athlete and gym rat has been doing for years and years, with AMAZING results.
The bro science would tell you the protein target is still too low too :)
That's starting to change... mostly in that exceeding 14g:1kg ratio mentioned in TFA is being shown to have worse results, so some more recent recommendations are that you need to get enough protein, but not too much.
My own opinion is that you should also get at least 0.5g fat to 1g protein as a baseline... more would be for energy in lieu of carbs.
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