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FAWS comments on What should I have for dinner? (A case study in decision making) - Less Wrong
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When people talk about diet, the phrasing often seems to be "fats are bad for you" versus "carbs are bad for you" or "this is bad for you" versus "that is bad for you."
The question that I came up with while reading this post was, why are these hypotheses in conflict? Why should there be an option that is "good for you"? Assuming that "eating" evolved by way of "things that eat tend to reproduce more" and "things that feel good when eating things that help them reproduce will eat them, feel good, and reproduce" (I realize that I'm abusing evolutionary explanations here but I will get to my point) I don't see any reason to believe that there exists a diet which will make people happy and healthy over the long long term.
On the one hand, the existence of food that would keep humans healthy significantly past reproductive age has only been selected for in the past 10,000 years. On the other hand humans that stay healthy past reproductive age have never been selected for (at least in men ).
So there's a lot of evidence that I don't fully understand in the background of this debate, and I have little to no knowledge of nutrition, so I'm hoping to learn a lot and change my mind at least twice based on replies, but...
So I guess my question is, do "mainstream" nutritionists maintain that carbs are good for you? Does Taubes maintain that fat is good for you? Does data suggest that there exists a diet which is good for you, that creates serious improvements in longevity and health?
Unless all food is always exactly equally bad and nutritional science completely worthless there must be some food or combination of foods that is less bad in a given situation than the alternatives. You might as well call that food "good" since, unless identical, compared to a baseline of whatever foods would be considered the default it should have a positive effect of some kind.
I agree that good food by that definition is likely to exist, but since I don't see a specific reason for it a priori, I don't see any reason that the difference in health should be particularly large. One thing that I would like to see is some scientific evidence rather than anecdotal that there is any significant correlation between certain diets and health outcomes. I believe they exist but I don't currently have strong evidence for that belief, other than "people talk about it like it's true."