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Good Calories, Bad Calories is a comprehensive and detailed discussion of why the conventional wisdom on diet is flawed. Here's a less rigorous run down of the different fats. Saturated fat is the main reason to prefer animal fats as it is hard to find in non animal sources. One non animal derived option is coconut oil.
Most people who question conventional wisdom are cranks. As a non-expert, I am not capable of evaluating the object-level arguments on the subject. Why should I grant Gary Taubes any more credibility than any other random person who writes a book with lots of footnotes?
I haven't read the book either.
I don't know about heart disease and cancer risk and I'm in roughly the same epistemic position as you on that.
For plain old fat loss, though, there's more reason to believe that more fat and protein compared to carbohydrates is effective. First, that's what athletes and their nutrition coaches do -- it's always useful to look at the practices of people whose livelihood depends on objective success. Second, I've read a fair number of CDC studies showing that diets have modest to zero effect -- and usually the test diets do not have a high protein + fat to carb ratio. That's weak evidence, but evidence: the stuff that doesn't work is not the candidate in question. Third, it just makes sense that simple sugars break down into glucose faster than anything else, which means a quick spike in blood sugar instead of slow release over time, which means you'll be hungry soon after. No, plausible mechanisms aren't science, but they help. Fourth, it's easy enough to perform the experiment yourself for three months and see what happens.
If you are not confident in your own ability to recognize cranks (either in general or in a particular field) then sticking with conventional wisdom may be your best option. In general my experience is that it is not very difficult to spot genuine cranks however but YMMV. I'd suggest that health in general is a poor place to put great faith in conventional wisdom however since there are many powerful interest groups influencing things like government issued recommendations whose interests are not always well aligned with yours.
Nutrition and diet are relatively amenable to self experimentation however and so at least some claims are fairly easily testable. Obviously you aren't going to be able to confirm claims of reducing your risk of heart disease or various cancers (for example) in the short term but claims about weight loss are trivial to verify and it is not terribly difficult to test other claims by having blood work done (triglyceride levels, LDL/HDL ratios etc.) and by keeping a record of possibly diet related symptoms under different regimes (mood, energy level crashes, digestive problems, etc.).
Thanks for the information. Although I haven't read it, I'm familiar with the topics covered by Good Calories, Bad Calories, and feel that the points it brings up have good support among people who care about the scientific method.
The two pages on Mark Sisson's website that you linked to only claimed that saturated fat isn't bad; I can agree with that, but what I'm really interested in is why you seem to feel that they are especially healthful. It doesn't seem like he claims that.
Well he tends to emphasize that the key to healthy eating is to minimize refined carbohydrate intake and he recommends a protein intake in the range of 0.7-1.0g per lb of lean body mass so fat intake is in part driven by the need to make up the rest of your target calorie intake. Saturated fat seems to be the a fairly healthy way to make up the calorie deficit given the options.
That a much less dramatic claim than it sounded like you were making at first, which is good for me, since it doesn't make me feel obliged to add animal fat to my diet.
I do eat a lot of fat, though mostly unsaturated (nuts and avocado). I also eat a lot of carbs, but I try to eat almost no refined carbohydrates; your example of beans and rice amuses me because brown rice and beans are a significant portion of my diet.
I think beans and rice was actually jimmy's example but yeah, rice is pretty horrendous health wise, brown or not. The jury's still out on beans from what I've read. You can't easily match the calorie intake from grains without upping your fat intake though since you need to eat a hell of a lot of green vegetables to match the caloric value of grains.
Sorry about the confusion.
I've been told by dozens of people that rice is "pretty horrendous" health-wise, and I've looked into it a bit myself. The signal-to-noise ratio is really low on this issue, so I keep running into very unscientific claims. The closest I've come to good evidence for that proposition is weak but scientific evidence that glucose intake (as part of starch) needs to be balanced with fiber intake, and that foods like rice must be balanced with foods that are almost entirely fiber (and have virtually no calories).
Would you please link me to more good arguments against consuming all starches, not just refined carbohydrates?
[EDIT: replaced fructose with glucose]
A couple of Mark Sisson's articles on grains. I'm not linking to this site because it is the most rigorous or most scientifically unassailable source for nutrition information but simply because it's easy for me to find reasonable summaries there. Good Calories, Bad Calories would be my recommendation if you want exhaustive references to the studies that many of these claims derive from. Googling for 'paleo diet' or 'paleolithic diet' should turn up a bunch more information as well.
I don't really take Mark Sisson seriously. He makes a lot of claims that can be backed up specifically, but he usually doesn't do the leg work to back them up, and he's made enough claims that I know to be verifiably false that I usually just ignore him[1]. He does suggest cutting grains of all kinds from our diet, but many of the problems he cites (insulin spikes) are remarkably different for different grains.
Google Books seems to have most of Good Calories, Bad Calories; searching within the book, there are 30 instances of the word rice; every one of those is either a quotation or Taubes specifically distinguishes between brown and white rice; in several places he implies that brown rice doesn't cause the problems that white rice does.
All this is adding together to reinforce my degree of confidence in considering brown rice an acceptable food.
[1] In the second article of his you linked to, he links to the pop-science coverage of an unpublished paper, cites their reported findings, and then outright not only dismisses but outright contradicts their conclusions with his own personal interpretation of what he wants their findings to mean.
I believe brown rice has a lower glycemic index and glycemic load than white rice and it doesn't have some of the other negatives of grains like wheat (gluten for example). It's still high in carbs and low in nutrients relative to vegetables. It's probably one of the least bad grains but it's still something I prefer to avoid. Rice was pretty easy for me to give up anyway though, I never much liked it. The only thing I really miss is sushi / sushi rolls but I can still eat as much sashimi as I like so it's not too bad.
I also consider the "paleo diet" somewhat silly, not because I think there's a good reason for it not to be healthy, but because I think of it as impractical; how many of our modern fruits and vegetables, or even meats, closely resemble what we had available to eat more than 10kya? How many paleo practitioners will seriously evaluate making terrestrial arthropods a significant portion of their diet?
However, Evolutionary Health Promotion: A Consideration of Common Counterarguments so far seems to be the best argument I've found against brown rice, since it compares a Paleolithic diet against a Mediterranean diet, which contains quantities of unrefined grains, and finds moderate improvements for the former.
This seems to be rather an extreme case of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Sure there are differences between modern fruits, vegetables and meats and the pre-agricultural versions but they are a lot more similar to the pre-agricultural diet than grains or vegetable oils. Most paleo diet variants advocate trying to source foods that more closely match pre-agricultural staples - wild salmon, grass-fed beef, wild game, etc. - but I haven't seen much direct evidence of the benefits of that approach (although you can make inferences based on other evidence).
Anyway, I think diet may be one of those things where there is a big risk of other optimizing and I think it is quite likely that there is no one size fits all diet that is suitable for everyone (due to different genetic heritages and tolerances for things like gluten, dairy, etc.). It's an excellent place to apply some self-experimentation to see what works for you.
Paleo-type diets have worked well for me because they correspond closely to the kinds of foods I like to eat anyway and a major factor in the success of any diet is how 'deprived' you feel by the restrictions placed on what you can eat. YMMV but I think most people can probably benefit from eating fewer processed carbohydrates and sugar and more fruits and vegetables.
What's the name of the bias of judging messages based on the messenger? I suspect part of my problem is that everyone I've personally met who advocated the paleo diet was also into homeopathy and crystal healing, and didn't actually have any idea what paleolithic humans really ate.
The fact that we eat different things from our evolutionary ancestors should generate hypotheses about how dietary differences affect our health; two of the biggest changes to my mind would be a dramatic increase in starch consumption and an even larger increase in cooked versus raw food. However, I haven't seen evidence that either of those is specifically a negative change, whereas increase in sugar consumption has been conclusively shown to be a big dietary evil.
One of the reasons I'm so active on this sub-thread is that dietary changes over the past two years have made huge differences in my day-to-day life, but I feel like I could still do better. However, I'm not eager to abandon cooking my food, to start eating mammals, or to stop eating all grains, so I want to hear convincing evidence to do those type of things before I'm willing to self-experiment with them. Your point that I should perhaps not try those anyway (because of feeling too restricted) is well taken.