[nscalf]

The real issue is that nutrition science is bad and everyone has a book. Maybe 1 in 20 studies don't have obvious confounding factors that cause us to have no real base facts, but we can find a lot of correlation. Unfortunately, this is kind of the nature of the beast, nutrition science isn't bad because nutrition scientists are bad, but rather because it's so complicated it's tough to have very clean data.

Demonizing fats in favor of sugar as a country has allowed one of the biggest and longest population studies of its kind, and it's pretty obvious from the health of the population that very high calorie, sugar rich diets are overall bad for you (notice the wide strokes we have to make here).

Everyone is different, and no rules apply uniformly to everyone, but general rules do apply to everyone. Fructose in a caloric surplus is more damaging than glucose, for instance, but different bodies are more or less effective at mitigating this. Most people have some inflammation response to gluten, but for the vast majority of people, it's minor. Most things are a sliding scale, on one end is no measurable result, on the other end is acute response.

NOTE: I'm not interested in arguing about what the research says here. I know the pro-gluten party will come out in force, and I've made an enemy with the bread baker's union. I'm not a researcher, I'm just a nutrition hobbyist. There are much smarter people doing much more comprehensive breakdowns and having much more meaningful debates than I can, so go listen to them. Read the research yourself with a skeptical eye. Take all dietary advice with a grain of salt, and check the opposite side of the research, nutrition and biology is WEIRD.

Also, we're still learning very basic things that have massive impacts. No one was talking about "gut health" unless you had a chronic disease roughly 10 years ago. Microbiome didn't have much place in the conversation about health and nutrition, no crossfit people knew about resistant starches, etc.

[cageface]

The government may have been advocating low fat diets but of course people don't follow nutrition advice. If you look at what people were actually eating in the time you describe they started eating more of everything. Consumption of chicken and cheese in particular exploded.

Sugar consumption has actually been in decline for years now and obesity keeps climbing. Yes sugar is bad for you but blaming modern health problems just on sugar is not accurate.

[nscalf]

Yeah maybe I should be clear here, I'm not talking about putting granulated sugar in your coffee. I'm talking about the explosion of dumping high fructose corn syrup into everything that occurred during these years. And teaching children that they need to eat foods based off the food pyramid was directly opposite to what was actually good for you. Of course everyone doesn't listen to the government recommendations, but it's naive to say it doesn't have an impact.

In addition to that, eating a bagel for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and having bread on the side with dinner is pumping carbohydrates for you body to break down into sugars 24/7. These things are higher in calories.

To reinforce what you're suggesting, I'd need to see trends of added sugars to food going down and the obesity rate increasing. At the end of the day, it's calories in vs calories out, but pumping things with fructose increases the calories and the palatability of food, increasing how much you eat. There are a number of negative health side affects, but sugar likely causes obesity by secondary affect.

[wtetzner]

> Sugar consumption has actually been in decline for years now and obesity keeps climbing.

Do you have a source for this? Because it seems like unless you cook your own food, it's nearly impossible to avoid foods that have _added_ sugar these days. Maybe sugar consumption has increased, but it's less obvious now.

[simonsarris]

> Maybe 1 in 20 studies don't have obvious confounding factors that cause us to have no real base facts, but we can find a lot of correlation.

Even worse: Many studies are done on mice, who do not eat the same things as humans

And worse still: Many are done with "food surveys" which lean too much on the poor memory and faulty assumptions of participations (eg what some Americans think of as a serving of "meat" is really a serving of fried breaded bread with condiment levels of meat mixed in. Most Americans do not know that chicken nuggets are half corn. etc )

The people with the worst data may be the scientists, unfortunately. You can draw somewhat accurate conclusions from your own personal testing and anecdotes, but you might draw mightily wrong conclusions from survey data which appears to say something that simply isn't true.