[ska]

> How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products?

It's impossible to do this really rigorously, as there are too many unknowns in nutrition still. So this leaves holed you can drive all sorts of sized trucks through, which means a lot of argument but not a lot of resolution.

[maxerickson]

There's not magic shit in meat, it's mostly water and amino acids and the remaining fraction is mostly bad for you.

(I eat meat all the time, but we know a lot more than barely anything about nutrition. Figure out vitamin RDAs in milligrams if you want an example)

[DetroitThrow]

I'm shocked that people seriously believe that the fundamentals of nutritional science are a virtual mystery or has enough "wiggle room" to make ridiculously broad claims about diet necessities. We know almost exact micrograms of iodine we need per day to be healthy. We have a pretty great idea of what the body needs to function optimally and are getting a clearer picture every day.

Is this why GMOs became such a pariah?

[ska]

If what you were saying were true, we wouldn't have wildly divergent (macro) diet and nutrition claims being made in cycles without clear resolution. Most of them are wrong, it seems, but the science is hard.

You are right we have some pretty good information on deficiency problems with key things like iodine, B12 (topical) etc. We have much less understanding of how even dietary source actually work even with some key nutrients outside of lab conditions, and beyond that dietary nutrition is absolutely full of handwaving. We are nowhere near a clear picture; lot's of people will tell you we are but they still contradict each other regularly. This is not a mature science.

[maxerickson]

The hard part of modern diet isn't macro composition, it's measuring caloric requirements and sticking close to them over long periods of time. Macro composition can help with that, but eating way too much of the perfect diet is still going to be bad.

[ska]

Sure, we understand "too many calories is bad" also, but that wasn't my point. A lot of conflicting claims about macro composition are made for example, and it's really hard to definitely dismiss them (or even answer how much it matters) mainly because we don't understand it well enough.

[ska]

I didn't say we know "barely anything", just that the unknowns are significant enough to allow a lot of wiggle room and arguments. Including, for example, the accuracy of many vitamin RDAs.