Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by whatscooking 938 days ago
All these anti-aging posts make me cringe. Face it, you’re going to die one day. You want to be healthier? Eat a healthy diet and exercise instead of looking for shortcuts
2 comments

> healthy diet

Easy to say that phrase, much harder to elucidate exactly what it means. And how will we find out what it means without studying it?

Everyone is different. Eat what you want. There is no perfect diet. And we are all going to die [if not tomorrow :-]
That’s anti-science. It’s well established you shouldn’t just “eat what you want,” at least when it comes to living a long/healthy life. Death is a compounding statistical phenomenon, not a discrete one.
Most nutrition science is bunk. We know you shouldn't consume too many calories. We know you need a certain minimum amount of micronutrients and essential amino acids. Nothing else really meets modern evidence based medicine criteria. If there are actual benefits from eating or avoiding certain foods then the effect sizes appear to be much smaller than other lifestyle factors like sleep, exercise, stress, and substance abuse.

As a practical matter a more productive approach is to (mostly) ignore the science and conduct informal n=1 experiments. Try adding or removing certain foods for a few months and see how that impacts your athletic performance and subjective well being.

It's really hard to tell what's science in nutrition and what is some unreplicable crap Nestlé is using to say its cereals are healthy.

Brief reminder we recommended sugar over fats for decades.

It’s all science, reproducibility is a larger crisis within science at the moment not unique to nutrition. But even if it was (and it is) slightly higher in food science, the solution is not “eat whatever you want”, it’s more like that you should understand the fundamentals instead of overfitting to individual studies.
This post is a data point about the definition of “healthy diet”.