[hilbert42]

"And the last we only have evidence of in the past couple of years, and it's relatively weak evidence."

Perhaps so, but it turned out to be good advice—I heeded the advice and have always limited my sugar and salt intake. As I said, at what point or how much evidence is need to heed such advice. Leaving it until factually certain could mean it's too late.

"Well, sugar intake isn't a risk factor or cause of type 1 diabetes."

That was known at the time (and to me also—in fact to all of us). The instance further highlighted the sugar/diabetes issue as we kids actually knew someone who had diabetes and who had to inject insulin (even if we didn't have diabetes, we knew we could still develop it and that excessive sugar would likely be the cause).

The thought of having to inject insulin daily focused our minds. That seems obvious doesn't it?

[mlyle]

> As I said, at what point or how much evidence is need to heed such advice.

This is like a Pascal's wager. There's a bazillion things we could be doing that there's a little evidence for or a plausible explanation. And we can't do them all, or believe in every God, or whatever.

And even things that we had a lot of evidence for (like dietary fat) turned out to be harmful when given as public health advice.

In the end, things are tricky. Best to do whatever seems like it's reasonably careful to you, and for science to try and figure more of this out and decide the best things to give advice on.