[sudowhodoido]

This has been the case in the UK for many years as well.

One of my earliest memories at the tender age of 3 (very early 1980s) was wearing one of those blue anoraks with a fuzzy collar and being wheeled to the greasy caf'[1] in a buggy and fed bacon, beans, chips (French fries) and tea. This was in Islington in London. I can't think of a single week I haven't eaten bacon since.

That's just normal here. No crazy or macho rubbish. Food staple.

And as I've had this argument before (on reddit...), to the Americans, we don't eat that shitty Canadian bacon or the streaky stuff you get in the US here. We use the latter to add flavour to other foods and eat the nice lean back bacon: http://www.clancysofchester.co.uk/back%20bacon.jpg . The streaky stuff is kind of horrible and clogs up your arteries.

[1] Not café. Caf' innit (local dialect)

[Chevalier]

Just to update your nutrition information, the streaky stuff is great for you. Fats, especially animal fats, are pretty wonderful for human health. You lose both flavor and nutrition when you remove it from your diet.

I feel like I'm letting a secret out, but if there's any crowd that we want to be healthy and productive, it's HN. Eat fat. It's great for you. What's important is to remove sugar from your diet in all its forms.

[tjradcliffe]

The belief that the human nutritional optimum is narrow and deep, so that "complete elimination of food X" and "total focus on food Y" will enormously enhance your health is a crypto-creationist argument, as it requires a complete rejection of everything we know about evolution in general and human evolution in particular.

Omnivores like humans evolve with broad, shallow nutritional optima. Humans are happy with a diet of simple starches (metabolically almost indistinguishable from refined sugars) or a diet of fatty meat, and do pretty much the same on almost everything in between. There are statistically measurable variations, but the optimum is so broad and shallow--as our evolutionary history would predict--that it is full of really shallow local optima that are due purely to noise. Crypto-creationists glom onto these shallow local optima and make out like they have incredibly deep minima hidden in their midst, which is utterly implausible unless you reject evolution as the force that shaped us as species.

[Chevalier]

I'm not sure that equating creationism with nutrition makes sense. Nor does the rise of grain necessarily signal evolutionary adaptation. It seems quite possible that humans can survive and thrive on sub-optimal nutrition.

In fact, Jared Diamond quite convincingly demonstrates that hunter-gatherers, with their meat-and-vegetable diets, were far healthier than their agricultural cousins. But the abundance that resulted from agriculture (along with the perils of nomadic hunting) allowed farmers to have far larger families and eventually drown out hunter-gatherers through sheer demographic superiority. It doesn't mean that grains are ideal for human consumption, only that agriculture allowed population growth and urban density that eventually crushed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

We could live on Twinkies if required. We are, as you pointed out, omnivores. The relevant question is what diet is most optimal for human health.

[revelation]

I think you didn't exactly read the answer? Humans can survive on much any diet, and the differences between them are mostly insignificant, certainly as it pertains to criteria that apply to people sitting most of the day doing mental work.

[sudowhodoido]

Not too much. Coronary heart disease wiped out a big chunk of my family and it wasn't because they ate sugar - it was the lard on toast and chips cooked in lard...

Everything in moderation is probably better advice than a single fact.

[awolf]

The connection between saturated fat and coronary heart disease has had a lot of legitimate doubt cast upon it in the past decade.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648

If you say "eating fatty things will give you heart disease", most people will blindly agree with you. In actuality there is very little valid basis for making that claim.

(Edit, and this is a parenthetical because I do not believe anecdotal evidence is useful for arguing for general cases: My personal n=1 experiment: I have comprehensive blood panels done every three months. Over the past four years I adopted a diet that is high in healthy animals fats and proteins, high in vegetables, low in fruit, and devoid of grains. As in: 3 eggs plus sausage or bacon and a salad for breakfast. Every day.

Prior to starting, I had mediocre to bad cholesterol. My numbers are now: 105 LDL, 70 HDL, 52 triglycerides. Superb by all measures.)

[xorcist]

> The connection between saturated fat and coronary heart disease has had a lot of legitimate doubt cast upon it

So has the belief that all fat is all good for you, to put it lightly. Human nutrition is a lot more complex than that. Unless you like experimenting with yourself for the sake of it, go with a balanced diet.

[zo1]

"go with a balanced diet." As much as I'd like to, it's next to impossible to even figure out what a "balanced diet" is these days. The information conflicts even on something that basic.

[Taek]

Balanced diet: some fat, some sugar, some protein. You've got a lot of flexibility, just make sure every major food group has something of a presence. No need to micromanage.

[awolf]

The position that saturated fat is causative in heart disease is not the default position. If an idea is going to generate prescriptive advice it should come with ample supporting evidence.

Despite this we've been strongly indoctrinated with the idea that fat == unhealthy. It has caused us to change our behavior by avoiding foods that our parents and grandparents have been eating down through the generations. We've moved away from the default "balanced diet" on bunk data.

[justin66]

> healthy animals fats and proteins

Given you eat sausage and bacon every day, I wonder what you'd classify as an unhealthy animal fat or protein and what your rationale is?

[awolf]

I define healthy fat as meat which came from a healthy animal. I define a healthy animal as an animal that was raised in accordance with its species' natural diet and lifestyle.

Grassfed beed, pasture raised pork, wild caught seafood.

[Chevalier]

Personally, I'm persuaded by my personal experience as well as testimony from /r/keto. I've lost nearly 100 lbs over the past year by switching to a high-fat, moderate-protein, and ultra low-carbohydrate diet. I really can't endorse it enough.

If I had to guess, your family's health problems weren't with lard -- they probably resulted from the companion toast and french fries. Any calories you eat will be directed to storage if your insulin is spiked... which happens when you eat carbs like those found in wheat and potatoes.

That's not to say that glucose, which you find in potatoes, is necessarily awful. I don't eat it, but Dr. Robert Lustig (an incredible font of knowledge) thinks glucose can be a valuable part of a diet. What's particularly important is to eliminate fructose and sucrose. They're toxins with no redeeming qualities except making fat-free foods palatable.

[michael_h]

  eliminate fructose

To better health: Eliminate fruit, increase bacon consumption. Got it.

[Chevalier]

You think you're being sarcastic. The only reason why fruits are okay in moderation is that their fiber mitigates some of the damage of their sugar content. The vitamins you can get from fruit are valuable, but the sugar rush isn't.

I'm not opposed to the occasional fruit. But given your tone, I rather suspect you think Jamba Juice is healthier than a steak. Go ahead, I'm not here to save your life... but you may want to read a bit on the subject. I'd start with Gary Taubes, Peter Attia, and Robert Lustig.

[gurkendoktor]

> I'm persuaded by my personal experience as well as testimony from /r/keto

Being healthy and athletic in the short-term is one thing, living a long and happy life is another. I always feel that the Paleo/low-carb communities focus on the former, but if you can believe the gist of The Blue Zones, then happy centenarians have very "boring" eating habits (statistically speaking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone

[xorcist]

An anectode is not data, as you well know. Neither is it surprising that you can find likeminded communities on the Internet.

Great to hear that you feel well though. But please avoid the opportunities to convert heathens on the Internet, if you can. Some of us are skeptics by nature and will never be persuaded by anything less than full scientific studies (especially with areas as complex as the human physiology).

[fredfoobar]

While I do appreciate the benefits of a ketogenic diet, I don't think it's for everybody. This could work great for people who are "out of balance", i.e. if you have excess body fat, it might be beneficial to switch to a metabolism that uses your fat stores (rather than continuing to add to it). I don't think it's a good idea to put your kids on a ketogenic diet (unless they're epileptic and don't respond to treatment) because it is known to stunt growth in children.

[sudowhodoido]

How's your heart?

No their problems weren't just the lard. It was derision pointed at the unfounded basis of your analysis and the complexity of the human diet, metabolism and relatively limited knowledge of nutrition we have.

/r/keto isn't a valid citation, well no more than /r/spacedicks (NSFW) or the pope. Neither is you losing weight.

[Chevalier]

My health has never been better. I'm not sure why you think I've earned your derison... but okay.

Eat sugar, dude. I'm not here to save your life. But if some of the awesome nerds who read HN decide to get healthy, I'd really recommend eliminating sugar from your diet. Life is so much better without it.

Recommended introductory reading would be Gary Taubes, Robert Lustig, and Peter Attia. The history of nutrition over the past fifty years is absolutely shocking.

[sudowhodoido]

I eat a shit ton of straight sugars, fat and carbs and am technically obese if you consider the rather non-scientific BMI system.

However, I rode 59 miles from London to Brighton on my nice Dawes Ultra Galaxy a couple of months back without any trouble. Last month I had a medical and am, according to doctor "in wonderful shape". Go figure.

Oh right, everything in moderation. That's the win. I eat that stuff when I need it.

I wouldn't cite a bunch of random popular reading health authors and an endocrinologist incapable of using the scientific method in his work. Go read some Feynman and apply some critical thinking and get back to me.

[eropple]

Toast and chips are still simple carbohydrates.

[DanBC]

Chips are made from potato. That's a complex carb.

Wholemeal toast would he a complex carb. White bread would be a complex carb in the form of a refined starch - still not a simple carb.

[eropple]

Sorry, yes. Wrote "carbohydrate", deleted it, phone suggested "simple" because autocorrect, and like a dolt I went right ahead. :-)

[sudowhodoido]

Aware of this. My point was purely derision.

A lot of nutritional fads are indistinguishable from religion. Scales are always balanced, not necessarily visibly.

[zzleeper]

Are you sure, or is the medical community changing its mind in 10-20yrs now with a "oops, we just realized its only good when you eat a tenth of what you are eating", or something like that. Also, is both the fat of the pork, and all the oil it is cooked in healthy, or just the first?

I think we don't really know enough about health to have a comprehensive answer, sp. regarding long term effects, so the best thing may be just to be conservative.. i.e. don't each much of anything that our body may not be wired to (like you said, processed sugars, but also deep fried precooked bacon)

[mark-r]

I've never found a need to use oil to cook bacon, it generates plenty of its own in the first few seconds.

[dzhiurgis]

It's great once a week. Stay on nuts, beans and other sources of fat and protein for the rest of the time.

Obviously don't do sugars, but a piece of bread or pasta is just going to give you energy. Which you will use in your exercise. Do eat fruit and plenty of vegetables. They have different types of fiber which does different things to your intestines.

I have been lardon myself most of my life and now I am going thru a change. Took me years, took me meeting some very smart people whose only hobby besides technology/work is exercise. I have also met some crazy illuminati believing, LSD loving, psychedelic trance vegans who spend most of their day looking for healthy stuff. Met overweight vegetarians, some of who only ate fruit.

For some reason people think food is the only saint thing they are allowed to imbibe on. The disappointing truth is that you have to be starving a bit. That's it.

What was even more shocking was recent article about how fasting forces revival of your immune system. Or that yoga moves some of the muscles that normal exercise wouldn't move, hence removing more toxins from there. Or that meditation is one form of natural high and there is nothing esoteric about it.

[001sky]

There's plent enough fat in back bacon. Its unclear why the US doesn't sell it readily. Streaky bacon is more of a condiment than useful protein source.

[cgh]

"Canadian bacon", as you call it, is back bacon, same as the UK. In the US, it's often salted and cured kind of like a packaged deli meat or something and it's pretty awful and bears little resemblance to the genuine article.

[jessaustin]

The streaky stuff is kind of horrible and clogs up your arteries.

Citation needed.