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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25228 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I'll add nutrition "experts" to the pile as one of the groups that I started losing trust in. I still can't believe I fell for the idea that sodium is "bad for you" above the recommended 2300mg/day recommendation. Preventing muscle cramps by cranking up my sodium intake and following up on the empirical evidence for low-sodium diets was one of my first indications that the public health professionals are either ignorant or lying.

Nutrition is protoscience, barely better than psychology.

at least psychology has IQ going for it, which is useful.

Really? So what can I know about the food I eat?

Specific about given food - fine. How to avoid scurvy and similar - fine.

That we should avoid extremely processed food, overeating, sugary drinks and similar traps - many clear cases that should be avoided are known.

But science based guide for optimal diet? Hahaha. No.

Eat more calories to gain weight and less to lose weight is pretty solid.

That's physics, not nutrition, to be fair.

Quite a lot actually. We know that lack of Vitamin C will cause scurvy, lack of Vitamin D will cause rickets, and lack of Iodine will cause goiter. The last two were extremely common prior to the 20th century.

Unfortunately, nutrition science didn't build on these successes but started to make conclusions which weren't supported by evidence.

The other problem is that the job got a lot harder. We have basically invented entire new classes of food since then, and more importantly there's been a lot of population mixing. Given that the optimal diet for one group (not even race, much narrower genetic groups than that) can be completely opposite that of another, it's a damn hard nut to crack now.

I can't say I disagree, as an aspiring psychiatrist who currently has to occasionally write diet charts.

Well, at least the drugs work, regardless of the theoretical grounding of more hand-wavey stuff like therapy.

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