With an Ivy League PhD in physics, I'm a big fan of science.
I have not observed a scientific approach to diet effective in promoting health.
In my albeit limited observation, I observe no correlation between knowing a lot about food, digestion, etc and fitness or healthiness. In particular, American culture appears to approach diet most scientifically, yet has probably the least healthy population. Meanwhile, many illiterate cultures appear to have healthy diets (implying thousands of years of trial and error, admittedly a form of science, works).
My observations are anecdotal, not data, so feel free to dismiss them as such. I just suggest all scientific results so far, compared to what we'd need to meaningfully predict healthiness in a diet, negligibly less anecdotal.
The body is incredibly complex and diet involves multiple internal systems -- digestive, motivational, cardio-vascular, etc -- interacting with huge varieties of foods -- themselves sets of incredibly complex systems. Looking at parts of these systems doesn't seem effective in helping people get healthy, at least not at the level science is at today.
Generations from now science may be able to grasp this complexity and predict healthy diets at the individual level. For now, I appreciate people researching it, but I found all of their predictions for what makes healthy food based on so many untested assumptions and other logical jumps as to be worthless for anything but displaying the pre-conceived notions of the experimenters.
I'm very scientifically bent, but yeah, nutrition science seems to amount to roughly superstition at this point. A little bit of knowledge combined with an ironclad belief in rationality is a dangerous thing - our gut instinct seems to work much better in this case. Unfortunately, the FDA can't admit that they have no idea how things work.
Nasa and the DoD have done a fair amount of research into Diet and found it's mostly not that complex of an issue assuming you eat a verity of foods, have plenty of exercise, and a reasonable caloric intake.
Humans are omnivores with the ability to create most important vitamins, other than 2 major vitamin issues, C because we can't create it and cooking food destroys it, and D because we need sunlight to create it. There are also plenty of individuals with specific food issues. But, consider while eventually it will kill you, a healthy person with a good died can have zero vitamin C intake for a month with no noticeable side effects. http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
PS: I think the real issue is the assumption that the perfect diet is going to some sort of fortified bean paste. Simply picking a random ethnic food at each meal is a much better option.
PS: I think the real issue is the assumption that the perfect diet is going to some sort of fortified bean paste. Simply picking a random ethnic food at each meal is a much better option.
The problem is that nutrition is a highly political topic, even though it may not seem like it from a distance, and often times these studies are financed by someone who is looking for data that jives with their results.
Overwhelmingly, the research that I have seen has recommended consuming carbohydrates only in the form of fruits and vegetables, and ignoring grains almost entirely, as well as limiting the consumption of red meat and consuming much greater quantities of fish and seafood.
> American culture appears to approach diet most scientifically, yet has probably the least healthy population
What makes you think this? Assuming you mean the USA,
I would think there are countries in northern european where diet is on average approached more "scientifically". For
example, national nutrition recommendations are taken
very seriously and abided by in school/workplace cafeterias.
> Meanwhile, many illiterate cultures appear to have healthy diets (implying thousands of years of trial and error, admittedly a form of science, works).
Hit the nail on the head. America is too young of a country and culture, we don't really have a national cuisine. Perhaps burgers and fries, but those are nothing more than the product of our early adoption of industrialized food production.
National cuisines from other cultures have sort of "symbiotic" properties which increase their nutritional properties. I'd have to re-read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma to find specific examples, but I remember things along the lines of soy sauce or rice vinegar enhancing the nutritional value of rice as an example.
This is one of the reasons America is plagued with fad-diets like Atkinsons, etc. that have no real proven benefits. American's grasp at straws asking "What am I supposed to eat?!" while other cultures don't have to wonder.
Isn't the problem rather that it is difficult to stick to a diet? The illiterate cultures you cite probably don't pass a McDonalds every day on their way to their hunting grounds.
How to make diets stick is simply another field of science, which apparently still needs a lot of work.
That's one part of the problem, but we also don't have great data in the first place on what diets should be stuck to, especially when it comes to solid evidence of long-term outcomes. We have better data about short-term weight or muscle loss/gain, but whether some diets result over a lifetime in higher or lower rates of heart attacks, or other organ failure, has little solid data, with the exception of a handful of clear carcinogens. A lot of arguments end up extrapolating from a few observed patterns of variation (e.g. what seem to be positive effects of the "Mediterranean diet", which might also be conflated with non-diet lifestyle factors), then attempting to figure out what factors explain those observations.
There has been research showing healthier outcomes from those eating predominantly plant-based diets. That means: less meat than what most Americans have been eating. However, when in 1977, such guidelines were introduced with "less meat", the meat industry pushed back hard [1, see history of DGA '77], which prompted a revised 2nd edition. This revised 2nd edition dropped less meat and instead focused on nutrient composition ("leaner meats, less fats").
So the politics of food science won't let the government publish "less meat, more vegetables" type of research. Instead, it's veiled in micronutrient suggestions. THen people go and buy vitamin supplements to hit the targets, instead of eating the damn dark leafy greens.
This is so true! And yet the government's food pyramid was until recently promoting processed carbohydrates as the main dietary staple. While you can't really pick a diet scientifically, they all seem to agree this is the one group of foods you want to avoid.
As a side note, the government's new pyramid is even worse ... they've realigned the bars so you have no clue what percentage of each group is desireable. And their own literature totally ignores the yellow bar (what is it?). Check out http://www.choosemyplate.gov/food-groups/downloads/resource/... for a laughably meaningless info-graphic.
> American culture appears to approach diet most scientifically
I don't think this claim can be substantiated. The belief that "a calorie is a calorie" is an axiom in American culture. Despite having been shown by Feynman to be wrong some 30 years ago.
The American culture believes that cholesterol intake is harmful, despite lack of evidence for that (despite a lot of time searching). Similarly for blood pressure and salt (which correlate for 5%-20% of the population, but otherwise a "normal" range of salt intake does not cause hypertension, and too little sodium DOES cause problems)
Here's some more anecdotal "diet of nations" theories:
Climates with less sunlight and more cold require humans to consume more meat to absorb its Vitamin D. Nations that aren't as far north don't have to eat as much meat, or they may be closer to a coast and consume more fish/shellfish. In addition, the warmer climate may lead to its inhabitants being outdoors more often, which may lead to more overall exercise.
A food culture based on centuries of the local inhabitants using what they have available may lead to increased health. For example, if the local food happens to store well and can be harvested en masse, and isn't threatened significantly by drought or floods, they may just naturally eat less food because it's availability is greater than those of other cultures. For example, Freekeh is a mediterranean grain staple which is harvested early in the season, which reduces the threat of rain, drought, pests and vermin, which not only increases the total average yield but reduces the need for chemicals to ensure a good harvest.
Another factor which may affect the diet is the length at which one needs to go to harvest their food. Some foods are quite labor intensive to gather or prepare and thus a lot of time and energy will be taken just to get the food ready to consume, while other foods can be picked off the ground and eaten. Some also can only be harvested at precise intervals while other are available nearly year-round. This may lend to either a "storing fat for the winter" gorging when food is available, or the opposite, eating lightly and occasionally whenever it is desired.
Finally, there are general cultural differences when it comes to how and when to consume food. In Mexico (and I would assume many parts of latin america) it is typical to have a small breakfast, a quite large late lunch and eat dinner after 9PM. In other parts of the world the custom may be to eat a pastry for breakfast, a light lunch and a healthy balanced dinner early in the evening with different beverages throughout the day to tie one over.
When it comes to America, there seems to be a culture of sport that many parts of the country are lacking. If you see some kids playing soccer, chances are they're mostly not "white americans". Baseball used to be a favorite summer pasttime, but I don't see that many kids playing stickball in the streets these days. And in winter, besides ice hockey in the north you won't see a whole lot of outdoor sport played by kids or adults in America (unless it's some sort of amateur league team sport). Many other countries play sports year-round which no doubt contributes to a healthier overall lifestyle.
Finally there's our unique food culture and history. We're not a very old nation, so there hasn't been a very long time to develop a history of eating particular food. On top of that we're a geographically large nation with lots of different food staples throughout different regions. And as modern progress has sped the production of new ways to make and consume food, our culture has embraced the cheap-and-easy mode of bulk consumption that encourages we pay an additional $0.50 for another 10 ounces of soda. It's just too damn easy to eat unhealthy crap in our country, and we're almost proud of that. Compare that to nations that have eaten the same way for centuries and don't have the same history of new food businesses pioneering ways to produce crappy food, and you can see how our way of eating is more of a popular novelty than a real food culture.
I'll leave the food influences by religion of a region to someone more familiar with that, but it's safe to say that religion has influenced diet for thousands of years.
I'll leave the food influences by religion of a region to someone more familiar with that, but it's safe to say that religion has influenced diet for thousands of years.
I'd say the major way has been by affecting alcohol consumption. My religion bans various little things, but the big change in diet in becoming religiously observant (I'm mostly not, mind you) is the sheer number of ritual meals involving rather large glasses of wine, usually red.
Given the heart-health effects of wine, it might almost cancel out how fat the Orthodox tend to get from sitting around studying religious law all the time.
I have not observed a scientific approach to diet effective in promoting health.
In my albeit limited observation, I observe no correlation between knowing a lot about food, digestion, etc and fitness or healthiness. In particular, American culture appears to approach diet most scientifically, yet has probably the least healthy population. Meanwhile, many illiterate cultures appear to have healthy diets (implying thousands of years of trial and error, admittedly a form of science, works).
My observations are anecdotal, not data, so feel free to dismiss them as such. I just suggest all scientific results so far, compared to what we'd need to meaningfully predict healthiness in a diet, negligibly less anecdotal.
The body is incredibly complex and diet involves multiple internal systems -- digestive, motivational, cardio-vascular, etc -- interacting with huge varieties of foods -- themselves sets of incredibly complex systems. Looking at parts of these systems doesn't seem effective in helping people get healthy, at least not at the level science is at today.
Generations from now science may be able to grasp this complexity and predict healthy diets at the individual level. For now, I appreciate people researching it, but I found all of their predictions for what makes healthy food based on so many untested assumptions and other logical jumps as to be worthless for anything but displaying the pre-conceived notions of the experimenters.