I’m studying nutrition at a tertiary level for pretty much this exact reason and what it has taught me from speaking to dietitians who teach my course and from doing the course is:
a. Advice for the average person with a typical western diet boils down to “would it kill you to eat a damn vegetable?”
b. There’s a lot of organic chemistry that despite me being 3 years into a 4 year degree hasn’t paid off (I am doing the degree that feeds into a masters of dietetics, so I’m sure that’s where it was going to pay off. Alas, I’m not going to do that masters any time soon because my government engineering job 8 years in pays more than and end of career dietitian despite the higher level of education, and the masters would require me to work 9-5 for 6 months for free)
But most importantly, and most relevantly for the lesswrong sort of person, is that it is basically impossible to study diets in anything resembling double blind randomised placebo controlled. Diets are strongly linked to culture and personality and strongly influenced by those around you and virtually impossible to double blind. Like, imagine you wanted to study whether eating red meat is good for your health. Imagine getting 10,000 people and randomising them into three groups (high red meat, moderate red meat, no red meat). Would a steer farmer from Texas really stop eating red meat just because he was randomised into the no group? Would I, a vegan for 5 years, start eating 4 serves of red meat because I was randomised into the high group? (no, but I wouldn’t sign up for the study for this reason, which is a confounder because people like me then wouldn’t sign up). And if the Texan did stop eating red meat, would he keep it up for 20 years? Would someone randomised into the high group who got diagnosed with heart disease and was told by their doctor to cut down on red meat ignore the advice because of the study?
It’s that problem but writ large that makes decent dietary research hard to do. You’ll notice a lot of studies are done over 1-3 months, because that’s a reasonable amount of time to be able to provide three pre-packaged meals to your participants that you can control exactly (though those participants are probably going to eat other things: who goes to a birthday party without eating cake, for example?).
So then we have to do animal studies, and our ancestral diet is very different from say a mouse or even a chimp, and is maybe not even what is best for us.
Also, something that isn’t really emphasised in this sort of discussion is the cultural value of food. Sitting and sharing meals with people is good for our mental wellbeing.
I think some people also stick on “are eggs good or bad for you? is red meat healthy? are tomatoes good?” when this is kinda missing the point. No one thing should be such a big part of your diet that this information is gamebreaking. And I think everyone knows that vegetables are healthy and hamburgers aren’t.
So, where does that leave us?
Fortunately, pretty much every country in the world has a team of dietitians who come together to make a guide for how to eat healthfully. I’m Australian so the Australian guide to healthy eating ( https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/guidelines/australian-guide-healthy-eating ) and the associated material on the website is what I’m most familiar with. It boils down to eating a lot of vegetables (50% of your plate!), a moderate amount of grains, a small amount of lean protein, and eating fruit and calcium-rich foods. But the website has a lot of information on it in a very accessible format and I’d recommend it as a good starting point.
But most importantly, and most relevantly for the lesswrong sort of person, is that it is basically impossible to study diets in anything resembling double blind randomised placebo controlled.
To be more exact, doing that is basically outlawed. You could run those studies in prisons but that wouldn’t get past the ethical review board.
Indeed, since each body is a different ecosystem and each body exists inside larger, distinct ecosystems, you’ll have to decide what your objective about health is and be satisfied with “good enough” and letting your body do its thing.
To illustrate the complications, people who descend from groups adapted to particular regions and who have now migrated or been forcibly relocated to others may have different dietary needs than the adapted, local groups. For example: someone living away from the equator traditionally consumed a lot more fish and milk derivates, which helped compensate for the lack of sunlight in winter. Skin colour and the composition of the microbiome in their gut also played a role.
Once you select an objective (live longer, reduce the chances of developing a disease you are genetically or environmentally disposed toward, reduce impact on environment, reduce animal cruelty, etc.), you can go the “literature” and find information. I like nutritionfacts.org, among others.
Collecting data on a regular basis will be helpful in tuning your diet; I’m thinking blood lab work and the recently en vogue microbiome DNA reports. Lastly, in my opinion, you should only consume supplements when you have identified chronic deficiencies, like vitamin D or B12.
Advice for the average person with a typical western diet boils down to “would it kill you to eat a damn vegetable?”
I heard a hypothesis that all “diets that work” have one thing in common (which is probably the only reason they work) -- they recommend eating more vegetables than you were eating previously, but they achieve it mostly indirectly, by banning something else. Also, they indirectly make you eat less, by making you pay more attention to what you eat, and banning some of your previously favorite meals.
For example, vegetarian or vegan diet seems like an opposite of paleo diet, but the one thing they have in common is that they ban something other than vegetables (meat in case of vegetarian or vegan, grains in case of paleo). If you take your previous eating habits, and just remove that one component, it increases the relative proportion of vegetables in what is left.
This makes me think about a diet, not sure if someone else invented it first, that would go like: “each day, first eat this amount of vegetables, and then eat whatever you want, how much you want, until 6 PM”. (Probably would go with specific list of vegetables, like “one cucumber, one tomato, one carrot...”, but ultimately the exact list doesn’t matter, it just makes planning easier.)
my government engineering job 8 years in pays more than and end of career dietitian despite the higher level of education, and the masters would require me to work 9-5 for 6 months for free)
Could the masters degree open for you possibilities other than working as a career dietitian? For example, would it make legal for you to provide expensive private diet advice?
For mere 20% of profit, I would let you use my magical diet explained above. :D
I’d also imagine that coma patients are really cooperative experimental participants.
They don’t tend to be cooperative about eating to the point where they have to be fed via tubes that bypass part of the eating process. They are also untypical for other reasons and are not willing to put in their daily steps.
Setting aside the absolutely horrific ethical problems with experimenting on imprisoned people, imprisoned people do have access to commissary, would have access to special meals for religious or cultural reasons, and are likely to exchange food amongst themselves.
And as said in the other reply, coma patients are fed through tubes and don’t do things like exercise, so you wouldn’t be able to determine the effect of protein intake on muscle growth or whatever, and they also have whatever condition put them in a coma in the first place, and I believe long term comas are rare. Oh, and no informed consent, because they’re in a coma.
I’m studying nutrition at a tertiary level for pretty much this exact reason and what it has taught me from speaking to dietitians who teach my course and from doing the course is:
a. Advice for the average person with a typical western diet boils down to “would it kill you to eat a damn vegetable?”
b. There’s a lot of organic chemistry that despite me being 3 years into a 4 year degree hasn’t paid off (I am doing the degree that feeds into a masters of dietetics, so I’m sure that’s where it was going to pay off. Alas, I’m not going to do that masters any time soon because my government engineering job 8 years in pays more than and end of career dietitian despite the higher level of education, and the masters would require me to work 9-5 for 6 months for free)
But most importantly, and most relevantly for the lesswrong sort of person, is that it is basically impossible to study diets in anything resembling double blind randomised placebo controlled. Diets are strongly linked to culture and personality and strongly influenced by those around you and virtually impossible to double blind. Like, imagine you wanted to study whether eating red meat is good for your health. Imagine getting 10,000 people and randomising them into three groups (high red meat, moderate red meat, no red meat). Would a steer farmer from Texas really stop eating red meat just because he was randomised into the no group? Would I, a vegan for 5 years, start eating 4 serves of red meat because I was randomised into the high group? (no, but I wouldn’t sign up for the study for this reason, which is a confounder because people like me then wouldn’t sign up). And if the Texan did stop eating red meat, would he keep it up for 20 years? Would someone randomised into the high group who got diagnosed with heart disease and was told by their doctor to cut down on red meat ignore the advice because of the study?
It’s that problem but writ large that makes decent dietary research hard to do. You’ll notice a lot of studies are done over 1-3 months, because that’s a reasonable amount of time to be able to provide three pre-packaged meals to your participants that you can control exactly (though those participants are probably going to eat other things: who goes to a birthday party without eating cake, for example?).
So then we have to do animal studies, and our ancestral diet is very different from say a mouse or even a chimp, and is maybe not even what is best for us.
Also, something that isn’t really emphasised in this sort of discussion is the cultural value of food. Sitting and sharing meals with people is good for our mental wellbeing.
I think some people also stick on “are eggs good or bad for you? is red meat healthy? are tomatoes good?” when this is kinda missing the point. No one thing should be such a big part of your diet that this information is gamebreaking. And I think everyone knows that vegetables are healthy and hamburgers aren’t.
So, where does that leave us?
Fortunately, pretty much every country in the world has a team of dietitians who come together to make a guide for how to eat healthfully. I’m Australian so the Australian guide to healthy eating ( https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/guidelines/australian-guide-healthy-eating ) and the associated material on the website is what I’m most familiar with. It boils down to eating a lot of vegetables (50% of your plate!), a moderate amount of grains, a small amount of lean protein, and eating fruit and calcium-rich foods. But the website has a lot of information on it in a very accessible format and I’d recommend it as a good starting point.
To be more exact, doing that is basically outlawed. You could run those studies in prisons but that wouldn’t get past the ethical review board.
Indeed, since each body is a different ecosystem and each body exists inside larger, distinct ecosystems, you’ll have to decide what your objective about health is and be satisfied with “good enough” and letting your body do its thing.
To illustrate the complications, people who descend from groups adapted to particular regions and who have now migrated or been forcibly relocated to others may have different dietary needs than the adapted, local groups. For example: someone living away from the equator traditionally consumed a lot more fish and milk derivates, which helped compensate for the lack of sunlight in winter. Skin colour and the composition of the microbiome in their gut also played a role.
Once you select an objective (live longer, reduce the chances of developing a disease you are genetically or environmentally disposed toward, reduce impact on environment, reduce animal cruelty, etc.), you can go the “literature” and find information. I like nutritionfacts.org, among others.
Collecting data on a regular basis will be helpful in tuning your diet; I’m thinking blood lab work and the recently en vogue microbiome DNA reports. Lastly, in my opinion, you should only consume supplements when you have identified chronic deficiencies, like vitamin D or B12.
I heard a hypothesis that all “diets that work” have one thing in common (which is probably the only reason they work) -- they recommend eating more vegetables than you were eating previously, but they achieve it mostly indirectly, by banning something else. Also, they indirectly make you eat less, by making you pay more attention to what you eat, and banning some of your previously favorite meals.
For example, vegetarian or vegan diet seems like an opposite of paleo diet, but the one thing they have in common is that they ban something other than vegetables (meat in case of vegetarian or vegan, grains in case of paleo). If you take your previous eating habits, and just remove that one component, it increases the relative proportion of vegetables in what is left.
This makes me think about a diet, not sure if someone else invented it first, that would go like: “each day, first eat this amount of vegetables, and then eat whatever you want, how much you want, until 6 PM”. (Probably would go with specific list of vegetables, like “one cucumber, one tomato, one carrot...”, but ultimately the exact list doesn’t matter, it just makes planning easier.)
Could the masters degree open for you possibilities other than working as a career dietitian? For example, would it make legal for you to provide expensive private diet advice?
For mere 20% of profit, I would let you use my magical diet explained above. :D
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They don’t tend to be cooperative about eating to the point where they have to be fed via tubes that bypass part of the eating process. They are also untypical for other reasons and are not willing to put in their daily steps.
Setting aside the absolutely horrific ethical problems with experimenting on imprisoned people, imprisoned people do have access to commissary, would have access to special meals for religious or cultural reasons, and are likely to exchange food amongst themselves.
And as said in the other reply, coma patients are fed through tubes and don’t do things like exercise, so you wouldn’t be able to determine the effect of protein intake on muscle growth or whatever, and they also have whatever condition put them in a coma in the first place, and I believe long term comas are rare. Oh, and no informed consent, because they’re in a coma.
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