Longevity: Consider “What kills people?” Heart disease, linked to a shitty diet and inactivity. So eat mostly vegetables, healthy meat (grass-fed free range organic etc.), and limit processed foods. Do cardio so that you don’t keel over from basic activity. Cancer is a big one; avoiding carcinogens seems to be the only way to fight that. Again, don’t eat much processed food, don’t smoke, don’t live in a high pollution area, etc… After that, injury from broken bones and bodily weakness are huge problems for elderly people. Do weight training to build muscle mass and bone density (and be sure to eat enough to put on muscle), as muscles and bones get weaker without a training stress.
Why would “organic” be a health-improving characteristic of a food? Organic foods tend to use more and nastier pesticides, contain less nutrients, and as a side benefit they damage the environment far more than normal food because they use more resources.
Edit: In retrospect, this is more a mockery of organic plant farming, not organic animal farming. The environmental concern stands, but they haven’t done nearly as much laboratory-based genetic modification of animals(though we’ve done just as much with selective breeding, of course, which is why GMO complaints always seem funny to me), and I’m not familiar enough with organic livestock chemical use to say for sure that they use worse ones(though it wouldn’t surprise me, I can’t make that claim confidently enough to do so).
Organic foods tend to use more and nastier pesticides, contain less nutrients, and as a side benefit they damage the environment far more than normal food because they use more resources.
Could you give sources for these three claims?
I’m most interested in the nutrition one; the first hit on google is contrary.
Actually, what do you mean by “organic”? Your edit makes it sound like you just mean not GMO, while I think it’s a lot narrower.
See for example this, this, or this—there are safe organic pesticides, but the most effective ones tend to be in the “shockingly lethal products of evolution” category, and are only believed to be safe because of vitalism myths.
The less nutrients thing refers to crops like golden rice, which has been genetically engineered to contain Vitamin A to help stave off 1-2 million people dying every year from deficiency. Naturally, organic food activists are violently opposed to it(sometimes literally).
The more damage refers mostly to the Borlaug hypothesis—using more efficient scientific farming techniques means you can grow more food on less land, which means we need to do less deforestation and can leave more land in its natural state. Also, remember that prices contain information—farmers need to pay for all the resources they use, and those costs are embedded in the price of the food. If organic food costs twice as much, it’s probably because organic farming uses twice as many resources. (Admittedly, this does include resources like labour, which isn’t strictly a “green” concern, but I like people, so I care about how hard they have to work on top of environmental issues)
Agreed. My comment and thought process is USA-centric. Free-range doesn’t really mean anything in the US as a standard for poultry, and nothing for other kinds of meat. Organic beef on the other hand has “Must have unrestricted outdoor access” as a required criteria, along with prohibitions on hormones and antibiotics.
Don’t eat sugar. If you can avoid eating processed man-made sugar (believe me, it is everywhere), you’ll by necessity be avoiding so much of the bad stuff. Do that and ephion’s tips, you’ll be fine. Expect unbelievable difficulty when reducing carbs for the first two weeks, followed by a health, cognition and wakefullness spike, followed by normal life with a little bit more cognitive stability than beforehand.
Some of the very basics I know from researching veganism:
Moderate meat-eaters seem to have longer lifespans than heavy meat-eaters and vegans. I can’t remember if vegetarians are equivalent or a little shorter. This is epidemiological data so take it with a grain of salt—you can eat french fries all day and be considered a vegan, likewise many vegetarians probably substitute meat with unhealthy amounts of cheese. But eating meat-heavy meals for every meal appears to be bad for longevity.
Fish is effective at preventing alzheimer’s. This does not seem to be reproducible by taking (overrated) omega-3 fatty acid capsules.
So, eating more vegetarian dishes and fish once every few days or so is probably a good idea. I have no clue what to help with short-term cognitive performance.
Avoid artificially concentrated sugars. Don’t drink soda or eat candy. Trans fats are almost certainly bad as well, (but are slowly being replaced in most foods). Don’t drink too much alcohol. (Also, don’t smoke)
The field of nutrition is a mess, but I think the above claims are genuinely noncontroversial, and can lead to larger improvements than any other general or exotic nutritional advice.
There’s a cost estimate on the spreadsheet. With lactase and a scoop of whey I’m totaling around $2.80 for 1291 calories. But the cost goes up when I add fresh fruit or kefir or ice cream or anything else, which I do for variety.
This is probably not a great forum to take nutritional advice from—LW many have human rationality down better than most but the domains of food and methods of thinking are far apart. For what to do, I would either do the research or trust nutritionists that aren’t selling anything. Alternatively, find healthy people or populations and ask them what they do.
This is probably not a great forum to take nutritional advice from—LW many have human rationality down better than most but the domains of food and methods of thinking are far apart.
Questions about what the most instrumentally rational practice is for a task shared by all humans are not not outside the domain of human rationality. If it happens that lesswrong is as bad at nutrition as you imply then that represents a failure according to the expressed and actual values of the site.
It seems to me inconsistent to suggest that a random LW user can usefully “do the research” but cannot usefully extract information from other random LW users, some of which probably believe that they have “done the research.”
There’s a selection bias problem, the people most likely to comment are those with strongly held outlier veiws rather than the majority who have considered the problem and come to some moderate solution.
1) Greens with good nutrient contents, such as kale, spinach, asparagus, or the delicious butter lettuce (but not iceberg lettuce, yuck). 2) Sulfur-containing vegetables such as onion, broccoli and cabbage (the Proper recipe for cabbage is to slice it into thin strips and saute it in sesame oil—try it). 3) Variety is good. Eat bell peppers! And some carrots! Have you ever in your life tasted fennel? How many different colors of “green” beans to they sell at your local market?
The Proper recipe for dark green vegetables is to fry them at high heat and then add vinegar (ideally rice vinegar and fish sauce, as in pad see ew). Otherwise they are inedibly bitter.
If you’re cooking for yourself, try them lightly steamed first. There’s huge variation in human sensitivity to bitter tastes. I personally have very weak sensitivity to bitter tastes. Your “proper recipe” would ruin dark green vegetables for me.
I figured anyone not sensitive to bitterness would already have found an acceptable way to prepare dark green vegetables and wouldn’t be turned off them by trying my recipe (as I was by years of “lightly steamed” greens).
Note, though, that the frying should be quite brief and very little oil should be used.
Large amounts of vegetables. In particular the kind that is more like broccoli and less like potato in terms of your best estimate of macro-nutrient content.
Minimal amounts of carbohydrate that are not in the aforementioned vegetable form. Avoid grains, sugar and probably artificial sweeteners too. Note that many kinds of fruit count as ‘sugar source’ and so are far less healthy than I was told in school. Some fruits like berries tend to be lower on the sugar side so are worth looking in to.
Plenty of protein and fat. Saturated fat is basically ok (again, in contrast to what I was taught in school). Do be sure to include enough Omega-3 either via fish or supplementation. Avoid trans-fats (like from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) like the plague. This means the kind of fat typically found in snack foods.
Beware soy, gluten and dairy. Response to these foods varies greatly among individuals and various levels of allergy or intolerance are possible, including at a level not dramatic enough to be noticed. Response to these substances can be tested empirically either through self experiment or medical tests. In the case of soy it is usually worth avoiding regardless of any intolerance since it messes with hormone levels.
When changing your diet remember to eat enough food. When changing from a diet high in energy dense carbohydrate sources (like bread) to a healthier diet a common mistake is to underestimate how much of the new food is required to supply the same amount of energy. Starvation makes compliance with new dietary practices unlikely.
I don’t buy the “sugar is inherently bad” hypothesis. It seems to cause inflammation in high amounts, but excluding the micronutrient dense fruits such as oranges, bananas, apricots, and above all, coconuts, from your diet in moderate amounts seems like an incredibly bad move.
I don’t buy the “sugar is inherently bad” hypothesis.
I don’t know much about inherent badness but if you also happened to not buy the hypothesis “at the margin for the overwhelming majority of people in western civilisation additional sugar is detrimental” then you would be significantly misinformed.
It seems to cause inflammation in high amounts
See also: insulin resistance.
but excluding the micronutrient dense fruits such as oranges, bananas, apricots, and above all, coconuts, from your diet in moderate amounts seems like an incredibly bad move.
I happen to include those foods in my diet. I no longer believe that I am virtuous for doing so. The advice ‘eat lots of fruit and vegetables’ is bizarre, it’s like comparing apples and oranges would be if they were not, in fact, so similar. I suppose it makes sense for anyone with completely inadequate vitamin intake but for their role as a macro-nutrient source the two are a world apart. (Exceptions apply on both the fruit and vegetable side, including those previously mentioned.)
, and above all, coconuts, from your diet in moderate amounts seems like an incredibly bad move.
When considering the moderation of sugar intake from fruit the emphasis on coconut seems rather odd. Coconut is largely a (saturated) fat source, not a sugar source. It was even mentioned in the grandparent that the lower sugar fruits are worth researching. Clearly coconuts were not something being discouraged. In fact, given the encouragement given to both low sugar fruits and saturated fats I would infer the reverse.
sure, additional sugar in the context of western diets is bad. What I’m objecting to is the vaguely paleo point you’re making of “lots of vegetables, little fruit” as a bare claim. If you’re aware of any evidence that a carb heavy (where carb heavy for me means 40-50% of calories) diet is bad when those carbs come from whole food sources I’d like to see it. Anecdotally, I can say I get a lot more fruit, milk sugars, and starchy tubers than I do cruciferous or leafy veggies, and I can’t find anything lacking in either my blood panels or nutritional analysis of my diet.
From this post I got the idea of doing the same, and I created a menu of easy to prepare food that I can eat every day, and that meets all the FDA requirements (except for potassium; I don’t think it’s possible to get that much from natural sources) and that still lets me lose weight. So far it seems to be working; eating like that most days, I am (slowly) losing weight, and I feel fine.
Dark green ones seem to have more nutritional content in general, but yellow, orange, & red vegetables are typically good sources of Vitamin A & some other pigment-like compounds that might not be in large amounts in the green ones.
Per the vegetables question: what should I eat?
For what goal? Longevity, weight loss, muscle gain, ethics?
Longevity and cognitive performance.
Longevity: Consider “What kills people?” Heart disease, linked to a shitty diet and inactivity. So eat mostly vegetables, healthy meat (grass-fed free range organic etc.), and limit processed foods. Do cardio so that you don’t keel over from basic activity. Cancer is a big one; avoiding carcinogens seems to be the only way to fight that. Again, don’t eat much processed food, don’t smoke, don’t live in a high pollution area, etc… After that, injury from broken bones and bodily weakness are huge problems for elderly people. Do weight training to build muscle mass and bone density (and be sure to eat enough to put on muscle), as muscles and bones get weaker without a training stress.
Why would “organic” be a health-improving characteristic of a food? Organic foods tend to use more and nastier pesticides, contain less nutrients, and as a side benefit they damage the environment far more than normal food because they use more resources.
Edit: In retrospect, this is more a mockery of organic plant farming, not organic animal farming. The environmental concern stands, but they haven’t done nearly as much laboratory-based genetic modification of animals(though we’ve done just as much with selective breeding, of course, which is why GMO complaints always seem funny to me), and I’m not familiar enough with organic livestock chemical use to say for sure that they use worse ones(though it wouldn’t surprise me, I can’t make that claim confidently enough to do so).
Could you give sources for these three claims?
I’m most interested in the nutrition one; the first hit on google is contrary.
Actually, what do you mean by “organic”? Your edit makes it sound like you just mean not GMO, while I think it’s a lot narrower.
See for example this, this, or this—there are safe organic pesticides, but the most effective ones tend to be in the “shockingly lethal products of evolution” category, and are only believed to be safe because of vitalism myths.
The less nutrients thing refers to crops like golden rice, which has been genetically engineered to contain Vitamin A to help stave off 1-2 million people dying every year from deficiency. Naturally, organic food activists are violently opposed to it(sometimes literally).
The more damage refers mostly to the Borlaug hypothesis—using more efficient scientific farming techniques means you can grow more food on less land, which means we need to do less deforestation and can leave more land in its natural state. Also, remember that prices contain information—farmers need to pay for all the resources they use, and those costs are embedded in the price of the food. If organic food costs twice as much, it’s probably because organic farming uses twice as many resources. (Admittedly, this does include resources like labour, which isn’t strictly a “green” concern, but I like people, so I care about how hard they have to work on top of environmental issues)
I was specifically referring to meat, which has much better conditions than factory farming, and much better nutrition as a result.
But that’s a gain due to free-range techniques, not organic prohibitions.
Agreed. My comment and thought process is USA-centric. Free-range doesn’t really mean anything in the US as a standard for poultry, and nothing for other kinds of meat. Organic beef on the other hand has “Must have unrestricted outdoor access” as a required criteria, along with prohibitions on hormones and antibiotics.
Ah, if you’re engaging in rules lawyering I understand completely.
Don’t eat sugar. If you can avoid eating processed man-made sugar (believe me, it is everywhere), you’ll by necessity be avoiding so much of the bad stuff. Do that and ephion’s tips, you’ll be fine. Expect unbelievable difficulty when reducing carbs for the first two weeks, followed by a health, cognition and wakefullness spike, followed by normal life with a little bit more cognitive stability than beforehand.
Some of the very basics I know from researching veganism:
Moderate meat-eaters seem to have longer lifespans than heavy meat-eaters and vegans. I can’t remember if vegetarians are equivalent or a little shorter. This is epidemiological data so take it with a grain of salt—you can eat french fries all day and be considered a vegan, likewise many vegetarians probably substitute meat with unhealthy amounts of cheese. But eating meat-heavy meals for every meal appears to be bad for longevity.
Fish is effective at preventing alzheimer’s. This does not seem to be reproducible by taking (overrated) omega-3 fatty acid capsules.
So, eating more vegetarian dishes and fish once every few days or so is probably a good idea. I have no clue what to help with short-term cognitive performance.
Also, moderate wine consumption is extremely good for you. 3 glasses a week can increase your lifespan significantly.
Some low-hanging fruit:
Avoid artificially concentrated sugars. Don’t drink soda or eat candy. Trans fats are almost certainly bad as well, (but are slowly being replaced in most foods). Don’t drink too much alcohol. (Also, don’t smoke)
The field of nutrition is a mess, but I think the above claims are genuinely noncontroversial, and can lead to larger improvements than any other general or exotic nutritional advice.
The cortisol drop I got from using soylent orange probably swamps the actual nutritional impact on my health.
What has the daily cost of soylent orange been, and do you not get tired of the taste?
There’s a cost estimate on the spreadsheet. With lactase and a scoop of whey I’m totaling around $2.80 for 1291 calories. But the cost goes up when I add fresh fruit or kefir or ice cream or anything else, which I do for variety.
How much does soylent orange cost per day?
This is probably not a great forum to take nutritional advice from—LW many have human rationality down better than most but the domains of food and methods of thinking are far apart. For what to do, I would either do the research or trust nutritionists that aren’t selling anything. Alternatively, find healthy people or populations and ask them what they do.
Questions about what the most instrumentally rational practice is for a task shared by all humans are not not outside the domain of human rationality. If it happens that lesswrong is as bad at nutrition as you imply then that represents a failure according to the expressed and actual values of the site.
It seems to me inconsistent to suggest that a random LW user can usefully “do the research” but cannot usefully extract information from other random LW users, some of which probably believe that they have “done the research.”
There’s a selection bias problem, the people most likely to comment are those with strongly held outlier veiws rather than the majority who have considered the problem and come to some moderate solution.
Nutritionists are a profession. Almost per definition they are selling something.
1) Greens with good nutrient contents, such as kale, spinach, asparagus, or the delicious butter lettuce (but not iceberg lettuce, yuck).
2) Sulfur-containing vegetables such as onion, broccoli and cabbage (the Proper recipe for cabbage is to slice it into thin strips and saute it in sesame oil—try it).
3) Variety is good. Eat bell peppers! And some carrots! Have you ever in your life tasted fennel? How many different colors of “green” beans to they sell at your local market?
The Proper recipe for dark green vegetables is to fry them at high heat and then add vinegar (ideally rice vinegar and fish sauce, as in pad see ew). Otherwise they are inedibly bitter.
If you’re cooking for yourself, try them lightly steamed first. There’s huge variation in human sensitivity to bitter tastes. I personally have very weak sensitivity to bitter tastes. Your “proper recipe” would ruin dark green vegetables for me.
I figured anyone not sensitive to bitterness would already have found an acceptable way to prepare dark green vegetables and wouldn’t be turned off them by trying my recipe (as I was by years of “lightly steamed” greens).
Note, though, that the frying should be quite brief and very little oil should be used.
Large amounts of vegetables. In particular the kind that is more like broccoli and less like potato in terms of your best estimate of macro-nutrient content.
Minimal amounts of carbohydrate that are not in the aforementioned vegetable form. Avoid grains, sugar and probably artificial sweeteners too. Note that many kinds of fruit count as ‘sugar source’ and so are far less healthy than I was told in school. Some fruits like berries tend to be lower on the sugar side so are worth looking in to.
Plenty of protein and fat. Saturated fat is basically ok (again, in contrast to what I was taught in school). Do be sure to include enough Omega-3 either via fish or supplementation. Avoid trans-fats (like from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) like the plague. This means the kind of fat typically found in snack foods.
Beware soy, gluten and dairy. Response to these foods varies greatly among individuals and various levels of allergy or intolerance are possible, including at a level not dramatic enough to be noticed. Response to these substances can be tested empirically either through self experiment or medical tests. In the case of soy it is usually worth avoiding regardless of any intolerance since it messes with hormone levels.
When changing your diet remember to eat enough food. When changing from a diet high in energy dense carbohydrate sources (like bread) to a healthier diet a common mistake is to underestimate how much of the new food is required to supply the same amount of energy. Starvation makes compliance with new dietary practices unlikely.
I don’t buy the “sugar is inherently bad” hypothesis. It seems to cause inflammation in high amounts, but excluding the micronutrient dense fruits such as oranges, bananas, apricots, and above all, coconuts, from your diet in moderate amounts seems like an incredibly bad move.
I don’t know much about inherent badness but if you also happened to not buy the hypothesis “at the margin for the overwhelming majority of people in western civilisation additional sugar is detrimental” then you would be significantly misinformed.
See also: insulin resistance.
I happen to include those foods in my diet. I no longer believe that I am virtuous for doing so. The advice ‘eat lots of fruit and vegetables’ is bizarre, it’s like comparing apples and oranges would be if they were not, in fact, so similar. I suppose it makes sense for anyone with completely inadequate vitamin intake but for their role as a macro-nutrient source the two are a world apart. (Exceptions apply on both the fruit and vegetable side, including those previously mentioned.)
When considering the moderation of sugar intake from fruit the emphasis on coconut seems rather odd. Coconut is largely a (saturated) fat source, not a sugar source. It was even mentioned in the grandparent that the lower sugar fruits are worth researching. Clearly coconuts were not something being discouraged. In fact, given the encouragement given to both low sugar fruits and saturated fats I would infer the reverse.
sure, additional sugar in the context of western diets is bad. What I’m objecting to is the vaguely paleo point you’re making of “lots of vegetables, little fruit” as a bare claim. If you’re aware of any evidence that a carb heavy (where carb heavy for me means 40-50% of calories) diet is bad when those carbs come from whole food sources I’d like to see it. Anecdotally, I can say I get a lot more fruit, milk sugars, and starchy tubers than I do cruciferous or leafy veggies, and I can’t find anything lacking in either my blood panels or nutritional analysis of my diet.
From this post I got the idea of doing the same, and I created a menu of easy to prepare food that I can eat every day, and that meets all the FDA requirements (except for potassium; I don’t think it’s possible to get that much from natural sources) and that still lets me lose weight. So far it seems to be working; eating like that most days, I am (slowly) losing weight, and I feel fine.
What vegetables should you eat?
Dark green ones seem to have more nutritional content in general, but yellow, orange, & red vegetables are typically good sources of Vitamin A & some other pigment-like compounds that might not be in large amounts in the green ones.