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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

You know why? Because the effects are not that big. It's hard to detect small effects.

Here's what I do: I eat whenever I feel like it, whatever I feel like, as much as I feel like. But when I'm full, I stop.

For breakfast this can be:

    - yogurt with banana and jam and sugar
    - slices of bread with cheese and tomato and olive oil heated in the oven
    - a bar of chocolate
    - bread with boiled egg and mayonnaise
    - bread with butter and cheese/jam/other
    - nothing
    - pizza left over from the previous night (home cooked of course ;)
    - any other left overs
    - fruit
    - when I'm hungry, a bowl of pasta

According to every eating school of thought, at least half of these are very bad. Yet I am perfectly healthy. Not overeating (and undereating) is like 10 times more important than what you eat, as long as you get enough of all the nutrients you need.

Don't obsess over what you eat until there is clear evidence. Eat things you like to eat.

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According to every eating school of thought, at least half of these are very bad. Yet I am perfectly healthy.

What I personally would be worried about is the long-term effects. Unfortunately, these would be very hard to pinpoint as it would be virtually impossible to get enough people to volunteer eating a certain diet, without much fluctuation, for some 30 years or so. And even if such a study would happen, the endless argument would start: "But the diet A contained X, and diet B lacked Y, so obviously we can conclude ..." etc.

Not overeating (and undereating) is like 10 times more important than what you eat, as long as you get enough of all the nutrients you need.

This may or may not be true, and also we could argue about the factor forever. I would say it's way less than 10, especially in the long-term, but I have no way to prove it of course.

Don't obsess over what you eat until there is clear evidence. Eat things you like to eat.

Well, there is the "classic" - "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price. (Available online at http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/price/pricetoc.html) He traveled around the world and watched what happened to primitive societies when they introduced western foods in their diets. I read it briefly, and he made an emphasis on dental health, but literally introduction of white flour, sugar, polished rice and canned food produced a huge drop in dental health.

> Unfortunately, these would be very hard to pinpoint as it would be virtually impossible to get enough people to volunteer eating a certain diet

Perhaps you don't need to force people to eat certain things. You can observe what they eat and how healthy they are. If you have a large enough sample set you may be able to reach some conclusions. The internet and recent developments on it like things like Facebook may help a lot: if people start recording what they eat on a regular basis you may be able to get a huge and diverse sample quite easily.

> I would say it's way less than 10, especially in the long-term, but I have no way to prove it of course.

From what I've seen I disagree. I know people who eat healthy according to conventional wisdom, but they eat too much. As a result they are fat and unhealthy. I also know people who get at least half of their calories from things that are considered unhealthy like sweets, coke and potato chips, but because they don't overeat they look healthy. Now it's true that body weight is not the only aspect of health, but it is a very big one and the only one that you can measure by looking at somebody...

> I read it briefly, and he made an emphasis on dental health, but literally introduction of white flour, sugar, polished rice and canned food produced a huge drop in dental health.

It's an interesting study but this is not surprising, since bacteria love these things too. Fortunately we have toothbrushes.

That said the study is highly biased. The "native" people are always laughing in the photos and the "modernized" people are looking sad.

>That said the study is highly biased. The "native" people are always laughing in the photos and the "modernized" people are looking sad.

But this doesn't explain away the order-of-magnitude differences in dental health Price found everywhere he went between people living on traditional diets (who typically didn't have toothbrushes, either) and those living on processed diets.

Oh I'm sure that eating those things is bad for your teeth if you don't brush them, simply because the bacteria grow on that kind of stuff (actually I already said this). I'm just saying that the studies sound unscientific; he sounds like he's trying to prove a point.

The traditional diets (which varied dramatically, by the way) resulted in consistently good teeth for people who never touched a toothbrush. In fact, their results were much better than those of people on processed diets who had toothbrushes. That's the point.

Right. My point is that a scientific text has the form "we researched this and here are our findings: things that support theory X and things that support (not X)" rather than "this is my point X and here is evidence for X".

Have his findings been independently verified? Especially his claims that the bone structure is better in the individuals on native food, for which he provides almost no evidence.

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