Hacker News Reader

Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat tangential. I often see people treating different diet restrictions that make you healthier as if they were competitors. Low carb/high fat, versus low calories, versus intermittent fasting. They imagine the different orientations as startups in a winner-takes-all market and pump their preferred one against the others.

I think a better way to frame a healthy diet is that you should aim to follow all three and realize that they (obviously) help each other work. These are collaborative orientations, not competitive.

You can control i) what you eat (low carb/high fat), ii) when you eat (intermittent fasting), and iii) how much you eat (low calories).

You should be following at least one of them at all times, two of them often, all three of them sometimes.

View on HN

I agree, there's different strategies for different scenarios. However your 3 scenarios don't take into account highly active people who are in shape. When losing fat, I ate less carbs, and did intermittent fasting. But once I had built muscle and kept exercising I need those carbs as short-term energy.

Carbs are fuel, if you're not exercising you don't need much fuel, and can probably run on your fat reserves. I'm on a high carb, high protein, low fat diet now, which wouldn't be viable if I stop exercising.

Another thing to consider is that everyone are different. Some respond well on low-carb even when building muscle, while it never work for others.

I am not advocating the author nor the diet but there was a book on blood types diet that proposes certain foods are better or worse based on our blood types.

As with methods for sharpening knives, the best diet is the one you actually do

Totally agree. Each diet may affect different pathways; we probably want to engage in all of them to a degree.

Recently I have been pondering how we should eat if higher protein increases all-cause mortality and higher carb diets increase all-cause mortality, so I've come up with my seasonality hypothesis: basically we would experience periods of lower carb or lower protein diets historically, which would engage each of these various beneficial pathways we have.

For instance, and this is my hypothesis: we wouldn't eat wooly mammoth for breakfast lunch and dinner every day, we would eat nothing but it for three days, once a month. Dense carbs would come sporadically ("yay, we found a bee hive" twice a year) and fruits (carbs) would blossom in either only spring or fall.

While you are possibly correct that those may be somewhat realistic historic diets, why do you think they would be favorable to a longer, healthier life?

Evolution doesn't generally optimize for longevity, it only optimizes for reproduction. The lifespan of most animals in the wild is much shorter than what can be achieved with a carefully controlled diet.

Humans have a long childhood and even the availability of the grandparents can increase the chances of survival of the child. So we adapted to live longer.

Is there any proof that more primitive humans (ones who ate a more natural diet, I mean) lived longer or had other benefits (e.g. seem younger at older ages)?

Reminds me of cephalopods and their outright suicidal reproduction in contrast. It involved a specific gland and when removed they would starve themselves to death anyway.

Granted it is a very different niche in the ecosystem but it hints that it is a matter of self-perpetuation where longer lifespan in this case is a side effect.

Fat. Why not consider the third macronutrient?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com