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Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting that him, and other rich men like Kurzweil are choosing plant-base diets instead of the Taubes, paleo crowd-pushed meat and fat diets.

They can't be both right.

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Why can't they both be right?

We're omnivores. I would be surprised if there weren't multiple diets that led to health.

The two are wildly opposing, blaming each other for all the modern life diseases.

It's not impossible to be both right, given a sufficiently diverse human genotype pool, but rather hard to imagine really.

Then look to the things are a similar in both diets. Both avoid sugar and processed foods. Both push to one extreme either high fat/low card or high carb/low fat levels. Not to mention things like lowering your stress levels.

They could both be right that their diets are healthy. They could not both be right that the other side's diet is poison.

The list of things they eat could be right, but the arguments behind them wrong.

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....

That's one camp, sure. Taubes strongly refutes it.

My bet is that neither is right...

Eat when you're hungry. Stop when you're full. Laugh often. Play (physically) more than occasionally. Drink and be merry. Stop worrying. You'll live forever.

And even if you only live a short while, it's better than living a boring life for a slightly longer while.

Sadly it is not so simple for an increasingly large number of people suffering from diabetes, obesity, arterial and heart diseases.

They are looking for solutions to get healthy so they can enjoy life in the ways you are presenting.

So far the 2 main camps claiming to have the solution to everything are pushing 2 completely opposed strategies, none of them seemingly more proven than the other...

Sufficient exercise can reverse or minimize many of those diseases you mention.

Except that the more you exercise, the more your body hungers for more calories. The homeostasis theory of the body makes far more sense than the current thermodynamic view of eating; that change in weight is equal to what you eat minus what you burn.

If you exercise more, you burn more of course. Supposing that your body has no idea how much energy its consuming, and thus the 'what you eat' part of the equation is independent of the 'what you burn' is simply ridiculous.

Those diseases, the diseases of western civilization wont go away by simply exercising more. Exercise more, you eat more, you don't lose your fat weight, you won't reverse those diseases.

Except that carefully controlled studies have failed to support your claim that sufficient (whatever that is) exercise can reverse or minimize most of those diseases.

Neither of you have provided any evidence to support your assertions. I don't understand how either of you can have positive karma scores.

As the very overweight will attest, "hungry" and "full" are very subjective terms. Eating when they are hungry is what got them into their present state. Laughing won't do much about it, nor will acquiring a drinking problem. Stopping worrying about it leads to the troll-fest of pro-fat discussion boards.

I don't think that the paleo crowd is really pushing a high fat and meat diet like you say. Taubes' views could almost be more easily lumped in with those of Atkins followers than of paleo eaters. Different people have different feelings about it but in general paleo eating is more centrally about eliminating the consumption of processed sugars, excessive sodium, gluten, and lactose. Vegetables and fruits make up a significant portion of the diet and eating leaner game meats and fish is usually encouraged over the more fatty factory farm meats. The idea is basically just that things that have relatively recently become cornerstones of our diet, whether due to technological advances or otherwise, might not be so good for us because we didn't evolve with exposure to anything like them. It comes down to making choices like having an orange instead of a bowl of ice cream, some roasted asparagus instead of a buttery dinner roll, or a nice cut of rabbit instead of a 70% lean hamburger with melted cheese. That seems like a fairly reasonable stance on diet to me, regardless of whether or not you buy the evolutionary rationale.

What if they're both right, but not for the same population? It doesn't sound unreasonable that different people with different metabolisms would benefit from different diets.

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