Poll: Is quantity or quality of calories more important
Obviously eating the correct amount of healthy food is optimal and obviously there are a lot of "it depends" answers here. But imagine the following very oversimplified thought experiment.
Alice can control the kind of food that is eaten by a million experimental subjects. For the sake of argument assume she has some magic insights into nutrition so we don't have to debate vegetarianism vs low carb vs keto vs whatever else. Alice's subjects all eat very healthy food but are normally distributed in how much they eat. Sampled globally including from places like the US where people tend to eat too many calories and places like Sudan where people might be malnourished from not being able to get enough calories per day.
Bob runs a competing experiment on another group of a million people. All Bob can do is control quantity. Assume each person in the group knows their goal target weight and the overweight ones will eat a calorie deficient diet and vice versa. What people eat will be normally distributed from global habits. Some people will eat a mcdonalds burger and coke every day, others will be eating broccoli and chicken, etc etc.
After 20 years, will Alice or Bob have *fewer* significant health problems in their group (cancer, heart disease, anything that requires hospitalization or has significant effect on quality of life)?
No one should take the results of this to be meaningful without consulting a professional. Obviously it's also a difficult study to conduct, so just assume a simplified world where we can correctly control for confounding factors. From people I've asked seem to have "strong opinions strongly held" about so figured it would be interesting to see how strongly it skews one way or the other and I've seen HN debate related topics before so I guess many here will have a strong opinion.