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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

One of the best examples of a food industry (grains) being able to influence eating habits to their benefit.

Anyway, the phrase "healhty" in relation to food is a bit of a trigger phrase to me nowadays, healthy how? It's completely lacking in nuance. Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose. Granola is healthy, unless you eat it three times a day and little else. You get the idea. The problem there is "x is healthy" makes people overconsume it and ignore anything that isn't marked "healthy".

"healthy" eating takes work, study, and moderation.

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At the same time, there is also a faction that appears to argue against overly studying or obsessing about nutrition science, saying that if you really just prioritize variety, moderation, and made-at-home, then you're already 90% of the way there.

I wonder what the value is of that advice, it's so incredibly vague. What's "varied"? What's "moderated"? Feels a bit like an excuse to stay ignorant.

I mean, I'm obviously giving the one line summary that usually leads into a significantly more detailed treatise, eg: https://openbooks.library.unt.edu/nutritionforconsumers/chap...

I think point is less to stay ignorant and more to focus on macro-level changes (water > soda/beer, vary your starches, get sugar from fruit, avoid "filling up" on purely protein) rather than obsessing over this or that micronutrient and trying to boil it all down into a perfect formulation that you consume in a sludgy pancake-batter-tasting "shake" twice a day.

In a situation where one does not know a lot it also mitigates the risk that the thing you ate a lot of turns out to be really unhealthy.

Ben Goldacre used to have a regular column against misleading health fads, amongst other things, called Bad Science.

He was a practicing GP and whenever asked to give some advice himself he said that people and lifestyles were too varied to give any advice more specific than "Eat mostly fresh fruit and vegetables, cut down on cigarettes and alcohol, and do some exercise".

> Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose.

Speaking of things from back in the day, an episode of GI Joe featured this idea (only it was dumping truckloads of apples onto a giant gelatinous blob to kill it).

Granola was never healthy even in moderation. It's just pure sugar.

Healthy is something the shopping mall checkout register can quantify?

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