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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

eating "hamburgers" where the buns are made from two deep fried chicken breasts

You're referring to KFC's Double Down I assume, but if you look at it's nutrition facts (1) it's not as bad as you think, especially for a Paleo/Atkins based diet. And it's delicious.

1 - http://fast-food-nutrition.findthebest.com/l/1377/KFC-Origin...

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It is very nutrient poor and it is very calorically dense, almost as dense as bread.

  | food (100g prepared) | cals |
  |----------------------+------|
  | KFC double down      |  224 |
  | whole wheat bread    |  259 |
  | brown rice           |  110 |
  | corn                 |   86 |
  | carrots              |   41 |
  | cantaloupe           |   34 |

But I guess if you love saturated fat and get your nutrition advice from bloggers and journalists it's awesome!

You're eating it for the protein (52g) and the taste. Not fair to compare a chicken breast to carrots in terms of nutrients. And the saturated fat isn't a big deal, that's the fuel your body uses when you're on the keto-diet, as I learned from my own switch to a keto-diet 4 years ago.

How about the trans fats?

edit: just realized there's supposedly no trans fats in KFC food. This is surprising and interesting. (apparently trans-fat free since 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KFC)

N-6 fatty acid over consumption is still a huge problem, trans or not. Anything cooked in vegetable oils is bad for you. I believe the rise in vegetable oil (soy, corn, sunflower, canola, peanut) consumption is a key factor in the obesity epidemic. It has the effect of lowering metabolism and increasing inflammation.

Yes, there's lots of recent research showing the importance of managing n3/n6 ratios, typical western diets being up to 15:1 6/3 whereas ideal would be purpoted to be more closer to 1:1

The ratio is not nearly as important as keeping PUFA intake as low as possible. Fish oil is just as bad an idea as canola oil. There is a pretty clear body of literature linking PUFA of both kinds to cancer.

Which means eat real food not supplement to manage ratios?

Many "real foods" are rich sources of PUFAs.

Plus it depends what exercise you're doing. If you're doing heavy weight training (5/3/1, Starting Strength etc) then 52g of protein in one meal isn't that much.

Unfortunately macro ratios only don't matter a whole lot in isolation, there are studies with any imaginable result out there for macro ratios so it's easy to pick-and-choose to represent any world view which makes the signal/noise ratio shit.

The easiest take-away is to start with avoiding heavily processed food, regardless of the macro ratios.

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