I work on energy balance, metabolism, and leptin, albeit at a jaunty angle from people studying human body weight. Let me see what I can tease out for you. In the meantime, books you might find interesting that you haven't listed are Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy and Traci Mann's Secrets From the Eating Lab. Mann's book in particular links to one of the most startling findings I've run into in years, which is that the perception of how good a food will taste/how "healthy" it is actually influences how much ghrelin is secreted in response (ghrelin being a hormone associated with being full-not-hungry, much like my leptin).
- What is the actual knowledge of the diet and health of "cavemen?" If humans can fit it in their mouth and it won't immediately kill them, historically humans have tended to give eating it their best shot.
- Do we actually know anything about nutrition, given the every-five-year swings between "eggs are cardioprotective/eggs are a heart attack on a plate," "fat is the Devil/carbs are the Devil," etc? If so, what is it and how do we know it? In my personal estimation, having gone digging through a bunch of this literature? We know approximately how much you probably need to keep someone alive, and we know how dietary deficiencies like rickets work. We have a rough idea of the types of diets associated with longevity, but we don't have a good idea of how transferrable those diets are to other people, and we don't really understand well how adiposity (fatness) and diet fit together, nor do we have a great understanding of how these things interact with other things (like STRESS). We know that if you feed mice and rats very high-fat diets, they will become obese, and we know that it's very hard to get people to sustainably change weights outside of about 20lbs away from their "set point". We do not understand how "set points" get set or why they change over time.
- What is the actual science on being fat, thin, and in-between in terms of health? For instance, is it better to be fat and active than "normal weight" and sedentary? (I know the answer but I'm looking for something that goes into this in-depth.)
It's better to be active. If you want it, I'll go digging for the primary literature, but the Mann book also talks a lot more about this in a lot of detail, and I would probably start by looking into her citations.
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Date: 2019-04-24 09:20 pm (UTC)- What is the actual knowledge of the diet and health of "cavemen?"
If humans can fit it in their mouth and it won't immediately kill them, historically humans have tended to give eating it their best shot.
- Do we actually know anything about nutrition, given the every-five-year swings between "eggs are cardioprotective/eggs are a heart attack on a plate," "fat is the Devil/carbs are the Devil," etc? If so, what is it and how do we know it?
In my personal estimation, having gone digging through a bunch of this literature? We know approximately how much you probably need to keep someone alive, and we know how dietary deficiencies like rickets work. We have a rough idea of the types of diets associated with longevity, but we don't have a good idea of how transferrable those diets are to other people, and we don't really understand well how adiposity (fatness) and diet fit together, nor do we have a great understanding of how these things interact with other things (like STRESS). We know that if you feed mice and rats very high-fat diets, they will become obese, and we know that it's very hard to get people to sustainably change weights outside of about 20lbs away from their "set point". We do not understand how "set points" get set or why they change over time.
- What is the actual science on being fat, thin, and in-between in terms of health? For instance, is it better to be fat and active than "normal weight" and sedentary? (I know the answer but I'm looking for something that goes into this in-depth.)
It's better to be active. If you want it, I'll go digging for the primary literature, but the Mann book also talks a lot more about this in a lot of detail, and I would probably start by looking into her citations.