Debunking food, fat, and fitness myths

[rachelmanija]

I would like your best recs for in-depth articles, studies, or books on the most cutting-edge current knowledge about nutrition, body weight, and health.

I am NOT interested in basic articles about very well-known ideas like fat will kill you, carbs will kill you, meat will kill you, anything your grandma wouldn't recognize as food such as everything but cabbage and turnips will kill you, etc.

I am also NOT interested in articles with a primarily political bent (i.e., "pushing diets on women is based on sexism/capitalism not science;") I agree with that, but I'm looking for stuff where the meat is science and the politics is the side dish rather than the reverse.

I'm looking for more in-depth, up-to-date information on topics including but not limited to...

- 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?

- What is the actual science on grains (and no, I don't mean Wheat Belly)?

- What is the best and most cutting-edge knowledge on gaining strength?

- What is the actual science on the causes of Type 2 diabetes, why its prevalence has risen so much, and its association with obesity?

- What is the actual knowledge of the diet and health of "cavemen?"

- 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.)

- What is the deal with "calorie reduction makes you healthier and live longer" vs. "dieting is bad for you?"

I'm already familiar with Michael Pollan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark's Daily Apple, Diet Cults, Body of Truth, and The Starvation Experiment. And lots more but those are the things I get recced a lot already.

Comments

[autopope]

I'd like to say that I generally agree with your summary, with one addition: it's not merely about human evolutionary adaptation to diet, but the human microbiome—our gut population do a lot of pre-digestion.

In particular I note the use of antibiotics in animal feedstocks going back to the 1940s because they make animals put on weight, and that the obesity epidemic in humans post-dates the introduction of antibiotics (and spread around the world to some extent regardless of variations in local diet). I'd love to learn of a cross-cultural study of obesity rates against antibiotic prescribing in the under-5s: I suspect there may be a connection. And this is before we get into the existence of things like SMAM-1, Ad-36 and other obesity-inducing viruses.

Upshot: it's really complicated and we aren't close to understanding the relationship between food inputs and metabolism in anything but the crudest way—by implication the immune system, inflammatory response, our commensal gut bacteria, and possibly zoonotic infections are all involved to some (maybe little, maybe a lot) extent, and focusing purely on diet is to risk missing the point.

[telophase]

If there's not one yet, I expect there will be one (or more) in upcoming years, as I just dropped "obesity antibiotics" into the search at the library where I work and it's popped out a lot of articles and small-sale studies about the correlation of early childhood antibiotic use and obesity, starting in about 2012, and getting more frequent in 2015-2018.