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

[starlady]

This article is from last year and you may have already seen it, but this article by Mark Bittman and David Katz is a pretty good summary of the current state of knowledge about what we actually know about nutrition, to the best of my knowledge: The Last Conversation You'll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right.

[havocthecat]

One of my best friends is getting her PhD in nursing. Let me see if she has any information on this from her classes or from her work experience (she is presently in a hospital setting, but also adores research) and then I can hopefully get back to you.

[naye]

The University of Cambridge Epidemiology Unit is full of people trying to answer a lot of these questions, but because they're scientists they don't give quick cut-and-dry answers about anything. Their research papers should all be available open access, and they have a Researcher Voices section where they have podcasts, blog posts etc aimed at a general audience.

Disclaimer: I worked there as an admin for years, which is the only reason I know this page exists. I am not a scientist and can't actually parse research papers.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks, that would be awesome! I have enough of a medical background to read more academic stuff.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks, that sounds great!

[rachelmanija]

Thanks!

[pameladean]

This is an account of an experiment run on consenting conscientious objectors after World War II, with the purpose of finding out what was the best way to help the millions of people who had been deprived of adequate food during the war. The article compares the deprivation that the subjects underwent to that mandated by weight-loss diets. If I hadn't eschewed dieting forever already, this would certainly have made me do so.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/minnesota-starvation-experiment

P.

[sciatrix]

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.

[sciatrix]

Oh, and before I forget--let me just point out that stress, especially chronic stress, is a huge factor in weight gain, to the point that one of the existing models for obesity in rats is stress-induced hyperphagia. I cannot overestimate how much energy balance and stress are hooked together (as are things like reproductive investment and social context). I would be very interested in looking at overall stress levels in the context of modern weight gain, personally.

In the meantime, I'm looking at the interactions between cortisol and leptin in the context of social behavior, and I'm really excited to see that data once I can successfully analyze it.

[rachelmanija]

Thank you very much! I haven't read either of those.

I'd love to hear anything more you come back with!

Incidentally, my context for this is being incessantly bombarded with demands to adopt some diet. Most recent was two successive doctors telling me to become a vegan, and telling me to go ultra-low-carb to the point of not eating apples or oranges, and only eating small amounts of berries spaced out throughout the day.

I'm not overweight IMO or according to the BMI, but after 1) losing a third of my bodyweight due to illness, then regaining it, 2) being over 40, 3) menopause, 4) five years of extreme, unrelenting stress, I do have high blood pressure and a fair amount of abdominal fat of the sort you can grab in handfuls. I also exercise a lot and eat a diet of the sort people like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman and other whole-food enthusiasts would approve of, and I'm losing my mind with all the demands to give up gluten, egg yolks, meat, fruit, dairy, nightshades, foods cooked in microwaves, etc.

[telophase]

This is a few years old, but IIRC, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain was a good look at what we know about exercise ca. 2008 (1st edition) and 2013 (2nd edition).

[rachelmanija]

Thanks! I've been meaning to read that, so thanks for reminding me.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks!

[telophase]

There's also a BBC documentary titled Why are Thin People Not Fat? that replicates an experiment in which researchers took a group of "naturally" thin people and had them over-eat to see how fast and how much weight they'd gain, and how easy or hard it was for them.

They also looked at a couple of other questions, such as how fast the stomach empties after eating when eating a meal with a lot of water in it (like a thick soup) or the same meal with the water separate. I'll let you discover exactly how they did that experiment. :)

The doc itself is found illegally uploaded on various sites--the YouTube version I watched is no longer available, but Dr Google tells me that it's up on Vimeo at the moment as well as a few shadier-looking sites.

[sciatrix]

....yeah, pretty much no diets are evidence-based, and the paleo people in particular are, er. Well. Er.

Look, I'm not an anthropologist, but I am an evolutionary biologist, and I can tell you that for one thing we know that humans have adapted, including adaptations geared towards digestion, since the advent of agriculture: lactose tolerance is particularly well known, but we also have evolutionary evidence of adaptation to high-starch/grain diets (and not just in us--in dogs, too!). See here this interesting piece about human evolution as a dialogue between the genetics of any given human population and the culture of that human population.

Now consider variation in the makeups of human cuisines across various cultures and socioeconomic strata: everything from almost purely carnivorous to purely vegan, incorporating meat, eggs, insects, fruit, plant pith, sap, leaves, milk, flowers, seeds, grains, tubers, weird shit like honey--if it is digestible, some human culture somewhere has worked out when and how to effectively eat it. The paleo people always have some extremely specific idea of what Early Man ate and figure that humans have just been in stasis this whole time, I guess, without adapting to their circumstances. But adapting to circumstances is what humans do.

Re: diets for weight loss, you might find this paper on the long-term efficacy of diets to be interesting; it should be freely available. The short answer is that in the long term, diets don't work, and if anything the stress can increase your set point of weight. Generally, if you can't get access to a peer reviewed article you want on your own, let me know and I'll host a downloadable version.

[larryhammer]

Was coming here to rec that one in particular.

ObOffTopicDigression

[larryhammer]

if it is digestible, some human culture somewhere has worked out when and how to effectively eat it

My go-to example for this is hákarl: some Icelander was desperate enough to figure out that if you ferment a dead Greenland shark (whose flesh has neurotoxins) by burying it in sand for several weeks then cure it by hanging for several months, it becomes technically edible. Nauseating to people who haven't developed a taste for it, but it will no longer kill you.

(The only thing I've tried that tasted worse than hákarl was a "broccoli casserole" flavored soda.)

[shati]

Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory by Kristen Gremillion was published in 2011, so YMMV on cutting edge, but it's one of the newer books I could find on the subject. (Paleofantasy is the other, but I haven't read it yet.) It's mostly focused on how flexible human diets and human behavior around food have been, but there's some discussion of nutrition, and a lot of examples of what's known about pre-Neolithic food in particular areas and how it's known.

[jenett]

She's not currently updating, but the Fat Nutritionist has been a great source for breaking down some of the research and what people misread in the research - she's got an articles and resources section on her site as well as the stuff in her blog posts.

[longstrider]

I've enjoyed Healthcare Triage on Youtube hosted by Dr. Aaron Carroll. He takes short looks at health science news that has made headlines and then looks at what the research actually says. Lots of talk about the different ways that statistics don't mean what people think they mean and which ones are likely to be the most relevant. Also how different kinds of research articles can tell us different kids of things. (experiments in animals vs people, review articles, clinical trials etc etc) He also has a book called 'The Bad Food Bible'. While I haven't read it, I generally trust that he's going to tell you exactly why he's said X is likely ok/good for you and link to the research to back it up.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks! That sounds fascinating.

[shopfront]

I quite like The Food Medic, who's a junior doctor in the UK with a specific interest in nutrition. It sounds like you're pretty well informed on the basics already, so she might not deep-dive in the way you're currently looking for though. But she's across a lot of channels (I mostly just use her instagram and podcasts) and so a convenient sort of general ongoing background content choice for me and I often look to see if she's written or spoken on a subject if I hear some new health thing that I want to fact check. I find her a good mix of being super enthusiastic and interested in new research and info, while also really good at keeping things in perspective and very upfront about where there's gaps in current knowledge. Her guests are largely (though not solely) also medical professionals and researchers, so she can sometimes be a good bouncing spot for useful citations or people who do specialise in the actual cutting edge things. Overall I'd say she's very in keeping with The Last Conversation article linked above as being sensible and evidence based and focused on the basics.

Incidentally, she's eating mostly vegan lately - but she's also the first person to interrupt anyone specifically preaching any given diet including veganism and is very open that it's a super personal choice, and that there's loads of diet choices that may be better for some people/there's pros and cons to any diet. So if you're looking for more info in that direction (either for or against) to arm yourself against pushy doctors, she might be helpful there.

[megpie71]

One nobody's mentioned yet is The Angry Chef, who works on debunking a lot of the pseudoscience in food fads.

[zeborah]

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.

And if it does immediately kill them, then the person next to them has said "Huh, whoops - but what if we leech/ferment/bake it first?"

[recessional]

The closest one to having any "evidence based" is the whole "Mediterranean diet" one which, as far as I can tell, you (Rachel) more or less already follow.

http://thischangedmypractice.com/weight-loss-in-healthy-people/ this is the post (the basic site is maintained by UBC med school) that made my mom hush in her previously slightly-annoying-standard-for-mainstream fixation on what I ate, and it has a crapload of sources at the bottom.

I mean it seems very very clear to me that what's happening is you're running into people who don't realize that this shit is not "do this and you Will Be Healthy", it's "do this and the shit that we know gets caused by not doing this won't happen, or won't happen as much, but actually there's so much other shit that could happen that who knows whether you'll actually be healthy or not, it's just you won't be for sure LESS healthy?"

It's like, if you're miserable-angry AND you haven't eaten or slept well lately, the first good step is to eat and maybe get some solid sleep, because those things are enough in and of themselves to cause Misery and Anger, and that way you can eliminate them as potential causes.

BUT you might still be miserable and angry later, because they're not the ONLY things that can cause them. So.

tl;dr as far as I can tell you are in fact doing everything "right" and you're just getting shitty luck, and also shitty luck in running into doctors who find this offends their just-world fallacy comfort zone.