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

[recessional]

Damn, I don't have my sources to hand, but: it's also very difficult to project definitive info re: agriculture/etc? because about the time we do a lot of agriculture we also start doing a lot of WAR, and a lot of high income inequality, and also the infant mortality thing is more significant than one might think (ie: actually we may just be getting an increased survival of "suboptimal" specimens to actual adulthood, whereas the rigours of babyhood/very young childhood are often more rigorous in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as well as there being fewer to-term pregnancies overall).

We also honestly have very poor total numbers of survivals of bones for pre-agriculture societies because we have significantly fewer mass gravesites that are protected from animal scavengers/etc, plus the usual problems with getting bone survivals at all, so we can't be sure how much of our data is because we have a Weird Sample. (This doesn't get talked about a LOT, but speaking as someone who does the history shit all the time it is a significant issue and it's ALWAYS a significant issue: we can only judge by survivals and sometimes our survivals might be subject to weird selection pressures we're not aware of but are not necessarily representative to our work).

This is also germane:

Gurven and Kaplan 8, in a review of hunter‐gatherer and subsistence farmer mortality data across 12 populations, report that ~60% of newborns in these populations survive to age 15 and ~40% to age 45. Those who survive to age 45 can expect to live another ~20 years 8.

If you make it to 45, you're likely to make it to 65 - but you probably WON'T make it to 45. So, you know.


Basically we know that hunter gatherers move a hell of a lot more than we do! And that this appears to be better for their health when everything else is equal.

[rydra_wong]

These are fair and valid points.

Basically we know that hunter gatherers move a hell of a lot more than we do!

Yup, the last paper I linked has data on that re: the group they were studying, among many other fascinating things.