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What's a bit of good advice that's really bad advice? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by solidgrue@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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You know, like "always split on 18," or "having kids is the most rewarding thing you can do in life."

What's that one bit of advice you got from a trusted friend that you know deep, deep down would just ruin your thing?

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[-] Akareth@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

The major problem with most studies in the field of nutrition is that most of them are correlation studies, which are useful in creating hypotheses but are not sufficient in determining causation.

[-] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

I won't argue that as a layman, but I feel that there are nutritional meta-studies, plus evidence from inter-disciplines (such as physiology of the colon, how the body processes food at the micro & molecular level, and what H.s.s's typical diet was across many centuries) to suggest that what I posited above is true.

AFAIK the body of nutritionists and the national academies have to take all of this in to account (including the limitations of correlational studies) when making hypotheses about best diet, making for a reasonably clear picture that the human body (outside of people like the Inuit I guess) typically doesn't handle excess meat well, and that we likely evolved as omnivores who didn't eat processed foods, and who mainly ate vegetables & some fruit with opportunistic protein supplementing such.

If this is indeed what our bodies evolved to handle, it shouldn't really be a surprise that we do best health-wise maintaining that approach. Not to mention, there are plenty of studies to suggest the various ways we can get in to health problems straying from that baseline.

[-] Akareth@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Nutritional meta-studies are based on individual studies. If the foundation is composed of correlation studies, such a meta-study would still not be able to show causation.

I was disappointed in the science of nutrition compared to other disciplines, which is why I looked to adjacent fields of study, like anatomy, evolution, biology, psychology, anthropology, archeology, and the history of the study of nutrition itself.

Modern humans have been around for ~300,000 years, and humans have been around for ~2 million years. Looking at our diets across the last several centuries isn't enough to get a clear understanding as we haven't significantly changed anatomically for hundreds of thousands of years. Humans have become apex predators not from scavenging for vegetables and fruits.

Humans have thrived through multiple ice ages where vegetables and fruit were scarce as hunters of megafauna. Our anatomy and unique adaptations suggest that there were strong evolutionary pressures that shaped us into the apex predators we are, despite not having large claws, horns, teeth, jaws, etc. that are typical of other apex predators.

Humans handle fatty meat very well. The growing popularity of the carnivore diet is a testament to this, with several practicing medical doctors starting to speak out in support of it. On the other hand, various populations handle different vegetation with mixed results. For example, a large minority of many populations still can't handle bread, of all things, very well.

You should double-check those studies, as they are likely to be correlation studies that do not prove causation and are riddled with confounding factors.

[-] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

Humans have become apex predators not from scavenging for vegetables and fruits.

What's your basis of conceiving of humans as apex predators? I haven't heard them described that way before, moreso that we're fantastic opportunists who can indeed hunt successfully when such is called for. But historically, based on the findings, I don't know of any evidence that suggests we were universally 'apex predators' for any significant amount of time.

Humans handle fatty meat very well. The growing popularity of the carnivore diet is a testament to this, with several practicing medical doctors starting to speak out in support of it. On the other hand, various populations handle different vegetation with mixed results. For example, a large minority of many populations still can’t handle bread, of all things, very well.

This is starting to sound pretty disingenuous or poorly-informed based on my impressions of the science.

Feel free to have the last reply, and if there's something to learn from it, I'll try.

[-] Akareth@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

What's your basis of conceiving of humans as apex predators?

Going off memory:

Archeology tells us that human sites were littered with the bones of large and medium-sized animals
Archeology also suggests that our diets were very meat-heavy from looking at stable isotopes in the bones of ancient humans
Biology tells us that the sounds of human voices instill more fear in animals than even the sounds of lions
Biology tells us that we once had the ability to break down fiber, but we have lost that ability after switching to an animal-heavy diet for more than 2-million years
Anatomy tells us that we have many adaptations to hunt and consume meat, such as: our skeletal structure allows for precise long-distance throwing of heavy objects (such as rocks and spears), high stomach acidity (useful for eating old meat from megafauna that weren't consumed immediately), forward-looking vision (characteristic of predators), the ability to sweat (that allows us to keep cool during persistence hunting), teeth with thin enamel that aren't well-suited to grinding down vegetation, and an intestine-to-height ratio in line with predators

This is starting to sound pretty disingenuous or poorly-informed based on my impressions of the science.

I'm not sure what science you're referring to, but from what I've learned, nutrition science is very much not a mature field of study, especially compared to adjacent disciplines. If you immediately discount the carnivore diet, I would ask you to ask yourself why (for example, is it because "everyone just knows that fruit, vegetables, and grains are healthy for you"?), and approach the question of what humanity's species-appropriate diet is from first principles.

this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024

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