There is a massive amount of conflicting research/information on nutrition out there. Eggs are great for us, eggs are clogging our arteries, eating carbs is good and gives us energy, carbs make us lethargic and fat. As someone who, after years of treating their body like crap, wants to make an effort and eat things that are good for me, it seems impossible because at this point I feel like whatever arbitrary statement about food you take (like, eating 1/2 green apple increases your metabolism but only on Tuesdays and Fridays), you will find some type of research “confirming” it. Why is it so hard to have concrete research/evidence of what is good for our bodies and what isn’t, at least generally? Isn’t it science? How are we supposed to know what to eat??
In: Biology
For your personal life, it really isn’t that complicated. Anything is bad in excess and few things are terrible in moderation. A little bit of awareness of how you eat will go a very long way.
To start with, just mind your calories and macros. Calories are simple, this just the energy you derive from your food. If you consistently eat more calories than you expend, you’ll grow fatter. If you eat fewer than you expend, you’ll lose weight. Tracking calories is an easy way to prevent over-eating.
Your basic nutrition macros are protein, fats and carbohydrates (sugars, starches, dietary fibres). All three of them are actually pretty important for your body so, extreme diets aside, you really shouldn’t label any of them as simply bad. It’s excess that is bad.
Where it gets complicated is processed foods. The things that are important to our bodies tend to taste good. And processed foods take advantage of that by including those things in excess in order to make food delicious.
Carbs for instance are the most common source of energy for your body. A 100 grams of apple contains about 14 grams of carbs. While 100 grams of whole wheat bread contains 41 grams of carbs. It’s a lot easier to overeat on carbs when you eat bread than when you eat an apple. So while one or two slices of bread for breakfast are great. Eating a foot-long sub is overdoing it.
Processed food makes it very easy to eat nutrients that are good for you in amounts that are bad for you. On top of that, the way you digest food also makes a difference.
When you eat ice cream or a chocolate bar, not only is there a lot of fat and sugar in that food. But the fat and sugar is readily available. Sugar itself is very easy to digest, most of it is absorbed straight into the bloodstream through the stomach lining.
That means that when you eat something super sugary like chocolate. You get a huge immediate energy boost as all that sugar is absorbed all at once. Which immediately gets used up by your body and then your energy levels crash again.
When you eat something like green beans, it’s much harder to digest due to fibre in the foo and the more complex makeup of the green beans. It takes your body more work to digest and as a result, the energy and nutrition contained in the food is released gradually. This provides you with more balanced energy levels and a longer-lasting feeling of being sated.
Anyway, wall of text. If you want to eat healthier try this:
* Track your caloric intake just to figure out if you’re not eating too much or too little, an app like FitnessPal can help a lot.
* Track your macros just to figure out if you’re not eating too much fat, sugar etc.
* If you’re willing to give it a try. Start by making your meals out of unprocessed food as much as possible. Fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts etc. When you cook yourself, you have a much better idea of what you’re eating.
* Exercise. Using your body causes your body to use and process its reserves and food intake much more effectively and it’ll make you feel better too.
In terms of ingredients, don’t worry too much about what’s good and bad. Eggs are not a problem in a varied diet but you shouldn’t eat anything to excess.
The main thing you should watch out for is processed foods because they usually overload on sugars, fats and other things to make the food more appealing to you.
The effects of nutrition are hard to study for a lot of reasons. One big one is that the effects of a diet aren’t always obvious in the short term. You might be eating something now that’s bad for you, but if it takes 30 years of eating for problems to manifest you’re not gonna know for a while. That’s why it took people so long to agree that smoking was bad: One cigarette won’t hurt you much, but doing it for years will.
You cannot easily study the longer term effects of a particular diet on humans. You cannot control what people eat for years on end, and you cannot trust that they accurately report on what they’ve eaten for the last several years.
Also, human body by itself is: 1. insanely complex and complicated 2. varied from person to person, dependent on climate the person lives in, varied between sexes, between races, genetics and basically due to anything that affects you in any long-term way
And than, science is all about control experiments where you change a single variable at a time. That just can’t happen with human nutrition.
Hard science, e.g. physics, chemistry, etc.. build rigorously on basic, well established, mechanisms of nature. In general, with hard science, when you claim something, you find a correlation, come up with a theory of a mechanism on how you think that correlation comes about and then come up with a way of testing the mechanism by controlling all other factors and seeing if your mechanism really works the way you thought it did.
Bio-chemistry would be the ‘rigorous’ hard science that should be behind nutrition and medicine. Unfortunately there is a huge gap between where bio-chemistry ends and where nutrition start. In some cases, proper bio-chemical mechanisms can be shown. More often though, nutrition come up with claims purely based on correlations from observational studies, where the underlying bio-chemistry is not understood at all.
Due to factors like these, the research studies coming out in nutrition have a huge signal-to-noise ratio problem to the point where you can pretty much find them to support any personal pet theory, well accepted by the field or not.
Try to look up science behind “microbiota”. It’s a booming part of science and I think this will give you a great foundation for deciding what do validate when looking up nutrition itself.
Short explanation, your body consists of 60%~ bacteria. This bacteria is actually the greatest benefactor of what you eat. Feeding the bacteria will in turn feed you with the right chemicals to be helathy.
This is how I come to ground myself in every piece of nutrition information, and with it I can back every claim with science.
Good luck!
You are making a rather simple question more difficult, in a sense. The average human body is relatively tolerant and a modern human diet is generally more than able to provide basic nutrients necessary for good health. Your body will take in what is necessary and dispense with the rest.
You cannot eat your way to health. Moderate regular physical exercise, healthy social activity, engagement of mental faculties, a moderate balanced diet is really what will deliver pretty good results. Anything else runs the danger of being “food faddism” – unproven or barely correlative results used to promote books, lifestyle and other questionable ideas (perhaps in good faith, perhaps for profit).
It is very unethical to test out certain ideas. For example, forcing some group of people to take a diet that might be harmful just to gather enough data for “research”. Locking a group of people for long periods of time and controlling every part of their lives and environment for the sake of gathering data is unethical.
The human body is the result of billions of years of evolution. Many experiments can show correlation but not necessarily causation because of the complexity and time for long term outcomes to manifest.
Food is only one part of health. The physical environment, social environment, psychology, physical activity, put different stresses on the body. These are impossible to control (see above).
The world with regards to humans lives doesn’t operate on certainty, there is chance and risk. If you are asking a question “what can I eat to guarantee 100% that I will always be healthy and live to 120 years” or something similar, then you’re not recognizing the complexity of the world we live on. Anyone that tries to sell you “guarantees” in life is trying to scam you.
I don’t think that’s specific to nutrition. Understanding the relevance of each study is not easy. If you want to confirm your own bias then it’s easy to find that one study that says it and run with it (looking at you antivaxxers), even if the results were never reproduced. In the case of nutrition, it’s also more interesting for researchers to study a group for 10 years than it is to put them in the lab and answer questions only once (contrary to smth like game theory). So the research takes time and relies upon people sticking to it.
The industries lobby because money, and the human body is so fucking weird and confusing.
Part of the problem is money corrupts everything, part of why we have the modern American diet and the infamous “food pyramid” was because of lobbying.
The other part is the human body, such a complicated little thing, you can treat people the exact same and something like a food allergy could ruin the research study. Maybe a genetic deficiency that was passed down so the body can’t break up this specific component when you eat these foods. Your body seems to act weird when you don’t have enough of this nutrient or vitamin.
I had a coworker find out his body was being dumb from a lack of caffeine, he uses that to justify his daily monster, but that’s beside the point.
I think the main reason has been propaganda by the food industry. Years and years of ads telling bullshit about fats and you end up with a country that thinks eating sugar with milk is a healthy thing to eat when you just woke up.
Besides that there has been very big misconceptions about cholesterol in the medical community. Many medical professionals still believe cholesterol cause veins to cloth up. This is not true. Cholesterol is actually how your body is trying to fix it. The real problem is just people getting fat.
Try to cut down on everything sweet and try to eat lesser portions. In the end is just calories burned – calories ingested. If you burn more than you eat, you lose weight.
Sweet food will make you feel more hungry though. That’s why you should avoid them.
Ethics – Researchers can’t lock people up and force them to eat certain foods. So researchers have to rely on willful compliance, which is difficult for most people.
Money – Human research is expensive.
Conflicts of interest – Food is a big business, and businesses do not like threats to their profits. So they are more than happy to finance research of questionable quality in the name of profits.
Time Scale – Some issues relating to diet take years to manifest. And on such a long time scale, there are many other potential contributing factors which must be rule out.
Difficulty – Science is hard and new tools & techniques emerge which help researchers do and explore more than they ever could. This drives a lot of the findings that “turns the field on its head.” Communicating scientific findings to layman is also very difficult.
Trial and error. New research means new answers. Look at the dates of the stuff you’re reading. STAY OFF YOUTUBE.
It’s about what works for your body on your budget. My Net Diary is an app where you can track your food. It’s free and it’s basic. Just try to make better choices when you can. Stay within your calories with the food you choose. Be honest with your portion size. It’s not all about loosing weight. It’s about running your body with the best fuel you can.
FYI: a baked potato with butter has ever nutrient you need. That doesn’t mean you should only eat potatoes and butter.
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