Try to cook your own food at least half the time and have a balanced intake (just the basics: meat + veg + fruit), if you stick to natural unprocessed foods it's pretty hard to go wrong, avoid sugary treats and highly processed food as much as possible, that's basically all you need to know (sounds pretty obvious because it's common sense).

The fad diets and contradicting advice do not arise out of a failure of your grandmas advice, they arise out of supermarket foods, high sugar, high carbs, ready meals etc. Same with the obesity epidemic, it does not come from lack of will power to not eat like most people think, it comes from the laziness and temptation that we all get from supermarkets.

I try to cook at least half the time and keep an eye on my tendency to be lured by what is becoming way over half of supermarket isles these days (sugar and carb packed processed shit), go to the meat and veg isles out of habit don't even walk down the others unless you want to treat yourself (sugar is a treat not an everyday thing).

My mom ate the a same since an early age and had very high cholesterol and the doctors warned her that she is on a similar course as my grandpa if she didn't change her diet.

I've since convinced her of going on a plant based diet and I am planning her meals. Her cholesterol has been decimated, she lost a ton of weight and feels way better now.

Am I a qualified nutrionist? No. Am I feeding her the diet my grandma ate. Fuck no. Where did I get my information? Plenty of peer-reviewed studies. There is no denying that dietary cholesterol is a killer and cutting out meat and dairy is probably the healthiest option for the majority of the population.

I believe you when you say they lost weight on an all plant diet. But I think you're probably attributing their success to the wrong thing. Correlation != causation. People on a diet would never dream of having refined carbohydrates or too much sugar, because those are universally understood to be bad for you (even if it's just the 'empty calories' argument). They just so happened to also stop eating any animal products. So I don't think you can target the meat and dairy and just claim that removing them is "probably the healthiest option for the majority of the population". Rotten thinking like this is what got us into this catastrophic obesity epidemic in the first place.

Yeah, except that the pendulum is swinging the other way now. http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni...

"There’s a growing consensus among nutrition scientists that cholesterol in food has little effect on the amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream. And that’s the cholesterol that matters."

which is exactly the phenomenon GGP commenter zython was describing.

edit: "dietary cholesterol != blood cholesterol" was even in the popular culture ca. 1995, see "Homer the Great" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZkCXbbEJw

Another thing to note is that often the case is that food that is high in cholesterol is also high in saturated fat, both things that affect ldl cholesterol levels in a negative way.

Cooking using good quality foods (veg + fresh fish and/or meat) does a lot + I feel much better. If I do go for a sugary treats, then it's some good quality artisanal chocolate instead of mass produced crap.

One downside: I noticed my bi-weekly shopping bills to have definitely gone up. Probably spend double or even triple now what I spent before. But hey, you only live once.

On the flip side, that might be a very cheap investment for your health vs future medical bills, lost productivity due to illness / lethargy etc, etc.

Mine has gone down after switching to eggs as default go-to food.

https://nutritionfacts.org/2014/08/19/how-eggs-can-impact-bo...

My partner eats boiled eggs daily for breakfast and at one point I tried to switch to having 2 eggs for breakfast every couple of days. I rapidly developed an unpleasant body odor that went away when I stopped having eggs so frequently. So daily eggs is not be a viable solution for everyone.

I've started precisely after reading the studies that find no correlation between consumed cholesterol and its levels in blood. Also when I found out that the vast majority of cholesterol in blood is made in the body to match the levels it needs. Also when I found out the link between heart disease and LDL levels couldn't be proven.

Of course, I eat them alone, without bread or fries like I used to do.

> they do get boring after a while

Luckily for me they don't

As far as I know, the consensus is that dietary cholesterol doesn't affect ldl cholesterol as much as saturated fat, but it doesn't have "zero effect" either.

Eggs also have a lot of saturated fat. That's already two things affecting your ldl cholesterol levels in a bad way.

One of the ones linked in this article, I don't remember which. https://lifeforbusypeople.com/2016/08/24/why-anti-fat-is-com...

[0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-...

It doesn't matter - the underlying mechanism of all these diets is simply that ANY amount of thinking about what you eat is better than the default choice of just eating whatever's in front of you.

What's good for me might not be what's good for you.

Lifestyle, genetics, gut biome can all make a huge difference in the way your body reacts to different foods

This stuff is extremely individual, unless we're talking extremes. Just do whatever makes your favorite KPI trend in the direction you want. Experiment. The rest is bullshit.

Fitbits and such also measure resting heart rate for cheap. As far as I've heard, that correlates well to lifespan as well.

If I were you, I'd steer clear of any sites that talk about 'toxins', 'detox', 'cleanses', or anything else like that as it's likely to be junk science. Juice cleanses can be particularly hazardous (I am honestly baffled that anybody would think drinking a ton of sugary juice is healthy). I was going to say look for articles that cite their sources, but even the medical literature can be cherry picked to support any hypothesis.

We still have a long way to go before we have nutritional advice that 1. Is actually correct, meaning it's heavily supported by scientific research and has been shown to work and 2. Is accepted mainstream. Until then, I think everyone can at least agree on a few things:

1. Don't eat sugar. Yes, natural alternatives like honey or agave are also sugar.

2. Don't eat refined, processed carbohydrates.

3. Don't eat trans fats.

I think correcting those will eliminate the majority of most peoples diet-related health issues. Everything else pales in comparison.

For me, I found a few things (and I've actually lost weight and kept it off for years):

Mostly vegetarian works for me - I eat fish a couple times a month. I had gall bladder problems, though, and have had it taken out. This works well for my body and I like the food. I cook at home 95% of the time. I skip breakfast (I'm not hungry!). I use butter and cream. I also walk often.