Doctors just repeat advice given by national boards. These organisations are a bit slow, but still update their advice every few years, and these are heavenly reliant on statistics & research.
Just read Harvard's nutritional advice pages, they are exactly what a doctor will tell you.
The problem is nutritional science is highly unreliable. And the main reason is, that it's incredibly difficult.
Lots of the generic advice given is based on large scale studies over long years of population in the advice against red meat etc. But there are just too many variables. Which is why they keep changing their advice, however they thoroughly understand statistics.
Also the main focus has been on risk factors instead of understand in the mechanisms behind certain things, partially because the mechanisms are just so darn complicated.
Cigarettes was pretty clear pretty fast, they resorting to hiding the research, it was much more difficult to obfuscate it.
With practical matters putting a man on the moon it's easy to figure out who's wrong and right.
Not all NutScis work for the national boards. But those that do are bombarded with lobby.
> The problem is nutritional science is highly unreliable. And the main reason is, that it's incredibly difficult.
Science is --if the proper protocol if followed-- never unreliable, at best the scientific conclusions change often. Science is ALWAYS difficult, or it would not be science but mere common sense.
> national boards [...] are heavenly reliant on statistics & research.
So how come there's soooo much difference between countries? Canada recently started to advice against milk, but the US still promotes it. To me this shows the power of lobby is very stronger in these boards.
What's the source for that?
The "make water your drink of choice" replaces a reference to milk in the previous recommendation.
From the guidelines [0]:
"Vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and protein foods should be consumed regularly. Among protein foods, consume plant-based more often. Protein foods include legumes, nuts, seeds, tofu, fortified soy beverage, fish, shellfish, eggs, poultry, lean red meat including wild game, lower fat milk, lower fat yogurts, lower fat kefir, and cheeses lower in fat and sodium." (Italics mine)
[0] https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/guidelines/appendix-b-summar...
But there are risks of deficiencies in a meat & dairy free diet. I've people close to me had b12 and iron deficiencies who cut out those because of modern diet ideas.
Especially B12 is a big one, and if you don't supplement it's almost impossible to get on a diet without dairy or meat. It's also full of many other nutrients. So recommending milk doesn't sound so crazy to me, even though I agree the milk lobby is a known powerhouse in many countries.
B12 is produced by bacteria in dark soil, and water soluble; so found in surface waters. Now we and most livestock drink treated water, so no more B12 in the water. Hence I supplement. The B12 that's in meat, eggs and dairy is typically also supplemented to them in their feed.
There might be issues with contanimated milk, but milk in itself doesn't seem to have much negative substances in it.
Lactose intolerancy is annoying for those who have it, but doesn't seem to have much consequences. Kale also has similar effects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3c_D0s391Q
A main thing is the hormone content.
> Lactose intolerancy is annoying for those who have it
I believe we all have it to some degree. And LI is the default, it is just some europeans who became better at digesting lactose.
All food comes with downsides. I'd say for us humans the least downsides can be found in fruits and tender green leafs, which is what the diet of the other primates (yes humans are biologically classified as primates) predominantly eat in their natural habitats.
Apart from science and research, there's also common sense: no other animal consumes milk after their (if mammal) weaning stage.
Kind of strange you are going all the way back to primates. The last 200.000 years we've evolved to eat 60-90% of our kcals diet of animal based food.
The last 10.000 - 15.000 years we moved more to agriculture, mainly grains and rice. Which is not that long but allowed us to be better adapted to grains and other plants.
Overall the body seems to be very good at processing different kinds of food. From meat, dairy, eggs to plants. In these debates all sides invest too much in their moral positiion and have to resort to very complicated logic that doesn't have any backing in research but makes sense for them with a few graphs and 1 or 2 principles that they think define are the base of human health.
Meat & dairy come with its issues, but so do plants. They contain lots of antrinutrients blocking nutrient intake (which is main reason why iron is spinach is not taken up well). And plants are much less nutrient dense and are harder to digest. It's the vegans & vegetarians that need to supplement, which says something.
He shares some facts on dairy, that's all.
> The last 200.000 years we've evolved to eat 60-90% of our kcals diet of animal based food.
Evolution is not that fast. We can "adapt" in that time (like the lactose tolerance), but not evolve to live of different foods. Evolutionists seems to agree.
> Overall the body seems to be very good at processing different kinds of food. From meat, dairy, eggs to plants. So people engrained too much in these debate resort to very complicated logic that doesn't.
Short term yes. Long term no. Primates are already omnivores. They eat bugs and rarely hunt. So its not far off. Dairy after weaning stage is a new thing.
> It's the vegans & vegetarians that need to supplement
Source? B12 is already discussed in this thread. Apart from that D maybe? Because we left our original sunny habitat. Otehr than that I dunno. See what the keto fans are recommending in supplements :)
From Credit Suisse Foundation in 2015: 54% surveyed doctors falsely believed eating cholesterol-rich food raises blood levels of cholesterol. Concluded: "Clear example of the level of misinformation that exists among doctors."
> Just read Harvard's nutritional advice pages
Haha. The Economist: A researcher at the University of California uncovered documents from 1967 showing that sugar companies secretly funded studies at Harvard University designed to blame fat—not sugar—for the growing obesity epidemic
from: https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie
Medicine is also very very large and very fuzzy when you step out of the time tested knowledge. Reading pudmed is surprising. Everything is statistical and there's always a paper contradicting a previous one.
A more appropriate typo I haven't seen in a while. I'd definitely read pudmed.
(For those with English as a second language, "pud" is a folksy abbreviation for "pudding".)
You could follow the paper results as written.
But everything is statistical and youre and individual.
Isn't there a better way?
The reason why is much simpler: in virtually all cases, if you don't bother to see a doctor, you won't die. Doctors aren't killing people at such high rates that most of us should already be dead.
This is the reason discourse on this site is going down the toilet.
Would you ever go to a dentist with crooked teeth or a physio with scoliosis?
It’s a shame you don’t play by your own rules, because then we wouldn’t have to read your idiotic spew.
By all means, go get scammed. Go buy books and fall for the mythos and appeal to authority.
That didn't go well - the way covid sceptics were treated by the Cathedral was not nice.
It's rather like software engineering, but with lives/health at stake.
Although your use of the phrase "the Cathedral" doesn't lead me to believe you're very grounded in reality yourself.
Your second is just raising the temperature without adding any real value, hence the downvotes you appear to be getting.
Hacker news is weirdly populated by people with no grounding in reality on very specific topics, like this and the MOND bullshit people spew in all physics discussions. I think it's an unhealthy obsession with being contrarian mostly.
You see the phrase "the Cathedral" flung about a lot. I take this as a fairly solid indicator of ESR-fellating big-L Libertarians.
It's worth remembering the definition of skeptic as stated here:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/skeptic
"a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual.".
But COVID discussions tend to be extremely black and white, with no place for a middle ground.
The comment about skeptics serves only to keep that black and white picture, which is one reason for downvoting.
I think the comment I replied to would've been much more valuable if it specified which groups of COVID skeptics they're backing up. As it stands, it's just playing apologetics for crazy people.
It would be far healthier for discussions to separate skeptics and obviously crazy or idiotic. Those are two very different groups.
As it should be, because they were dangerous idiots coming away with stuff that would have made a Victorian-era quack patent medicine seller blush.
No, Stoney McDooberson, smoking weed will not protect you from COVID.
"BuT BiG PhArMa Is TrYiNg To KeEp EveRyOnE SiCk WiTh VaCcInE cLoT sHot! BuY hOrSe WoRmEr InStEaD!!!"
Yeah, who do you think makes the horse wormer? Hint - not a naturopath.
Were they dangerous idiots?
Dangerous
It was the screaming racist Qanon anti-vaxxer maniacs that were pushing the "lab leak" idea, and they turned out to be entirely wrong too.
I stand by this. The current debate is around a modified strain escaping from a lab, but even if that's laid to rest, how would we rule out a leak of an unmodified virus?
I find it embarrassing that everyone took so long to point out the obvious: whether it was a lab leak is impossible to disprove.
You can use it in humans, but in a far smaller dose than you'd expect. It works quite well as a dewormer in humans too.
It does precisely fuck all against COVID or any other sort of virus.
Solid gold against intestinal parasites though.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Health
Most Drs I know have NO idea of the basics principles of statistics. They just repeat things, eg “fat is bad, a healthy diet has a base of >=50% grain”.
When you ask them where they get that from, they tell you they read it while in school (in the 90s), from a book that was edited in the 70s, that took it from a study conducted in the 60s, that is just an appeal to P-hacking.