A chef who’s debunking detox, diets and wellness

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jun/18/angry-chef-debunking-detox-diets-wellness-nutrition-alternative-facts?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

by prostoalex • 9 years ago

31 49 9 years ago

theguardian.com

epx• 9 years ago

The guy lost me when linked home-cooked food with misogyny.

emodendroket9• 9 years ago

"Sugar is good, even though it's high in calories yet doesn't make you feel any fuller, because you need calories to live" seems like an odd claim too, given that we don't live in a society where most people are suffering from insufficient caloric intake.

throwaway911112• 9 years ago

And yet, i still need quick calories to catch a bus in the morning. Amazing!

smt882• 9 years ago

That's a social issue/argument. Does it make his scientific claims invalid?

devoply2• 9 years ago

Well it does not seem to me that he's making any scientific claims, just opinionated claims. Which is his right, just as much as it's might right to voice my own opinionated claims as a eater of food.

devoply2• 9 years ago

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2098199-lets-ditch-the-...

Apparently it's a thing, and just shows this whole line of thought has sort of jumped the shark...

emodendroket9• 9 years ago

It found that home-made meals based on 408 bestselling cookbook recipes for infants and young children are not always healthier than ready meals and convenience products. In fact, on many measures they seemed less healthy: they tended to have a lower vegetable variety per meal and were more likely to exceed maximum recommendations for energy and fat content.

Is that representative of what the average person cooks?

belorn• 9 years ago

One of the biggest problem I had with that statement is how extremely unscientifically it was. Home cooking don't take a constant amount of time and vary based on what food you make and how many people there is in the household. Some people like me do once a month cooking where you dedicate almost a whole day per month, usually a day on the weekend. If you are a single person then you might not even need to cook that often.

TwoBit• 9 years ago

Aren't keto diets about making you more satiated and not about nutrition? I thought I've read that people have done a better job losing weight on such diets.

mistermann2• 9 years ago

Most anything I've read most people's "stats" (cholesterol, blood pressure) improve once on a keto diet.

akytt3• 9 years ago

Where did you read that? How many were in the sample, how long was the diet, was it a double-blind test, what was the significance of the find? That's exactly his point: people write a lot of stuff on the internet that they believe or think is true. It might even work on them because of placebo efect. But it does mean these statements are facts.

sargun• 9 years ago

I lost ~60 lbs on a keto diet, but every stat was unsafe, and I felt awful in ways I'd never felt before.

revscat• 9 years ago

My anecdotal experience is that I have lost ~15 pounds since I started keto a month ago, with no change to exercise habits.

He may have a strong opinion, but I am not sure how based in science it is.

emodendroket9• 9 years ago

What's dismaying about weight loss isn't that people can't manage to lose weight but that the success rates in keeping it off over the longer term (5 or 10 years) are extremely bad for just about every method except stomach stapling.

taneq3• 9 years ago

That's thanks (IMO) to the existence of a huge industry dedicated to convincing people that "a diet" is a temporary change in what you eat, after which you can once again throw restraint to the wind.

bayonetz• 9 years ago

Congrats! Whatever works I say. The one issue, in my experience, is that usually it's just the act of paying attention to what you eat that makes the difference (and basically all diets help with this). I still think there is value in having choice in different diets and such, but hard to see how people can get so religious about any single one of them. You're not being religious or anything, just made me think of this common conflation is all.

akytt3• 9 years ago

That's exactly his point. There is no scientific evidence that this happens systemically, i.e. "Keto will lead to weight loss". That does not mean it does not or that you can't lose weight. There's just no evidence.

majkinetor4• 9 years ago

That is BS - there is so much evidence that I don't know where to start.

intromatt• 9 years ago

You reduced your caloric intake. That's wonderful.

flohofwoe• 9 years ago

Well, I lost weight by eating a junk-food-chain hamburger each day for a few weeks (it was an experiment, and I didn't get the fries and cola, only the hamburger). In the meantime my food intake has become a bit more varied, but ideology-free ;)

It's all about calorie intake and consumption really.

tluyben2• 9 years ago

Sure that works. I lost 10 kg only drinking beer (2-3 months because everyone said beer was the fat cause which it is not; it is a combination); losing weight is hard but not if you have the power to cut something out you normally do eat.

Just do not eat as much. I eat half a pizza instead of a whole one (If I do what my mind wants I eat 3-4 napolitana pizzas in a go; I eat half of one now), drink less etc and it works. Unfortunately I love food so on culinary trips the flesh is weak, but I lose it quickly by eating varied and little.

ricardobeat• 9 years ago

That's missing the point. You don't starve on a low carb diet.

haburka• 9 years ago

I mean obviously sugar is not toxic. I think most people that do low sugar and no sugar diets are aware of that. Instead, they understand that there's way too much sugar out there and it is very addictive. That's the issue with this kind of anti-homeopathy reasoning, it's mostly just an attack on non-scientists who have their own theories and claims. However, science has a lot of gaps, especially when it comes to nutrition. It's very hard to be precise with it.

appleshore2• 9 years ago

If you're on a low carb diet, sugar can give you a headache so in that way it does feel toxic. But is that just because your body isn't use to it?

tzs• 9 years ago

For the year to date, I've gotten 33% of my calories from carbs (and 25% from protein, 42% from fat). 23% of the carbs have been added sugars, or 7% of overall calories.

I know that's not actually a low carb diet, at least by the standards most people use when they talk about low carb, but it is quite a bit lower in carbs than what the average American eats.

I've been eating this way since September 2015, and even this moderate reduction in sugar has been enough to cause a change in how I react to sugar.

I don't suffer any adverse reaction, such as headaches, if I have something high in sugar. Well, at least nothing I have ever noticed. What has changed is that I just don't find anything particularly attractive about high sugar foods any more.

For example, if someone brings in donuts for the office and I eat one or two it tastes OK, but it is nothing special. It's not really a treat like it would have been a a few years ago. I will now almost always pick a salty snack like potato chips over a sugary snack.

akytt3• 9 years ago

Science has gaps because scientist do not know things. Non-scientist going "based on what happened to my cousin, this must have been what happened" is not going to fill the gaps in knowledge.

mercer• 9 years ago

That strikes me as obviously untrue.

For example, we might now have the 'scientific knowledge' to explain why a particular mushroom is poisonous, but it probably started with a 'avoid it because your cousin died eating that one', followed by the observation that this happened to multiple cousins, followed by some kind of proto-scientific experimentation. None of this might qualify as 'scientists' doing 'science' by our standards, but it's still knowledge.

That doesn't necessarily mean homeopathy should be taken seriously at this point though.

emodendroket9• 9 years ago

Right; we'll have to just not eat until there is more data.

majkinetor4• 9 years ago

I mean, its obvious that sugar is toxic, as anything is. The toxicity is in the dose. So context matters.

Sugar IS toxic if it hangs out in the blood too long, with adequately high levels. It produces all sorts of bad effects - from AGEs to diminished vitamin C uptake (and thus immunity). Sugar is uniquely toxic to teeth, there is nobody that will argue that.

This ... angry chef ... doesn't actually provide anything but confusion. I highly recommend you to avoid it and do your own reasearch.

appleshore2• 9 years ago

The traditional dismissal of detoxes is that your body naturally detoxes itself. If it was full of toxins, you'd be sick. Can anyone parse that with those who get mercury toxicity from eating too much sushi?

And how is sugar an important building block of life? I'm presume he means calories are important, and he's not referring to glycobiology.

majkinetor4• 9 years ago

Toxicity, when fat starts to burn down, is well known phenomena in medicine. You can be poisoned and toxins can be 'stored' in fat for years, depending on their type, then one day when you start melting that you start to experience symptoms.

And how is sugar an important building block of life?

Not very much, since there is no such thing as sugar deficiency and liver can make its own via gluconeogenesis. Unless you have impaired liver or are starving, sugar probably has little value.

al_chemist• 9 years ago

This guy links detox, diet, wellness, Brexit and Trump. That's typical "we are wise, they are stupid" stance.

chiefalchemist• 9 years ago

Toxic or not, sugar is unnecessary. Just look around. It's not healthy, literally, to allow people to believe sugar is okay. The context matters. And in the context of most people's diet and lifestyle giving up sugar is probably the quickest and smartest thing they can do.

Else, we have the status quo. Clearly, that's not working.

A chef who’s debunking detox, diets and wellness

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