What's best? low-fat diet? low-carb diet? vegetarian diet? the answer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

by zurla • 19 years ago

24 14 19 years ago

nytimes.com

imsteve• 19 years ago

Looks like a very long article with very little content.

drm237• 19 years ago

And even less to do with hacking...

dhouston• 19 years ago

i disagree. the interesting points aren't about food -- for example, it's a case study in how a lot of smart people, over a long period of time, can fool themselves -- in fact, the movements to improve software engineering have the same kind of faddishness as nutritionism.

another interesting point was how being "scientific", and looking at individual factors in isolation (e.g. vitamins) missed the forest for the trees, and did more harm than good.

another takeaway was the extent to which "studies" are pushed around/mediated by big political interests, e.g. the meat lobby and the marketing muscle (the suns, microsofts, and Extreme Programming vendors of the food world) that have a big interest in keeping the status quo.

dkarl• 17 years ago

Your body is an intricate piece of technology that you hack on every day, intentionally or not.

mildweed• 19 years ago

By reading the opening, the closing, and skimming the rest, you will see that it has a fair bit of useful and accurate content, just very spread out.

And just as the article points out, it gave away its whole article with the words "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

brett• 19 years ago

Pollan's latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is worth reading. http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meal...

The overall organization is little forced at times, but the research for each section is really interesting.

ecommercematt• 19 years ago

The Hacker's Diet is an interesting approach to weight loss.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

mynameishere• 19 years ago

Hunger is not arbitrary. The nervous system tells you what to eat. If you stay with substances that were around during humanity's long evolutionary period, you'll do fine: Meat, vegetables, fruits. If you spend more than 10 minutes worrying over it, you've already lost.

zurla2• 19 years ago

if you spend less than 10 minutes worrying about your diet, you'll end up eating twinkies and mcdonalds most of the time. it's not trivial to find good produce and vegetables in america. also, one of the article's main points is that meat is not good for you in large quantities, but it's ok in relatively small quantities (much smaller than what the typical American consumes).

aston2• 19 years ago

Was this a different link earlier? I read this article a while ago (and liked it a lot). But the link I read from this post earlier today was about the coolness of the Atkins diet and was not nearly as good. Whappen?

What's best? low-fat diet? low-carb diet? vegetarian diet? the answer.

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