RE: Will Keto Be Vindicated With Update To Official Health Guidelines?
Hey @thewseph0319 Don't know who you are or what you do, but you seem to know your stuff and so I'm glad to have you here! Diet and nutrition interests me and a lot of people, so it would be great to read whole posts from you, which you can post using the steemstem tag - steemSTEM's middle name is evidence-based! - and thereby get greater upvotes as well as visibility for your content.
Sometimes I feel the nutritional recommendations fall short of the optimum precisely because they're aiming at what they think is actionable by most people. But some people are not most people! Some people can follow more stringent recommendations. In this era of health- and body-obsession, more and more people are becoming like that. Recommending an ideal diet which would be followed by a few now would perhaps pay off long-term, because the few would become a real-life example that would perhaps provide inspiration for the many. Perhaps most people are not such couch potatoes as we think, they're just disappointed because no diet they follow seems to work.
In other words, I think we should talk about what the optimal diet is (and most people who ask about diet ask precisely this), instead of just what the most practically actionable diet is for the average person who can't afford a lot of time to learn about diet.
Off to read the article you linked!
Hi @alexander.alexis, great tip about steemSTEM. I came across that tag and couldn't find a description for it. Glad to have more context for it. I'll check it out again. Fair warning: I intend to challenge any healthy lifestyle articles that don't cite scientific journals.
We are still talking about the optimal diet. It just isn't a finite list of foods to eat or macro proportions to meet. The science of optimal nutrition does not exist in the way that most people think. The myth of a reductionistic optimal nutrition is perpetuated by people selling "expertise" in the form of a diet plan. Nutrition is not able to be reduced to one right plan, or even the "right plan for me." (See the information on the food4life study toward the end of the article linked below)
The reason for that is the hardest physiological science of nutrition is one of deficiencies, excesses, and allergies. All the nutrients in the foods we combine have interactive qualities (agonistic, antagonistic, synergistic, emergent). Capturing the comprehensive science of combinations of so many nutrients in various proportions along with all our bodies' sizes, ages, food tolerances, and eating routines makes anything other than general recommendations next to impossible -- not to say the pursuit isn't worthwhile, only much bigger than we can truly comprehend.
Add to that the fact that a diet plan or anything anyone tells one to follow isn't as sustainable as a habit change that person identifes for themselves. Even then, the change won't typically stick unless the person connects it to what's most important to them and find the right strategy to incorporate it into a plethora of other routines.
As written in a Center for Responsible Nutrition conference round table report: "The scientific focus of nutrition had [previously] narrowed with a reductionist approach and subsequently (now) expanded to be more holistic. It is now recognized that the study of nutrition involves more than the biology of nutrients, but encompasses the integration of other scientific disciplines, including social, political and environmental sciences." Therefore, optimal nutrition science has evolved into a bio-, psycho-, social, environmental, economic, political pursuit. For some more bedtime reading (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5442251/#!po=8.49802).
I know this has blown well out of proportion for the original post. I am considering writing my own articles, but I'm still figuring out Steemit, so sticking to comments for now. I'll attempt be more succinct in future comments!
That was an elloquent and clear response that could easily be turned into a post! I do hope you write them and educate us about nutrition. A steemSTEMer who sometimes writes about nutrition/health is @chappertron.
steemSTEM has its own site (though in beta phase) that runs on steem (just like steemit) at steemstem.io, so you can check out articles there.
I read your other linked article with interest and will read this one as well!
Great. Just followed @chappertron and will check out steemSTEM.io. Thanks, I had meant to request some suggestions for people to follow, so perfect response!
Oh and steemSTEM also has a discord.