There is very little science in nutrition, despite the existence of thousands of studies. There are huge gaps in even the basics of nutrition understanding, and we are constantly discovering new confounding variables. Some dietary fibers were being counted as carbs as late as the 2000s. The huge impacts of the gut microbiome on digestion of food has barely been recognized in the last 10 years, and we still basically know nothing about it. Inter-personal variations in base metabolic rates and/or absorption of nutrients from food is gigantic, with basically no known reasons for it (some of the difference is tied to muscle mass, but even if you eliminate differences in muscle mass, there are still large differences that remain), and no inclusion in common models and dietary recommendations.
I'm not trying to say that red meat is good for you. I'm just saying we have no real idea, and you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot. Try things out, see if you can eat similarly to people you know who are in good health, and get blood work done regularly to see if you're ok. Probably avoid highly synthesized foods.
Says you? because that's not what cardiologists, nutritionists and doctors say. around the world. there's a ton of real, good science from many countries that show a very clear link between increased saturated fat intake, CVD and LDL-C levels. It's not really in question.
You are essentially hand waving away 80+ years of scientific studies and data because...you said so?
> you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot.
This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern.
In any other domain, I would agree with you 100%. But nutrition science really is that bad, in my experience and opinion. With some exceptions (e.g. the need for vitamins to avoid things like scurvy, or the relationship between salt intake and blood pressure), even long-standing nutrition beliefs and practices have been overturned (e.g. consumption of cholesterol, or the discovery of the role of dietary fiber), and some of the newer research is likely to overturn others (e.g. with the role and diversity of gut microbiomes, it's likely other nutrition advice will depend to some extent on your specific microbiome).
The reason for this is fairly simple to see: the methods of science that work so well in other areas of biology are completely impractical in nutrition because of
1. The difficulty of ascertaining and maintaining compliance with a specific diet for a long term study
2. The very long-term effect of some food choices
3. The unknown degree of inter-personal variance in food consumption
4. The expected low effect size of dietary recommendations
5. The huge variety of possible dietary effects
6. The huge amount of possible confounding factors in any population-level study
As you'd expect from this combination, the only effects we really have good science about are those that are relatively fast acting (e.g. salt intake increases BP in less than a day) or have very strong effect sizes (e.g. lack of vitamins or certain amino-acids produces severe diseases). For things like life-long effects, or even effects over multiple years, especially where the correlation is slight, you're left with very unclear science where the unknown possible confounding factors dominate any conclusion.
Edit to add: even today, there is a clear disconnect in nutrition science between people who advocate mostly for relatively simple guidelines and the avoidance of processed foods, usually recommending a preference for vegetables over animal-based products; and the older style of guidelines that you suggest, that say a grilled steak is much worse for you than, say, a stevia-sweetened granola bar you'd buy in a super market.
Matter of the fact is that the entirety of belief that saturated fat "clogs the arteries" was based on the epidemiological studies which failed to adjust for other risk factors such as trans fat intake, intake of processed foods, and many more.
We should not throw away "80+ years of scientific studies and data" because... said "80+ years of scientific studies and data" do not exist. Not a single actual study had ever been made. The best we have are epidemiological studies, and these have massive issues.
"This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern."
It is not an insane take, you are just being a dumbass. Doctors do not have any training in nutrition. When I asked my doctor - doctors, actually, plural - for dietary advice, literally all of them told me "I don't have knowledge to advise you on that, figure it out on your own".
Science has basis in reality, yes. But doctors aren't scientists.
Consuming cholesterol doesn't normally change the level of cholesterol in your bloodstream - it simply leads to your body producing less cholesterol. Unless you're consuming gigantic amounts, or have some problems with your cholesterol regulation, dietary cholesterol is completely safe. It's only if your blood work shows elevated cholesterol levels that you need to start paying attention to cholesterol intake. This is in fact very similar to what happens to blood sugar levels, in fact.
The so-called "Mediterranean diet" is a myth, and one of many myths that even serious "nutrition scientists" believe and perpetuate. Actual people in the Mediterranean have way different diets, and ones that include significant quantities of things like pork, lamb, fatty fish, very sugary confections, processed meats like sausages or jamon, etc.
I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
At the same weight, fat contains way more calories than sugar, so the difference in difficulty of digestion is irrelevant at this level. It's true that if you were to consume 1000 Cal worth of sugar vs 1000 Cal worth of fat, you'd get slightly less fat from the fat - but this should be seen simply as one of many limitations on the "calories in" measurement. The same kinds of differences likely exist between different sugars, different fats, different proteins - and may well be affected by other aspects of how the food containing these nutrients is consumed; and it almost certainly varies a lot between people or even for the same person based on various factors such as age, activity level, time of day, etc.
You'll find many people claiming almost the exact opposite, just as confidently. Plant fats are generally seen as much healthier, especially olive oil and similar fats. This idea that the combination of macronutrients that a food contains also seems highly suspect - generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
"generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other"
Well, that is obviously the wrong idea. Even basic logic speaks against it: people lose weight on keto diet, people lose weight on vegan diet... so neither protein, fat nor carbs can be causing obesity. But what do foods that we know are obesogenic have in common? 1) They are highly processed and/or 2) they combine fats and carbs into single package.
But it is true that we don't know for certain. What we do know is that this dietary experiment we have had going since 1970s at the latest has failed completely. As I tend to say: paleo diet should be the basis of any diet, and then you further adjust it based on how your body responds.
People lose fat on calorie restricted diet. How will you get to it, either by counting them or by improving metabolism or by changing insulin levels, is a different thing.
Vegan or keto diet can both be calorie restricted, as much as any macronutrient mixture. However, it doesn't mean its sustainable. If you are hungry all the time, you can stay on the diet for some time, but not forever. Since insulin is the primary storage hormone, reducing it will make you less fat (just look at type 1 diabetics). We now know that carbs are the highest promoters of insulin, that fat has 0 influence, and protein some. We have drugs like metformin or GLP-1 that brute force some of it and they are working.
So, we know that sugar is mostly bad and that fat and protein are not. Ofc, some fats are bad for other reasons (by promoting inflamation) but that has nothing to do with obesity.
People lose weight, temporarily, on all sorts of diets, restricted or not. It is the nature of specific diets that they tend to reduce appetite, and simply following a diet tends to reduce snacking - by virtue of selection bias, mostly (that is, people who are successfully following a diet are by definition people who aren't overeating).
Very traditional diets also tended to include lots of foods that are both highly processed and contain both sugars and fats, like cheese or sweet nut cakes. Paleo diets are a modern invention, and have little in common with the concept of what our ancestors ate. They often have deeply anachronistic ideas, like favoring raw foods, when the use of fire has been a core part of our ancestors consumption since way before Homo Sapiens existed.
I'm skeptical that paleo diet would be healthy for long term. There are studies where they find atherosclerosis in pre-industrial hunter-gatherer remains. It's called HORUS study.
The big question with such foods is are they worse for you just in and of themselves, or do they tend to promote obesity through inducing people to eat more? For the most part, research seems to suggest that as far as weight gain is concerned, calorie is a calorie (whether from fat, carbs, or protein), but some foods seem to induce people to eat more in general, compared to others. (highly processed and high-sugar food seeming to be some of the worst in this regard, but it's not clear exactly what it is about highly processed food that promotes this).
They said that you can't subnet a /64, not that you can't subnet in IPv6. And while technically you can subnet even a /64, it's not supported by SLAAC, which means that, for example, you can't get an Android phone to work with auto-assigned addresses in a /80 IPv6 network.
SLAAC is a huge and complex part of IPv6. Higher reliance on ICMPv6 is also a big part of it. Networking stacks for IPv6 are also more complex, especially if you want to support SLAAC, requiring things like multiple IPs on every machine by default, and so on. The very fact that you have to choose between static IP, SLAAC, and DHCPv6 is another complication - if the choice is even there, as some major devices don't support DHCPv6 (Android).
SLAAC is stupid simple. The router just sends out its address, the netmask and optionally DNS servers. You can configure each host on your network to use the MAC address based suffix, a privacy one (random and changes several times an hour), or a static suffix. This is way simpler than DHCP which is stateful and requires multiple back and forths with the DHCP server.
And yes each host/interface can have more than one address which is amazing compared to having to create virtual interfaces for IPv4. You can literally just add more addresses.
Oh and when working with Docker or other container systems you can just use a link-local subnet instead of setting up a virtual network which makes things so much easier and nicer. There it really is zero configuration, not even firewall rules. It takes less effort to do this than to use IPv4.
That's a very bad example, as ordinary Russians lived MUCH better lives under the USSR than they did under the Czars, at least at that time. The Czarist empire was still mostly a feudal state, and most peasants lived with no education and no money, barely scraping by. Standards of living, while still much, much lower than what was achieved in Western Europe, were still much better than what came before.
Now, can we imagine a world where the Czar was replaced with a Western-style democracy, where the Russian population would have ended up much better than they did? It's possible, sure - but there are no guarantees.
Realpolitik can only ever be an explanation, not a justification. We don't need to accept this from our leaders, especially if we live in any of the more powerful nations of the globe.
The last US president to seriously question their country's foreign policy got their head blown off. It goes without saying that Trump is not a serious person.
Everyone wants to live in the most powerful nation of the globe. Nobody wants to acknowledge what it takes to be the most powerful nation in the world.
Even if a peace deal is reached, and even if that is part of the peace deal, that doesn't mean we are accepting it: we [Europeans] fought (mostly economically) a good 5 years to try to prevent it, and lost. Accepting this would have meant not providing any aid to Ukraine and instead just saying "Russia has a clear doctrine of not allowing NATO control of the Ukraine region" as if this justified and their actions.
Russia is one of Europe's major trading partner. This issue is also the same for Australia, where they go against their largest trading partner to appease the US Empire.
Russia would be very happy to install a puppet regime in Ukraine, as long as they had some certainty this regime would be stable and subservient to their interests. We know for a fact that they don't care about necessarily invading other countries as long as those countries are subservient: they are not planning to annex Belarus, nor did they have any real problems with Ukraine as long as it was led by their preferred leaders and it was not making any overtures to NATO or the EU.
The exact same thing will happen in Venezuela: the USA will be happy with any leader that they have confidence will represent US interests, stop doing any business with Russia or Iran, and that they think will last. If instead another member of Maduro's party looks likely to win power, either now or in the near future, they will certainly not allow that to happen, even if it were to happen as a result of free elections.
Yes, they did, and there was no attempt to annex Ukraine before that regime fell, I said as much in my comment.
Note that this is not in any way an attempt to justify Russia's actions, quite the contrary. I'm using the comparison to Russia's obviously horrible actions in Ukraine to condemn the USA's equally horrible actions in Venezuela.
In the 90s, the status of Crimea was an internal dispute in the newly-formed Ukrainian state. The status of Crimea as a part of the new Ukrainian state at this time was not yet settled in any way. The territory only became firmly a part of Ukraine in 1995.
The 2003 dispute over the island of Tuzla - whose status had not been clearly settled during the independence of Ukraine from the USSR - was settled diplomatically. If you call this occasion an "attempt to annex Ukraine", then we could equally say that "Romania attempted to annex Ukraine" when the countries had several rounds of negotiation and arbitration for control of Snake Island in the Black Sea.
The only reason Russia has been reluctant to formally annex territories it broke away from other countries until 2022 was minimizing economic damage to itself. They knew how sensitive the western countries were to forceful changes of the world map, and felt no need to inflict economic sanctions on themselves for a mere symbolic act of annexing a territory they already fully controlled.
Once that Rubicon was crossed (sanctions were in place and there was nothing to lose), they annexed the four regions of Ukraine that they partially controlled.
I'm not trying to say that red meat is good for you. I'm just saying we have no real idea, and you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot. Try things out, see if you can eat similarly to people you know who are in good health, and get blood work done regularly to see if you're ok. Probably avoid highly synthesized foods.
reply