RE: Will Keto Be Vindicated With Update To Official Health Guidelines?
The intention of this comment is to advocate for evidence-based healthy living content on steemit. I think @alexander.alexis comment highlights the crux of the broader issue for healthy eating. People are going to move in the path of least resistance when making food choices. Low-fat took off as a result of USDA recommendations, however foods marketed as low-fat are not always whole foods and therefore not always healthy and within other healthy eating guidelines (e.g., high in sugar or refined starches). Without in-depth nutritional education, the package label makes those food appear to be a "healthy choice."
Keto represents a pendulum swing from the low fat approach to low carb. The food industry could do the same thing with keto, make a low carb snack packed with trans-fats, slap on a keto approved label and you don't have a healthy food, just a reversed unhealthy situation. Fixating on a specific macronutrient or even a specific eating regimen accounts for neither the bigger nutritional picture nor the broader context of an overall lifestyle.
Regardless, to be recommended by the USDA, it appears keto diet advocates still need to present longitudinal and replicable research demonstrating evidence that it: 1) reduces the long term risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and metabolic syndrome, 2) is a sustainable lifestyle based approach, and 3) correlates with a longer lifespan (not only of quantity, but also of quality life).
Though on another level, as a society we need to have conversation broader than specific diet plans. Positive impacts on global health related to food relies heavily on evidence-based nutritional research. And, the application of that research will have to take into consideration that the average person is not going to count their carb to fat ratio on a daily basis.
David Katz sums up this point poignantly in his relatively recent article: Can we say what diet is best for health? "We need less debate about what diet is good for health, and much more attention directed at how best to move our cultures/societies in the direction of the well-established theme of optimal eating, for we remain mired a long way from it" (https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-032013-182351). I recommend this article for reliable up-to-date information on nutritional approaches.
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.