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This book got me started. I'm six months in and doing great on it:

https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Returning-An...

The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided.

It seems more likely that the supposedly "heart healthy" seed oils are causing heart disease.

The Carnivore Code has some very good insights (at least in my opinion) [1]

And this talk on how seed oils are destroying our health is also pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGnfXXIKZM

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Returning-An...

⬐ dang

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115815.

⬐ didibus

> The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided

From my personal sifting through research, it seems there's a lot of correlation with different diets which shows people with more health problems often have an animal based diet and people with less health problems often have a more pesceterian diet.

What is absolutely not clear is any of the cause/effect. It's also unknown of the nuances.

For example, what else correlates with those? It often is true that people with pesceterian diets are from specific isolated genetic lineages. It is also often true that when they're not, they tend to be individuals that pay much more attention to their overall health, making sure they don't eat too much, eat high quality produce (organic, wild caught, etc), exercise more, and often are more financially wealthy.

Personally I agree with you, but I also agree with the opposite:

> The idea that vegetables/fruits/nuts/seafood products are unhealthy seems to be misguided

Historically, we've always consumed all these things. Meat, seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, seeds, human lineage ate all of this for a very long time. Why would any of it be bad for us?

More recently as I've been thinking about this, I'm wondering if it's more related to our modern production of those things, and our changing consumption habits.

Take meat for example, the meat we eat today is very low quality. The animals are themselves unhealthy, fed garbage food, and have a lifestyle unlike their natural one. Can we compare the effect of eating unhealthy meat to healthy meat? We know grass fed beef has way more nutrition than non grass fed beef for example, so there's clearly major differences between eating one or the other.

Now take vegetables, we've not been hard pressing canola into an oil extract and consuming it in high quantity before. This is a modern change.

In fact, I don't even think canola is a plant we would have eaten the seeds off in the past.

So my current thoughts are that low grade produce and processed foods might have a lot more to do with it. And all of the "diets" no matter if you think they are a fad or which affinity you have will emphasize this point: Avoid processed foods and try to get the highest quality ingredients.

In the past, we'd probably eat an animal that had eaten canola itself and processed it for us, and we'd get the canola nutrients through eating the animal.

But also, we wouldn't be eating animal all the time at the quantities we do now. Because winter, and hunting is hard, and lack of preservatives. But also because once we became sedentary, meat was expensive and most people could afford very little of it.

And like I said when we did, it would be this very high quality meat. Very different from what we eat today.

We also wouldn't be consuming all these processed vegetables byproducts, like oils. Appart from those that were very easy to extract, like Olive oils. Everything else that requires modern industrialization to extract it was probably consumed in much less processed forms, such as eating the seeds themselves, or grinding a much smaller amount and getting much smaller amount of oil out of them.

Modernity has brought major changes in that all foods are now of a lower quality, and come in a much more processed form. It made a lot of foods more accessible which mean eating as much as we do is also a modern change. And it allowed us to modify the proportions of what we'd eat, like way more sugar and salt, way less veggies and fruits. In my opinion these are the more consistent factors. So from my readings, I currently conclude the best course of action for your average healthy person is to eat less food overall, eat unprocessed foods of the highest quality (organic, grass fed, wild caught, etc.), In mostly equal quantity of each kind (based on calories), like consume the same calories of meat, fish, veggies, fruits and grains.

⬐ wtetzner

I think you're probably right.

> Historically, we've always consumed all these things. Meat, seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, seeds, human lineage ate all of this for a very long time. Why would any of it be bad for us?

In terms of fruit, it would have been seasonal, and it would have been good for us to put on weight when we got the chance. So some fruit is probably fine, but I suspect people eat too much of it.

There's also a theory that we only resorted to seeds if we couldn't get anything better. Which would explain some of the research that shows seed oils tell fat cells to stay "open" and keep growing. It was a signal that we were on hard times, and needed the extra energy stored.

For vegetables, I guess it comes down to "which ones". I guess the same would probably be true of fruits and nuts, too.

> And like I said when we did, it would be this very high quality meat. Very different from what we eat today.

And we would have eaten nose-to-tail, meaning we'd have eaten the liver, spleen, heart, etc.

> Modernity has brought major changes in that all foods are now of a lower quality, and come in a much more processed form.

Yeah, I think that's where our biggest problems are likely coming from. It looks a lot like the seed oils might be the worst offenders.

> So from my readings, I currently conclude the best course of action for your average healthy person is to eat less food overall, eat unprocessed foods of the highest quality (organic, grass fed, wild caught, etc.), In mostly equal quantity of each kind (based on calories), like consume the same calories of meat, fish, veggies, fruits and grains.

I'm not sure about equal quantities, but I'm also not sure what the right quantities are either. I'm not convinced we should be eating grains at all, and we should probably be careful about fruits. Maybe only eat them when they're in season? I dunno.

Fish is tricky, just because you have to be careful of mercury, even if they're wild caught. So I guess just try to find the types with the lowest mercury levels?

In terms of vegetables, it can also be tricky. Nearly all plants have some kind of toxins to protect themselves (they obviously can't run or fight back with teeth and claws). Our livers have mechanisms to deal with toxins, of course, but which ones we can handle and how much is not clear (to me). I guess it might be one of those cases where you have to experiment and figure out what seems to work for you, at least until we have better understandings of them.

⬐ curryst

> Historically, we've always consumed all these things. Meat, seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, seeds, human lineage ate all of this for a very long time. Why would any of it be bad for us?

Because evolution trends toward living long enough to reproduce. People often die of heart disease once they're old enough they weren't having kids (although exceptions certainly exist).

Evolution doesn't give a fuck if fruit suddenly becomes poisonous to you on the day you turn 65. Youve passed on your genes, your survival is now irrelevant.

So the things that will help us live a long time are not driven by evolution. "We've always eaten it" is a terrible argument because it should be followed by "but the average lifespan was like 40 up until a few decades ago".

⬐ didibus

You're right, the evolutionary argument is just one dimension.

I don't think it's irrelevant, because logically we should have evolved to process what we eat so it doesn't kill us. But evolution could have settled on a compromise between availability to the food and some "good enough" health and lifespan like you say, live at least 40 years, healthy enough to have and raise offsprings.

It just seems a good starting point to start refining from.

I've alluded to other dimensions, like how it seems plant and seafood heavy diets correlate to longer healthier lifes and meat heavy ones don't. But I also wanted to point at the uncertainty exactly in those. We don't really have data of people on very good meat quality diets versus your typical large scale meat production. So it can be premeditated to just blame meat.

Similarly more modern forms of vegetable based byproducts also have studies showing correlation with inflammation and other issues. And again I think it be premeditated to just blame vegetables.

In the end, when I consider multiple dimensions that I've read about, the diet most consistently appearing "healthier" in the average is what I said. A varied source of nutritions from different foods, all of high quality, with no excess in any one of them over the others, with overall eating less of it all, with minimal processed food consumption. For which I was just showing that even the evolutionary dimension corroborates.

Another way to look at it, we don't know enough about any single food and their risk, so a diversified portfolio is the best strategy to mitigate the risks, similar to financial investments.

⬐ wtetzner

> Because evolution trends toward living long enough to reproduce.

I'm not sure it's that simple. Given that humans tended to live in tribes, it was in the tribe's best interest if people were healthy and vital beyond reproduction, for hunting, protection, care of young, passing on wisdom, etc.

> People often die of heart disease once they're old enough they weren't having kids (although exceptions certainly exist).

There are cultures where heart disease is nearly unheard of. So I don't think this explanation is very satisfying.

⬐ 2OEH8eoCRo0

It's what the science says so far. It's amazing that since there are gaps in our knowledge people readily jump over to woo woo fad diets.

⬐ wtetzner

> It's what the science says so far.

No, it's what some interpret the science to mean. It's not like the Carnivore Code is just a nonsense fad diet. It's a book describing the science behind it. You may or may not agree with its conclusions, of course.

And I'm not even suggesting to start eating a carnivore diet. I don't. I just think it's worth reading for some valuable insights.

Additionally, I would argue that the science on seed oils points to them being bad for our health. If you watch that video, the conclusions are all based on research.

There's no such thing as "the science", as if there's only a single conclusion that can be derived from experiments. That's not how science works.

⬐ pjkundert

If the epic, explosive scale of obesity, diabetes and heart disease under the modern government recommended high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet doesn't give you pause, then.... I just don't know what to say.

⬐ boatsie

It makes you wonder what would happen if they recommended the opposite for a generation, what would happen. Would recommending a ketoish diet improve health outcomes? Or does the recommendation mean almost nothing and people will just eat whatever is sold by big food.

⬐ lazyasciiart

Yes, the recommendations appear to mean almost nothing. Americans didn't even reduce the amount of fat consumed since the government started recommending that they eat less fat. They just haven't increased it as much as they increased the amount of carbs consumed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/did-the-govern...

⬐ 2OEH8eoCRo0

Those aren't their recommendations.

https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2020-1...

⬐ wtetzner

They do recommend eating polyunsaturates over saturated fats. That isn't doing us any favors.

⬐ nradov

The science in this area is actually pretty low quality from a strict evidence-based medicine standpoint. It mostly consists of poorly controlled observational studies, which are only one step above the woo woo fad diets. We still don't have a solid theoretical framework for how all the pieces fit together.

⬐ Pulcinella

We (and by we I mean the government) just need to bite the bullet and and pay for a multi billion dollar study where we pay tens of thousands of people to control* and monitor what they eat, exercise, etc for 20 years and just figure this out. None of this “well we had 20 grad students journal what they did for 6 months and this is the result” low quality studies.

*Morally correct and ethically of course. I’m not saying we force people into large hamster cages.

⬐ lazyasciiart

You want to look at the Framingham studies. Not what you're describing, but it's far far above the 20 grad student model https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?...

⬐ nradov

Unfortunately such a study still wouldn't produce valid results. The problem is that study subjects don't report accurate data. They lie because they're ashamed of their choices, or they forget, or they just don't know how to accurately count what they eat.

Consider a hypothetical study subject who goes to watch the game at his local bar, drinks 7 beers, eats a plate of hot wings, and then stops at Taco Bell for nachos on the way home. When he wakes up the next morning what do you suppose he'll enter on the form?

Yes it's a great elimination diet but there is a growing community that just stay on it as a lifestyle because you could feel so good.

Turns out animal-based food has all the nutrients you need if you include offal like liver (a serving of liver has more vitamin C than an apple). I ate mostly Ribeyes and liver. Sometimes I had yogurt but if you're eliminating to find allergens I would cut dairy at first.

I recommend this book https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734640707/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_jp...

⬐ M5x7wI3CmbEem10

liver tastes horrible. any preparation methods? or could you avoid this with vitC supplementation?

⬐ amasad

I'm from Jordan so we grew up eating liver raw and cooked so I'm okay with the taste. Chicken liver is a lot milder. And I know some people prefer liver pate.

I don't know if you can supplement, I've never used them.