I really struggle to take dietary and nutritional science seriously. It seems impossible to control other variables sufficiently to make any statement with any kind of certainty. Plus it's something the media love to seize on and report without context. We've had hydrogenated fats, non hydrogenated fats, sugar, fats, sweeteners, E numbers, eggs, red meat, cholesterol, seed oils, salt, etc.
That's not to say we should stop researching or trying to quantify it, after all we can only know the true impact of salt, cholesterol, different types of fats, by doing more, better, research. However in the meantime you probably shouldn't jump on every new finding to shape your diet. The salt myth has been around for 50+ years and refuses to die.[0]
I'm sticking to eating mostly fresh vegetables, butter, some sugar, some junk food when I feel like it and lots of salt. Plus an inadvisable level of alcohol consumption that makes the rest irrelevant.
Edit: since I just had a rant about lack of faith in climate science elsewhere I'd like to clarify that what I think this area of science struggles with is lack of settled consensus. For every study showing one thing to be bad, you can just as easily find studies showing it not to be bad, or the real picture to be far more complex.
As a vegan (for ethical reasons) for over 15 years, and with the egg price craze I find hard to understand people’s obsession for eggs and milk, there are so many other foods that seems bizarre to me that people are debating if they’re healthy or not, if they raise cholesterol or not. It’s actually simple, not eating them won’t harm anybody.
blacksmith_tb · 2h ago
Interesting for sure, it seems to jibe with the recent finding that arterial plaque is caused / worsened by the gut microbiome[1].
I really struggle to take dietary and nutritional science seriously. It seems impossible to control other variables sufficiently to make any statement with any kind of certainty. Plus it's something the media love to seize on and report without context. We've had hydrogenated fats, non hydrogenated fats, sugar, fats, sweeteners, E numbers, eggs, red meat, cholesterol, seed oils, salt, etc.
That's not to say we should stop researching or trying to quantify it, after all we can only know the true impact of salt, cholesterol, different types of fats, by doing more, better, research. However in the meantime you probably shouldn't jump on every new finding to shape your diet. The salt myth has been around for 50+ years and refuses to die.[0]
I'm sticking to eating mostly fresh vegetables, butter, some sugar, some junk food when I feel like it and lots of salt. Plus an inadvisable level of alcohol consumption that makes the rest irrelevant.
Edit: since I just had a rant about lack of faith in climate science elsewhere I'd like to clarify that what I think this area of science struggles with is lack of settled consensus. For every study showing one thing to be bad, you can just as easily find studies showing it not to be bad, or the real picture to be far more complex.
[0]: though more recent sources seem to back up salt's impact on blood pressure and cardiovascular disease - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26997359/ , https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7384997/ at this point it feels like something of a 'poisoned well'.
1: https://english.elpais.com/health/2025-07-17/revolution-in-m...