So much info and conflictions, I get so confused! page 2

[Leida]

I don't ignore the arguments. I take them into consideration. Then I experiment on myself. Things changed for me during my life. I used to thrive on the healthy version of CW before I had my child. Now it turns me into a sick wreck. I strive to find a way of eating that suits me the best by keeping me in a desired weight range, while satiating me and making my moods and energy stable. The rest is irrelevant in the long run.

[john_solo]

Common sense is entirely useless. Its common sense that says that being gay is a sin, its common sense that eating fat makes you fat, its common sense that red meat gives you cancer, its common sense that whole grains are the best food on earth, its common sense that eating powdered rhino horn cures erectile issues.

I think you mean Conventional Wisdom?

[Lewis]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/op...oc.semityn.www

The Ornish article?

It's a lot of bluff. He's got virtually nothing to back it.

Have a look at this article on the "research" he's leaning on:

The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.Do statinators dream of engineered mice? » The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

[cantare]

I love to read and people who speak the good "health talk" and "science talk" can persuade me well. I'm easily influenced. Someone just posted this article to me, she is very healthy and fit. Not primal though. I read this and don't know what to think.

If you're easily influenced, then you should cut it out! (my saying that should work, provided you're easily influenced)

Ornish has pretty well-known biases...always good to check bylines and funding sources for those. But impartial altruists are rare in science, so this only gets you so far. (At least you can identify the battle lines and the different camps involved.)

I like to remember that any real scientific truth is a feature of the terrain, like the Arch at St. Louis, casting its shadow in all directions. It may not look the same from every angle, but as experiments and data accumulate, that landmark will keep popping up in one form or another, even if finding it wasn't the investigators' main goal. This is convergence, and also coherence: independent studies keep showing us the same thing in different contexts, and the pictures they paint fit together.

Of course if you've an ax to grind (or a corporate funder to please), you can always pick the one vantage point where the Great Arch looks like a mere tower if you squint hard enough, take some grainy photos, and then write a rigorous-sounding paper that claims the Arch has no curve.

That's how a lot of CW hit pieces work: they start from faulty premises, like a "representative LCHF diet" based on modified shoe-leather keratin and hydrogenated mung bean oil; or they use gerrymandered statistical methods while ignoring confounding variables and inconvenient findings, like Colin Campbell in The China Study; or else their technically valid conclusions have very limited applicability (to certain genetically engineered mice, but not to humans, for example).

Usually the authors stop just short of outright misrepresentation and let the ham-handed media finish the job for them: some watered-down correlation in a retrospective, questionnaire-based analysis of cardiac patients turns into

"UNIVERSITY STUDY SHOWS BACON KILLS ZOMG RUN AWAY!!!!11!"

They succeed in making waves, but they don't achieve convergence and coherence--only conspiracy, once there are enough influential voices promoting the same misinformation.

I find it so hard to focus with all this propaganda out there but I do respect all nutritional ideas, cultures, and techniques. Do you all put bllinders on and keep to yourself?

I wouldn't endorse wearing blinders, but you do need a filter. Once you've read enough to get the lay of the land and pick a general direction, then you really have to do your own n=1 and go with what works for you without getting tripped up by every new debating point or hysterical overcorrection. Debunking propaganda is exhausting, and true scientific progress is glacial: It's very hard to design good experiments in complex areas like human nutrition, even if you find someone willing to fund them. Being open to new information is great, but you'll be long dead before science validates even a tenth of the choices you make!

[Iron Fireling]

The problem is that they'll often compare "eating a diet high in fruit and vegetables with healthy whole grains" to "eating a SAD" rather than "eating a clean, paleo/primal diet". It sounds to me like the article is promoting the first sort of diet, without actually taking into consideration the health benefits one gets from eating a diet mostly composed of meat, veggies and plenty of saturated fats. It ASSUMES that red meat and saturated fats are "unhealthy" and that whole grains etc. etc. are "healthy" without actually being able to PROVE this assertion either way.

The article says "But never underestimate the power of telling people what they want to hear — like cheeseburgers and bacon are good for you. " I'm pretty sure no one here will claim a cheeseburger is healthy (unless it's sans bread and made with grass fed beef )... but certainly the McDonald's cheeseburger would never fit that category!

Logic states that people should eat real food. That is... food that our ancestors would have recognised (those of 100 years ago, as well as those of 20,000 years ago).

People 100 years ago didn't get heart attacks. They just didn't. They were eating full fat meat and butter, full fat milk, cream etc. etc. They also weren't eating processed, refined junk food .

There's no point in comparing someone eating a "healthy" CW diet and someone eating a lot of rubbish (which may just happen to include lots of red meat and saturated fats), it's NOT the same as comparing CW with primal/paleo.