From the perspective of a non-biologist reader only seeing popular articles, the past ten years have been completely bewildering. Nutrition has seemingly been boiled down to a couple of magic totems that are always simplistically either good or bad.
Antioxidants are good.
Inflammation is bad.
Telomeres are good.
Carbs are bad.
All the "bad" things get associated with each other and anti-associated with the good things. Carbs have less antioxidants, which prevent inflammation, which shortens telomeres. Everything is associated in a completely mysterious way to "the gut". Carbs are bad. Why? The gut. We read this in more words and nod sagely. It gives me the feeling of reading a children's picture book.
Biology isn't supposed to be this simple. If inflammation were always bad, our bodies wouldn't have evolved to do it. I'm not saying the science is wrong, I'm sure it's well thought out, but something is getting severely oversimplified in the leap to popular articles, to the point that I don't trust any nutrition advice based on the pop science. Does anybody know of a better source?
Carbs aren’t bad and protein isn’t some miracle. First I’ve heard of proteins being a source of antioxidants if carbs can’t be their source. Really colorful things like the skin of blueberries tend to be the highest sources of antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals. Also is there some dietary source of telomeres? Slightly sarcastic there...
“How not to die” really combined a lot of knowledge, including dietary knowledge, into one place. Netflix’s “the game changers” was cool, too.
I spend/spent a lot of time on nutritional information sites like the SELF or nutritional value org site. I research ingredients and recipes that way to make dietary choices. It’s the pretty “boring”, uncontested data in the dietary mine field.
General trends include Whole foods tend to have the highest concentrations of nutrients per calorie. Stay away from processed foods like white sugar, white flour, etc.
> magic totems that are always simplistically either good or bad.
I read a book on nutrition (forgot which) that started out with these helpful definitions:
unhealthy - food we statistically eat too much of
healthy - food we statistically should eat more
Food that is unhealthy is almost never plain "bad". In small quantities it is probably even "good". It's just that most people have too much of it in their everyday diet.
Ingested antioxidants have no pathway to the cell interior where they might act to "counter oxidation".
Further, if there were it would probably be quite negative as the oxidation and free radical production, etc., is very likely an essential cell signaling mechanism - namely, a signal that it is time for that cell to undergo apoptosis.
Which is to say, those cells are poorly performing and need to be culled. They should commit cellular "suicide". If you found a way to keep them alive it would be to your freat detriment.
I encourage everyone to read _Power, Sex, Suicide_ by Nick Lane:
The good versus bad narrative is also determined by the source/reader's orientation:
Western medicine is corrupt and bad; natural solutions are wholesome and good.
Natural medicine is anti-science and bad; western medicine = science and good.
Each side is engaged in a turf war with the other. IMO, there are pros and cons to each, but the dogmatism clouds adherents to the potential of the enemy's understanding and solutions. That potential seems to be inflated and premature in the case of natural medicine, and sometimes deceived via bias by money-interests in the case of western medicine. Pursuing natural treatments to the exclusion of western treatments can prevent a person from using something that has proven effect; pursuing western treatments to the exclusion of natural treatments can be signing on to destructive side effects.
That’s a common narrative, but science can explain what’s going on just fine.
Natural Medicine does seem to get people to change various behaviors. Several friends went through a bizarre homeopathic stage. I kept quiet because they where told the ‘magic pills’ only worked if they took care of their general heath better such as getting more sleep, and so they would comply.
I don’t think the placebo effect + lifestyle changes warrants calling these things an alternative, but it does explain why they can stick around. Sadly, some people are willing to just sell the magic pills without the advice that makes them useful.
There's a huge difference between the acute inflammatory response (obviously good and necessary for life) and chronic inflammation (very bad).
The biology is hideously complex and not well understood. This past year I've gone through thousands of paper and feel like I'm just getting a real handle on how little is known. Mechanisms (not to mention downstream effects) for some of the most widely and commonly used medications are practically medical mysteries and new metabolic pathways are discovered basically daily.
Luckily almost all of the peer-reviewed primary literature is indexed on PubMed, and you can use ResearchGate, Altmetric, etc to help prioritize your research. Once you start reading you'll see that there's tons of conflict and disagreement.
If you're looking for something a step up from pop journalism (which is terribad), you can start with sites like Examine or Health Line which at least give proper citations, but in the end, I suspect you're just going to need to do your own spelunking and come to your own conclusions because the quality of life-sciences research is quite frankly... uneven at best. Nutritional research is particularly bad.
Chronic inflammation is definitely turning out to be a topic of great interest lately. Here's some starting points (you can follow the citation chain if you actually care):
Lawrence, Toby, and Derek W Gilroy. “Chronic Inflammation: A Failure of Resolution?” International Journal of Experimental Pathology 88, no. 2 (April 2007): 85–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2613.2006.00507.x.
Freire, Marcelo O., and Thomas E. Van Dyke. “Natural Resolution of Inflammation.” Periodontology 2000 63, no. 1 (October 2013): 149–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/prd.12034.
Straub, Rainer H., and Carsten Schradin. “Chronic Inflammatory Systemic Diseases.” Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health 2016, no. 1 (January 27, 2016): 37–51. https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eow001.
Murakami, Masaaki, and Toshio Hirano. “The Molecular Mechanisms of Chronic Inflammation Development.” Frontiers in Immunology 3 (November 15, 2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2012.00323.
Minihane, Anne M., Sophie Vinoy, Wendy R. Russell, Athanasia Baka, Helen M. Roche, Kieran M. Tuohy, Jessica L. Teeling, et al. “Low-Grade Inflammation, Diet Composition and Health: Current Research Evidence and Its Translation.” The British Journal of Nutrition 114, no. 7 (October 14, 2015): 999–1012. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007114515002093.
But yeah... antioxidants are not necessarily good. Or consider this: if you have an autoimmune disorder, you gotta be careful with immunomodulatory agents that are supposed to "boost" your immune system. What might be healthy for people without autoimmune disorders might be lethal for you. Here is an eye-opening article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130893/
I don't this new understanding implies biology is simple, but it looks like we had previously understood the urban, Western diet's consumption levels of sugar and simple carbs as "normal" when in reality it wreaks havoc in seemingly everyone's system.
We now have enough data to think critically about our diet so it's almost like Nutrition is a whole new field of study that is being discovered.
>>Biology isn't supposed to be this simple. If inflammation were always bad, our bodies wouldn't have evolved to do it.
People think that they can "hack" the body and live to 4000 years. What if biology is pretty simple: some things are good, some bad, but even if you do all the "good things," unexpected things will happen and either way you'll die one day. Find a mate to pass your genes, raise your kids and start saying your goodbye! The fact that we now live some 30-40 years after our kids are grown, is a bonus, but that doesn't mean that it is unlimited.
adopt, raise, long life. Or just live. My post wasn't meant to include everyone or exclude a specific group. (they are some who can't have kids for example, or refuse to...etc.etc. But in general we want to pass down our genes)
This is exactly the problem. In general the society expects us to pass on our genes by default. And those unfortunate feel that if they can’t pass on their genes there is something wrong with them.
What you said, is irrelevant to the main discussion (biology.) Whether not passing down your genes is good or bad for the person or society is a different discussion.
Antioxidants are good.
Inflammation is bad.
Telomeres are good.
Carbs are bad.
All the "bad" things get associated with each other and anti-associated with the good things. Carbs have less antioxidants, which prevent inflammation, which shortens telomeres. Everything is associated in a completely mysterious way to "the gut". Carbs are bad. Why? The gut. We read this in more words and nod sagely. It gives me the feeling of reading a children's picture book.
Biology isn't supposed to be this simple. If inflammation were always bad, our bodies wouldn't have evolved to do it. I'm not saying the science is wrong, I'm sure it's well thought out, but something is getting severely oversimplified in the leap to popular articles, to the point that I don't trust any nutrition advice based on the pop science. Does anybody know of a better source?