4 Damaging Mainstream Nutrition Beliefs

Discuss, well I would say the whole article could be shortened for the TL;DR crowd: use your f___cking head. I really like that article, mind you, but what it really boils down to is simple. Your health is important, so get educated on it. If you plan your dietary and health approach based on the opinions of others, you might have a bad time.

I like the points made; weight loss is NOT the same as good nutrition, which is NOT the same as weight loss! You can lose weight eating candy bars only, and you can gain weight eating nothing but lean meat, veggies, nuts and fruit. I see too many threads on here that seem to equate weight loss with nutrition; the logic is sloppy. I agree that nutritionists sometimes seem to focus more on weight loss - probably because that is often when people go see them. Thanks for sharing the article.

Discuss, well I would say the whole article could be shortened for the TL;DR crowd: use your f___cking head. I really like that article, mind you, but what it really boils down to is simple. Your health is important, so get educated on it. If you plan your dietary and health approach based on the opinions of others, you might have a bad time.

what does TL;DR stand for-been trying to figure it out for a while now :blushing:

"Your post was too long; I didn't read it." So in being humorous with you, you could say the TL;DR of my reply is "Too long; didn't read".

As an RD he probably sees people with very unhealthy view of food and their relationship is skewed so it biases his view.
But in general, he's wrong.

For someone that eat 5%-10% of my food from so called "junk-food" and an incredible variety of fresh and local product - yes, there is no bad food. His example of ED makes no sense in my house hold. My daughters are allowed to have soda perhaps once a week or ice cream as the odd dessert (more often it's fruit) and are healthy and active. So no, there is no "bad food" and focusing on making bad foods leads to poor nutritional choices and little diversity.

While he does not understand "moderation" and finds it chaotic it just is a universal truth. Just as water in excess will kill, so will any effective medical treatment, exercise routine. So "moderation" is a good rule - that it grates on him is his problem. No real content on that point. There are no foods that you should eat always - how totally boring. How lacking in variety and nutritional diversity. Broccolli everyday? No thanks, and I love it. Adherence is better with diversity, at least for me.

Point three I agree with mostly, while mMany "healthy eaters" are disordered or restrictive eaters and there are many studies on nutritional gaps and deficiencies of certain types it is true that planning proper nutrition is a need for everyone - omnivore or veg*n.

Finally he addresses a fourth strawman by setting up his own strawmen - we as a public need dieticians to tell us not to eat 3x a week in a drive thru? Really? We somehow cook all our dinners (the "norm") in a microwave? Really? I have a picky eater at home and damn right I'm going to be realistic - yes, I push her envelope to try new items to at least taste things but it would be moral or mental violence to expect her to eat only "outside of her envelope" - realism is a useful strategy to see what can change, where adherence is possible and and what works long term.

So, with his criticisms of what actually does work I'm going to guess he has a very frustrating existence - I certainly would not use someone like that.

Of course, I expect the usual "toxins" crowd to rally right behind him.

Because toxins.

I came in here to post a similar but shorter and poorly worded version of this. So instead I will just say:

To be the devil's advocate here...

As an RD he probably sees people with very unhealthy view of food and their relationship is skewed so it biases his view.
But in general, he's wrong.

For someone that eat 5%-10% of my food from so called "junk-food" and an incredible variety of fresh and local product - yes, there is no bad food. His example of ED makes no sense in my house hold. My daughters are allowed to have soda perhaps once a week or ice cream as the odd dessert (more often it's fruit) and are healthy and active. So no, there is no "bad food" and focusing on making bad foods leads to poor nutritional choices and little diversity.

I find this line of reasoning flawed. He doesn't say that these foods are fatal, only that they are the opposite of good. Junk food is not good food. That's why we call it junk.
Now the degree to which you can tolerate and sustain an overall healthy diet with some of this food included is up to the individual. You and your family are able to include some food like that and still maintain a good overall level of health. That doesn't mean that that stuff is good for you, just that in the overall balance you are still ahead by an acceptable margin.
To me the analogy is if an athlete smokes just a few cigarettes per week, but is still overall very fit. Doesn't mean the cigarettes aren't bad, just that he/she does enough otherwise good living that the impact is mitigated.

While he does not understand "moderation" and finds it chaotic it just is a universal truth. Just as water in excess will kill, so will any effective medical treatment, exercise routine. So "moderation" is a good rule - that it grates on him is his problem. No real content on that point. There are no foods that you should eat always - how totally boring. How lacking in variety and nutritional diversity. Broccolli everyday? No thanks, and I love it. Adherence is better with diversity, at least for me.

His point is that Moderation in and of itself is a crappy term that is widely mis-used and misunderstood. It's the same reason that alcoholics going through rehab now use the term 'using' rather than 'abusing' because it's very easy to rationalize what is or is not abuse, especially with someone who has a real problem in that area.

Finally he addresses a fourth strawman by setting up his own strawmen - we as a public need dieticians to tell us not to eat 3x a week in a drive thru? Really? We somehow cook all our dinners (the "norm") in a microwave? Really?

You are not dealing with his patient base. There are many, many people for whom this is the norm and have to be educated otherwise.

Alehmer pretty well said what I was thinking. Junk is junk, if you can eat it and stay relatively fit, well that's good but that doesn't mean it's helping to keep you healthy at all. It's just not doing as much damage as it otherwise might because you're balancing it with good food. But at the same time he does recognize that it's not realistic to say "I am never going to eat anything unhealthy ever again", hence his view on the odd indulgence being ok. But at the same time, there's a wide range of things that could be considered indulgences too, and some are worse for you than others. I think this part of it kind of sums that up:
"we can not and should not deny that certain foods belong in the “eat always” category, others in the “eat sometimes” category, and others in the “eat rarely, if at all” category."

ETA: I can't figure out how to get the quotes to work properly lol

IN... For Moderation & Against Demonization of any foods.

Show me the study which proves that eating a snickers/cookie/ice cream sandwich a day results in anything unhealthy.

There's quite a lot of semantics here, and while so many internet discussions seems to devolve into fights over semantics, they definitely do color how we look at things.

He's an RD, I think it would be wildly inaccurate to say that he has no idea on how to put together a diet plan (not per EvgeniZyntx), or that he would think that a small amount of chocolate would hurt somebody.

I think a lot of the good food/bad food debate is set by our own boundaries, and using simple terms to try to describe those will inevitably allow for huge argumentative holes.

For me:
Bad doesn't mean all bad, completely without any redeeming value. I use it in the same context as good, in that it has more pros than cons.
IE a Big Mac is bad because it is highly processed, very high calorie, high sodium and what good nutrients are there are of relatively poor quality. And it tastes like cardboard crap, so, you know, there's that. There is nothing inherently bad about the Macronutrients found in the sandwich, and there's some natural ingredients with minerals and vitamins. But I could get all of the good things found in the Big Mac in other foods that don't have the negative factors associated with it, foods which I would call good.

Chocolate has a great many positive things associated with it. But when you eat an 8% chocolate 90% sugar/fat candy bar, it's disingenuous to say that you ate a Good Food when you could have had a very high Cacao content treat and gotten the same good things without the bad. Which is why I have 3 pieces of 85% Cacao chocolate every day.

I would call food where the postitive features are dwarfed by the negative features 'Junk', or it's corrolary in any language.

Would you feed your family nothing but cheesecake, soda, and fast food? You know you wouldn't becuase you know that it wouldn't be healthy. It's all just protein, carbs, and fat, but the way you take it in really means something or we wouldn't all be here.

Funny thing there are studies that show that light smoking might have impact on lung function. Can you point to a study that shows the negative impact of one candy bar a day or a week? Bad analog.

It's a strawman argument to imply that since 1 candy bar a week won't have a noticable effect, so candy as a whole is completely fine.
Nobody who goes to see an RD or is on this board to improve their nutrition is there because of 1 candy bar a week. These foods are cheap, addictive, and through their high calories displace more nutritious food if not eaten with discipline. If the discipline to eat those foods was in abundant supply, I don't think we'd be here having this argument on a diet website.

I understood that he thinks it is a poorly defined term, it is. That's the beauty of the universe there are things that are not simple dichotomies. And yet we can set guidelines - 10% or 20% discretionary calories. "Junk" food is not an addiction, despite the hundreds of posts and issues that people have we do not go through withdrawal symptoms from changing from substrate A to B. It's a nice rhetorical image but it's really not biologically supported.

Incorrect. One of many studies showing the exact opposite. High calorie, sugary/fatty/salty food is extremely addictive.
http://hms.harvard.edu/news/addicted-food-7-3-13

Yes, I stated from the very start that he might have a bias. But I didn't know that nutritionist could be afforded by those that cannot afford healthier food. How do teens and twenty something junk food junkies pay for their registered nutritionist. Or is this demographic mostly in your head.

Nope, widely understood and clear statistical data.
Google search (how do you post links to Google-found PDFs, gives HUGE link?)
www.aae.wisc.edu/fsrg/publications/wp2005-02.pdf

TL:DR - go to page 20 for the chart to see the H U G E spike in fast food consumption.

C'mon vegetables are cheap. It's nutritional education that's expensive. Even more so when we spend our time vilifying food groups rather than focusing on nutritional diversity.

Dollar for dollar, you can eat a balanced-ish meal out for about the same as you could make at home. But it's the seductive convenience of the fast food vs. the effor it takes to plan for, shop for, and cook a well-balanced meal. It's more like opportunity cost than anything. In addition, it takes a LOT more volume of healthy food to hit the same calories.

I don't think that anyone has villified a food group.