Health derail Re: diet fads

[Maddremor]

I’ve touched upon this in another thread, but the whole “refined carbs are bad” thing still feels off to me. While modern nutritional science does expand our knowledge in regards to health, it does operate with the assumption of a caloric surplus (in the western world). If tomatoes and lettuce becomes better base foodstuffs than flour, sugar, and lard, it clashes thematicaly with Cata as a apocalyptic survival game. Of course, if we outright state that food should be abundant as a game design choice, my objections becomes pretty moot, but to my knowledge no such statement or (pseudo)consesus has been made/reached.

If we are to going down the road of caloric scarcity, I would suggest lookng at historic times of starvation and/or rationing. What food was considered valuable? What was prioritised in agriculture?

[TooDAMNMuch]

[quote=“Maddremor, post:1, topic:13984”]I’ve touched upon this in another thread, but the whole “refined carbs are bad” thing still feels off to me. While modern nutritional science does expand our knowledge in regards to health, it does operate with the assumption of a caloric surplus (in the western world). If tomatoes and lettuce becomes better base foodstuffs than flour, sugar, and lard, it clashes thematicaly with Cata as a apocalyptic survival game. Of course, if we outright state that food should be abundant as a game design choice, my objections becomes pretty moot, but to my knowledge no such statement or (pseudo)consesus has been made/reached.

If we are to going down the road of caloric scarcity, I would suggest lookng at historic times of starvation and/or rationing. What food was considered valuable? What was prioritised in agriculture?[/quote]

if you pay attention to nutrition advice from doctors and the like you realize just how little we still understand it, i give the anti-carbs fad diets… eh… 5 more years? before they’re “proven wrong” by some other shit that contradicts literally everything they said before.

[deoxy]

[quote=“TooDAMNMuch, post:2, topic:13984”][quote=“Maddremor, post:1, topic:13984”]I’ve touched upon this in another thread, but the whole “refined carbs are bad” thing still feels off to me. While modern nutritional science does expand our knowledge in regards to health, it does operate with the assumption of a caloric surplus (in the western world). If tomatoes and lettuce becomes better base foodstuffs than flour, sugar, and lard, it clashes thematicaly with Cata as a apocalyptic survival game. Of course, if we outright state that food should be abundant as a game design choice, my objections becomes pretty moot, but to my knowledge no such statement or (pseudo)consesus has been made/reached.

If we are to going down the road of caloric scarcity, I would suggest lookng at historic times of starvation and/or rationing. What food was considered valuable? What was prioritised in agriculture?[/quote]

if you pay attention to nutrition advice from doctors and the like you realize just how little we still understand it, i give the anti-carbs fad diets… eh… 5 more years? before they’re “proven wrong” by some other shit that contradicts literally everything they said before.[/quote]

They’ve been running strong for 25+ years, no reason that should change just because they are the fad right now.

Of course, I would agree that they won’t be the fad anymore, and 5ish years seems like a reasonable guess for that.

[TooDAMNMuch]

first it was food groups, then it’s a pyramid (that all happened pre-2000s btw), then it was protein, currently it’s low carbs, it changes at complete and total random, the reason being: we still understand nothing of nutrition to the point where we’re still repeatedly invalidating our previous recommendations, that’s what i was getting at.

we’re literally too stupid to know how to properly feed ourselves these days from a nutritional standpoint.

[tarburst98]

that still isn’t what this thread is about weyrling, this thread is about the health SYSTEM not how healthy the foods are. read my previous post for a proposed revised system.

[deoxy]

[quote=“TooDAMNMuch, post:4, topic:13984”]first it was food groups, then it’s a pyramid (that all happened pre-2000s btw), then it was protein, currently it’s low carbs, it changes at complete and total random, the reason being: we still understand nothing of nutrition to the point where we’re still repeatedly invalidating our previous recommendations, that’s what i was getting at.

we’re literally too stupid to know how to properly feed ourselves these days from a nutritional standpoint.[/quote]

You’re talking about fads, and yes, those are stupid and insane. They generally follow the small, single study that most recently caught the right people’s fancy, and yes, they are often directly repudiated.

There have been people on the low-carb bandwagon for 25+ years, and they are, statistically, more healthy than the rest of the population.

More specific than that seems to vary too much by individual or genetic group to say much at the general population level to make many claims - heck, even the low-salt thing has finally been admitted to really only matter for about 10-15% of the population (now that it’s been obvious for years).

[TooDAMNMuch]

to be honest, i think it’s more of a “no right answer” situation to some extent anyway, also i couldn’t really call the food groups or pyramid fads… they were pretty well represented, it wasn’t someone trying to make a buck it was actual study results informing those from what i understood, credible(ish) studies no less.

[Maddremor]

Well, I’m not exactly refering which diets that works and which doesn’t. It just feels tonally dissonant with micronutrients being a larger issue than calories. An analogy would be a hypothetical Mad Max style vehicle survival game where gasoline is abundant but motor oil is scarce and the scavenging gameplay focused on motor oil. While cars need both, it would still feel “off” to not focus on on gasoline. If I were a pre-industrial/post-apocalyptic farmer (read: poor, starving peasant), I would prioritise growing some kind of grain with a high caloric yield per harvest, rather than green vegetables.

In a similar fashion, we tend to view industrial food additives with suspicion. While they might be harmful IRL, I’m still betting that heavily proccessed potato chips are more healthy than foraged berries, as they could carry radioactive fallout, toxic strains of blob, spilled industrial waste and the occational stray mycus spore.

Now, this doesn’t mean I disregard vitamins and nutrients. I’m a proponent of the vitamin system, and would like to see it continue to develop. It’s the holistic health system that rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps the health system is more thought out than I give it credit for? If so, a discussion would be welcome. A wiki page on GitHub for food balancing similar to the current page for weapon balance could bring more clarity and common understanding to the discussion, if anyone has time and inclination to make one.

[deoxy]

to be honest, i think it’s more of a “no right answer” situation to some extent anyway, also i couldn’t really call the food groups or pyramid fads… they were pretty well represented, it wasn’t someone trying to make a buck it was actual study results informing those from what i understood, credible(ish) studies no less.

Then you would be mistaken. The food pyramid wasn’t about making a buck, it was pure politics (which on the back side means making bucks for the right people, of course, but also other things). Seriously, go look at the history of it.

I don’t know as much about the “food groups” issue, though - does that predate the food pyramid? Is it actually useful in terms of diet, or just a convenient way to categorize similar types of food? Can’t speak to that.

I wouldn’t so “no right answer” - I would say “no ONE right answer”. People vary a lot more than dietary “science” has assumed for the last several decades. There’s at least some data today suggesting that’s due in large part to variation in the “microbiome” in the gut, but how large a part is still unknown, and why the microbiome varies so much, person to person, is also unknown.

[TooDAMNMuch]

yeah, the food groups was the direct predecessor of the food pyramid if i recall.

what i mean by no right answer is at some point humans or our ancestors were most likely purely carnivores and evolution adapted them to be compatible with plant matter as well as a response to the scavenging whatever was available, so we’re designed in such a way that variety is one of the cornerstones of eating right.

consider dogs by contrast, there is a very firmly defined correct diet for most animals, their bodies do not need or even react well to variety.

[deoxy]

[quote=“TooDAMNMuch, post:10, topic:13984”]yeah, the food groups was the direct predecessor of the food pyramid if i recall.

what i mean by no right answer is at some point humans or our ancestors were most likely purely carnivores and evolution adapted them to be compatible with plant matter as well as a response to the scavenging whatever was available, so we’re designed in such a way that variety is one of the cornerstones of eating right.

consider dogs by contrast, there is a very firmly defined correct diet for most animals, their bodies do not need or even react well to variety.[/quote]

You have that backwards on humans - adding significant meat into the (previously near vegetarian) diet is one of the primary things listed in the theories of our evolution that allowed the development of our very large brains.

But you’re definitely correct about human ability to eat a very wide variety of things. Some of that may be related to the gut microbiome as well - lots of research in that area right now, lots of interesting correlations… which may, of course, turn out to be coincidence or driven by some unknown third causal agent. But it’s interesting none the less.

[pisskop]

I think including different kinds of carbs is not going to benefit the game.

Such detail is not in the scope of DDA as a coregame. But we can use ‘junk food’ to account for crappy sources of calories and perhaps subdivide that? The idea would be to limit how useful twinkies are as a foodstuff.

Buuut, I defer you to the ease of farming and ease of running food over

[TooDAMNMuch]

well… either way the underlying point i was making remains the same

at any rate, i can be prone to indulging going off on tangents, sorry if it’s disruptive.

also i agree on farming, realistically one survivor wouldn’t be able to farm any worthwhile amount of food, which is why i play with 90 day seasons.

[deoxy]

[quote=“TooDAMNMuch, post:13, topic:13984”]well… either way the underlying point i was making remains the same

at any rate, i can be prone to indulging going off on tangents, sorry if it’s disruptive.

also i agree on farming, realistically one survivor wouldn’t be able to farm any worthwhile amount of food, which is why i play with 90 day seasons.[/quote]

Oh, there are plenty of historical examples of people living off the land alone, with farming being a large part of that… it’s just that they didn’t do much else. The problem is that farming takes so very very little time for the amount of food you get, especially for an unskilled non-farmer.

With sufficient farm equipment (plow, planter, harvester), producing enough for one should be quite easy (we have a large surplus of farmed food with less than 2% of our population farming). The problem there is the lack of any kind of pest or other negative affects on the crops that would need supervision to prevent.

[TooDAMNMuch]

ideally, some farms do operate crop dusters still, failing that a lot of the time there’s irrigation stuff set up with pesticides, i’d say best case scenario is finding one of those industrialized farms, hell i know of about 5 apple orchards i could raid, some wine grapes too.

[pisskop]

people.

go back to poly farming

[Rot]

I’ve read through this and I can vouch for low/no carb diets. I was 165 lbs and around 21-ish% body fat. I set aside 2 months of a low carb diet, and I basically just worked out and did a lot of aerobic exercises at the end of my workouts.

The key to this is a caloric defict and a lot of sweating. Drink water, pee it out, sweat buckets. At the end of each workout I lost around 6 pounds+ of water weight.

My diet consisted of a banana in the morning, a huge (and great) salad at lunch (Around 1pm) and basically just meat and veggies during dinner (8pm).

The key to the diet is a lot of exercise, and basically no carbs or sugar. (Carbs are broken down into simpler sugars, fyi)
But I still drank a bottle of gatorade after a workout, mostly so I can curb the cravings and rehydrate.

2 months of this and I dropped 20 pounds and was around 12% body fat.

After the 2 months I stopped the diet (This was around 2015, by the way.) and since then my workouts have been fluctuating going from working out minimally to every day for months, and I still retain by 12% body fat, but i’m now around 160lbs.

Also regarding the diet of our ancestors, I do want to add that there is some cause to belief that early humans were scavengers - picking off meat from freshly slain animals by other predators, and eating marrow inside the bones of said animals. Which I add, marrow has a high fat content, and is believed to have aided the growth of our brains.