Without any further context, this is most likely not a healthy diet. You're certainly missing out on B vitamins and heme iron due to lack of meat and likely have a poor Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio due to the use of plant oils over other fats. Just a guess.
You also probably get way too much sugar from sugary fruits which you overindulge in because your diet otherwise is so "healthy". Instead of soft drinks you have fruit juices, which have effectively the same amount of sugar. Again, just a guess.
You probably got your nutrition advice from ideologically based publications, or you're just "winging it" based on what makes sense to you, in which case you're likely going to be wrong as well.
I did my research. Also I tracked my nutrition with Cronometer in the first weeks. Not a single day did I miss on B-vitamins.
Heme iron is associated with disease in all major studies. I don‘t see a reason to ingest it.
I have a great O3/O6 ratio. I don‘t use oil at all and avoid foods that are filled with plant oils. My breakfast contains lots of flax seeds. Our usual foods contain hemp seeds. All good sources of O3. And all without pollutants from fish.
I get a lot of information from nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger offers free information as in free beer. No ads, no sponsors, even the earnings from his books are given to charity. I highly recommend you check him out. He certainly has his biases but still way less than most other doctors.
> I did my research. Also I tracked my nutrition with Cronometer in the first weeks. Not a single day did I miss on B-vitamins.
If you didn't have any animal foods, you're going to be missing out on B-vitamins, because of low bioavailability[1].
> Heme iron is associated with disease in all major studies. I don‘t see a reason to ingest it.
An excess of many essential nutrients and vitamins is associated with disease, that doesn't mean you should cut them out. Non-heme iron is way less bioavailable, especially in combination with plant antinutrients[2], so you can end up iron-deficient.
> I have a great O3/O6 ratio. I don‘t use oil at all and avoid foods that are filled with plant oils.
You probably should be using oil, just not plant oils.
> My breakfast contains lots of flax seeds. Our usual foods contain hemp seeds. All good sources of O3.
Unfortunately not, because those sources also have low bio-availability.
> And all without pollutants from fish.
Pollutants are unfortunate, but when it comes to nutrition, you have to pick your poisen. Salmon roe is a good source of Omega 3 that is low in pollutants.
> I get a lot of information from nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger offers free information as in free beer. No ads, no sponsors, even the earnings from his books are given to charity. I highly recommend you check him out. He certainly has his biases but still way less than most other doctors.
A plant-based diet is ideology that is cherry-picking and misrepresenting some insights of nutrition science while sweeping others under the rug. With his exaggerated claims[4], Greger isn't any more credible than certain people on "the other side".
I think it is not productive to have this discussion. I have good blood markers after 6 years on this diet. LDL of 52. BP of 101/74. So for me this diet is way healthier than the omnivorous diet that I had before. If you want to believe that animals are essential for human health, go on. But in my opinion science does not back this up. But that is my interpretation.
Your thoughts on bioavailability are also outdated. It has been shown for protein, iron and some vitamins that bioavailability in practice is very good for plant sources. E.g. iron is converted as good as heme iron when combined with vitamin C. And it‘s hard to avoid C on a plant based diet.
> I have good blood markers after 6 years on this diet. LDL of 52. BP of 101/74. So for me this diet is way healthier than the omnivorous diet that I had before.
Perhaps, but we're talking about nutritional deficiencies, have you tested for all of those? A vitamin deficiency can take up to a decade to manifest in symptoms.
> If you want to believe that animals are essential for human health, go on.
I don't want to believe that, I would prefer not to have to believe that. On the other hand, many people want to believe that animals are not necessary, for ethical reasons. That causes distortion and misrepresentation, because it would be inconvenient if a plant-based diet was not entirely healthy and nutritionally complete.
> Your thoughts on bioavailability are also outdated.
Those aren't "my thoughts", that is scientific data. Show me yours.
> It has been shown for protein, iron and some vitamins that bioavailability in practice is very good for plant sources. E.g. iron is converted as good as heme iron when combined with vitamin C. And it‘s hard to avoid C on a plant based diet.
Source?
> May I ask where you get your information from?
I get it from all available sources. If Doctor So-and-so claims this-and-that, I look at the scientific publications supporting that.
On top of that, I try to look at what's plausible from an evolutionary history perspective. A plant-based diet doesn't seem plausible. That doesn't mean it's not good, of course - especially compared to a junk food diet. However, there's a lot of "ethical incentive" to misrepresent it as better than it is. You gotta watch out for that.
Regarding B6. The last days that I tracked I had 3-4 times the RDA of B6 with ~4mg. Even if the absorption were really low I still meet what my body needs. And other sources report way better absorption rates.
Have you measured it in the blood? Even if your B6 is fine, what about B12? That has even worse bioavailability from plants or supplements. Again, you need to measure it, furthermore B12 takes years to deplete.
My B12 was so high I had to lower my supplementation twice. Now I only take the spray every two weeks to allow my values to get down. But even on that dose my values are at the very top of the reference range.
The problem with B12 is more with low cobalt in the soil and genetically low absorption. There are now even bioactive plant forms of B12 like water lentil.
Who says that B12 supplementation works less good than eating meat? The last studies I read on supplementation all showed good results. Better results than among omnivorous people.
Vitamin B12 supplements require very high doses due to poor bio-availability. You have to ask yourself, could this be a healthy diet when you effectively need a pharmacy to maintain it? What else is your body missing out on that we might not be aware of?
That's why I say a plant-based diet is science experiment with no plausible basis in evolutionary history. I'm not saying it's bad per se, I'm saying we don't actually know if it's good.
Looks like you have done your homework and are not in fact deficient, at least in terms of those biomarkers and reference values. A lot of plant-based dieters are not that diligent, affluent or educated.
I think the current diet that 90% of the developed countries practice is the large experiment. Question is how long our health system can tolerate these rates of disease.
> Healthy food is typically less expensive than junk food.
This isn't true, at least in the US. Or maybe we have a very different idea about what "healthy" food is.
Rice, beans and starchy vegetables are problematic for various (different) reasons and non-starchy vegetables generally aren't very nutritious from a macro perspective, which makes them relatively expensive.
I don't think there's a common understanding of how much time working class people have to spend on work. It's frequently on the order of 50-60 hours across more than one job, plus the attendant transit and pre-work chores. Your job doesn't provide you with cheap, healthy food on-site. You frequently can't eat on the way to or from work, per transit rules or enhanced police presence on your route. Lunch breaks are a strict 30 minutes, and being late can get you fired (hope whatever you're eating doesn't have too much fiber). You may have to go out of your way to shop, if you live in a food desert, and apartment fridges preclude buying in bulk. Oh, and for a racial angle, produce in cities (and, not uncommonly, in majority-minority suburbs) costs more than in white suburbs and rural areas.
We have so many UX experts on here, is it really that difficult to think of this problem as an experiential narrative instead of an engineering problem that can be solved by tweaking a few variables?
> Bananas by themselves are not healthy food, they're very high in sugar and have little else to offer.
That depends on ripeness [0], I eat a mostly green banana every morning and it doesn't have much sugar at all while keeping my bowels very regular.
It's been my breakfast for decades, I'm quite healthy, and eat a diet almost entirely composed of raw produce. The rest is nuts/seeds/legumes and canned fish. I rarely ever cook, and if I didn't go for organic produce this would be a very cheap diet except for the nuts.
> It's been my breakfast for decades, I'm quite healthy, and eat a diet almost entirely composed of raw produce. The rest is nuts/seeds/legumes and canned fish.
You get virtually all of your macronutrients from the nuts, seeds, legumes and the fish - not the produce.
> I rarely ever cook, and if I didn't go for organic produce this would be a very cheap diet except for the nuts.
So it would be cheap if it was something else, but it's not.
In any event, I consider any diet high in grains/legumes a science experient which may or may not work out. I don't consider it a healthy diet.
> So it would be cheap if it was something else, but it's not.
By volume most of the "nuts" are roasted unsalted peanuts, which are very cheap, and as you know actually legumes.
I just have a taste for expensive walnuts and cashews, and like organic produce, but I'm not poor.
Everyone can afford peanuts, or peanut butter. I prefer roasted intact peanuts since there's less opportunity for fuckery like replacing peanut oil with palm oil and adding sugar.
People eat beans for decades. Why should this be an experiment? Because people like Dr. Gundry want to sell books? He‘s even admitted on TV that cooking mitigates the whole problem. And who eats raw beans? I think it‘s pure hysteria. In observational studies „anti-nutrients“ are mostly associated with better health outcomes.
> People eat beans for decades. Why should this be an experiment?
People also eat donuts for decades, that means nothing.
People didn't eat beans for hundreds of thousands of years. They're not a "natural" part of the diet. They contain poorly researched plant toxins and anti-nutrients, which can are known to cause issues in sensitive people.
Can you "mitigate" the problem with proper preparation? Apparently, but that doesn't mean we know they are actually healthy as opposed to "sustainable". Populations across the world which have no choice but to rely on grains and legumes as a staple do suffer from malnutrition.
> In observational studies „anti-nutrients“ are mostly associated with better health outcomes.
Observational studies are mostly useless, because anybody who buys into "legumes are healthy" will focus on living a healthy life in other aspects as well. As I said, swapping in legumes in place of donuts is going to be a benefit. That doesn't mean it's optimal.
You say that beans are problematic but you don‘t back it up. I only have to show you that beans are just as much part of human diets as are other foods. What is the actual science that anybody on earth suffers from the consumption of beans? For donuts we see a direct correlation between sugary processed foods and obesity, T2D and other diseases. For beans you can not show this. The only thing you can show is some mechanistic data, where we can speculate. In my personal opinion you are the victim of an industry that wants to sell stuff like Gundrys supplements like „Lectin buster“ and the like.
> What is the actual science that anybody on earth suffers from the consumption of beans?
"More than half of the world populations are affected by micronutrient malnutrition and one third of world’s population suffers from anemia and zinc deficiency, particularly in developing countries."
> I only have to show you that beans are just as much part of human diets as are other foods.
Again, that literally means nothing. Humans can survive on very poor diets.
> For donuts we see a direct correlation between sugary processed foods and obesity, T2D and other diseases. For beans you can not show this.
Of course, I never said beans cause T2 diabetes or any other "disease of civilization". They cause nutrient deficiences in populations that are underdeveloped. As for what it does with those few people in developed nations who choose to adopt a plant-based diet, there's just no good data, yet. That's a recent phenomenon.
> The only thing you can show is some mechanistic data, where we can speculate.
Of course we have to speculate, because we don't know. You can always ask for more evidence that this-and-that is or isn't harmful in some dose. Somehow, people are very wary about synthetic toxins or pesticides, but when it comes to natural toxins that plants produce to defend themselves, we don't really pay the same kind of attention.
What's the evidence that heavy metals, or dioxin, or any of the other pollutants are harmful in the doses that we allow them in? There isn't any, that's why we allow them. Does that mean harmful effects don't exist? No. It means we don't know any better.
Legumes just happen to be the biggest offenders of natural toxins in our diet. They all have a rich history of requiring preparation to become digestible at all. We're not evolutionarily prepared to handle them, we haven't eaten them as a staple for more than a few thousand years. That's a red flag.
> In my personal opinion you are the victim of an industry that wants to sell stuff like Gundrys supplements like „Lectin buster“ and the like.
I don't care about Gundry opinions or his supplements, he's no better than your nutritionfacts guy. Also, it's not like there isn't a whole industry behind selling the plant-based diet. A much bigger industry in fact, also fueled by ideology, ethics and virtue signaling. Red flags.
Bananas are high in potassium. And for a healthy individual fruit consumption has never been a problem. Please show me a study that fruit consumption is linked with higher rates of disease in healthy individuals.
Could you tell me why rice and beans are problematic? The studies I know are typically in favor of these kinds of food. Bean consumption is typically a good predictor for survival in elderly people. Is this some kind of carb-phobia?
In the context of T2 diabetes, white rice is a high GI food. Brown rice, legumes and grains contain plant toxins and antinutrients which are poorly researched, but at least anecdotally can cause all kinds of issues especially in sensitive people.
Also, in the west, a lot of the culture of preparing these foods (such as fermenting or vigorous soaking) is bypassed.
> Bean consumption is typically a good predictor for survival in elderly people.
That data suffers from the usual issues related to nutritional studies. Consuming beans in place of donuts may be a good predictor of health, that doesn't mean that beans themselves are healthy relative to other healthy foods.
Rice may be relatively high GI but it and similar foods do not usually give you type 2 diabetes. Junk food does. Rice is far cheaper than that. I don’t really think you can make the case that T2 diabetes is a poor man’s sickness.
White rice is linked with 10% increased chance of t2 with each serving per day(1).
I don't know if poor Americans are doomed to diabetes, but it is certainly orders of magnitude easier for the poor to eat poorly compared to the rich. Boosting morale in the poor is difficult without cheap fatty/sweet food and drugs, other poor people have nearly nothing else to get by excessive stressors except exercise. Running a perfectly clean life is admirable and very difficult with limited resources, social standing and spare time.
I‘m pretty sure that that‘s a reverse causation. People who eat very high amounts of rice are the poor who can not afford a better mix of food. They are then malnourished as rice is not providing all needed nutrients. Also being poor means often no health care. Controlling for these socioeconomic factors is very difficult.
Rice in itself is a healthy food, especially when it is brown. I read a study some years ago where a doctor even cured mild forms of diabetes with high loads of rice instead of junk food. Don‘t have a link handy though.
Americans are not doomed to diabetes. Diabetes T2 is one of the easiest diseases to prevent. Vegans for example have 60-70% less diabetes according to observational studies like Adventist Health II.
What's wrong with (intermittent) fasting? Of course if you don't raise your blood sugar as much by changing the diet, your HbA1c goes down by definition.
However, limiting your feeding window will naturally reduce the amount of time you spend with elevated blood sugar, without any calorie reduction. Again, that'll lower your HbA1c by definition.
Calorie reduction on the other hand can slow down metabolism
and cause a yoyo-effect[1].
The real issue is insulin resistance. Even if your blood sugar is "normal", it may take more insulin to achieve those levels. Elevated insulin levels are harmful by themselves. Also, if you go back to your old diet, you will still be insulin resistant.
Intermittent fasting can reduce visceral fat particularly in the liver and improve insulin sensitivity[2].
> New research suggests that intermittent fasting may raise insulin levels, damage pancreatic cells, and increase the amount of abdominal fat.
>
Specifically, the new study — led by Ana Cláudia Munhoz Bonassa, a researcher at the University of São Paulo in Brazil — suggests that intermittent fasting may impair the normal activity of the pancreas and the production of insulin, which may, in turn, raise the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Dr Nicola Guess, Lecturer in Nutritional Sciences at King’s College London, responding to that study:
> Firstly, it’s important to bear in mind there are important differences between rodents and humans – particularly with regard to diet. For example, a high fat diet causes insulin resistance in rats but it does not appear to in humans.
> The exact method is unclear from the abstract, but if the rats were fasted for one day, this is equivalent to an approximately 3 to 4 week fast in humans! So it’s not applicable to the 24-hour or 48-hour fasts practised by humans on common fasting diets.
(Note: the study made rats fast for 3 days)
Doesn't seem like the study I'd stop at when evaluating the benefits of intermittent fasting. For example, what about the promising ones that study actual humans and only see all markers improve?
I'd certainly stop going around spouting "fasting is bad" if this rat study is all you've got. Reminds me of that political cartoon of a soccer mom digging through a massive stack of studies, finally finding one that says vaccines might be bad, and going "Hah! Knew it!"
This is hard to put into the right words especially in a short way but
The entire "what should I eat" field is so full of bad science that I disbelieve everything. There is so much money to made here it's astonishing and it makes everyone's motives questionable.
I believe in a somewhat closer-to-the-nature approach without going stir crazy.
Moving from very processed foods to their less processed versions felt like a good move. I am playing this by the ear because as our conversation shows there is a study to counter every other study.
I personally believe that general food advice can't exist because surely our genetics play a role in how our body reacts to different foods -- foodstuff itself is very complex chemically, biologically.
I am very near 100% my attempts at intermittent fasting caused this blood sugar spike but since I do not have a lab result from before I can't prove it but I dislike coincidences like that.
As other have noted, someone caught on to the simplicity of RPC.
It always baffled me how so-called RESTful APIs became popular, despite virtually all of them being RPC APIs with a veneer of rather pointless HTTP semantics.
Virtually none of those APIs do anything to serve the intentions and goals behind REST[1]. Furthermore, many RESTful APIs end up being wrapped into language-specific clients anyway, because they have poor ergonomics in their raw state.
I consider RESTful APIs the most significant anti-pattern not widely recognized as such.
That said, for an API consumed by third-party developers, REST makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, which is like 98% of the APIs out there, RPC really is superior.
I've implemented a tool similar to what OP is building: Wildcard API [1]
> rather pointless HTTP semantics.
Agree. Actually, while implementing Wildcard API, I made sure to abstract away all HTTP semantics. With Wildcard, you don't think in terms of "HTTP verbs" but you think in terms of functions. Like you are naturally used to.
> It always baffled me how so-called RESTful APIs became popular
I believe REST became popular because it got lot's of exposure since all third-party APIs were using REST.
"(x + y) is an expression rather than a statement. The J programmer can embed (x + y) in a larger expression, perhaps a matrix multiplication (w +/ . * (x + y)) which adds the equivalent of three more nested loops, but is still a single expression. Expressions can be combined; statements cannot."
What about an expression like (x * x + y * y)? This would still be a single loop in C. Is J smart enough to figure that out, or will it turn that into three loops?
> Because for-profit healthcare is immoral, wasteful, and inevitably results in scenarios like the above.
There's no such thing as a healthcare system where nobody profits in some way. Lots of people working in "non-profit" organizations are still lining their pockets.
> A Bismarck system (nonprofit govt sponsored insurance companies that all charge the same and are taken by all doctors) would be fine too, but that's not on the table in the US
You must be alluding to the German system. We actually have two-class healthcare: Private insurance for those who are self-employed or who earn well enough to afford it and public insurance for everyone else (15% of income).
Those with private insurance get preferred treatment at almost any level, because while price controls exist for both public and private treatment, the amount of money doctors get for public patients is a joke.
It doesn't stop there of course, salaries for all healthcare workers are extremely low, as is the budget for cleaning personnel. Pretty disgusting, but also dangerous. Our rates of MRSA are extremely high, for instance.
Lots of German healthcare workers are moving to Switzerland (private system, but compulsory), being replaced by Eastern-Europeans. That doesn't bother me per se, but if we didn't have that kind of cheap labor, the system would just collapse.
In effect, I can tell you how to get "affordable" healthcare, whether it is public or private: Just pay your healthcare workers dramatically less money. Instate price controls. You'll have a lot of frustrated workers in a system constantly working at the brink of collapse, but it does work.
"Bismarck" is a class of healthcare systems, referring to employer/employee financed insurance-based healthcare. It is used in Germany, the Nederlands, and Switzerland I think. Other models are Beveridge (like the UK) and National Insurance like Canada.
The difference in payment between US and European health care workers isn't large enough to make much of a dent in US healthcare expenses. The big sources of costs is the US massive bureaucracy dealing with bills, insurance and negotiation, as well as the medical inefficiency and overprovision inherent in the system. Also high drug prices.
For example, a US medical doctor makes about 100 000 $ more than the European average, although a few countries pays doctors more. There are about 1 million doctors working in the US. So thats 100 billion. US overspending is about 1 500 - 1 800 billion.
> It is used in Germany, the Nederlands, and Switzerland I think.
Germany today has a public/private mixture, Switzerland and Netherlands is fully private. I'm making this distinction because private profits do exist in these system, while the original comment I replied to lamented them.
> The difference in payment between US and European health care workers isn't large enough to make much of a dent in US healthcare expenses. The big sources of costs is the US massive bureaucracy dealing with bills, insurance and negotiation, as well as the medical inefficiency and overprovision inherent in the system. Also high drug prices.
Are you sure about this? Last time I looked it up, I came to a different conclusion: Administrative overhead (~8%) is neither a huge part of costs, nor is it massively different than in Europe. Drugs prices also only account for 10%.
Salaries for workers on the other hand are a significant chunk, and those are easily double than those in Germany in most cases. Note that I'm talking about all salaries, doctors, nurses, clerks, cleaners...
I agree with the overprovisioning being much costlier, but those are due to legal liabilities being more expensive in the US in general. In Germany, even if you win a malpractice suit, you get a pittance.
> There are about 1 million doctors working in the US. So thats 100 billion. US overspending is about 1 500 - 1 800 billion.
Again, this disregards the vast majority of worker salaries involved.
Private insurance in those countries works because those markets are highly regulated, and they don't have a corporate culture of trying to rip off people as much as they can.
I guess the point is: No matter whether you are privately or publicly insured in Germany, a transport in an ambulance, an emergency helicopter ride, a long-winded illness like cancer, or any other medical treatment won't ruin you financially. The same goes for most (all?) of Europe.
Doesn't insurance in the US cover these cases? I think it ultimately comes down to whether people can afford healthcare or not. For instance, healthcare costs are covered with unemployment benefits in Germany.
If you don't have insurance in Germany you'll have to pay for that yourself as well. That's rare, but it happens especially with the precariously self-employed.
The issue with the US system is that you can't have it be both non-compulsory but also that coverage must be offered to everyone, no matter their state of health. Then you'll have a few healthy people pay huge premiums to finance treatment for those who never bought insurance until they're sick.
It is my understanding that a compulsory purchase (as in Switzerland) would be unconstitutional, so I guess "Medicare for all" in the form of a tax would actually be the next best thing. Just keep in mind that with US levels of healthcare salaries, that wouldn't come cheap.
> If you don't have insurance in Germany you'll have to pay for that yourself as well. That's rare, but it happens especially with the precariously self-employed.
The difference is GKV being the default, and opting out of that kind of hard. You have to earn €5,062+ per month, for a start [0]. And the step is intentionally hard to reverse. I consider that a decent compromise. At that point people have to actively shoot them self in the foot, and I've little pity for those.
If you didn't opt out, thus are still under the GKV, the system will cover emergency services. Even if you haven't payed (yet).
> The difference is GKV being the default, and opting out of that kind of hard.
It's not hard at all, just go self-employed and you have the option.
> And the step is intentionally hard to reverse.
Yes, so that people towards the end of their lives don't profit from a system they never paid into. You're stuck with expensive private insurance for the rest of your life. In the US however, you would qualify for Medicaid.
> At that point people have to actively shoot them self in the foot, and I've little pity for those.
It's actually not that uncommon for people to fall into the trap of working self-employed for most of their lives, then retiring poor because they never paid into the pension system and their private insurance costs them over 500€/month.
Compulsory purchases are constitutional, as long as Congress can reasonably invoke its taxation power in application of the penalty. Americans are already compelled to buy health insurance, but as of the 2017 Republican tax bill, the penalty for not doing so is $0.
Then it's not a compulsory purchase, it's a tax. The money doesn't go to the insurer. Even before the penalty was $0, it was too low to be effective.
In Switzerland, it is compulsory to purchase insurance, there's a basic plan that all insurers must offer, and if cost exceeds a certain fraction of the income, the state chips in.
You also probably get way too much sugar from sugary fruits which you overindulge in because your diet otherwise is so "healthy". Instead of soft drinks you have fruit juices, which have effectively the same amount of sugar. Again, just a guess.
You probably got your nutrition advice from ideologically based publications, or you're just "winging it" based on what makes sense to you, in which case you're likely going to be wrong as well.