I must say I’m quite skeptical that a balanced diet is really all that important, so long as you get yer calories and yer vitamins. Am I really wrong?
There are substances other than calories and vitamins that seem to be good for us, and it’s very likely that we don’t know about all of them. Stick to what we know is good and you may find you’ve been missing out on something that you’d rather not.
Honestly, I don’t think it makes a huge difference. I switched from a diet full of fast food, junk food and beer last year to a diet consisting mainly of whole grains, lean meat, and lots of fruit and veggies and I don’t feel any different except I don’t really get afternoon sleepiness anymore. Maybe it has a larger impact in the long term?
But now that it’s been so long since I’ve eaten fast food, I don’t have any desire for it anymore. Same with beer, although I’ll have a few drinks once or twice a month.
Yes. Calories are found in fats and proteins and carbohydrates, as well as some other forms like sugar alcohols. A calorie is just a measure of energy. It doesn’t deal with health issues at all.
The balances and kinds of fats and proteins and carbohydrates are known to be important factors in health and nutrition. There are also minerals as well as vitamins that are critical. And as ultrafilter says, we keep learning more about micronutrients that appear to be hugely valuable, and that we know are in fresh foods but we don’t know enough about yet to put into pill form.
A good balanced diet - plus exercise - is the way to health. Any other path is riskier. There is no way to predict for any individual what risks you will run in the future the farther you get from that basic path, but there is equally no question that the risks are there.
Yes. Please do some basic reading on the topic before demanding refutations to your speculation.
Stranger
Give it a chance, if you are truly eating right, and balanced you will see a change. HOwever, if you are sabotaging it someway, then all the dieting in the world won’t help.
I believe whole heartedly that a balanced diet helps tremendously. I had attention deficite disorder, I have since I was a teenager. I got off med in my twenties and switched to a complete balenced diet, it had helped immensly and that combined with a work out regime makes for a healthier me.
Oh and I second what **Stranger ** said.
Tell you what - Go eat nothing except three sticks of butter (approximately 2200 calories) and a one-a-day vitamin for a week and let us know how you’re doing.
By your logic, you’ll be just fine as you’ll have all your calories and vitamins.
I understand where you’re coming from, but if I was going to do research myself I wouldn’t use the straight dope.
As for gotpasswords, I like pleasant food too much, so can’t do that.
A balanced diet provides such things as essential amino acids and essential fatty acids. Choose a diet which lacks one or more of these things and stay on it too long, and one’s health will suffer in a significant way. If the proper proteins and lipids cannot be built to make new cells, due to lack of key construction elements, said new cells will not function properly.
I’d worry about missing those things a lot more than about missing out on poorly defined ‘micronutrients’.
So, a handful of sites proclaim the virtue of eating a “balanced” diet.
Please provide complementary cites/sites with evidence that eating a “balanced” diet translates into better health and/or longevity (let’s not get into tooth decay from simple sugars or fibre for “regularity”).
I’ll go first.
While not literally testing a “balanced” diet, the diet in the following three randomized control trials all included high fibre, low fat, high vegetables, and high fruit - so approaching, if not identical to, what I think a reasonable person would call “balanced”:
Well, there’s this, which says that the Nurses Study (with 110,000 participants versus the 845 in the studies cited above) did, in fact, show that
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fruits.html
The article, which summarizes data from a number of large studies, also says that diets rich in fruits and vegetables can lower cholesterol and may be preventative for some, if not all, cancers.
You’ll notice that the motto below the banner says “Fighting Ignorance Since 1973,” not “Stalking Ignorance Through The Valley Of The Benighted, Over The River Of Witlessness, And Into The Desert Of Obtusity In Order To Chase It Down And Strangle It Barehanded.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake, this is fundamental nutritional science. Next you’ll be asking me to cite the color of a blue sky. If you can’t be bothered to obtain a minimal layman’s education on nutrition, nothing I can provide to you will be of any use. Eating a non-balanced diet has almost immediate detrimental effects in terms of basic health in comparison to eating a diet that has the appropriate balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, with the recommented complement of minerals and vitamins.
And citing a handful of studies which fail to find a statistical link between a recommended diet and a specific chronic ailment or condition is a witless attempt at diversion. It is almost universally recognized that many cancers have a strong genetic component which is often more significant than normal environmental factors, and in regard to the third citation, that a late term dietary “intervention” has little impact on the development of chronic disorders.
I don’t know if your arguing just to debate, or arguing out of blind ignorance, but this claim is absurd to an extreme. You can live on just calories (and a few proteins) but you’re certainly going to be healthier and better fit on a balanced diet, period.
Stranger
I’ll take an RCT with 800 participants versus a prospective cohort design anytime.
You do know that the same Nurses Study showed that postmenopausal estrogen use was associated with a 50 percent reduction in CV mortality :eek: ? And, that users of high dose vitamin E had a similar benefit :eek: ?*
- for those not in the know, subsequent randomized controlled trials showed that estrogen use was downright detrimental and vitamin E neutral.
And now they’re saying that limited estrogen use might be beneficial after all. I think the estrogen debate will go on for a while yet.
Ah, I see. Who needs evidence when you say so.
Of course, the evidence that I cite is “a witless attempt at diversion”. It is a shame that the NHLBI didn’t consult with you before shelling out their $100 million (not to mention its good name) on such “witless diversions”.
It’s not that I say so. It’s that any basic textbook on nutritional biochemistry will say so, in unambiguous terms, and will describe the mechanics of the digestive and respiration cycles in detail. If it is your wish to remain ignorant of decades of research into the science of human biochemistry that’s your business, but don’t go screaming foul because I say that I don’t need to prove that the Earth is round.
Great, you present three studies of a group of “postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years” which conclude that they don’t see any specific benefit from said diet in reduction of colorectal cancer, invasive breast cancer, or cardiovascular disease, and conclude that a balanced diet has no health benefit to anyone of any age. Inductive fallacy much?
Stranger
While I agree that generally speaking, a “balanced” diet is better than one of cheetos and pepsi, I think our bodies are really remarkable machines in their adaptability to just about anything we try to fuel them with. And how “balanced” is “balanced”? There are hundreds of thousands of people who eat barely more than a bowl of rice a day and live into old age. I think most of us would agree that a diet of a rainbow of veggies and whole grains and low-fat fish is going to yield better results, on average, than a diet of Big Macs and french fries. But where is the limit? Is one Big Mac a year a death sentence? How 'bout one a month? One a week?
There are very few of us who can commit and stay sane on an optimal macrobiotic whole foods Mediterranean clone diet. The key to all this research, IMHO, is to find out exactly how “bad” we can be to our bodies before they rebel. Or, conversely, how many pounds of veggies I need to consume in a month before any more is just pointless. Is there a point of diminishing returns? If I consume too many calories in brown rice and broccoli, it will still end up as fat.
I think that both KarlGauss and Stranger are both right.
From a best guess scenario, I think that it would be very, very unwise for anyone to start knawing on a couple of sticks of butter and a multi-vitamin every day so that a person got every known and defined required nutrient (I’m including things like essential amino acids and fats in this group) with the expectation that they wouldn’t feel any adverse effects. First off, given the enormous complexity of the human body, there probably are essentials nutrients that we still don’t know about.
That said, a lot of the diet advice that “governement scientists” and other people that ought to know has a shockingly weak hard-science basis. For example, people that have pedaled various versions of the food pyramid for decades have often claimed that a high-carbohydrate, moderate protein, and extremely low fat diet was the route to thinness and health. People pushing things like the Atkins diet were ruled apostates with no “supporting science” when in reality double blind, placebo controlled, randomized trials about how people should eat are impossible to conduct. The next best thing, large randomized trials are extremely difficult to conduct because you aren’t just trying to get people to pop a pill, you’re attempting to change their diet.
And when people actually managed to conduct a decent trial of such, the results seem to suggest that the Atkins diet was inappropriately maligned by the nutrition establishment.
And I think that KarlGauss is right to maintain a degree of skepticism about all of the things thrown out there by such people. At least somebody should keep asking skeptical questions along those lines.
The real answer the the OP’s question is that we have some educated guesses, but we really don’t know. I don’t think that it would be ethical to run a randomized experiment where some people ate a “balanced diet” and the other people got the butter-sticks, so we’re unlikely to ever have a truly solid answer to the question. That said, I’m glad to hear that the question is a hypothetical one for your own sake.
Inuit/Eskimos lived for centuries on almost 100% meat. Course they do eat parts that most folks won’t. And I’m not sure what thier life expectancy was.
Brian