How important is nutrition by itself?

Factual Questions
1

To clarify this question, let’s say that your diet is poor, mostly junk food, but your caloric intake is sufficient and you are at a healthy weight and get a lot of physical activity and have no other common risk factors like smoking. What health consequences are likely, if any?

I ask because every single thing I’ve ever read about the relationship between diet and health seems to boil down to two problems: either you get obese, which causes problems, or you’re not getting enough calories, in which case you’re severely malnourished. I’ve never heard of a health consequence of poor diet where obesity wasn’t the key factor. It seems to go in steps: poor diet, then obesity, then oh shit. Is obesity a warning sign that things are starting to get bad, or can you have serious problems even while your weight is healthy?

2

eating 2000 calories per day of just king dongs, i think you would find yourself heavily vitamin deficient among other deficiencies.

Your body has it’s own internal menu it needs that has nothing to do with calories, calories are just energy, your body also has a large chemical requirement to fund its laboratories.

3

Lack of essential nutrients and minerals can be a real problem. If you eat nothing by potato chips and drink nothing but sodas your body won’t have what it needs to function properly. It won’t happen overnight, but sooner or later you’ll pay a price for bad eating habits.

4

Vitamin deficiencies. Mineral deficiencies.

Some of these will kill you. The ones that don’t may make you wish they did, you’ll be so miserable. Any of them are possible given a sufficiently imbalanced diet, even if calorically sufficient.

5

Yet vitamin deficiencies are very rare, and mostly related to not enough food. How frequently does someone actually get a vitamin deficiency when they are consuming enough food?

When I refer to junk food diets, I’m not referring to such an extreme case of only chips and soda. Most people who prefer junk food will eat things like pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, cookies, chips, chicken, and usually find a few other foods that are actually healthy that they like as if by accident, like almonds. They may also eat sugary breakfast foods which are fortified with lots of vitamins and minerals.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that a person has an unhealthy diet high in bad fats and sugars but which also has enough nutrition to avoid vitamin deficiencies(although vitamin intake levels are still suboptimal).

6

If the diet is mostly junk food then your caloric intake is likely elevated far above your body’s needs.

A person who habitually sucks up the sugared foods, eats meats with a batter made from wheat flour, fried in polyunsaturated vegetable oils, just from those facts is, in fact very unhealthy already–either diabetic, pre-diabetic, compromised metabolically, or worse.

It matters not if the signs are there. The proof is in a body fed after that fashion.

How do you know? That’s the inevitable question.

Personal anecdote

On March 16, 2016, my weight was 93 kg (206 lb.), BMI of very near 30. I was doggone miserable all the time, was 64 years old, and just got sick of being fat and slow and looking stupid.

March 16, 2016, was the day I took radical steps to change my eating lifestyle, and with it my life.

Three things were forbidden:
–Sugars and sugar alcohols
–Starches of any sort
–Polyunsaturated vegetable oils

That’s it.

My weight this morning was 58.5 kg (129 lb.). That puts BMI at very close to 20. The weight loss was steady until about November, when I hit in the 60 kg (140 lb.) mark. Excepting the expected daily variation (never more than .6 kg (1.5 lb.) the weight fell off slowly and steadily, and now remains very close to the 60 kg (132 lb.) line.

I said no starch, and I meant it. Except a few beers most night (never more than 3 to 3.5). After about a month eating this way I found I couldn’t pack away 5-6 470 ml (16 oz.) beers. In the first place I was completely drunk (knee-crawlin’ and close to commode-huggin’) when I opened the third one. In the second place I just didn’t want any more. In fact my stomach had shrunk to the point I could not accommodate more than that.

Recommendation: You cannot outrun your fork!

7

Now that’s quite true. I lived on a junk food diet for most of my life, and when I was young, it didn’t matter. I was healthy, I was skinny, I was fit. I was good at athletics and lettered in baseball, football, and basketball. I was one of the best long distance runners in my school.

Then at 30 I hit 200 pounds and realized I was starting to get into trouble. At 43 I have not had the dramatic results you’ve had, because I still love my fatty foods. I just eat less of them and more healthy stuff. So my weight has stabilized at around 200 for the past 13 years.

But that still means that obesity comes before health problems in the vast, vast majority of cases. Everything I’ve read about nutrition from non-faddish sources places caloric restriction above all else. If you maintain a healthy weight, you’ll probably be healthy, assuming you aren’t doing it through eating disorders.

The main reason I brought this up was the debate over nutritional standards in school lunches. It seems to me that it’s more important to fuel kids than to restrict their calories. Yes, childhood obesity is up, but it’s not school lunches that are causing that, it’s the bag of chips and box of cookies they eat at home while watching TV. I question the amount of harm a hamburger and fries for school lunch is going to do a kid who gets lots of physical activity.

8

I didn’t mean to imply that I restrict fats (saturated fats) in any way. My food intake is loaded with good fats:
–Lard (rendered hog fat)
–Tallow (rendered beef fat)
–Butter
–Avocado Oil
–Walnut Oil
–Coconut Oil

Furthermore, I fry a lot of food with a breading made from a small mixture of:
–Coconut Flour
–Almond Flour
–Wheat Bran Meal
–Grated Parmesan or Romano cheese mixed with sesame seed (the kitchen will stink!)

With the other unbreakable rules, also follow moderation in protein intake.

Vegetables, sure! Just not poison vegetables; instead:
–Leafy greens of every variety
–Green and yellow vegetables
–Broccoli
–Brussels sproute
–Cauliflower
–Parsnips
–Radishes, cucumbers, other salad garnishes

You literally cannot eat enough of the vegetables I use to cause an unhealthy condition.

The motto is High Fat, Low, Zero, or Minimal Carbohydrate, Moderate Protein

And remember that all sugars are carbohydrates! The sugar alcohols (mannitol, sorbitol, xylitol, etc.) are practically as bad as refined white cane sugar.

One should work very hard toward making 50 g of carbohydrates, 20 g of protein, and unlimited fats as the intake goals.

It’s up to you.

9

Macronutrients are still nutrients. Eating enough protein and fats (or just calories in general from carbs or otherwise) is just as important as getting enough vitamins. So I nitpick the use of the word “nutrition” to exclusively mean micronutrients.

But dude, haven’t you heard of scurvy, goiter, beri-beri? Many people of otherwise “healthy” weight died or were made miserable from lack of micronutrients prior to the early-to-mid 1900s. “Fortifying” foods with vitamins and minerals was one of the huge medical breakthroughs of the 20th Century.

10

There was a college kid who died of scurvy recently because he skipped a month of school to play World of Warcraft, and ate nothing but Domino’s pizza and Mountan Dew in his dorm for that entire month (plus probably it was a major component of his diet before that, too).

Okay, I went to find a cite, and came upon this, from Snopes, saying it is an urban legend. I’ll go ahead and hit “post” anyway, so that others can learn from my mistakes.

11

in order for a life form to continue its existence, only 2 processes are required.
1 receive nutritious food.
2 remove metabolic waste.

no nutritious food intake >> death.
no metabolic waste removal >> death

junk food is any food high in calories and low in nutritive properties.
junk food is mostly composed of sugar, salt, vegetable oil, vegetable fiber.
this can describe basically all processed food.

beyond a very small amount (1 teaspoon), sugar, salt, and vegetable oil are actually toxic to the body.
junk food is equivalent to eating greasy cardboard that had a coating of salt and sugar on it.

junk food >> fat people = nutrient deficiency + toxic overload >> disease >> death.
junk food = fake food = 90% of metabolic waste. that is right your eating sh*t.
junk food = slow death.

you want to live well? eat real nutritious food.
many people are surprised (when they start eating real nutritious food) at how little they need to eat.

I can go 10 hours on 3 glasses (16oz) of carrot juice.
I then eat 1 or 2 small meals a day. I still weigh 180 lbs at 5’10", I do not exercise.

12

I was under the impression that high salt intake is a risk factor for high blood pressure and geart disease even for people who aren’t overweight.

13

For the species rather than the individual - not very ( ETA: well, over a certain minimum threshold of course ). Once you have reproduced and lived long enough to raise the next generation to sexual maturity, Mother Nature is largely done with you. Mass quantities of carbohydrates are a very effective way of getting you to 35-40.

For the individual it is huge, because for some twisted reason folks seem to enjoy living past 40 ;).

14

I can’t recall the English term for it at the moment, but the problem of “people eating too much cheap/ junk food without enough healthy food” has been known as a big problem for charities / groups that work with poor people for decades (aside from Beri-Beri, which was discovered about a 100 years ago, when peeled rice replaced unpeeled rice, and people got sick from lack of Niacin).

In 3rd world countries, people can afford first of all staple foods - the typical cup of rice a day. More money, for vegetable or fish gravy to add, is not there. With a bit more money, people eat 2 cups of rice rather than 1 cup and veggies, so that they feel full.

In western world, poor people find that cheap food like hot dogs is cheaper than veggies (plus the problem of preparation) so they gain weight from too many calories yet lack nutrients and get sick. Poor people die statistically 5 to 10 years earlier than middle-class people; some of that is stress, which negativly impacts health, but some of it is also bad nutrition.

15

I’m sure you can provide a cite for this.

Right?
mmm

16

I can go 10 hours on absolutely nothing. This sentence is meaningless, like the other parts of your post that aren’t just flat out wrong.

17

[QUOTE=Crickets;]
Chirp…chirp…chirp
[/QUOTE]

I guess not.
mmm