<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>tolmasky</author><text>This is a mischaracterization of the past 30 years.  In the 1980s, American&amp;#x27;s really were told to drastically reduce their fat intake due to a misunderstanding of LDL. It remains recommended to only be 10% of your daily intake of calories -- a statement of the &lt;i&gt;percentage of calories&lt;/i&gt; you should eat as fat, not a statement about excess calories, which can be regarded as bad in general regardless of their source. If you look at what took place in the following 30 years since this stance, fat intake has in fact been reduced quite considerably in the United States, yet heart disease has &lt;i&gt;increased&lt;/i&gt;. This has nothing to do with worshiping &amp;quot;ancient wisdom&amp;quot;, its simply identifying an error science made (which it is allowed to do), and rectifying it without historical revisionism.</text><parent_chain><item><author>drzaiusapelord</author><text>These are pretty disingenuous, uncited, and generalized examples. For example, fat has always been fine, excess calories are not. That leads to fatty build-up that does cause serious health issues. The problem is that casuals see &amp;#x27;fat&amp;#x27; and equate it with body fat, instead of being focused on what science has been saying saying all along: eat that calories you need and not past that as you&amp;#x27;ll gain weight.  Marketers have used this confuse to sell products, &amp;quot;low fat&amp;quot; craze, but that has never been the staple of nutritional understanding.&lt;p&gt;Lets also remember even the ones that the &amp;quot;ancients&amp;quot; got right, they got millions wrong, most of which were seriously dangerous. The modern person&amp;#x27;s appeal to the past is insane to me. I think if you could travel back in time to live in one of those cultures you value so much, you&amp;#x27;d see nothing but sickness, death, and other horrible things that would be trivially treated in post-enlightenment societies.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, bullshit like &amp;#x27;ancient wisdom&amp;#x27; has become popular of late thus parents not vaccinating their children, a return to extreme&amp;#x2F;fundamentalist religiosity, and dangerous cargo cult-like beliefs like treating cancer with green tea.</text></item><item><author>SoftwareMaven</author><text>Take a look at what Weston Price learned as he traveled around healthy cultures. I&amp;#x27;m certainly not implying &amp;quot;everything old is good&amp;quot;, but we have adopted an attitude of &amp;quot;they were all stupid&amp;quot;, which isn&amp;#x27;t true.  Let&amp;#x27;s take a look:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Wisdom: Fat is a good energy source.
  &amp;quot;Science&amp;quot;: Fat makes you fat and clogs your arteries.
  Now: Fat is important for regulating satiety and nervous system health.

  Wisdom: Simple carbs and sugar should be very limited.
  &amp;quot;Science&amp;quot;: You can eat as much as you want without any problems.
  Now: High glucose and fructose loads are significant players in NAFLD, diabetes, heart disease and dimentia.

  Wisdom: Fermented foods like keifer, sauerkraut, and miso are important parts of the diet.
  &amp;quot;Science&amp;quot;: Kill all the bugz!
  Now: Gut biome health may be a significant factor in many physical and mental health problems.

  Wisdom: Regular periods of fasting are good for mind and body.
  &amp;quot;Science&amp;quot;: You should eat 6 small meals every day to keep blood sugar even.
  Now: See TFA.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I&amp;#x27;m sure I could keep going...</text></item><item><author>thenmar</author><text>Evidence of fasting having value is interesting, but I wouldn&amp;#x27;t put much stock in the &amp;quot;wisdom of the ancestors&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>SoftwareMaven</author><text>There is a lot of evidence beginning to emerge on the value of fasting. This was once encoded in culture as almost every culture had some concept of fasting. We lost so much knowledge when we let nutrition &amp;quot;science&amp;quot;[1] completely overwhelm the wisdom of our ancestors.&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, I found fasting became much easier after I changed my diet to be ketogenic. With a metabolism primed for burning fat for energy and not subject to a blood sugar roller coaster, going a couple days without food is more of a mental challenge than physical hunger.&lt;p&gt;1. We&amp;#x27;ve acted like nutrition can give the same cut and dry answers that physics has, and the health of our population shows how well that has worked. Worse, nutrition seems to be driven by egos and media in a way that is nothing short of frightening.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system</title><url>http://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regeneration-of-damaged-old-immune-system/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>SoftwareMaven</author><text>There is more involved than just calories. It&amp;#x27;s surprising that this myth continues to hold, when we understand how differently macronutrients are treated in the body. Calories are a second-order effect: you don&amp;#x27;t gain weight because you eat too many calories, your body demands more calories because it is hormonally&amp;#x2F;nutritionally imbalanced and, therefore, shunting energy into fat cells instead of allowing it to be used for energy. And this doesn&amp;#x27;t get into the fact that a high percentage of chronically ill patients (CVD, diabetes, dimentia) are thin.&lt;p&gt;Having dealt with being overweight most of my life, I can&amp;#x27;t help but believe the reason the myth holds on is because it is a way to justify judging fat people as less than skinny people since they just &amp;quot;can&amp;#x27;t control themselves&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Eat a better macronutrient ratio, and the body responds positively, even for isocaloric diets, whether for weight loss[1] or for maintenance[2]. But, really, isocoloric doesn&amp;#x27;t mater; what matters is &lt;i&gt;ad libitum&lt;/i&gt; eating. Ironically, every study that I&amp;#x27;ve read that compares low carb diets against low fat diets allows &lt;i&gt;ad libitum&lt;/i&gt; eating for the low carb but restricts caloric intake for the low fat. Why is that? Even with that constraint, the low carb diets win[3].&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2014/04/30/ajcn.113.081216.short&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ajcn.nutrition.org&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;early&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;ajcn.113....&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22735432&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pubmed&amp;#x2F;22735432&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nutrition.stanford.edu/documents/AZ_abstract.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nutrition.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;AZ_abstract.pdf&lt;/a&gt; (I have a lot of respect for Christopher Gardner. He&amp;#x27;s a vegetarian who started this study because he believed a vegetarian diet would trounce other diets. It didn&amp;#x27;t, but he didn&amp;#x27;t try to game the results. That&amp;#x27;s an unfortunately rare behavior in nutrition research where so many people seem to be more concerned with proving their idea correct than finding the truth.)</text><parent_chain><item><author>drzaiusapelord</author><text>These are pretty disingenuous, uncited, and generalized examples. For example, fat has always been fine, excess calories are not. That leads to fatty build-up that does cause serious health issues. The problem is that casuals see &amp;#x27;fat&amp;#x27; and equate it with body fat, instead of being focused on what science has been saying saying all along: eat that calories you need and not past that as you&amp;#x27;ll gain weight.  Marketers have used this confuse to sell products, &amp;quot;low fat&amp;quot; craze, but that has never been the staple of nutritional understanding.&lt;p&gt;Lets also remember even the ones that the &amp;quot;ancients&amp;quot; got right, they got millions wrong, most of which were seriously dangerous. The modern person&amp;#x27;s appeal to the past is insane to me. I think if you could travel back in time to live in one of those cultures you value so much, you&amp;#x27;d see nothing but sickness, death, and other horrible things that would be trivially treated in post-enlightenment societies.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, bullshit like &amp;#x27;ancient wisdom&amp;#x27; has become popular of late thus parents not vaccinating their children, a return to extreme&amp;#x2F;fundamentalist religiosity, and dangerous cargo cult-like beliefs like treating cancer with green tea.</text></item><item><author>SoftwareMaven</author><text>Take a look at what Weston Price learned as he traveled around healthy cultures. I&amp;#x27;m certainly not implying &amp;quot;everything old is good&amp;quot;, but we have adopted an attitude of &amp;quot;they were all stupid&amp;quot;, which isn&amp;#x27;t true.  Let&amp;#x27;s take a look:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Wisdom: Fat is a good energy source.
  &amp;quot;Science&amp;quot;: Fat makes you fat and clogs your arteries.
  Now: Fat is important for regulating satiety and nervous system health.

  Wisdom: Simple carbs and sugar should be very limited.
  &amp;quot;Science&amp;quot;: You can eat as much as you want without any problems.
  Now: High glucose and fructose loads are significant players in NAFLD, diabetes, heart disease and dimentia.

  Wisdom: Fermented foods like keifer, sauerkraut, and miso are important parts of the diet.
  &amp;quot;Science&amp;quot;: Kill all the bugz!
  Now: Gut biome health may be a significant factor in many physical and mental health problems.

  Wisdom: Regular periods of fasting are good for mind and body.
  &amp;quot;Science&amp;quot;: You should eat 6 small meals every day to keep blood sugar even.
  Now: See TFA.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I&amp;#x27;m sure I could keep going...</text></item><item><author>thenmar</author><text>Evidence of fasting having value is interesting, but I wouldn&amp;#x27;t put much stock in the &amp;quot;wisdom of the ancestors&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>SoftwareMaven</author><text>There is a lot of evidence beginning to emerge on the value of fasting. This was once encoded in culture as almost every culture had some concept of fasting. We lost so much knowledge when we let nutrition &amp;quot;science&amp;quot;[1] completely overwhelm the wisdom of our ancestors.&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, I found fasting became much easier after I changed my diet to be ketogenic. With a metabolism primed for burning fat for energy and not subject to a blood sugar roller coaster, going a couple days without food is more of a mental challenge than physical hunger.&lt;p&gt;1. We&amp;#x27;ve acted like nutrition can give the same cut and dry answers that physics has, and the health of our population shows how well that has worked. Worse, nutrition seems to be driven by egos and media in a way that is nothing short of frightening.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system</title><url>http://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regeneration-of-damaged-old-immune-system/</url></story>