Neither poster makes convincing arguments; you can find anecdotal reports of nearly any diet producing seemingly miraculous results, but any consideration of one's eating patterns should be based off peer-reviewed research.
Even the peer-reviewed research is mostly junk observational studies that are distorted by the healthy subject effect and other uncontrolled variables. That is not a sound basis for making personal dietary decisions.
A better approach for most people is to conduct personal n=1 experiments and just see empirically what works best for you in terms of subjective feelings and objective performance metrics.
This is unfortunately the status quo of nutrition research; A long-term RCT is the "gold standard", but it is exceedingly difficult to recruit subjects and ensure their compliance over meaningful periods of time. Which is part of why constant flip-flopping about whether something is healthy or not is almost a trope in journalism. Nonetheless, a few principles have been well established: vegetables are good, fruit is (mostly) good, refined grains and free sugars are bad.
The issue with personal experiments is often that they are just as biased and cannot be conducted over meaningful time-scales. As an anecdote to illustrate this, I am significantly more productive and energetic when consuming a single sugary, chocolately coffee, but it would be foolish to conclude over such a short period of time that my personally ideal diet should include sugary coffee. I'm not deluded that this is a healthy practice, however; free sugars, fructose in particular, are demonstrably a major factor in the pathogenesis of lifestyle-related diseases.
> vegetables are good, fruit is (mostly) good, refined grains and free sugars are bad
Even those are not really absolutes, because a diet with only those "good" elements will still be worse than a mix including animal proteins. Also, some vegetables are simply bad in excessive quantities (mushrooms, potatoes, etc).
The problem we typically have is just over-abundance of everything in our diets. Too much meat is bad, too much vegetables are bad, too much fruit is bad, too much fish is bad, too much dairy is bad. And that's because our bodies evolved to make the most of anything they could digest, since the normal state was scarcity and every little bit helped with survival. Now these finely-tuned "recycling systems" are routinely oversupplied in ways they were not meant to be, and they can't help themselves but overproduce nutrients of all sorts, with all sorts of unpredictable results.
We are like ports where ships continue to unload containers at excessive rates. Some of those containers will end up polluting the area, some will just accumulate into horrible mountains, the motorways will be clogged by a continuous stream of lorries, etc etc etc. Some of those boxes will contain life-saving medicines and some will contain pointless junk, but that's not the actual problem - if you reduce the rate of shipping, then all containers will happily go where they have to go and be dealt with as they "deserve".
We were probably not built to have three meals every day.
Yes it should. And there is a lot of it linking a range of chronic disorders with nutrition. However not everyone has the time and perhaps the background to sift through and see what is significant. On the numerous diets on offer, my impression is that only the Mediterrean Diet has received solid backing from evidence-based peer-reviewed studies.
Part of the issue is that the so-called "Standard American Diet" is so bad in the first place that any deviation from it can produce encouraging results.
I tend to agree, however, that a Mediterrean-patterned diet is definitely in the right direction based upon the weight of nutrition literature.
I agree, but find it hard to balance a medium-to-high amount of seafood in the diet with the prevalence of dangerous levels of heavy metals found in fish
In general smaller fish that are harvested at younger ages have lower heavy metal levels. They haven't had as much time to accumulate toxins. Sardines are usually a good option.
Science is overwhelming on the side of whole-food, plant-based diets as the better choice for long-term health. This is covered in books like "How Not to Die" and "Own Your Health".
The study linked here agrees-- more fruits and vegetables is correlated with lower dementia.
Sincerely try it and see how it makes you feel, then decide. Make an effort for 3-4 weeks, making sure to get enough calories (https://cronometer.com/ is a good resource) and have support from your friends and family. I think only first-hand experience could really convince anyone.
Just be aware that nutritional deficiencies can take months or in some cases years to manifest. Just because you feel better in the short term does not mean it’s a long term solution.
There’s a couple of personal experiences where I switched to a vegan diet and felt great for the first two months or so but other health/performance factors in the longer-term caused me to deviate away from it.
You can measure athletic performance. Check your 1RM for the standard lifts, or VO2 Max for running, or whatever performance metric aligns best to your favorite sport.
A normal blood panel is a good place to start. For me, lipids and liver function tests are what I track. But insulin sensitivity is a good one too. All depends on your personal risk factors
