> Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner, eating right, exercise etc are boring and don't make VCs rich.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I see you implying something like "why do medicine, if we could eat less 'junk food', work less and smile more instead".
> curing Rickets and Scurvy by identifying the nutritional deficiencies behind then us totally not an advance in medicine
That's indeed the domain of medicine. Which will tell you, "you need more nutrient $X in your diet" as a solution to the problem, instead of "eat healthier" (for values of 'healthier' determined by current fitness fashion).
That sounds just really arbitrarily personally hostile towards me.
I have gone through multiple blogs in which I have tried to lay out specific nutritional recommendations for people with CF. The few people who have tried it have gotten results.
I have done everything within my own power to try to elucidate specifics no different from the examples of Rickets and Scurvy being caused by nutritional deficiencies. But it does not get taken seriously and I can find no path forward for that, and not due to lack of trying. One woman said she would write a paper with me on the subject, then arbitrarily changed her mind. Her son died of CF. She was a smoker. I don't think she really wants to admit that her smoking helped kill him. She wants to find a pill that makes everything OK and absolves whatever guilt she carries.
The CF community is not interested in what I am doing. So there probably is no path forward here. I fully expect to die in obscurity having never accomplished anything at all with my life.
But this arbitrary validation of nutrition as medicine, unless I am doing it and then it is somehow hokum, is just one of the craziest things I have ever seen on HN.
Yeah, nutrition as in "you need more vitamin C, or else scurvy", not as in "eat salads, drink no coffee, consume only 'natural', no processed".
Anyway, you're talking it personally way beyond what was intended. Nobody is discounting your opinions because you're you, or because you're a woman (in fact, people were probably positively biased towards them by the virtue of your karma score on the previous HN account, before you ditched it). You started your subthread here with, "Color me skeptical", towards the outcome of sponsoring biomedical R&D, based on your experience with one form of one disease that (you think) you figured out how to manage with healthy lifestyle. But there are plenty other forms of that disease, and plenty other diseases, and you can't cure them all by healthy lifestyle - and most importantly, people are not living healthy lifestyles for some reasons - reasons that are fully orthogonal to what medical research is doing.
Anyway, I'm going to drop it, as I'm no wordsmith, and 'dokein happened to make the same point I want to make much better than I ever could.
One thing I highly recommend for people with CF is the right kind of high quality salt. This is very much like taking vitamin D for Rickets or vitamin C for Scurvy.
But you just assume that I have nothing that specific to say and facts be damned.
Every nutrition as medicine claim on HN is highly controversial. Sure, there's some people that tend to vocally buy into even the most unscientific of them usually people that are personally invested in the claims made, which are often quite general in applicability. I suspect the reason you see less of that for yours isn't either a specific bias against you or anything about your particular claims except that the popular to whom they are applicable is fairly narrow. So you get the skeptics, but not the eager adopters.
Anyway, it is probably pointless to engage here. I did not expect my initial comment to get any upvotes at all, much less engender discussion. I expected it to be downvoted to hell and end up at the bottom of the page.
I meant it when I said that speaking to these issues on HN is evidence that I have snapped. I am, in fact, having a huge personal crisis that seems unsolvable. Spouting off is just me falling apart in public, basically. I already am very well aware that I will never be taken seriously. That isn't news to me.
But, some people on blogs trying it and then some of them saying a diet works is not really scientific. What would be needed is a larger scientific study. You can argue that such a study should be funded.
In fact, there does appear to be some scientific research, based on some quick googling [1]. If your goal is to increase the adoption diets based on those studies, then I would cite them directly. Promoting that work might work better.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156919930...
My most recent health blog is easy to find if anyone is genuinely interested. I have absolutely no reason to believe such interest exists.
I didn't make my comment to promote my blogs. I wish I knew how to promote my work and monetize it. I remain very poor and this is an ongoing source of stress in my life. But I don't know how to fix that. I see the current monetization schemes of health stuff as part of the problem. So to my mind that is a non starter.
I keep hoping someone will prove I am just stupid and it is possible to both do the right thing (in this specific domain) and also make money. But, so far, I am failing to find a path forward on that.
I wish I felt your suggestion was a good one. But 17 years of online drama suggests otherwise.
