The Role of Diet on the Gut Microbiome, Mood and Happiness (opens in new tab)

Minimize saturated fat (by replacing it with unsaturated fat). Get enough protein. Eat healthy carbs*.

* On HN and other social media, "carbs" is a euphemism for sugar and cake rather than beans and vegetables, so people will talk about how carbs made them fat when you know they're not talking about slamming back-to-back cans of garbanzos.

And don't take any nutrition advice seriously that doesn't break fat apart into saturated and unsaturated.

I improved mine significantly by just cutting out processed foods. Almost everything I eat is made from whole ingredients, and no artificial or "diet" anything. I'm in much better shape, both mentally and physically, because of it. It also helps with portion control, since I'm getting the maximum amount of nutrients from my food, so I don't "feel hungry later".

Just try stuff out, you have your whole life to figure out what works for you diet wise. You won't die if you cut out carbs or meat or only eat hard boiled eggs for a week or something.

It may feel like a huge sacrifice eating a hyper-restrictive diet for 2-3 weeks but you have thousands of weeks of life. Personally I feel pretty dialed in with a diet high in fatty meats (beef, salmon) fibrous carbs and cooked vegetables (raw vegetables mess my stomach up).

Currently I am playing around with my "default weight" and if it can be adjusted. There is a weight we all sit at if we eat a relatively healthy diet to satiety and I am wondering if it can be adjusted. i.e. if someone sits at 170-180 for years and then goes through some intense shift that drops them to 150, will they bounce all the way back to their old "normal" range or is a new lower one established where they can consume the same number of calories to satiety but their weight remains in the lower range.

There are different types of carbs. Generally simple carbs (usually called "sugars") are more likely to get converted to fat if you do not use them for energy right away.

A few decades ago food companies came out with "low fat" versions of snacks that had a lot of sugar in them. They still made people fat because people are more of them, since they thought the low fat versions were better for them.

And now there are a lot of people pushing low-carb or no-carb diets saying all carbs are bad. Your body does not process whole wheat bread the same way as a ho-ho. I knew a dietician who said being on a ketosis diet is as good for you as being on a cirrhosis diet. On the other hand, there are some breads that have high fructose corn syrup added, so you need to look out for that.

The same principle applies to fats. Omega-3 fatty acids are good for you, and other types of fats are not. There are saturated fats (aka trans fats, generally bad), polyunsaturated, monounsaturated (not as bad). Your body does not process these in exactly the same ways, so saying you are eating more or less fat than before is not really as useful of a statement as it seems.

So you cannot say that all fats are equally bad or all carbs are equally good.

I do not think the same principle applies to the other two macros. I think you can say alcohol is bad and protein is good and leave it at that.

I doubt any such consensus exists, but for me the number one rule is this: eat more protein. You can eat somewhat high carb diet and still be fine if you're getting enough protein.

Protein: Good, eat as much as you can

Fats: Some good (unsaturated), others less good (saturated), but mostly NBD. Eat whatever you want without regard to fat contents, but do make choices with less saturated. Your brain (aka your moods) will thank you.

Carbs: Some good, some bad. try to keep it under 35 grams per meal and 100 per day. Try to eat low glycemic/complex carbs. Avoid sugar and sugar equivalents.

The corner of the weightlifting world I keep an eye on has centralized around protein, veggies, and few carbs.

The other angle to look at is satiety; good food should also have a satiety so you don't go back and munch. :)

I don't think there's a silver bullet. The % for each macro - if it's a low carb or high fat or high protein really depend on the individual and the specific needs. My wife for example can't go on low carb or she'll have major headaches even after the "adaptation period", while I don't even get minor headaches. Also the amount of fat may vary, high fat diets tend to be better for overweight people while healthy people are OK with more balanced diets. The most important things are defining an objective and understanding how your own body works. My current diet was made for slowly losing body fat (mild caloric deficit) and it's like this: Breakfast: whole milk, oats, whey protein, flaxseed and chia seeds. Lunch: brown rice, vegetables, meat (steak twice a week, chicken or fish the other days) Afternoon snack: 2 boiled eggs Dinner: lunch without rice. It works for me but the whole milk and the steaks are really bad for some people.

> fats vs proteins vs carbohydrates

There's a Stanford professor who did a study comparing low-carb vs. low-fat diets. The surprising result: both groups lost weight.

My take (speculative): both groups cut out a lot of processed food. It's the processed food that's making us fat.

In the same boat. Lately I try to just focus on cutting out processed foods and sugar.

I have simple rule to start with that helps with so much. If it has a processed sugar, I don't buy it. (I have an exception for organic sugar because, how bad can the processing be?) This includes maltodextrin, artificial sweeteners, etc... (also no artificial colors or flavoring, also great indicators of how toxic the product is)

Why? Because if it has that one ingredient (group) it's almost always a low quality product that will make me sick.

I haven't had the flu for over 20 years.

Nutritionists will tell you what really matters is what type of fat/protein/carbohydrate. It's not one or the other. You need to eat plant based whole foods protein, fat and carbs too. For the most part, humans are carbohydrate processing machines (good carbs: like beans, whole grains, fruits, vegetables), these should be your staples.

This might be considered an implementation detail, but I know that eating 2 or 3 eggs in the morning keeps me satisfied longer than carbs, and that that feeling of satiety keeps me away from grazing on more carbs. So, a win.

It was a 2 week study, and diet was only changed for a week. The time period was probably long enough for existing microbes to decline due to environmental changes, but not long enough for new microbes that favor the new conditions to move in.

If you've ever dramatically changed your diet, you'll know a week is not long enough for the resulting GI upset to subside. It often takes a month or longer.

That's the kind of garbage results you get when you run a study with only 20 participants. Also they changed to both mediterranean and ketogenic? Wtf

I wonder if it's a case of soluble vs insoluble fiber. Insoluble fiber is often described as speeding up transit through the intestines, which might leave microbes less food to eat, or increase the microbes being driven out before they can establish.

Yeah, I thought fiber is literally food for gut microbes. WTF?

Better, but still carbs. It's just harder to eat a lot of those. I would challenge "whole grains" actually being any better at all.

Honestly, I think the whole fiber intake stuff is bs. Anecdotally, I feel much better on a low fiber high protein diet than anything else. So does the rest of my family.

My opinion on carbs is that you should only eat them when you're going to burn them quickly. That's what they're for, to give you a big energy boost. They're not for consuming and then sitting on your ass.

What ingredient?

I think there is a diminish of return on such foods. Fries are now pimped with bacon, cheese and all kinds of stuff. Sweet itmes are so over sweatened that if you eat a strawberry afterwards it tastes bland.

If we reduced the sweatiness of items we could enjoy them just as much as our senses adapt quite quickly. If I stop sugar for just 2 days and then eat something somewhat sweet it tastes very sweat.

It's a big issue with the food industry trying to outsweet each other because people are so used to the taste of sugar. Artificial sweeteners are also to blame for setting a hight expectation of sweetness in products.

Potatoes produce the highest level of satiety compared to other carbs. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6267283/ Combined with fats via frying or baking, and it's not a joke that they would make you feel the most full compared to a similar amount of rice or refined wheat bread/pasta.

A slightly healthier but equally delicious replacement for fries are oven-roasted or grilled duck fat potatoes with the skin on.

It's not. It's only controversial if you follow FDA recommendations. Any athlete knows this. Fat and protein are REQUIRED to build muscle and endurance. Carbs are great pre/post workout for energy and recovery.

Our society has a massive excess of carbs in our diets that don't get used for energy production and just turn into fat.

I mean… it’s all crap in the end, right?

Aren’t we just supposed to have a healthy mix of fats, proteins, carbs and fibre in a sensible portion size related to how much energy you usually expend over a given period?

That statement is much too reductive to be true. Yet it might still be closer to the truth than the old belief that it's best to avoid fats and eat loads of grains.

Is it? I haven’t seen any controversy around it, just a gradual shift to recommendations for more protein and fat vs less carbs.

Not crazy. Well done!

The thing with losing weight is that it doesn't differentiate between fat and muscle. So unless the body has a reason to keep the muscle around (the weight training) the body will absorb it (because of the calorie deficit).

The weight training helps limit the weight loss to the fat. This will also help to keep the body from looking like a deflated balloon when all that weight is lost.

Would love to hear more.

Like you ate mostly just hot dogs and kimchi for six months? Did you do that on purpose to see what would happen or just kind of felt like doing it?

When people refer to "processed foods", they're talking about things like frozen dinners and industrially prepared fried foods. Similarly, when people talk about "whole vegetables", I assume they're referring to buying the ingredient in the produce section and eating it without a bunch of fats and sugars.

> This is utterly meaningless bullshit.

This is unnecessarily combative. Unless you just want to score internet points by insulting people, everyone (including you) will get a lot more out of discussions if you steelman the other person's argument.

> cutting out foods with added sugar, eating foods having a low glycemic index, eating a lot of chicken, whole vegetables, whole fruit

>> This is great advice for most people, depending on what "whole" means. Am I allowed to cut and cook my vegetables?

Cooked, steamed, cut. Yes. Basically just don't "juice" or smoothie anything. The idea is to have your digestive system do as much of the "processing" as possible, and not outsource this to some external system. The longer it takes the food to digest, the longer you stay feeling "full". And feeling full really helps when it comes to weight loss. It's also harder to eat a dozen large whole oranges and bananas than it is to drink them.

> cutting out processed foods

>> This is utterly meaningless bullshit.

Keeping the glycemic index low means you automatically avoid foods like TV dinners, McDonalds burgers, highly processed white bread, etc.

Processed foods are a vaguely defined and somewhat arbitrary category of foods, but that does not mean the correlation between foods being highly processed and unhealthy is BS. Things that have ingredients like brominated vegetable oil or various other preservatives and stabilizers for texture and shelf life, artificial colors and lots of HFCS, meat slurries that have been pumped through tubes and formed into precise shapes, the "simulated yogurt" that wrapped the raisins in my trail mix... None of that stuff is a favor to your health.

Food optimized for mass market scale and profitability is practically never optimized for nutritional value, except as a hollow gimmick, e.g. Vitamin Water.

>> cutting out processed foods

>This is utterly meaningless bullshit.

Actually, it isn’t.

If you’d like clarification as to what counts as processed foods, you can ask.

To answer your question, processed foods in this context usually means foods with chemicals in them, hydrogenized oils, etc.

The actual preparation doesn’t matter. It’s okay to eat food that has been chopped and frozen, for instance. Your digestive system tears food up anyway.

Whole foods is just a common way to say you're buying ingredients then making them yourself. I think you're just arguing semantics for meanings that are fairly commonly used.

This should be the top comment.

Any major changes to gut biome will definitely take more than two weeks. Anyone who has ever had to do an elimination diet will tell you that it can take 4 to 6 weeks for things to normalize when making dietary changes.

I suppose without further research we won't have any clue what effect salt will or won't have on my emotional state ;)

But seriously, there is pretty much no point discussing the conclusions of such a deeply flawed paper.

With respect to these things he advised me to

Slow down - deep breath and chant om daily

Seek only that knowledge which helps me in my field of work

Think only the amount that helps me propel towards acting on the next step

For the 30 years I have walked this Earth, I have never been able to find a "healthy" way to manage stress.

In fact, I have had such bad problems with stress that it basically assisted in the emergence and continuation of an autoimmune disorder. So, I am quite aware of the damage stress can cause.

I have used plenty of unhealthy methods of managing stress, but the sad fact of the matter is that -- unlike yoga, warm baths, etc. -- the unhealthy methods actually work, and they tend to work really well.

The consumption of a carbohydrate-rich, protein-poor meal or snack can increase the synthesis of the brain neurotransmitter serotonin; proteins block this effect.

I think science is moving in this direction, but it's taking time. I've seen arguments in favor of fecal infusions (where they take fecal matter from someone with a healthy gut microbiome to someone with an unhealthy one). It has shown some promise in helping some rather stubborn illnesses. But still, these things take a long time.

The body can make carbs from proteins or fats. You don't _need_ dietary carbs (but will naturally get some in the course of eating a healthy diet).

I love sweetgreen for this reason. It really showed me how salad and healthy western food in general can be tasty.

I grew up with a few strict options:

1. very flavorful Indian food of varying healthiness made by mom,

2. rich western foods made in a factory,

3. badly seasoned healthy western foods made by mom.

My mom never learned how to make healthy western food that tasted good because things like balsamic or the right balance of ingredients are what determines flavor (oversimplifying) in western cooking.

As a result, it took meeting my American partner and eating healthy food she or her family made. That helped me understand that tasty healthy food does exist.

Sadly this has left me with a strange attitude about food which is wrong. When I want tasty food, I am not quick to think of healthy foods.

Trying to change it but I thought maybe other immigrants landing in the western world had the same experience.

How affordable are such changes for the average person? It seems like a carnivorous diet would be significantly more expensive than alternatives.

thanks for that, I buy organic white rice from california which appears to be the least bad origin in those papers