Nutrient Density and other Stupid Magic Words

You keep using that word..

wizard using magic words to summon nutrients

You know what really grinds my gears, folks? People using “magic words” when discussing or debating nutrition & health.

“Magic words” are those that imply something that is just not so. Their mere definition, at least as used commonly, already presupposes a certain outcome. If using a word presupposes an assumption that is actually under discussion, then it’s just a rhetorical trick and distracts from actually discussing the topic.

Clean & Healthy Food

“Just eat healthy!”

Oh, no shit. If only we could agree on what “clean” or “healthy” mean. Clean used to be more common, but it quickly lost any meaning. Healthy is still used like this a lot.

When you try to dig deeper, people will usually get angry. “Everybody knows what’s healthy,” your interlocutor will shout, “people are just too stupid/lazy/greedy to do it!”

No, we don’t agree. That’s the entire reason we’re discussing nutrition.

Vegetarbles bad?!

A couple of years ago I used to say that nobody can agree on anything in nutrition, except that leafy, green vegetables are good and sugar is bad.

Now, even those are out. Carnivores like Anthony Chaffee are unironically telling you that plants are out to murder you. At the very least, plants don’t seem necessary. Plenty of carnivores haven’t eaten plants in years or decades, without any apparent negative side effects.

I have done 90 days without any plants myself, and I’ve eaten a super low vegetable diet (~60g/day) for 2 years now and am feeling better than ever and am down over 70lbs.

Sugar good?!

About a year or 2 back, I had the “pleasure” of learning about Ray Peat & his followers, the “Peaters.” Ray Peat preferred sugar as a main energy source to anything else, because it digests easily and has fewer anti-nutrients than e.g. sources of starch like grains and tubers.

In a sense, the plant wants you to eat its fruit, so you’ll spread its seeds. Of course, you won’t actually spread its seeds these days, but plants don’t know that. Remember, they’re so rage-filled that they’re trying to murder Anthony Chaffee. They can’t think clearly.

Here’s a video of Andy, a Peater, comparing the best jugs of honey & maple syrup to buy at scale.

And, mind bogglingly, at least some of these sugar-eating/drinking Peaters have great glucose control and are in good shape & health. So, clearly, the truism that high sugar intake is necessarily bad is also false.

So in terms of what the field of nutrition actually agrees on, I think that is currently best expressed as follows: { }

Fattening

Being fat is bad! Hence you should avoid foods that are fattening. It’s simple, duh.

I associate the usage of “fattening” with boomers who have strong opinions and little knowledge or success when it comes to dieting. The type of person that acquired 100% of his knowledge, outside of a small niche relevant to his job or hobbies, from watching television and reading the headings in magazines & newspapers.

Depending on what time & cultural milieu these people grew up, they’ll typically hold views like:

• Bread is fattening

• Fat is fattening

• Sugar is fattening

• Carbs are fattening

• Dessert is fattening

These views are typically wrong almost by definition, because they completely ignore the somewhat complex contexts & interplays in nutrition and just categorically condemn one food or food group.

As we’ve seen above, even with green, leafy vegetables (ARRRGH!) and sugar, that seems wrong, at least for the commonly blamed foods & food groups like those named above.

Now there might be a way to make true statements this way, in which consumption of a certain thing is “fattening” independent of context. But, typically, linoleic acid is not what these people bring up in this context, and there are plenty of counter examples.

If you look at epidemiology in the real world and anecdotes of internet diet culture, there exist healthy people on an extremely wide dietary spectrum.

From ancestral people eating a 92% carb diet, mostly from sweet potatoes, to some Eskimos eating almost exclusively meat & seal blubber, to everything in between.

Without more context, no single macro and almost no single food item will be “fattening.”

Even if we assume linoleic acid did obesity (which I do assume), does that make “Twinkies” fattening, or “French Fries?” You could make either one without seed oils if you wanted, and they probably taste the same or better.

Hence, “fattening” is usually a degradation in the quality of discussion, and should be called out as such.

Balance

This is one used mostly by midwits who haven’t even read ANY nutrition, and usually haven’t tried anything either. They usually say meaningless phrases like “balance is good” or “you should not go too far in any direction.”

Well, ok, but that just means you can’t move at all. If you move from the point you’re standing, you moved more in one direction than in any of the other directions. That’s the definition of movement.

Balance is just completely undefined, a word that simply sounds nice to some people.

It doesn’t specify what dimensions should be balanced, or in what way. If you press people, they often have some extremely vague idea that can immediately be empirically invalidated.

For example, if you were to create a diet that’s balanced between the 3 major macronutrients (carbs, fat, protein), you end up pretty much at the Standard American Diet or the Zone Diet. This is about the worst type of macro composition you could do and still live, if you changed nothing else.

My diet is very balanced, with lots of cream and some beef & butter.

Oh, that’s not the balance you meant? Too bad you didn’t put ANY definition into your assertion.

Is a balanced diet of 50% cocaine and 50% heroin healthy?

“Balanced” doesn’t define the dimensions, or in what way they should be balanced. In addition, in a world in which we don’t know what’s making us unhealthy, a balance (which is just hedging against uncertainty) is almost certain to make sure we get whatever is messing us up. Whatever the bad ingredient is in “ultra-processed food,” a “balanced diet” will make sure you don’t cut it out.

You could hardly come up with a worse strategy or a more meaningless term.

Excess

Excess is practically a synonym for fattening in the dietary context, and it’s usually thrown around by enthusiasts or real, professional “scientists.”

Unfortunately, it’s just as meaningless as “fattening.”

First, the word just sounds bad. Excess! Excess is “too much” by definition, hence it’s negative. Don’t do negative stuff, bro.

As the bard would say, therein lies the rub: the definition is usually entirely circular:

1. Excess is bad because it has negative effects

2. It has negative effects, therefore it’s excess

The list of things that are bad in excess is long if you ask enough people:

• Carolies (midwits)

• Sugar (Dr. Lustig)

• Carbs (low-carbers)

• Meat (vegans)

• Fat (Ancel Keys, 1950s)

• Saturated fat (Ancel Keys, 1960s)

• Linoleic acid (me)

• All polyunsaturated fat (Ray Peat)

• Monounsaturated Fat (Brad Marshall)

• Protein (also me)

• Animal protein (T. Colin Campbell)

• Insulin (Ben Bikman)

• Insulin Resistance (also Ben Bikman)

Not all uses of “excess” are circular, i.e. I think there’s an objective number at which linoleic acid intake is “excessive” and, while I don’t have nearly as clear a number for protein, I try to be objective there too.

That’s why, in discussion or debate, I usually try to mention the objective numbers in the same breath as saying they’re “excessive.”

Unfortunately, most people don’t have such numbers.

For most “excess” is defined directly circular, “because it leads to bad outcomes.”

• Excess calories are bad because they make you fat because they were in excess

• Excess sugar is bad because it makes you fat because it was in excess

• ..

Some slightly more sophisticated people, like many nutrition scientists, use a more circuitous route:

• Excess calories are bad because they put you in a caloric surplus which makes you fat (still circular, but you got to use the word “surplus” which makes you sound fancy to other midwits)

• Excess calories are bad because they raise your caloric intake over your TEE (total energy expenditure), causing the caloric surplus, making you fat (and where does the TEE come from? Since it’s impossible to measure, it’s usually assumed to be your food intake +- your weight changes, and therefore, again, it’s circular)

• Excess insulin is bad because insulin causes nutrients to go into fat cells, and not come out of fat cells (ok, but how much insulin is excess? And don’t say “if it causes nutrients to go into fat cells” cause then it’s circular)

• Excess Insulin Resistance is bad, because your body secretes some insulin, but the cells don’t do what we’d expect healthy cells to do at this amount of insulin, so therefore there is “insulin resistance.” Why is there too much? Because a bad thing happened. Circular accounting tautology.

Nutrition scientists in particular seem to love this last one, the accounting tautology with a slight detour. For one, I think most nutrition scientists aren’t stupid enough to fall for a level 1 tautology. For example, almost no real nutrition scientists will directly admit to naive “CICO” and will even say you’re setting up a straw man.

But they seem extremely fond of adding a couple of detours and then running the accounting tautology for the rest of their career, pretending like what they’re doing is science.

I think this is because scientists need to fence off one little area of nutrition that they specialize in and become an authority on, where they can generate infinite busywork, publish papers, dig deeper, do more research, hire PhD students and post docs, get grants for, and all that.

The mainstream nutrition model right now, the EBM (Energy Balance Model) is this for CICO. They realized that naive CICO is worthless, easily falsifiable, or trivially circular, depending on how you define it. So they started adding more and more detours, intermediate steps, and proxy ratios to calculate. This way, nobody can ever prove them wrong, and they can always ask for more grants because “this stuff is just so dang hard.” A lot of words to say “We don’t know anything.”

On the ketard side, something similar is happening in the small: ketard nutritionists have noticed that carbs raise insulin more, on average, than other macronutrients. And they have noticed that, in obese people, insulin is very high.

They have since constructed a whole theory & body of work and careers about “insulin resistance.”

As Bart Kay likes to say, “Insulin Resistance” is a construct. There is no insulin resistance meter on the market, there is no physiological level of “insulin resistance” which you could measure.

Insulin Resistance is typically defined as a relationship between insulin and glucose. For example, the popular HOMA-IR (IR stands for Insulin Resistance, if you couldn’t guess) is:

(insulin x glucose) / 405

Values <1.0 are considered good, and >2.0 bad. Why? Because those are the values we see in healthy/obese people. I.e., it’s circular. Insulin resistance is bad because it makes you obese, and it does so because you’re insulin resistant.

Ben Bikman will spend his whole career talking about Insulin Resistance, and he will never figure out what actually causes it. He’s locked himself in an intellectual cell and thrown away the key.

This seems to be some sort of natural intellectual tar pit where nerds, e.g. scientists, snipe themselves into oblivion. They end up spending their whole lives on a layer of abstraction that they’ve tricked themselves into believing is very important.

Bikman himself is my example because I’ve interacted with him on Twitter about this very topic.

There are a whole bunch of holes in his theory that are so obvious, it’s almost an “Emperor’s New Clothes” type situation. Yet when asked about it, he will either give whimsical non-answers or literally answer with “I don’t care about this, I prefer hanging out with my family.”

Ok, bro, have fun hanging out with your family. But don’t expect me to take you seriously on nutrition if you openly admit not being interested in it.

He therefore runs around saying silly things that have been clearly disproven, basically spouting 2000s style Ketard Dogma. As if Keto had not failed on a population level already.

Processed Food & Whole Food

This is a common one. It’s similarly stupid to people complaining about “chemicals.” Everything is a chemical, bro. You’re made entirely out of chemicals and you’ve never eaten food that was not 100% made of chemicals.

“You know what I mean!” No, I don’t. That’s why we’re discussing this.

Shitting on “processed food” or “ultra-processed food” is popular with certain nutrition scientists, nutrition journalists, and slightly sophisticated enthusiasts online.

Everybody seems to agree that “processing” is bad for food. Nobody seems to be willing to say why, or even define “processed.”

If you ask people they get angry and yell “Semantics!” and assert confidently that “everybody knows.”

Almost none of them have even heard of the NOVA classification for processed food, about which I’ve written previously. (Hint: it’s garbage.)

Carnivore OG Amber O’Hearn even has a video on her YouTube channel about how the reasoning in NOVA classifications of processed foods is circular.

In short: processed food is bad because it makes you unhealthy, and it does so by being processed.

Whole food is good because it makes you healthy because it’s whole.

There are, of course, tons of “processed” foods that people have eaten for a very long time without getting sick. The French Paradox is just one example, people used to eat white flour, white sugar, butter, heavy cream, and fatty meat, and combine them all.

If you can’t explain why those people were thin & healthy, there’s a hole in your theory.

Some of the more advanced NOVA defendants will have vague theories of what exactly it is about “processing” or “ultra-processing” that makes foods unhealthy. Like “destruction of the whole food matrix” and stuff like that. But, for one, that just moves the goalpost, since we have basically zero science showing anything about this.

If you confidently assert “it’s complicated” but you can’t explain HOW it works in that complicated manner, I’m assuming you’re full of shit.

And, we actually have quite a few counter-examples. For example, the aforementioned Peaters are drinking fruit juice & maple syrup because it is easier to digest than the equivalent amount of sugar in whole fruit, and they’re fine.

The French Paradox diet consists of refined, white flour & sugar, not whole-grain pumpernickel bread. The entire French diet is pretty much designed to be as processed and unnatural as possible. Heck, they even take out the “whole fat” when cooking chicken and replace it with butter. Yet, eating this, the French of the 1950s or whenever the French Paradox was observed, were thin as rails and healthy. Maybe it was all the ironic smoking.

If you dig deep enough, “Ultra-Processed Food” just means “Lalala I can’t hear you.”

Hyper-Palatable

This is another one of those circular ones, but it’s so common among “serious scientists (tm)” that I thought I’d mention it.

Hyper-palatable foods are bad, because they cause you to overeat. They cause you to overeat because they’re hyper-palatable.

Don’t get confused by the name; it doesn’t mean that the foods “taste good.” Nobody would argue that twinkies or McDonald’s fries or Lay’s chips taste better than a cake your grandmother made, or original Belgian tallow fries, or the pizza made by an Italian grandma on her old stone oven.

Palatable here means that it induces you to eat it. You could say that it’s more like addiction than “deliciousness.” Junkies don’t think heroin tastes amazing (I think), but heroin has a certain effect that people can get addicted to.

Of course, it’d be super interesting if certain foods or ingredients had similar effects on humans. But the hyper-palatable people are never interested in figuring that out.

One could, for example, argue that certain fatty acids (*cough*) oxidize into molecules that trigger the endocannabinoid system, hijacking our appetite. Or that, when beta-oxidized in the mitochondria, this fatty acid (*cough* again could be anything!) messes with the feedback signal to the cell.

But, like “ultra-processed food” the term “hyper-palatable” seems explicitly designed to “stop the buck, and stop it here” without ever getting to the root of things.

Why figure out which part of the french fry, or the twinkie, or the pizza, is “processed” or “hyper-palatable” and the root cause of the diabesity epidemic?

Why not just blame overindulgence and “Western Diets” and “diet & lifestyle factors” and evil food scientists and multinational corporations?

Nutrient Dense

Now for the big one that grinds my gears currently, this is why I wrote this post and everything until here was just warmup.

I think Nutrient Density is an inherently stupid & dishonest idea. Unfortunately, even many people I like and respect run around on Twitter, promoting this.

“Nutrient Density” implies assumptions that are, at best, debatable, and probably wrong.

When people tout Nutrient Density as a metric, my impulsive answer is “So you mean high fat, right? Cause fat has the highest energy density of all the macronutrients at 9kcal/g.”

“No, that’s not what we mean! We mean micronutrients!”

Oh, ok. Maybe you should call it micronutrient-density then? As implied by the whole micro/macro thing, macronutrients are not only also nutrients, they are probably, on the whole, more important. You can live for quite a bit without consuming any vitamin B12, and we’re not quite sure what the appropriate intakes are for many micronutrients. But we’re pretty sure you’ll die if you don’t eat enough energy, and that bad things will happen if you don’t eat enough protein or fat for long enough.

In addition to the “Nutrient” part being BS, the “Density” part is also BS.

Density is mass per volume. It once again implies a ratio. Usually the Nutrient Density people don’t specify explicitly what they use as the denominator, but sometimes they do. Almost all of them, even if implicitly, mean calories.

But calories are, of course, a measurement of your macronutrients. And if you divide micronutrients by macronutrients, whatever the heck that is, “nutrient density” is a stupid name for it.

Optimizing for high “Nutrient Density” per this definition also implies that lower energy intake is better.

Again, if you ask proponents about this, they’ll deny it, but they’re just being .. dense. Obviously, the “Nutrient Density” will go up if you decrease the denominator, that’s how ratios work.

If you want to have high micronutrients and not necessarily minimize energy intake, maybe you should call it “Micronutrient Sum” and not “Nutrient Density.”

Almost nobody using this magic phrase seems interested in explicitly talking about what it even means. If pressed, I’ve seen quite a few of them just simply lie about it, as if we didn’t all know how math works.

But most just don’t seem to think about it, and when pressed for details or a definition, yell “Semantics!” or other anti-curious BS. “Everyone knows what it means!”

Calorie Dense

This is basically the opposite of Nutrient Dense, as in people think caloric density is bad.

As the denominator, they usually use volume or weight.

This is, in a sense, even stupider than using micronutrients to macronutrients.

If lower caloric density is good, then that means that energy is bad. Hence, the healthiest food is food that’s not food.

The caloric density of cardboard or tree bark is 0. You might as well drink lots of water with nothing, that’ll give you a lot of mass and exactly 0 energy.

I mean, why not just fast? Nothing has lower caloric density than not eating anything.

I think this comes from the idea that vegetables are healthy and vegetables have very low caloric density. Even starches like potatoes have 7-10% energy density, i.e. they’re mostly not food.

Then, the evil food scientists do “ultra-processing” by removing all that annoying non-food and turning it into actual food, thereby making us all diabetic and obese.

This seems so obviously idiotic I can’t believe anyone has explicitly thought this and agreed with the idea.

Clearly, humans need energy. If there is a certain amount of energy we need daily, why would it matter if we consumed a calorically dense food (say, butter) or if we consumed the same food + a bunch of non-food with high volume or mass? Say, cream, which is basically butter + water. Is my meal getting any healthier if I dilute it with cardboard?

I suppose this theory would make sense if having a bloated/distended stomach was somehow inherently good. Which it’s not, obviously, everyone can try that by eating a lot of cardboard. Being bloated is not a negative concept for no reason. Nobody likes being bloated, it feels bad and it is bad for you. Excess bloating will eventually give you butt cancer and kill you.

Proponents will now immediately roll their eyes and say, yea, duh, obviously, you shouldn’t do EXCESS nutrient density/caloric density. You need to find a BALANCE.

Ah, yes. Just be a little bloated. Optimal health is clearly found by not being not bloated, and not being too bloated, but being bloated just the right amount.

You can’t make this shit up.

Nutrients & Vitamins

In fact, even “nutrient” is a magic word. Nutrients (micronutrients, which they mean) are just chemicals.

Do you like to eat a high-chemical, low-energy diet?

Now “nutrients” are chemicals that we think can be used by the human body, that’s why we have a word for them. And vitamins are those to be thought necessary to the human body, in that it wouldn’t survive long-term (or be healthy) even in presence of enough energy and protein unless you ate them.

But common usage makes a lot of implicit assumptions about nutrients & vitamins that are flat-out wrong.

For example, it’s commonly implied that there is no useful upper limit, or no harmful limit. Few people will say this out loud, but they will loudly tout strategies & behave in ways that clearly imply this, or they wouldn’t make any sense.

“Nutrient density” is just one example. Is “more nutrients” always better? Clearly not. For pretty much any vitamin & other micronutrient I’m aware of, there’s a toxic dose.

Sometimes, there are relatively low doses that you’re not supposed to exceed, in the long run, and for even higher dosages, they can even be acutely toxic.

For example, vitamin A. Let’s see what the Mayo Clinic says on vitamin A, as mainstream in nutrition as it gets. This isn’t some weird anti-vitamin-A outfit.

Too much vitamin A can be harmful. Even a single large dose — over 200,000 mcg — can cause:

• Nausea

• Vomiting

• Vertigo

• Blurry vision

Taking more than 3,000 mcg a day of oral vitamin A supplements long term can cause:

• Bone thinning

• Liver damage

• Headache

• Diarrhea

• Nausea

• Skin irritation

• Pain in the joints and bone

• Birth defects

If you are or might become pregnant, talk to your doctor before taking vitamin A. Excess use of vitamin A during pregnancy has been linked to birth defects.

(from: https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-a/art-20365945)

3,000mcg of retinol is about 10,000iU. I get more than that just from my average heavy cream dose every day. It takes less than 60g of beef liver to get 10,000iU. That’s about 1.5 ounces.

Yea, a single such dose won’t kill you. But it’s quite easy to get too much, sometimes way too much, of a micronutrient. More is not always better.

The non-vitamin micronutrients, minerals, are not better. If anything, it seems they are much more about balances between e.g. sodium and potassium. If you just willy-nilly add one of them, it will very likely have negative outcomes because it will disturb the homeostatic balance.

Now you might already be in an imbalance, and adding a certain thing might fix it. But that’s certainly not a case for “moar nutrients moar better.”

RDAs are trash & we don’t know anything

What are the correct amounts of micronutrients to ingest? Nobody knows. The RDAs are pretty much made up. Many of the official USDA numbers on how many micronutrients are contained in various foods are also plain wrong. E.g., many USDA entries claim that beef has 0 vitamin C, which is simply false.

I actually think this is more a technical issue with the USDA database. They assign one common unit to each nutrient they measure, and they round down to 0 relatively early. Their unit for vitamin C is milligrams, but some meats probably only contain micrograms of it. That’s fine if the real requirement is 1/100th or 1/1000th of what the RDA says, but it can show up as “0mg” in the database, which is incorrect and misleading.

Empirically, people do carnivore diets for years and decades without ever getting any vitamin C deficient symptoms like scurvy. Heck, I’ve done it myself! I asked my dentist if I had scurvy and he looked at me like I’m retarded. Then he said: “No, of course not.”

So either vitamin C isn’t really necessary, or the amounts we need are hundreds thousands of times lower than commonly assumed.

Vitamin C seems to compete with glucose in some metabolic pathways. When I put on my CGM, it warns me not to supplement vitamin C, as it will totally screw up the reading. So maybe carnivores/ketoers get away with 1/100th the vitamin C because they are eating much less glucose?

If you look at the history of how the other vitamins were established/discovered, it’s not much better. The vitamin C story was so bad, even the guy who ran the experiment didn’t believe it. The vitamin A stories are worse, and just totally invalid in retrospect.

I’m open to the idea that these are actually essential nutrients, but I don’t think we have the first clue about how much you need, in which dietary context.

And it’s quite clear that “moar micronutrients moar better” is just plain false, and “I take X just in case” is simply stupid.

How would those same people feel about “I eat 5,000kcal/day just in case?”