For example, doctors have spent decades telling us to eat margarine instead of butter and eating egg whites while discarding the yolk (the most nutritional part of the egg!) out of fears of cholesterol. Those ideas (and others) have been completely discredited.
Then you have the "food pyramid" that was pushed on us for many years which basically says that most of your meals should be grain-based and that healthy fats like olive oil and nuts should be used only sparingly. This food pyramid (probably pushed in Washington by lobbyists for cereal companies) has also been discredited and even the government has been backing away from it in recent years.
Just like global warming, nutrition is not a "settled science" and there is much disinformation out there presented as settled science. Even worse, many doctors (for whom nutrition is not their specialty) parrot the misinformation pushed by the government.
Fully agree that most of the nutrition books out there are garbage. You can usually tell the bad ones when they make ridiculous claims on the cover like "lose 15 pounds in one week" or when they push a diet that requires you to buy special foods like shakes, protein powder and vitamin pills. Also, if a nutrition/diet book is pushed on daytime TV, it's probably one you should stay away from as well.
One should be able to eat perfectly well with the foods found in any supermarket and should never have to buy anything special or follow a "fad" diet (like eating nothing but grapefruit for a month!).
Lastly, you misinterpret my post to Swordmaker about the carbs. I eat carbs every day and I don't count them. Obviously I eat less carbs than the average person as I avoid junk food as much as I can and try to limit my intake to food in its natural form, such as meat, fish, eggs, nuts, fruits, vegetables, and whole-milk dairy products like yogurts and cheese.
So I fully encourage Swordmaker to follow the advice of his doctors in general but with regard to nutrition, some independent research and taking a common sense approach to what he eats will also go a long way.
I agree with SamAdams76’s take on this and not Fireman15’s. What Fireman15 forgets is that I’ve been working in medical for 35 years, although in a support field, and have access to many doctors who are well versed in the current state of nutritional research. In fact doing primary research why those 80 to 100 year old people you mention are hale and hardy and it has little do with a good diet, Fireman, as your anecdotal claims assert.
My girlfriend is an RN with other alphabet soup behind her RN, and is writing books on nutrition. She forgotten more than Fireman thinks he knows on this subject. She has years of practical experience in the field, having lost 243 pounds and kept it off for over twelve years, watching her health statistics closely, including all blood levels.
I know that if I deviate in the number of carbs I should eat on a daily basis above sixty, I WILL GAIN WEIGHT! Fireman apparently thinks, like most people, that all metabolisms are identical. I assure you, they are not. There are some that can exist quite happily on the government’s long discredited Food Pyramid, that many doctors are still touting as the be-all-and-end-all of nutrition, but that is actually only about 15% of the population! The hospital I was in actually had that damn pyramid posted! That lock-step adherence to the pyramid is what has resulted in two generations of obesity in the USA.
Most medical doctors are exposed to a single three hour course in nutrition in medical school. Some take three day symposia put on by companies selling diet plans! That’s it. They are NOT the experts Fireman claims them to be. I’ve had Cardiologists tout me to buy various fad diets from them such as the now discredited Micro™ Diet, the Paleolithic Diet, Weight Watchers, and even Jenny Craig, assuring me this was the most scientific breakthrough in cardiac dieting! All of them came with a high price tag! Anything to fatten their personal wallets.
I actually can’t find anything in your most recent post that I disagree with. I included you in my reply to Swordmaker because I felt you were part of the discussion.