Optimal eating (or rather, a step in the right direction)

I have really wanted to try MealSquares for a while now, but they are only sold in the US, with no timeline for availability elsewhere. In fact I don't think their site has been updated since I first encountered them a couple of months ago. Does anyone know if they still exist, and if they have plans to ever sell overseas?

See also discussion here, in particular, soylent green (unsuitable for OP because hypoglycemia), soylent orange (yay complex carbs!) and ketosoylent (most recently Yudkowsky's Mildly Surprising Super Ketonic Dietary Replacement Fluid: Your Alternative To Healthy Eating.)

Absolutely worth mentioning. They're something I'm interested in looking into, but as you say the pricing is a fair bit higher, and at the moment I'd prefer to keep costs lower.

What I'm seeing is $85 for 6 packs of 2000 calories. Which means $14/day for a person consuming 2000 calories per day. I am a large male with an active metabolism who is attempting to exercise on a regular basis - I haven't counted it up, but I'm probably closer to 3000 calories, which means $20/day. Still great compared to other prepared food options, but not the best option for me right now.

For other people, though, with slightly more expendable income and a desire to get a quick balanced diet in a non-shake form, this is probably a fantastic choice.

Thank you! Apparently this is fairly common knowledge (when I mentioned this to several friends they thought it was obvious). But I hadn't been aware, and that could have been very unpleasant.

I'm going to switch "tuna" to "canned salmon" in my post, and I'm trying out canned salmon today. Interestingly, when on sale there's not much difference in price between canned tuna and canned salmon, at least where I live.

I'm curious as to how it arrives at a version of paleo while simultaneously dismissing the paleosphere on wheat (of which Scott has listed only a few)?

Because if I could distill the object-level advice of the paleosphere into two words, they would be: "avoid wheat".

(Obviously, standard diet advice doesn't apply when one is hypoglycemic, although I suppose, depending on the underlying causes of the hypoglycemia, the prescription could be more carbohydrates or more fat)

Swapped quick for fast. Thanks for pointing that out!

On whey protein - I was exposed to a lot of unverified health information by an ex. Much of that information came from a group of sources that take a conspiracy-theory approach to nutrition research (there's a big food industry that controls what gets published, and a lack of evidence for or any evidence against fact X is because of the food industry!). This is not to say that the facts I was exposed to were wrong, but rather that I need to verify them. So according to her, whey protein was bad. A quick google search for "whey protein health concerns" turns up quite a bit, although it's a mishmash of stuff. The mayo clinic has a list of side effects from using whey protein, and this article states that "increased whey protein added to the diet of rats increased tumors and cancers". On the other hand, wikipedia mentions the potential value of whey protein in reducing risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. So the picture looks far from clear - I guess I have some more reading to do (unless someone else has already done the reading and can whey in?).

Thanks for the link on wheat stuff - because of the hypoglycemia, wheat has been a major building block of my meals. It's nice to know that I can continue that. Same goes for your suggestions on meat - most of my meat intake is chicken breasts, which fit in the non-processed lean meat category.

I really should try weaning myself off caffeine, and see how I feel. I was 20 before I started drinking it, and I was able to perform in school and work settings just fine without. That said, I'd like to do some more reading about how caffeine actually works - do you have another link to suggest? (if nothing comes to mind, I'll just spend some time with google).

Added Food and Western Disease to my reading list. Thanks!

Fantastic point. I'm blessed with fairly simple tastes when it comes to food, and I'm fine with some of my meals being fairly bland (pasta salad, for example, or spinach salads). But when it's easy and healthy, there's no reason not to make the food taste better.

Sidenote: the longevity article points out that garlic is linked to longer lifespans. So seasoning with garlic both increases flavor and health.

Thanks for all the recipes!

I could probably stand to lose a few pounds, but not to much more than that - I wasn't really aiming to change my weight with my diet. My BMR is 2025.04, apparently. My understanding, though, is that exercising can increase your metabolic rate even after you're done? I've been working to implement a workout regime based on http://lesswrong.com/lw/juc/optimal_exercise/, and am lifting weights or doing interval cardio 4-6 days per week.

I don't actually track how many calories I'm eating in a day - it would probably be a good thing to do.

Agreed. "hypoglycemia" is really the symptom, not the cause.

What I have appears to be a genetic disorder (my father and his father had it) that doesn't seem to be associated with any other health impacts. I recently realized that I should probably actually get the specifics pinned down, and that's something I'm going to work on in the future.

My understanding (through my father, who had his hypoglycemia tested when he was younger) is that my pancreas overreacts, putting out more insulin than is necessary for any given blood sugar level. It's particularly problematic when I consume simple sugars, as my pancreas drastically overshoots. The consequence is that, unless I eat slow-digesting foods every few hours, I feel cranky/exhausted/sad/impatient, get the shakes, and have general weakness in my muscles. If I continue to not eat, my emotional state stabilizes and I simply get really really tired. Not life threatening, but a serious interference with happiness/productivity.

But I will be looking more specifically into the causes, instead of my father's interpretation of his own diagnoses from forty years ago.

Optimal nutrition brings up the issue of human biodiversity, though in other contexts social justice warriors call this "racism" and "pseudoscience."

Metacomment: You keep throwing these highly controversial statements into posts. It comes across as using tribal cheering, or worse, tribal booing. People are downvoting your posts not only for poor thinking but the fact that you seem to try to connect almost every single post you can to your politics. The comments might be better received if you focused on facts and evidence rather than remarks like the above.

But what should you do if your parents or grandparents come from remote branches of the human species which didn't have the opportunity to interbreed until fairly recently?

Go with the diet of the majority ancestral group, I think.

Some quick informal arguments: imagine health response to diet is set by many genes of small additive effect. (This is often true for any complex trait; behavioral psychology, and a lot of the heritability of common diseases is being identified in GWASes as that.) Imagine there are population-level differences; this is trivially obvious (lactose and alcohol), but that there's a lot more than this (probable, since crops differ so much from region to region). Say, 1000. And you inherit genes from 1 of 2 ancestral groups, Red or Green. Each ancestral gene is +1 for that group, 0 otherwise.

Now, if you have 2/3s Red ancestry and you eat a Red diet, what's your diet score? Well, 666 of your genes are Red, and so you get 1*666=666; 333 of your genes are Green and you get 0*333=0, total 666. If you ate Green, then it's the other way around, 0*666 and 1*333, total 333. Clearly you want to eat Red. What if you're 3/3 Red? Then 1*1000 vs 0*1000, obviously you still want to eat Red. What if you have a bare majority Red, 501/1000? Well, 501 (Red diet) > 409 (Blue diet). No matter what fraction, you always do better by going with your plurality descent.

Q: what if there's uncertainty about the fraction of ancestry? A: the binomial around your estimated fraction is going to be pretty tight; randomness means if your family tree is 2/3 Red, you're going to be close to 2/3 of your diet genes being Red if there's more than a few dozen diet genes. And a quick $100 at 23andMe will fix any uncertainty about ancestry anyway.

Q: what if there's more than one relevant ancestral group and/or diet? A: the reasoning still works even if it's maximizing the gain from a split of genes like 10%/1%/1%.../1%.

Q: why not 'match' fractions of diet with fractions of ancestry, eg. if 1/3 Red and 2/3 Green, eat Red breakfasts but Green lunches & dinners? A: For the same reason "probability matching" doesn't maximize your expected-value when the probabilities are known (as they will be in this case); it might work if your genes were changing or there was a lot of uncertainty, but that's not the case and so 'pulling the suboptimal arm' is just suboptimal.

Q: what if I know that I am lactose-intolerant through self-experiment, should I really eat as much cheese as my Dutch ancestors? A: No.

Q: what if I know that I am lactose-intolerant because my 23andMe report shows I didn't get the relevant SNPs, should I really eat as much cheese as my Dutch ancestors? A: No.

Q: what if there are genes of differing effect sizes, where some seem to have large effects on how diet affects health? A: Well, if you don't know about them, then you'd expect all ancestral groups to have the same expected-value; and if you do know about specific ones, you can add them to the calculation based on their effect and different prevalences between groups.

Q: what if genes' effects aren't additive, but are crazy wild-ass interacting nonlinear networks and stuff like that? Nonlinear nonlinear nonlinear whoooo! A: lots of stuff seems to be additive, and anyway, if your genes are really that hard to predict, why would that make your minority genes outperform your plurality genes? It's wild stuff either way.

An interesting point, but a bad way of saying it.

I find it credible that people with different genes could have different optimal diets. How much of those difference would be between different ethnic groups, and how much would be between individuals within the same group, I have no idea. I also have no idea how much "what my ancestors ate" is close to "what would be optimal for me to eat". Also, I have no idea whether a diet optimized for a specific human would be significantly better than a diet optimized for an average human, compared with the improvement we would get by switching from an average first-world diet today.

I would like to see this question answered, preferably by someone who already doesn't have their bottom line written either way.

(A few random thoughts: Food allergies suggest that at least some individuals need wildly different diets than their neighbors. I would expect ethnic group differences in eating dairy products, and in vitamin D requirements. If Soylent becomes popular among people from different ethnic groups, we could get some nice data.)

I'd guess that the diets of a paleolithic Irishman and a paleolithic African are far more similar to each other than to a modern American diet.