Nutrition is Satisficing

Food is satisficing too. I found it liberating to realize I don’t need to come up with a new meal every day. Food doesn’t have to be exciting or novel or an amazing taste sensation most of the time.

Minor point of disagreement: unless you are actively working to build muscle, you don’t have to worry about protein. The vast majority of people in Western societies already get more than enough protein. Perhaps this is different for vegans, but I’ll let them weigh in if they choose.

Good points! Also helps one avoid the Goodhart trap, optimizing for a wrong thing. Also applies to savings: Dilbert's 9-point financial plan is one of satisficing, not optimizing:

Dilbert creator Scott Adams claims this is "everything you need to know about personal investing":

1. Make a will
2. Pay off your credit cards
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4. Fund your 401k to the maximum [Or your local equivalent employer contribution matching]
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum [Or your local equivalent of tax-deductible investment and/or tax-free interest growth]
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

Nutrition is one of those cases where perfect is the enemy of good. I mean, if you have sufficient education and enough time, go ahead, research everything, and create the perfect diet for you. But otherwise, your only choices are: using a few heuristics, or giving up. (Note that "I will research this topic later, and meanwhile I will continue eating junk food" is also a form of giving up. The "later" usually never happens.)

In the past, when I asked people what is "healthy nutrition", there were two kinds of unhelpful advice:

a) an incredibly complicated theory, that would require me to spend a few weeks or months studying, and afterwards measuring and analyzing everything I eat and calculating how many calories and vitamins it had;

b) a list of "forbidden foods" which contained pretty much everything I could think of, except for fruits and vegetables (actually, if I remember correctly, even bananas were bad somehow; also potatoes).

It also doesn't help that different people have contradictory theories, e.g. meat, eggs, and diary are either very important to eat, or very important to avoid. More precisely, the best form of meat is fish. Except you shouldn't eat fish, because they are full of deadly mercury. Also, you should eat less to avoid obesity, but you need to eat enough to have enough nutrients. (It is even easier to lose weight if you exercise a lot; but if you exercise seriously, it is even more important to eat enough nutrients.) As a feedback, you should measure your BMI; except that BMI is completely misleading, because it doesn't distinguish between fat (bad) and muscles (good).

(And if you happen to be a woman, it is even more socially important to lose weight, but at the same time getting rid of too much fat will damage your metabolism, because some female hormones need certain amounts of fat to function properly. Also, you probably don't want to get rid of your boobs, which are mostly fat.)

Well... thanks for the helpful advice, I guess. /s

Eat plenty of vegetables.

Notice that this is one of the few things the contradictory nutrition theories all happen to agree about. Vegetables are important in both paleo and vegan diets.

I would also recommend fruit. Unlike vegetables, fruit is usually not a part of a meal... so the simple solution is to eat it between large meals.

My favorite heuristic is Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen (available also as Android app).