Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
Bari Weiss had a podcast with Dr Casey Means about Means new "Levels" diet.
https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/d0186220/eating-ourselves-to-death
(Bari Weiss does not really interview, in the sense of pushing back on her subject and making them take tough positions. I guess that is podcasting world.)
The tl:dr is to not eat anything processed at all. There is some kind of biofeedback which shows you getting better by not eating processed food. The episode's arguments about why there is no support for this range from extremely reasonable to conspiracy theory stuff.
Is there any follow-up research on how well her diet works?
(I do not want "her ideal diet is wrong, follow my ideal diet instead." I just get this sinking feeling whenever I ask questions about a specific diet that people see it as a chance to talk about their own, and that the proponents of the diet in question will say that any problems with it are from not following it closely enough.)
My working theory on diets is that the default unconscious diet is so shit that the sheer fact that you do any diet will bring improvements because you pay attention to what you eat and you probably won't mindlessly eat the junkiest junk. The rest is window dressing to make it stick, by making it personal, important, moral, emotional, identity-forming, you-are-a-good-person-for-doing-this stuff.
This doesn't mean there are no biological differences between diets, but when a normal person picks up any diet, it will probably be an improvement. Just like there can be differences among the effectiveness of different exercises, aerobic, anaerobic, different workout programmes with flame wars between their fans, but all of them are an improvement over the default sedentary lifestyle.
Here's a competing theory:
Various branches of humanity evolved to survive quite effectively off whatever the local diet was. The Mediterranean diet is great for the Mediterranean genome, the medieval-times British diet works great for the medieval-times British genome, and so forth.
This suggests that most of us probably have a diet that works well for us - we just might not know what it is.
When "a new diet" becomes popular, a bunch of people try it, and a bunch of people discover that they've finally found the diet That Works For Them. This isn't a perception deal, this isn't a matter of paying attention, the diet really does work for them, so they talk about how it's been a miracle and try to spread it.
But it doesn't work for everyone, because no diet works for everyone.
I've seriously thought about trying to put together a Diet Book that just collects every cuisine that seems to work nutritionally for a significant set of people, then puts them all in one place, with the note "go through this book, stick to each diet for a month or two or three; if you find one that works, keep doing it".
That seems pretty far-fetched to me, in that a thousand years is nowhere near long enough for human level selection effects to occur. I could perhaps buy that our gut biomes adapted to ancestral diets, but I tend to suspect old fashioned diets being better for us is more just a matter of ancestral wisdom/modern processed food being utter shit. Like, obviously a balanced meal of lean protein, grains, and mixed vegetables is gonna be better than fast food or whatever sodium loaded nonsense one picks up in the freezer aisle.
A few thousand years is certainly enough, see lactase persistance.
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