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?
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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.)
I think any type of diet like this ends up being effective just like any other diet - calorie restriction. Processed foods are frequently high calorie. Replacing them with other similar foods will frequently be less calorie dense, therefore healthier.
Another factor is costs. Speciality foods cost more, so people will buy less to follow a particular diet, causing them to eat less and lose weight. Gluten fanatics eat less carbs which tend to be calorie dense. Etc.
Basically if any diet replaces high calorie low nutrition foods with low calorie high nutrition foods its probably going to be effective. If someone wants to do that with eating no processed foods and it works I think they should be empowered to follow the diet, even if they misunderstand how the diet is benifitting them.
This is my main issue when people start talking about healthy diets. I've never had a problem with eating the correct amount of calories, so my main interest in comparing the health of diets is wrt increasing longevity through non-weight related factors. Obviously weight has a huge impact on health but if that's not something one struggles with then a lot of talk about what diets are healthy becomes useless because often the main thing people use to compare the health of a diet is wrt how effective it is at helping people lose weight. So some diets termed unhealthy may become healthy when removing the weight factor, and vice versa. I'm not sure how often this happens or what other factors i should be looking at in order to evaluate what is the healthiest diet with weight factor removed though. Probably at the minimum diets with less burnt stuff and maybe less glycemic spikes? I don't know. Are processed foods statistically unhealthy because of calories or other reasons? How big of a difference do non weight related factors even make? Is worrying about them worth the cost of worrying about them or is it pretty resonable to eat what you want so long as weight is managed?
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