Body & Health
Eat well without the noise
Novice
What is Nutrition & Food Science
Nutrition is one of the loudest fields in science, and most of that noise is wrong. Every month a new study, a new podcast, a new diet book tells you the opposite of the last one.
Eat fat. Don't. Carbs are evil. No they aren't. Cut everything. Eat everything raw. The boring, deeply unsexy truth that survives every shift of fashion is: eat mostly plants you'd recognise as plants (less stuff that came out of a factory), get enough protein, don't drink your sugary calories, don't smoke, and keep alcohol low. That's it. Get the basics right and the specific best-diet arguments matter way less than the internet pretends.
Why bother
Make it concrete
In 2009, Brazilian researchers asked a deceptively simple question: how processed is this food? They built a four-level scale called NOVA. Level 1 is fruit, rice, eggs, basically untouched. Level 4 is the stuff with ingredient lists like a chemistry exam, most cereals, sodas, packaged snacks, instant noodles. Across many large studies, the more level-4 "ultra-processed" food a population eats, the worse the outcomes, weight gain, heart disease, mortality, even when calories and macros match. The lesson isn't "eat clean." The lesson is: the more your food was assembled in a factory, the more careful you should be. Cook more. The rest mostly takes care of itself.
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