… what? I have IBD but I’ve never heard this before. Maybe you mean some people can’t tolerate much plant fiber? I imagine that might be true for some patients.

Anyway, I guess it still comes down to whatever works for individual people!

This is a picture-perfect example of how much the one-size-fits-all model fails.

I just want to be clear (if I was confusing here), that I totally agree and didn’t mean that “exercise…etc”. was proscriptive for the definition HAES. I was just suggesting that we all have heard that, and that if it’s possible or plausible for us to pursue health that way individually we’d likely know it one way or the other by now. And that indeed, health for some of us doesn’t contain exercise. For people with Crohn’s, not too many plants.

Anyway, I laughed at KH’s Gary Taubes joke, but wondered if I’d been opaque even then. Even Taubes is AWARE of that proscription, even if he doesn’t agree. That’s all I meant – we’re all aware of that culture enough that it is likely if we’re doing something alternative we’ve had to confront the main culture head on to make the choice. It’s making the choices for your optimal health – whatever that looks like for you – that I personally see as HAES.

I too really appreciated Michelle’s post. It brought some things into focus for me.

Listen to your body, be skeptical, and read what’s out there. Really think it through, and experiment with what feels best. Ask questions. Enjoy yourself while you’re here. Be gentle with yourself and to other people.
I’m pretty sure everyone’s pretty clear on — “Exercise. Eat food, not too much, mainly plants” — yeah?

This is a picture-perfect example of how much the one-size-fits-all model fails. Exercise makes me very ill, and if I listened to my body all the time, it would be very, very bad for my mental health (instead, I briefly check in with it several times a day).

Disclaimer: I’m no expert, I’ve only done a ton of reading regarding the effects of carbs on the body in effort to figure out my own body. Everyone’s experience will differ.

First, I want to say carb addiction, or any type of addiction, is not a term I use lightly. Addiction implies an unsafe physical or mental demand to frequently consume something; a craving, or a desire, is something that can usually be satisfied and it goes away again for a good while, it’s not something that goes away again for an extremely short time until the effects of consumption are depleted and then the demand is there again.

Second, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the mid-afternoon blood sugar low is the most common form of blood sugar drop experience for the population. Remember the “Stay Sharp” commercials from Emerald Nuts? “Around three p.m. when your blood sugar and energy are low, some say that Robert Goulet appears and messes with your stuff.” They were making light of how many people experience symptoms of hypoglycemia including mental fog, stumbling, and falling asleep. So, it isn’t exactly hunger, but rather a desire for sugar or something that can easily be turned into sugar by the body – unfortunately, the easier it is for the body to turn it into glucose, the faster a hypoglycemic’s blood sugar will rise, followed by another drop. Raw or roasted nuts, for those who can have them, are then a good idea.

At times, hunger and low blood sugar seem to overlap, though – since the digestive system can run out of fuel to process around the same time the blood becomes low in sugar. You say it’s when you eat a smaller lunch. Actual hunger could very well be involved, but if there’s fogginess or other symptoms of hypoglycemia involved, I’m willing to bet it at least also involves your body asking for a sugar boost in its own way. Everyone truly is different, though: I’ve only met one person who I also knew to be hypoglycemic – because it’s usually not the first thing you talk about when introduced to people, of course, even for those who are aware they have it. She would experience blackouts and fainting in response to her blood sugar becoming low, which is dangerous of course, but less physically painful than the agonized shakes and tremors, heat flashes, and dizziness I would experience. There was a social element, as well – once in a while I’d be around people when my blood sugar became low, and suddenly I was making no sense, nor could I impart what the problem was.

missa is right on, I had no idea about hypo when I was young. I wanted to eat healthy, so I followed what the government told me was healthy – the food pyramid. I ate many servings of whole-grain breads and cereals – and other starchy things, like potatoes – as compared to meat or dairy. The older I got, the more I noticed I “felt a little funny” in the hours after eating these things at times, but it took me well into adult life before I found out the full connection and what was really going on and was able to fix it, sadly.

most nutrient requirements are normally distributed

Which means different people require different amounts, at various points along the bell curve, of every single nutrient. Which means that, on a macro-scale, an entire diet that is good for one person, or even a population of people living in a certain place and time, is going to look very different from an entire diet that is good for another person or population. Our bodies sometimes deal with things in idiosyncratic ways — nothing unscientific about that. It’s just biology, and biology is effing complicated.

I really doubt there will ever be consensus about one diet that is optimal for every single person in the world, honestly. There may be levels at which nutrient deficiencies develop in most people, but an entire diet comprises so many variables, it’s unlikely all those variables will ever be found to optimally align the same way for each individual on the planet.

I’m not trying to be all RELATIVISM FTW here, and I really do believe in science. But diet and nutrition is really, really complex, and people’s bodies are really, really complex too. It’s just not as simple as figuring out which diet is Right for everyone.

Damn right, it doesn’t exist. As I’ve said in the past, when the experts were coming up with the Dietary Reference Intakes (the new, improved, official RDAs for the US and Canada), they couldn’t even come to consensus about certain things like calcium. They came up with a “rough guesstimate” instead, called the AI (adequate intake.)

Nutrition is, if nothing else, an extremely young science, so unfortunately, we’re all going to be very privy to its growing pains.

It really doesn’t do a lot of good to harshly judge people who are just doing the best they can to wade through it and do what seems right for themselves.