Is it better to eat the correct number of calories (even if you eat potentially unhealthy food) or is it better to eat "healthy" but eat too much or too little?<p>Obviously eating the correct amount of healthy food is optimal and obviously there are a lot of "it depends" answers here. But imagine the following very oversimplified thought experiment.<p>Alice can control the kind of food that is eaten by a million experimental subjects. For the sake of argument assume she has some magic insights into nutrition so we don't have to debate vegetarianism vs low carb vs keto vs whatever else. Alice's subjects all eat very healthy food but are normally distributed in how much they eat. Sampled globally including from places like the US where people tend to eat too many calories and places like Sudan where people might be malnourished from not being able to get enough calories per day.<p>Bob runs a competing experiment on another group of a million people. All Bob can do is control quantity. Assume each person in the group knows their goal target weight and the overweight ones will eat a calorie deficient diet and vice versa. What people eat will be normally distributed from global habits. Some people will eat a mcdonalds burger and coke every day, others will be eating broccoli and chicken, etc etc.<p>After 20 years, will Alice or Bob have *fewer* significant health problems in their group (cancer, heart disease, anything that requires hospitalization or has significant effect on quality of life)?<p>No one should take the results of this to be meaningful without consulting a professional. Obviously it's also a difficult study to conduct, so just assume a simplified world where we can correctly control for confounding factors. From people I've asked seem to have "strong opinions strongly held" about so figured it would be interesting to see how strongly it skews one way or the other and I've seen HN debate related topics before so I guess many here will have a strong opinion.
Quality/type: <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/30/1208883691/diet-ozempic-wegovy-weight-loss-fiber-glp-1-diabetes-barley" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/30/1208883...</a><p>Some foods naturally increase GLP-1 hormone levels (high fiber diet, very broadly), and we know the benefits of those levels rising, including direct effect on adipose tissue. Effects from food have a shorter half life than from semaglutide injections, hence the drastic delta in observed effects.
Both quality and quantity are important for sustained human good health. Quality as far as your default diet and quantity regarding your use of regular physical exercise. BTW people using the Mediterranean diet generally live longer.
The literature is overwhelming that a certain level of caloric reduction is a health master key, the body does so many things to clean up and improve and lengthen lifespan and healthspan under just enough caloric reduction, people would probably routinely live to 150 in this regime. They might not be high productivity years, tho, caloric reduction implies energy conservation and guess what uses a lot of energy.<p>Within a given caloric regime, different people's bodies and microbiota react to the same foods in different ways. They also react in different ways at different times of day/year in response to different demands and stresses. But a regime that provides needed at the time chemical components with sufficient surplus for growth is not going to activate the markers that lead to longer life, but it will lead to a much more productive life.