You know how you get empty calories? Drink water. Every calorie in it is an “empty” calorie.

Salty snacks and candy don’t have “empty” calories. They offer satisfaction and pleasure. The notion that all our food must serve a purpose is the kind that creates relatively boring food like Graham Crackers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_cracker

Yes, we have “perverted” them from their original intent via Smores and Moon Pies (and my personal favorite, breakfast “cereal” from crumbled GCs in milk), but the entire idea was to make your food bland as possible, to turn eating to a chore.

No thanks. While you should match your intake to your daily burn, that’s the extent of real matching needed. Everything else is personal preference (and physiology!!), as long as you take a multivitamin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_effect

Their occurrence is a direct result of shoddy experiment construction.

Everyone should remember — especially in these days of “Climate Change” — that the Gold Standard of Science is not “Peer Review”, but multiple independent replications of a Double-Blind Experiment.

You damned sure are not likely to get that from “observational studies”.

I would argue that almost everything we are told about diet is wrong.

When nutritionists not trying to push some diet or fight some supposed evil are asked what we should eat they generally say the same thing — food. Not too much, and include vegetables.

Something like an FDA drug study is probably one of the best or most thorough approaches. At least I hope it is. But I was very surprised to see that those tests routinely detect and factor out something like a 20% placebo effect. Sometimes I have tried to explain this “problem” to people who are experimenting with their diet or over-the-counter drug therapies, a few respond as though I’d called them mentally defective.

Another thing I hadn’t heard of until recently is the “nocebo” effect. These are people who convinced that something they are taking or eating is causing them great harm, even when medical tests prove the opposite.
____

I like some salt and I’m slightly hypertensive, so I use LoSalt. 50% NaCl and 50% KCl. It tastes OK, though a little less strong in flavor.

I’ve also noticed that recently, on occasion, using sea salt on food tastes incredibly good. It’s been decades since the first time I tried sea salt, so I don’t know if I’ve changed or the sea salt changed, but I don’t ever remember it being that good. Or am I imagining it?

–Shakespeare (with a minor modification)

(That’s another show I loved for six seasons but the writers kept upping the stakes and horror, so I stopped watching.)

And don’t forget this cartoon:

https://morningglory2.wordpress.com/2007/01/17/the-golden-years/

Even that’s a lie 🙂 .

–Dr. House