What shall we eat?
A prediction to log for my own satisfaction: it can't be long before protein becomes demonised in the daily deluge of poor-quality dietary moralising.
Micronutrients pop in and out of fashion like there's no tomorrow. And there are a lot of micronutrients - quite possibly more than we know about already. So predicting the future popularity of those is pretty tricky. The scope for capriciousness is too high. And, by definition, there isn't a lot of micronutrient in anyone's diet.
For macronutrients, the stuff you mostly eat, there are only three main possibilities: fats, carbohydrates, and protein.
We're more or less through peak fat-is-bad. It was considered really very evil, but now we're getting towards a more nuanced view. Or a more ranty both ways view, if I'm feeling gloomy. Carbohydrates, and sugars in particular, are approaching peak evil. You can hardly open a metaphorical newspaper without reading something about how bad carbs are.
Protein is the only major nutrient yet to have a big anti-popularity surge. You can see the beginnings of this at the moment in the odd article here and there about how the stuff about incomplete/second-class proteins might have been a little overblown in the past, or pointing out that people who subsist chiefly on huge tubs of whey protein are not all as healthy as you might think.
So it looks like the early signs are there, and in a little while 'high protein' will be a bad sign, rather than the good one it is at the moment.
(For completeness, there's also stuff you need to eat lots of but isn't a nutrient. I'm thinking of fibre and water, mainly. We're learning more about fibre but going on about it seems terribly 70s and old hat.)
Oh, and I also want to note that there's an ongoing arms race between food technologists inventing new ways of processing food that do cool things for cheap prices but still show up innocuously in lists of ingredients, and not unreasonably suspicious techno-sceptics who are the only ones who care about what's in the list of ingredients anyway. I suspect this will not end well.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/299510.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
Micronutrients pop in and out of fashion like there's no tomorrow. And there are a lot of micronutrients - quite possibly more than we know about already. So predicting the future popularity of those is pretty tricky. The scope for capriciousness is too high. And, by definition, there isn't a lot of micronutrient in anyone's diet.
For macronutrients, the stuff you mostly eat, there are only three main possibilities: fats, carbohydrates, and protein.
We're more or less through peak fat-is-bad. It was considered really very evil, but now we're getting towards a more nuanced view. Or a more ranty both ways view, if I'm feeling gloomy. Carbohydrates, and sugars in particular, are approaching peak evil. You can hardly open a metaphorical newspaper without reading something about how bad carbs are.
Protein is the only major nutrient yet to have a big anti-popularity surge. You can see the beginnings of this at the moment in the odd article here and there about how the stuff about incomplete/second-class proteins might have been a little overblown in the past, or pointing out that people who subsist chiefly on huge tubs of whey protein are not all as healthy as you might think.
So it looks like the early signs are there, and in a little while 'high protein' will be a bad sign, rather than the good one it is at the moment.
(For completeness, there's also stuff you need to eat lots of but isn't a nutrient. I'm thinking of fibre and water, mainly. We're learning more about fibre but going on about it seems terribly 70s and old hat.)
Oh, and I also want to note that there's an ongoing arms race between food technologists inventing new ways of processing food that do cool things for cheap prices but still show up innocuously in lists of ingredients, and not unreasonably suspicious techno-sceptics who are the only ones who care about what's in the list of ingredients anyway. I suspect this will not end well.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/299510.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.