I consider myself a life extensionist and I actually found Overcoming Bias and this community via the ImmInst forums. I’ve read a lot about nutrition back then (2008-2009). As I can tell, so far the only guy besides me who mentioned ImmInst on LW is wedrifid. ImmInst remained my primary source of health info and I also frequently search pubmed for abstracts.
I haven’t read Taubes’ book. I remember faintly though that several people who disagree with the mainstream lipid hypothesis criticized the book for having very sketchy science. Its conclusions, however, seem to point in a good general direction, from what I heard. It is important to note that the “mainstream’” Taubes is against is actually very poorly established and is not something you would call solid. Why it gained momentum decades ago and haven’t already collapsed in billowing smoke is a genuine mystery of our times.
I personally follow a quite carefully constructed lowish-carb diet that I tweaked over the course of the last two years, and I also take some supplements that I also researched on the net to death. I’m not really expanding my views on nutrition right now because it’d be a bit lengthy. There are several big low-hanging fruits (like vitamin d3, one that I plan to write about a top-level post here sometimes) in life extension but most of the time it is rather like a battleground of dozens of complex and ambiguous ideas.
The issue is that it requires a huge initial effort to get a rough picture about health topics, and it also requires a considerable amount of rationality to just avoid instantly going astray and settling with some snake oil, fad diet or piece of ancient wisdom. After this barrier is overcome it isn’t very costly to maintain a lifestyle roughly optimized for health, according to what current science really says.
I consider myself a life extensionist and I actually found Overcoming Bias and this community via the ImmInst forums. I’ve read a lot about nutrition back then (2008-2009). As I can tell, so far the only guy besides me who mentioned ImmInst on LW is wedrifid. ImmInst remained my primary source of health info and I also frequently search pubmed for abstracts.
I haven’t read Taubes’ book. I remember faintly though that several people who disagree with the mainstream lipid hypothesis criticized the book for having very sketchy science. Its conclusions, however, seem to point in a good general direction, from what I heard. It is important to note that the “mainstream’” Taubes is against is actually very poorly established and is not something you would call solid. Why it gained momentum decades ago and haven’t already collapsed in billowing smoke is a genuine mystery of our times.
I personally follow a quite carefully constructed lowish-carb diet that I tweaked over the course of the last two years, and I also take some supplements that I also researched on the net to death. I’m not really expanding my views on nutrition right now because it’d be a bit lengthy. There are several big low-hanging fruits (like vitamin d3, one that I plan to write about a top-level post here sometimes) in life extension but most of the time it is rather like a battleground of dozens of complex and ambiguous ideas.
The issue is that it requires a huge initial effort to get a rough picture about health topics, and it also requires a considerable amount of rationality to just avoid instantly going astray and settling with some snake oil, fad diet or piece of ancient wisdom. After this barrier is overcome it isn’t very costly to maintain a lifestyle roughly optimized for health, according to what current science really says.