"Everything in moderation."

Sure, that can be legit sometimes. But I am so sick of people, who have no knowledge of anything about health and nutrition, covering up their ignorance and making themselves feel good by saying "Just eat everything in moderation and you'll live a long healthy life."

For example:
Me: "I don't eat wheat because it messes with my stomach."
Person: "Just eat everything in moderation and you'll be fine."

Gahhhhhh!

Every time I see the Food Pyramid, I want to punch a wall.

Those commercials with Susan Sarandon touting the "benefits" of lowfat dairy make me want to just slap her and the entire dairy industry. We buy vat-pasteurized, non-homogenized, full fat milk for my teenage son. His best friend (whose mother is one of those CW low-fat advocates) was at our house one day, and I offered him a glass of milk; he demurred, saying he didn't care for milk. I gave it to him anyway, saying he should try it, so he drank it...then looked at me and said, "Wow! What have I been missing?"

I told him, "Real food."

Eat whole grains. Don't eat rare meat and don't eat all that (yummy, yummy) fat attached to it. Also, the silly idea that tofu concoctions are just as tasty as the meat they poorly try to replicate. Women needing to take calcium supplements. You must wear super-supportive shoes for running and hiking or else you'll get hurt. Seriously, Mimsy - how are your feet not sore working out and hiking the mountain in those Vibram thingies?

Also, that weight lifting is bad for women and that if I want to get smaller, I need to do tons of cardio. Weight lifting/strength training will just make me look like a man. I broke through a plateau and got my hourglass figure back introducing this to my lifestyle, and the loss has been noticeable enough for quite a few people at work to comment on. However, when I tell this to other women, they act like I am some sort of anomaly and that if I was normal, the treadmill would be much safer and more effective for me.

Meat eating is not environmentally friendly. Apparently, cheap corn is?

Also, I hate this one: if you want a toned stomach, do ab workouts. Work those muscles to death and your stomach will shrink and get hard! Yeah, right.

And this more recent chestnut: some people are just born that way, and the best the obese can do is to try to keep their weight down with a low-fat diet and moderate exercise. We must accept our destiny and not hope to reverse thyroid and/or metabolism problems because those diamonds are forever.

The advice the American Diabetes Council gives to my mother:

"Eating sugar has nothing to do with developing type 1 diabetes.

The biggest dietary risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes is simply eating too much and being overweight—your body doesn’t care if the extra food comes from cookies or beef, it is gaining weight that is the culprit."

So she basically has a doughnut in one hand and her insulin shot in the other.

The advice given to my mother by her doctor and the ADC REALLY GETS MY GOAT.

My biggest one is that soy is good for you - Leo Babauta recently earned my eternal consternation with a post about how soy is really good for you and the WAPF is an evil organization spreading lies about saturated fat because they want to kill THE WHOLE WORLD.

That saturated fat is bad for you is another.

That eating meat is bad for the environment, full stop. That veganism, not sustainable permaculture incorporating animals for fertilizer, is the best system for the environment.

That sugar and high carb, low fat diets are thought to be ok for diabetics. My mother is a type II diabetic and the fact that I and not her doctor, am the one who tells her to cut out sugar completely and go low carb, makes me so mad.

I usually get irritated when I see ads for Soy products, touting their health benefits. Usually these are all around, since I shop at a co-op.

I also can't understand why diabetics keep getting advice to eat high carb diets. It's like the medical profession is trying to kill them off, not treat them.

Also, usually when I'm eating something, I get comments about how I'm going to die at a young age because I "just ate 12 eggs, that's like a year's worth of cholesterol", or my meat is killing the environment (I always feel smug when I reply that it's grass-fed, and it actually isn't destroying the world).

Another thing is, that my roommate separates the egg yolk out, and just eats egg whites. His diet also consists of tons of carbs (cereal, bread, etc.), and he states that he's "playing it safe" in regards to fat and cholesterol. My explanations of how fat and cholesterol are essential don't seem to change his mind, since I can't cite a value that he needs to eat.

"Stay away from processed food.....eat lots of bread and pasta..." ummm, isn't bread and pasta processed???!!!

Eat 3 meals a day and 2 snacks in between- that way, you'll keep your blood sugar levels steady!

when i tell people i do one large meal a day, they freak out and tell me it's going straight to my fat stores because I'm starving my body, then "binging."

this from the girl who packs a sugar-laden fruit cup, soy milk carton, and honey-oatmeal-trail mix bar and munches practically non-stop all day. and she wonders why she has so much trouble losing weight. "I'm just big-boned. You see, I eat healthy- lots of little meals throughout the day, so it can't be my perfect diet. It's probably just genetics."

Oh Girl, you have no clue

and when I have to feel guilty about eating butter straight. wish that was the norm :)

Avoid meat, eggs and dairy to treat gout.

Aside from weight, gout was my biggest health problem, and the above statement is what my doctor told me to do. I read Cordian and Taubes' thoughts on gout and I did the complete opposite of what the doc told me. I've had no gout symptoms in months.

its not so much a nutrition thing but:: "you must deliver (child birth) on your back" UUUUGH!! that's the WORST position for you when you are in labor!

This from WebMD - "A recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that a calorie-controlled diet rich in whole grains trimmed extra fat from the waistline of obese subjects."

It pisses me off more because it's on WebMD, people who don't know any better trust this site. They get on there and read everything as fact then pass on their "knowledge".

Eat soy and other beans as a healthy alternative to meat, and eat 6 small meals a day to keep you from going into STARVATION MODE!!!

All conventional wisdom is based on allowing your thought process to be usurped. So your goal is to retrain your thinking process and no CW will ever bother you because it simply won't matter because you always think for yourself.

That calories pertain to nutrition.

Exercise is good for weight loss.

I also hate most drug commercials, especially the statin drug ones.

It's not conventional wisdom (at least not yet) but the new "reports" (by uninformed, lazy journalists) warning that gluten free diets can be dangerous or cause weight gain. The craziest part is that the two that I've read really don't even give any specific mechanism for how it could be bad, only vague ideas that really have nothing to do with food or how our bodies utilize it, or the fact that starches just aren't necessary. We live in a crazy world.

We stayed with friends over memorial day weekend and the mom of the family absolutely avoids any kind of fat. We had 4 meals:

Lunch: Turkey sandwiches with fat-free mayo, Pirate's Booty (nearly fat-free corn puffs), fat-free chips, fat-free milk, grapes, lemonade with sugar.

Dinner: Frozen pizza (didn't see the box but from the taste both the crust and cheese must have been non-fat), salad with vinegar dressing with a splash of oil ("to make the dressing healthier I substitute most of the oil with vinegar" she said), sliced tomatoes, grapes, carrot sticks, non-fat ranch dressing. Berries with fat-free pound cake and low-fat ice cream for dessert.

Breakfast: bagels with fat-free cream cheese, fat-free butter substitute, a fat-free strudel type pastry, fat-free milk, lemonade with sugar.

Lunch: Same turkey sandwiches.

Dinner: Hamburgers (didn't see the package but they tasted like the "95% lean" beef), corn with fat-free butter substitute, fat-free hot dogs, fat-free cheese, fat-free mayo, ketchup, relish, pickles, fat-free milk, lemonade. Popsicles for dessert.

Despite this being the complete opposite of the diet that I want, I politely ate most meals. Suffice it to say that by the end of the second night I was in distress, with headaches and diarrhea. I snuck into the kitchen when nobody was around and looked for some butter, olive oil, any kind of fat, but there wasn't even any in the house.

The mom (who is a lovely friend of our family) seems to have bought into the "conventional" diet wisdom, with a vengeance. All of the food in the house is free of fat, mostly free of nutrients, mostly processed, and with lots of sugar. Her doctor recommends a "low fat" diet so this is exactly what she does. It was horrible!

I'll admit that sometimes when changing channels I'll pause on the Biggest Loser. When i see the cheerios product placements and the claims that cheerios are part of a heart healthy diet, I get so irritated.

Mast$$bation causes blindness. Believe me, if that were true, I'd be wearing sunglasses and singing "Feliz Navidad".

Money can't buy you happiness. That's true, but it can buy me highly tolerable misery.

LSD splits chromosones. If that were true, you would be calling me something else, like, The First Human Clone.

• 35 eggs per week can easily kill you, 80 slices of bread per week is okay.
• Food without salt is boring/bland.

• The eggs & cholesterol issue. "Official" recommendations in Finland are something like 2 a week. A WEEK. I used to eat 4-5 a day, and the most I've had in a day is around 10.

• The "60 % of energy from carbs"-recommendation. So outdated, especially for people who don't excercise.

These are at least the "official"-recommendation in Finland.

The marketing of probiotic dairy products also bugs me. Most of those products are full of sugar anyway and pasteurized so the benefits are pretty minimal. I have a lot of friends who eat these products, and I always say why don't you save your money, buy probiotic pills and eat your youghurt plain with fresh berries instead of these sugar or sweetener filled "health products".

1. I have to say don't skip a meal (eat 3 meals a day or 6 small meals a day) or else it will slow down your metabolism!

My friends and family think that I starve myself to lose weight because I do not eat dinner often or skip a whole day of eating. They just have no clue.

1. You need to eat fruit, sugar, or grains to live.

2. Low carb high fat diets are dangerous.

The TV commercials for Crestor..."When diet and exercise are not enough, take Crestor" or the commercial for Lipitor,...the one that says "I trust my heart to Lipitor" Both of these have 45 seconds of disclaimers and a listing of side of effects. The best is "May cause death in some patients"

and the latest TV for Uloric for treatment of gout. ULORIC is a xanthine oxidase (XO) inhibitor indicated for the chronic management of hyperuricemia in patients with gout. ULORIC is not recommended for the treatment of asymptomatic hyperuricemia.

Gee, perhaps we could afford a multi million dollar advertising campaign on TV that says: It's the fructose, stupid. "If you don't eat sugar, or HFCS, or high sugar content fruit in excess, you won't get gout and you won't need Uloric.

ORGANIC MACARONI AND CHEESE (or insert other processed SAD sh*t here) IS HEALTHY just because you buy it at whole foods. I was babysitting last week and the 8 year old girl is a vegetarian.... she wanted mac and cheese for dinner and when I opened the cabinet I almost laughed because there was organic mac and cheese (which is what I always use as an example of fake healthy), and I asked her what kind of veggies she wanted... she didn't want any (good ol vegetarian), but I told her she had to, so I made her a salad..... her toppings of choice included soy meat (I was kinda bummed that it was in a ziplock because I wanted to read the ingredients), heavily processed cheese, and canola/soybean-based dressing. VOMIT. The worst part is, how do you argue with that dogmatic of CW?

1) All the vague bullshit about "keeping your metabolism going" (WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN? Cellular respiration isn't going to stop because you go more than three hours without a meal.) by eating six meals a day or snacking all the time.

2) Avoid ever feeling slightly hungry at all costs. If you feel the slightest tinge of hunger you must immediately shovel a snack into your face. Fasting is the worst thing you can do for your health. It's like north americans have totally forgotten that feeling hungry for a few hours a day won't kill you and is far more natural than eating all the time.

3) Soy is a healthy substitute for meat.

4) Constantly touting nuts as an optimal fat source. And of course, you should cook in vegetable oils.

5) The obsession with that low fat sugary probiotic yogurt constantly being marketed to women.

6) Salt is terrible for you and you shouldn't use any in your cooking (when someone proudly proclaims that they never use salt, that's a sign you're in for a bland meal.)

My favorite is..:"oh come on...you can have ONE."

This is such a timely question, I just got a packet of recommendations from my health insurance company in the mail today. I'm wondering if I'm looking at my premiums going up if I don't make appointments to address the things they wanted me to do?

I'm supposed to get a lung function test because I developed asthma for a month as the result of some of the IV drugs given to me during the birth of my son. Apparently, they don't make any distinction between a temporary drug side effect and lifelong asthma.

They also included some dietary guidelines because my BMI is in the "overweight" category, and told me I should ask my doctor for a copy of the food pyramid (I thought that was totally defunct even by the CW gods), and to make sure I'm getting enough whole grains and lowfat dairy in my diet.

Arg! I sure hope they don't develop an evil way to start auditing my grocery receipts or the food diaries I've submitted to doctors, and somehow tie my rates to that. Paleo-friendly insurance plan where are you?!

"Cavemen only lived to be thirty years old."

Oh really? Based on what science? Who funded that experiment(s)? Who perpetuates this myth?

And how on God's green Earth could you logically blame these conclusions, even if proven true at some point in the future, on the quality of food sources prevalent at a time well before environmental toxins, bizarre food modifications and lab-made additives/chemicals were introduced into our food and water supply?

Even if cavemen lived to be 30 it says NOTHING about the quality of the foods that were part of their Paleolithic diets.

That is complete bogus logic and the big food companies and feed companies pushing nutrient- deficient dangerous and lethal foods know it.

The truth is not that complicated...

Early man and woman lacked elaborate infrastructure, extensive transportation networks required to deliver foods at all times of drought and scarcity, to all locations, in even the harshest climates.

Paleolithic man and woman died when they had access to less paleolithic food, not more.

So lack of Paleo foods killed them if anything, not the Paleo diet itself.

This is basic fucking logic - but people fail miserably at making such a simple connection

If you have the chance to get your hands on a savory food of Paleolithic quality today, consider yourself extremely fortunate and eat the shit out of it.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.