Talk:Dieting

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Taste and nutritional value

If the human brain can't connect between taste an nutritional value why does some people think that food has to be unappetizing to be healthy? At least my Dad seem to have fallen for this misconception.

2009-09-25 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

Suggestion: rewrite to be focused on an overview of diets in general

There is a relevant discussion in Talk:Calorie_restriction#Outdated_article_with_primary_or_animal_references. --Signimu (talk) 23:01, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

I would also strongly advise to create a "Diet" infobox, to try to standardize the informations of each diet. --Signimu (talk) 23:32, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

I would add also another very interesting point that should be further digged IMO: the assumption of weight being the cause for increases in mortality. Indeed, we know from large-scale epidemio studies that being overweight is associated with higher mortality[1], but we don't know if there's a causality! It might very well be indirect: overweight people either have an illness or an unhealthy lifestyle/diet that cause both the mortality increase and the weight gain. And yet, the assumption of weight loss for health benefits (not for better looks) relies on this assumption! There's already a few refs in the lede about this question of causality, but if good reliable sources can be found, IMO a full section should be dedicated to this very important scientific debate. --Signimu (talk) 02:09, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Not sure there's any "debate" about it. Here's a handy summary from the WHO.[2]. There is a fringey concept of Health at Every Size (terrible article - ouch!). Alexbrn (talk) 02:18, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Thank you! You're right, there is little evidence supporting that view, but I think making a section to link to the HAES entry is better than what we currently have (a doubt in the lede with no criticism on the notion). I'll try it and add more refs. --Signimu (talk) 19:58, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Done, and I've found that it's the same and only refs that are used in the Dieting#Side_effects section. Upon closer inspection, there was WP:OR and it's made mostly of primary research refs, I left an update banner to fix this later. --Signimu (talk) 20:22, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

About correlation vs causality, my initial argument, here it's better explained by the AHA[3]: «Moe didn’t consider that while some people on the diet were losing weight, it wasn’t because of the potion. Instead, they’d been chasing down frogs and bats to mix their own brew and were getting way more exercise in the process. In other cases, the brew might have been part of a larger diet and exercise lifestyle change. It wasn’t really the brew that made the difference. It was all the other things. So, weight loss and the witch brew were correlated, which means they were related, but one wasn’t actually causing the other.» - So even though some diets do effectively work, a confounding factor of indirect lifestyle changes is probably not to be excluded, and there's no study to my knowledge who studied directly that. The argument IMO has some value, but not in the way HAES frames it. --Signimu (talk) 16:16, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

Alexbrn, if the Health at Every Size concept is fringe, maybe we should trim the sentence about it from this article. It is currently mixed in with good, scientific information in the efficacy section, which made it seem like a mainstream idea when I read it just now before seeing this talk page thread. Thoughts? Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:18, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Sounds sensible. Alexbrn (talk) 13:52, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

There is most certainly a debate on this topic, with other epidemiologic studies concluding the precise opposite: that overweight is associated with a decrease in mortality (for example: [4]). The agreement lies only with obesity, which is consistently found to increase mortality. Non-obese overweight as a risk factor is not a consensus fact. ParticipantObserver (talk) 21:06, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

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Alleged Increased Mortality Rate

The study mentioned was financed by the sugar industry. Moreover, it is stated plainly that there are numerous problems with the source data, e.g., using only weight and BMI to quantify health outcomes, as body composition (and thus the proportion of lean tissue) is unknown. Why such a deficient study is even included in this article? 92.184.98.56 (talk) 07:18, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

? To which of the four studies in the Increased Mortality Rate section are you referring? Or are you referring to the meta-analysis? I am curious as to which one(s) that you think do not meet WP:MEDRS. Peaceray (talk) 18:06, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

The meta-analysis fits the description above (funded by the World Sugar Research Organization, and relies on imperfect data because only imperfect data is available). But it doesn't seem to be particularly promoting sugar, nor does the related text included in this article. So, is that a problematic conflict of interest? It does not seem like one to me. ParticipantObserver (talk) 12:45, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

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