Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I'm a co-founder of a company doing science-based tailored meal plans for people here in Shanghai, China, and over a few years of pre-study on this, we developed a framework to sift through the body of nutritional knowledge.

As a part of it, we're also making something similar to SpamAssassin for articles. "A friend of mine" is co-hosting SciHub mirror, so we parse and index an extensive collection of papers.

We ban for any "toxins", "detox.+", "mycotoxin", juicing, for anything "leaky gut"-related, any "meso-/ecto-/whatever-"-morph (somehow this stuff is popular here in China), any trademark mention, all Bulletproof® Coffee™ and such; ban most "doctors" mentioned on quackwatch.org + our own blacklist (Mercola, Osprey, Taubes etc).

Generally, we don't trust anything from the Internet, double-check the books, and re-check the scientific papers. Many papers study very small cohorts (N=10-20) or miss important correlation issues (like the famous Blue Zones study or China study).

Learn to recognize that ~30% of current proven knowledge will be disproven in the future, like cholesterol.

Personally, I trust Dr. David Katz, examine.com, to less degree consumerlab.com, healthnewsreview.org, sciencebasedmedicine.org, nutritionfacts.org.




Thanks for the reply! What is your take on foundmyfitness.com and Dr. Rhonda Patrick in general?


Happy if it helped. IMO Dr. Rhonda Patrick is good, even if she is a biochemist. Her nutrition advice is mostly based on others' work and is well researched and solid. I'm skeptical about the whole cryo thing, and we do not support smoothie movement, so we mostly ignore that part. She's certainly worth to listen/read.


This sounds fantastic; best of luck to you!




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: