I drink 88oz of coke every day. A gallon is 128oz. I also snack on chips a lot. I'm definitely not skinny, but by your logic, I should be about to overtake Gabe Newell. I'm not.
Most people are arrogant and think they know more than they do. The truth is, we know very little about nutrition (in an absolute sense, like "I absolutely know that if I hit that ball with X force, it will move Y meters").
>The truth is, we know very little about nutrition
We know what you're consuming doesn't qualify as nutrition.
Dude, you eat garbage. This isn't a hippy-crunchy-vegan thing; the "food" you eat is trash.
If you want to sooth your sweet tooth, go to your grocery store and buy a metric fuckton of berries. They're in season. Leave your strawberries and blackberries in the fridge, and throw your raspberries (they don't keep) and blueberries (they're fantastic frozen) in the freezer. Grab some bananas and milk while you're there.
Make a smoothy like so: 1 banana, 4-5 strawberries, a bunch of blue-, black-, and raspberries, put 'em in the blender. Fill the cracks with milk. Blend. Drink. You'll have to balance the berries for taste, as raspberries and commercial blackberries are sour; strawberries, blueberries, wild (ripe) blackberries, and bananas are sweet.
Do that, and you can satisfy your sweet tooth and get loads of good vitamins and whatnot in you. It's also easier than walking to the store, and not terribly expensive.
Remember those blueberries you put in the freezer? Next time you want candy or chocolate or something, munch on them. They're delicious (big ones are better).
One last note: stop pretending that your diet is okay. It really, really isn't. Your body is operating in spite of what you're putting into it, not because of it.
How old are you? In your 30s your body most likely will change, significantly.
Besides everything else, you are good to get periodontal disease and have false teeth early on. Nutrition is clear on several aspects. Eating horrible food is not some perceptual mystery. Eventually it will catch up to you. And it often makes you feel bad instantly.
Try changing your diet for 30-days, eat more fruits, vegetables, cut your sugar intake etc and see if you feel different.
And have you seen Tom Naughton's film Fat Head (the anti-Super Size Me doc)? Some bad logic in it but you sound like you could appreciate it. Good luck.
We do know basics though, like "you need vitamin C." If you eat no foods that contain essential nutrients (that our bodies don't produce) you will become deficient.
Certainly. That was an important step in our understanding. And we need to do more research.
I'm merely saying science is harmed when people blatantly decide to overlook reality.
It seems very interesting to me that I can drink 88oz of soda every day for the past 6 months and still be at the same weight. Why is that?
And it raises other interesting questions, too. Like the meaning of "health". For example, I know my muscles haven't been impacted, because I just armwrestled my wife's father and won, and the dude builds pole barns for a living. Like, goes out and actually builds them himself.
So if soda is so terrible, why haven't I been affected? Or is the truth that I'm overlooking some aspect of my health? I'm interested in the answers, but I won't ever find out if arrogant scientists continue with the "soda is terrible!" mantra.
Edit: as pyre points out, if someone reads this and thinks "Gee, maybe I'll try suddenly drinking 88oz of soda every day too!"... don't. I was just pointing out what I do, not saying that it's safe.
* It's also possible that human beings are complex enough that we process foods differently. It's not like all humans are allergic to the same things, for example.
* It couple possibly have something to do with the discovery that all of our digestive tracts can (possibly) be categorized into three different sets of bacterial fauna.
* I certainly hope that you aren't recommending that everyone should just drink nothing but soda because, "it works for me, so it should work for everyone."
I know a person who routinely says "I smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. It doesn't affect my health and I don't have lung cancer, so the doctors must be wrong."
The truth is your habits will catch up to you. Eventually.
OK, maybe metabolism can be a mitigating factor. Some people (fidgety people?) might have a really high metabolism. Perhaps you can have a few outliers who burn excess calories like some kind of rodent; but I doubt there's outliers with with a python-like metabolism who can spend weeks living off the deer they just swallowed. There's a base-line for what a warm-blooded human burns at rest (or at a desk), and not everyone with that slow calorie burn rate is severely overweight.
Most people are arrogant and think they know more than they do. The truth is, we know very little about nutrition (in an absolute sense, like "I absolutely know that if I hit that ball with X force, it will move Y meters").