Where you could just post some spontaneous idea or query or observation that occurred but didn't need an entire thread.
Kind of an ongoing meandering conversation. Might be fun
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Something that's been bothering me recently is the disconnect between nutrition science and its application to the modern human diet.
My cat has eaten the exact same type of cat food for > 5 years as his sole source of nutrition without any obvious nutrient deficiencies. So we obviously understand nutrition well enough to be able to produce sole source of nutrition foods that will keep mammals alive for very long periods of time. Yet we are either unwilling or unable to do that for humans (baby formula aside).
The closest things we have to this sort of food are breakfast cereals, which are not nutritionally complete and would put someone eating it as a significant source of nutrition in terrible shape.
I'm not a huge fan of heavily processed foods like breakfast cereals, but I think worse than them existing is how unhealthy they are. Given that they are by definition engineered foods, they could be made much more nutritionally balanced while maintaining a similar flavor. Yes they would have garbage like soy protein, insect protein and seed oils, but these foods already have garbage in them; and at least it would be more nutritionally balanced garbage.
Then beyond that, it seems for humans and humans only we are unable to either agree on or communicate a definition of "nutritionally balanced" in a way that we are able to for other animals. What should be basic knowledge of nutrition like proper macro nutrient ratios in a diet is somewhat of a fringe topic while mainstream nutritionists push garbage like the "food pyramid". Meanwhile you look at a bag of dog or cat food and it'll break down the exact percentages of carbs, protein, and fat it has; and you can get food with different ratios for different levels of activity, age, etc... So obviously this is well understood in animals but doesn't make it into discourse around human nutrition and diet.
Sometimes it feels like I have to have an undergraduate level of knowledge about nutrition science simply to eat healthy. I'm very sympathetic to people suffering from obesity because we shouldn't all be expected to all be experts in human nutrition; and the people who are experts are failing them.