Beef was literally never a staple food in the EU. There's only a few regions were there is enough pasture land for a local operation but even then it was always too expensive to be a staple. Pork has always been the staple meat and we grow enough of that.
not sure where people have been for the last year but MAHA and rfk have been on the "fat is good train" and seem to completely ignore entire decades of science.
all simple carbs are the devil, but we can't possibly feed billions of people actually healthy food - organic vegetables, nuts, and animal products, so come drink your corn syrup.
The sugar industry (topic of this article) can only be blamed for sugar, though -- not all high-GI foods.
And you can replace "sugar" in what I said earlier with "high-GI foods" and it doesn't change a thing. Persistent high blood sugar is diabetes; it isn't dietary.
>Persistent high blood sugar is diabetes; it isn't dietary.
how is it not dietary if consuming most carbs spikes your blood sugar for hours, which, with three meals + snacks + starbucks slurry, means elevated blood sugar 20+ hours a day?
I wonder if this is because it has less to do with fat and carbs and more to do with processed foods.
The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.
People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
Cochrane systematic reviews should make you seriously question whether the Mediterranean diet really is much good at all - hard data is inconclusive and low quality [1].
In general we really even barely have enough nutritional knowledge to say if the term 'good fats' even makes much scientific sense, but broad and vague things like "Mediterranean diet" are just total nonsense, from the standpoint of serious nutrition science.
That seems to be searching for RCT's, which, I'm not surprised would struggle to replicate. Most of these had a duration of less than 5 years, while dietary related health outcomes are the result of decades of following a pattern. It's possibly also unethical, in some cases (i.e. the existence of effective LDL lowering medication would likely complicate things).
Many people seem to disregard epidemiology, especially when it comes to nutrition (I think because it tends to support unpopular positions). But epidemiology has performed some excellent feats in the name of public health: cholera, smoking, pfao.
It is unfortunate that the large time-lines on these things make more rigor difficult, but I wouldn't throw out the epidemiology.
Epidemiology should generally be disregarded when it comes to nutrition.
There are exceptions when there are rare natural experiments (e.g. I forget the country, but the European one where some issue caused all flour for the country to be only whole-wheat, which led to clear nutrient deficiencies due to the phytic acid there) but in general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is not just quantitatively but qualitatively wrong, and you can't track enough people nearly long enough), there is virtually no control whatsoever (diets and available foods shift considerably over just decades), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid taxon, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
But even setting that aside, you can't define or study "Mediterranean diet" rigorously even in RCTs, so I don't see how you can think you are going to get much of anything here from epidemiological work that is going to lead to anything practically actionable.
Notably, the epidemiological study people like to dump on the most, largely did use natural experiments (i.e. they chose regions, that, at the time, had very traditional diets, without the convenience of supermarkets to mess it all up). They also didn't rely solely on food surveys, but actually measured the meals.
But all that aside, I don't actually follow a Mediterranean diet, and agree that one has to be careful here, because it is not well defined (or, it might be in some circles, but that differs from what the general population might expect).
The only reason I mentioned it was in response to
> The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat.
Where I was pointing out that the fats in the Mediterranean diet (by pretty much every measure of what it means to be a Mediterranean diet), are not saturated, and it is usually saturated fats that are considered "bad".
That is, all I was trying to do was clear up the (common!) confusion about fats (they are not all the same).
Fair, the term may have been well-defined and measured in the original study, or in some specific circles. I was definitely thinking of the meaningless general thing "Mediterranean diet" has metastasized into today.
I also think it is better, rhetorically, to not draw support for the badness of saturated fats / differences of different fats by referencing the Mediterranean diet, since this rather looks like drawing upon narrow / weak science to support something that is in fact much more broadly supported by a larger variety of more careful work.
But yes, it is very important that people recognize there are huge differences here!
There are so many differences in lifestyle between the regions that they studied and other places that it is absurd to attribute the outcomes confidently to the diet. Especially when stress is a well known CVD risk in itself.
This sounds like they didn't think about it at all. Of course they did, and sure, their techniques were not as sophisticated as today. But there have been plenty of follow-up studies that have controlled more rigorously for those things, and it turns out they were probably right?
Also, the 7 countries study didn't just compare the regions, they also did intra-regional comparisons. Not that I think this particular study is what you should base all your evidence on, but, most others back it up.
The people who run these studies actually know what they are doing. They know the limitations of their methods, and, they have thought about confounding variables. This _always_ comes up in internet debate, like, "ahh, but there are confounding variables so the study must be trash!". It's literally their job to take those confounding variables into account. They don't just grab random people of the street to run these things. And I assure you, they know about the details.
No, they are not. Dietary cholesterol has little to zero impact on blood cholesterol, and saturated fat we don't have reliable data that points to it being harmful either, when accounting for other influences.
> Dietary cholesterol has little to zero impact on blood cholesterol
The "well, actually" point on this is that dietary saturated fat drives blood cholesterol levels more strongly than dietary cholesterol. But it is not true that dietary cholesterol has "zero impact," and it is not true that "saturated fat we don't have reliable data that points to it being harmful." High-cholesterol foods are typically high in saturated fat, so these things are kind of intertwined.
Yes. Sugar (and all of its downstream phenomena - diabetes, insulin resistance, the ease in which sugar adds calories without satiation signals) is well established to contribute to CVD. Long-chain (animal based) sat fat and trans fat is also well established to contribute to CVD. The high calorie density of fatty foods plays a big role, as does the overall palatability and "eatability" of low fiber, high fat, high sugar, delicious foods, making portion control challenging. That should be uncontroversial at this point.
The jury is unclear on:
- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)
- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation
- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)
Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.
There are many people with type 2 diabetes that are not overweight; and also many people with overweight and even obesity who do not develop type 2 diabetes. The estimate is that around 537 million people have diabetes worldwide, while overweight and obesity is estimated to affect 1.1 billion people.
Carbohydrates do cause insulin resistance and diabetes. India has average BMI of 21,9, yet has very high incidence of diabetes - largely thanks to its carbohydrate-based diet.
I saw a youtube video of a single mother who job it was to cut out the ice from underneath the ships to create space to do the repairs. Apparently its a very dangerous job because you can easily end up frozen to the river if you're not careful. Must be the same one mentioned in the article.
I love how this is a community that talks about the singularity and transhumanism and all that sci-magick-fi nonsense as if it was going to happen next year, but a real geopolitical threat the likes of which have happened countless times in the last 500 years is considered impossible...
I love how you think that improbable capture of Canada is a real geopolitical threat, but losing the status of the dominant species apparently isn't. You think wars happened a lot? How many species were dominant before us and where are they all now?
I think that if you compare the worst poverty that Japan is willing to accept versus the worst that India is willing to accept ... some people die of hunger in India. People barely die of preventable diseases in Japan, and none of hunger.
India has a space program ... and India has people living off the land like they lived 6000 years ago.
And then you calculate and realize that in fact that, first, India could have the same standard. They have the money to do that. It is possible. Second, actually doing that would be the best thing that could possibly happen to the Indian economy. Hell, you could slowly implement this over 20-30 years and that would later be described as "creating a golden age".
In other words, Indian poor are kept poor to maximize the difference between the rich and the poor. If the poor were simply given money, one would expect that to 100x the wealth of rich Indians. And they're NOT doing it.
... and as bad as that is, then you look at Pakistan. WTF.
India has one of the most agrarian populations in the world, with a comparatively high prevalence of subsistence farming too. Its GDP per capita is maybe a tenth of Japan's.
One million is hyperbole, but Japan's more advanced economy and lower population vs India's less advanced economy and higher population is a strange comparison in some ways. The single number doesn't tell the whole story.
So you're basically talking about HDI. That's one metric. But I think equally important is also to consider the rote tech capabilities. That India still has a lot of people practicing susbistence farming and that China still has people living in caves, and that the US still has many homeless people living in tents, ... , all those aren't indicative of the rote tech capabilies of those respective countries.
Japan may have better human rights now, but was not the role model in the WW2.
People are an important component of growth. Japan is facing aging population negatively impacting their GDP.
What is greed for you? Building companies in the hope of becoming millionaire? If yes, then all the big economies have followed this path. Even China and Japan were greedy in that sense.
You can have growth without greed. This might sound crazy these days but you can build things and do things that make money and actually benefit people rather than exploit.
Japan is a capitalist country, their growth is as much based on greed as any other.
They do have robust social safety nets and a culture of civic mindnedness which improves quality of life over many other capitalist countries (particularly the US) but also "black companies" and salarymen working themselves to death.
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