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40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

washingtonpost.com

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Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#81

Post by enibundo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #77
enibundo wrote: post #74

Is it this difficult to know what to eat Americans? Just don't eat processed food and don't abuse with only one type of food ffs.

This is a case where I'm inclined not to blame the Americans. The modal human eats a more or less traditional diet that coevolved with them over a very long period. Unsurprisingly, Japanese in Japan do pretty well on their diet, Greeks in Greece do pretty well (though not as well) on theirs, and so forth. Japanese in the US show pathologies like obesity at elevated levels compared to the ones in Japan. The American d…

> The quest for the one perfect diet which is optimally healthy for everyone in the world, though, is obviously misguided.

I'm not talking about what the country eats but more on a personal level. At my workplace everyone eats meat and most of them eat junk food but I am vegetarian and I look after what I eat.

I don't wanna sound like a hippie, but just listen to your body and be conscious of what it likes and how you feel after eating certain kind of foods.

Personally speaking, after eating junk food I feel like shit. Voila!

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#82

Post by CompelTechnic »

Houshalter wrote: post #32
foota wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as a joke about the fact that the study is so old they're almost certainly dead (coming from a 21yo 40 years seems like a long time so that could be why I read it differently?)

I read it as a reference to the old idea that "science progresses one funeral at a time". That the information was suppressed because it didn't go along with their opinions, and had to wait until now to come out.

I agree with this interpretation.

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#83

Post by thaumasiotes »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #80
thaumasiotes wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a case where I'm inclined not to blame the Americans. The modal human eats a more or less traditional diet that coevolved with them over a very long period. Unsurprisingly, Japanese in Japan do pretty well on their diet, Greeks in Greece do pretty well (though not as well) on theirs, and so forth. Japanese in the US show pathologies like obesity at elevated levels compared to the ones in Japan. The American d…

>Japanese in the US show pathologies like obesity at elevated levels compared to the ones in Japan. The American diet is a pretty recent phenomenon and hasn't settled. // Are countries with a higher degree of capitalism in general or a greater profit motive in their food production more likely to have diet that leads to poor outcomes?

You know, Japan itself is ranked 22nd in the Heritage index of economic freedom ("degree of capitalism") for 2016.

And a raw country-to-country comparison of health outcomes will be badly confounded by the effect of race. Japanese in the US perform worse on health metrics than Japanese in Japan. They still do better than whites in the US.

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#84

Post by twelvedogs »

enraged_camel wrote: post #11
jinushaun wrote: post #3

To me, the problem is not scientific studies, but mainstream reporting of scientific studies that turn into popular fads and trends. Science doesn't deal in absolutes, but society does. This is true for dietary fat, autism, gluten, paleo, salt, etc.

Mainstream reports it that way because the general public has no appetite for the intricate details of scientific studies. The vast majority of people tend to look for quick fixes and easy changes, which is why they gravitate towards reporting that oversimplify scientific findings. And since the media wants/needs readers/clicks to stay in business...

i think it's mostly that most scientific studies have no clear outcomes, people want resolutions not "we did this study, it wasn't perfect but the findings seemed to point towards this effect and more better studies should be done in this area to back up this before we can say it probably does cause this effect" is not anything anyone who isn't a scientist would care about, especially since those further studies will very likely not happen

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#85

Post by Sacho »

saalweachter wrote: post #79
Avshalom wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course on the other hand: wouldn't it be amazingly convenient for the meat industry if just as a massive drought was bringing forth a renewed wave of criticism against the wastefulness of alfalfa for feed; with factory farms being heavily criticized as horrifying cruel; antibiotics in animal feed being blamed for bringing about the MRSApocalypse; hormones being blamed for... well just about anything; along with sh…

I suspect there is a certain amount of "meat solidarity", but meat itself is not really a monolithic thing. Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce, and poultry three times as efficient. Replacing beef in your diet with other meats is already a substantial improvement without the hassle of going full-vegan.

Err, in this hypothetical, wouldn't that be the case for vegetables as well? Some vegetables would not be as efficient to grow as the most efficient meats, thus you would want to focus on the efficient vegetables...etc

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#86

Post by Avshalom »

saalweachter wrote: post #79
Avshalom wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course on the other hand: wouldn't it be amazingly convenient for the meat industry if just as a massive drought was bringing forth a renewed wave of criticism against the wastefulness of alfalfa for feed; with factory farms being heavily criticized as horrifying cruel; antibiotics in animal feed being blamed for bringing about the MRSApocalypse; hormones being blamed for... well just about anything; along with sh…

I suspect there is a certain amount of "meat solidarity", but meat itself is not really a monolithic thing. Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce, and poultry three times as efficient. Replacing beef in your diet with other meats is already a substantial improvement without the hassle of going full-vegan.

It's not a question of 'is meat bad for the planet'. It's that the internet seems to be full of people who fancy themselves sharp-minded critical-thinking skeptics running around accusing Big-Ag of motivated reasoning with regards to carbohydrates while ignoring that meat production is part of Big-Ag and has just as much cause for motivated reasoning.

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#87

Post by Tycho »

dragonwriter wrote: post #69
Tycho wrote: post #47

We don't need scientific studies to figure out what to eat. Just look at what has worked for millennia and avoid newfangled processed food.

Systematic evaluation of what has worked for millennia is science. If you mean just gathering unstructured anecdotes of uncertain provenance about the past and using them to construct just-so stories as guides, well, that's not particularly likely to be more useful than just randomly guessing what you should eat, though it's pretty close to how many diet fads get created.

All these dietary fads seemed to emerge around the same time as nutritional science.

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#88

Post by mapt »

Sacho wrote: post #85
saalweachter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there is a certain amount of "meat solidarity", but meat itself is not really a monolithic thing. Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce, and poultry three times as efficient. Replacing beef in your diet with other meats is already a substantial improvement without the hassle of going full-vegan.

Err, in this hypothetical, wouldn't that be the case for vegetables as well? Some vegetables would not be as efficient to grow as the most efficient meats, thus you would want to focus on the efficient vegetables...etc

Fresh vegetables are typically only labelled by society as 'fresh vegetables' because they're so calorie-poor you'd need a fridge full of the stuff every day to feed someone enough calories that they don't lose weight. Efficient calories don't often get called 'vegetables', but some sort of essential staple food. Vegetables average around 100 calories per pound: http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/cal-par/calorie-paradox1...

.

Calories we can produce really, really well with various techniques:

Cereal grains - maize, rice, wheat, sorghum / millet

Legumes - soya, various beans / lentils / peas

Some root vegetables - potato, sweet potato, taro, cassava, yam, beet

Sugarcane

Plantains & Bananas

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#89

Post by saalweachter »

Sacho wrote: post #85
saalweachter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there is a certain amount of "meat solidarity", but meat itself is not really a monolithic thing. Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce, and poultry three times as efficient. Replacing beef in your diet with other meats is already a substantial improvement without the hassle of going full-vegan.

Err, in this hypothetical, wouldn't that be the case for vegetables as well? Some vegetables would not be as efficient to grow as the most efficient meats, thus you would want to focus on the efficient vegetables...etc

It's almost certainly true for some vegetables, but I'm not sure any of those crops account for a majority of a vegetarian diet. Soybean, corn, potatoes, rice and wheat are like, really awesome.

But "let's not use any animal products at all" is a much harder sell. "Hey, if you eat mostly chicken and pork with just the occasional steak or burger on a special occasion you can get like 50%+ of the environmental benefits" is a much more plausible way forward for the US.

Re: 40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published

#90

Post by pitchka »

epalmer wrote: post #37
narrator wrote: post #31

The context of the early 70s was that "The Limits To Growth" and "The Population Bomb" had just been published and there was a real concern in the air that the world was going to run out of food quickly unless something drastic was done. I think this created a strong confirmation bias that favored any scientific validation of vegetarianism as good news. Saturated fat being the main component of meats that is not in v…

Thanks for this. This seems very plausable. I'm now eating low carb and shuning most vetegable oils. I do use Olive Oil and eat more fish. I use just a little coconut oil. Lost ~28 lbs and have not been sick at all since going ketonic. Still have to lose more weight. I do eat red meat and chicken, turkey. Cheese is a favorite and my bias is I don't want to have to give up cheese.

ketogenic diet is a fad.

just like any other diet (paleo and other shit).

science today can tell you only that you have to eat a variety of foods, not too much or too little, mostly plants.

personalized nutrition will be the solution tailored and true, but that takes a lot of resources and currently uninvented tech.

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