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How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

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Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#21

Post by ryanfitz »

wmboy wrote: post #11

Once we realize that obesity is (by and large) a modern lifestyle disease caused by needless stress and a diet consisting of mostly fake food perhaps we'll return to eating a whole food diet consisting of real food? e.g. margarine (which has color added to it to make it look yellow, otherwise it'd be gray) is NOT a healthy alternative to butter.

the paleo diet is a growing diet/lifestyle based on eating real foods. If anything else its very interesting to read about. http://freetheanimal.com/ancestral-life-way is a great blog for anyone interested.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#22

Post by splish »

aantix wrote: post #10

Am I the only one that felt like he was holding the Afghanistan people up as a model of health because they lack fat? Their life expectancy is a mere ~44 years ( http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le... ). Neighboring Pakistan is 66 years ( http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le... ).

It was a doctor's observation. While operating on Afghan soldiers who have limited access to processed foods and a western lifestyle the fat deposits were not found as abundantly internally.

It serves as a launching point to describe the point of the article and book.

Your premise and statistics are a bit on the hand-waving side, of course no one is calling Afghanistan and Pakistan models of health.

And life expectancy is not a proper measure of health either, as per capita (~2006) Afghan people had $29 as the total expenditure on health per capita. The United States? $6,714. We may live longer but we have a lot more help in getting there.

http://www.who.int/countries/afg/en/

http://www.who.int/countries/usa/en/

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#23

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

Misleading title, it is not "western diet" what is bad for health, it is fast food, and sugar sweety food what is.

What Americans were eating 70-50-30 years ago was healthy and "western".

It has been people eating industrial foods instead of someone making the food what has changed. I use to look at obese people shopping cart and I see a lot of Coca Cola, pizza, industrial bread, industrial buns,cookies, chocolate,no fresh vegetables, no fresh milk or cheese, fresh fish or meat, no fress anything.

Artic Circle people have a huge problem in winter, only fish is fresh, so they eat potato chips with are easy and cheap to store for months(specially if they use trans fat).

I can't believe someone can live eating only with this. I'm from north of Spain and we like people from France used to eat very well, but people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#25

Post by evgen »

mikecarlucci wrote: post #5
deveren wrote: post #2

Good question and answer at the end of the article. Fat is not what's making Americans fat. It's the prevalence of carbohydrates in our diets, and overeating of the same. I was in KY last week interviewing my great aunt who is 108 years old. Do you think she never ate bacon, beef, etc? Haha, their diets would be today's poster child for meatlovers. They didn't eat too much sugar, or carbs, but more importantly they n…

I know what you mean. My great-grandparents lived well into their 90s and some of the stuff they ate was "terrible" but it was all cooked from home. Meats and sweets

Wow. My great-grandfather died when he was 35 and was apparently also an prolific eater of meats and sweets of the age. I guess it was the meats and sweets that killed him.

See, I can use useless anecdote too...

Your great-grandparents may have lived well into their 90s, but they are the outliers on the curve of lifespans for people born at the same time as them. Most of the variance at this extreme end of the spectrum is entirely due to genetics and not lifestyle (e.g. Donald O'Connor led an active lifestyle, ate well for someone who lived through most of the 20th century, and lived to be 78 which is almost 25 years beyond the average life expectancy for someone born in 1925 -- he also was notorious for smoking several packs (2-5) of cigarettes a day for most of his life; shall we suggest that smoking has no health consequences since I can find examples of people who lived a long time and were also smokers?)

What is more useful is to see what the impact of diet/lifestyle options are on the larger chunks of the population and not use outliers as exemplars for points we might wish to make.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#27

Post by sp332 »

aantix wrote: post #10

Am I the only one that felt like he was holding the Afghanistan people up as a model of health because they lack fat? Their life expectancy is a mere ~44 years ( http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le... ). Neighboring Pakistan is 66 years ( http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le... ).

Reminds me of a cartoon with a caveman thinking, "Something's just not right - our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past 30." :)

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#29

Post by trebor »

aantix wrote: post #10

Am I the only one that felt like he was holding the Afghanistan people up as a model of health because they lack fat? Their life expectancy is a mere ~44 years ( http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le... ). Neighboring Pakistan is 66 years ( http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le... ).

Poor public emergency care and unsanitary conditions would contribute to this very strongly. I bet they're mostly healthy until they get ill, or have an accident.

Re: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

#30

Post by viggity »

I've been overweight my entire life, and honestly, I blame the Surgeon General in the 1980s for telling my mom that feeding me low fat foods (which end up being high carb foods) will make me skinny.

Everyone believed this cargo cult "science" and it has had a devastating impact for hundreds of millions of people.

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