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Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2

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Re: Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2

#11

Post by xenonite »

hifromwork wrote: post #7

It looks like they asked (a large number of) participants what they eat, and checked a correlation between their health and how closely they follow their Planetary Health Diet[1]. First, I don't see any attempt to control for the fact that people who eat "healthy" diets (vegetarian, vegan, avoid sugars and red meat, etc) are often the same people who care about exercise, do routine health checks etc. So even if the d…

About your third point: raising animals on pastures is not necessarily worse regards climate compared to growing vegetables on fields. It may well be the other way around. For example: the humus layer is much deeper with grass, hence storing more CO2.

About your second point, you name it as "fact" that too much red meat is problematic. Scientists are not so sure if it is about the meat or about some side-effect, like e.g., a virus transmitted along with (rare/raw, or even higher heated) meat in Western societies. Reference: https://doi.org/10.1002/ijc.27413

Re: Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2

#14

Post by mupuff1234 »

cj wrote: post #6
thunkle wrote: post #2

The diet: > The food-based reference diet for generally healthy individuals aged ≥2 y emphasizes high consumption of high-quality plant-based foods (e.g., whole grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes, and unsaturated plant oils), low to moderate amounts of animal-sourced foods, and low intakes of saturated fats, refined grains, and sugar.

The only way I’ve found (that works for me) is avoiding regular grocery stores at all costs and only shopping at health food stores. The same stores will have more brands of granola than they do brands of regular cereal. They most often don’t carry things like Oreos, and many won’t carry nation-wide brands at all. (You won’t find Heinz ketchup, for instance) I find it extremely difficult to shop healthy at regular gr…

Where are you located? Most grocery stores probably have at least frozen veggies and fruit and I assume some selection of fish/meat.

And btw granola really isn't that healthy.

Re: Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2

#15

Post by manmal »

Jensson wrote: post #8
lumb63 wrote: post #3

Almost any diet that contains mostly real food rather than artificial food-like substances will produce substantial improvements in health. Contents are hugely secondary to actually consuming real food.

Only when factories focus on making addictive instead of healthy food. You can ruin the food yourself in the same way. Different cultures do this differently, so you see much healthier fast food packages in some countries than others.

Food isn’t all about macros, you need to get your micronutrients (minerals etc), which heavy processing partially removes. There’s also the rabbit hole of soil quality, where a plant can only contain the nutrients its soil has offered (copper, molybdenum, humic acid etc), where organic food tends to be better because soil health is actually looked at.

Re: Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2

#16

Post by jeffbee »

cj wrote: post #6
thunkle wrote: post #2

The diet: > The food-based reference diet for generally healthy individuals aged ≥2 y emphasizes high consumption of high-quality plant-based foods (e.g., whole grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes, and unsaturated plant oils), low to moderate amounts of animal-sourced foods, and low intakes of saturated fats, refined grains, and sugar.

The only way I’ve found (that works for me) is avoiding regular grocery stores at all costs and only shopping at health food stores. The same stores will have more brands of granola than they do brands of regular cereal. They most often don’t carry things like Oreos, and many won’t carry nation-wide brands at all. (You won’t find Heinz ketchup, for instance) I find it extremely difficult to shop healthy at regular gr…

You can find real food at any grocery store. You just have to keep walking past the froot loops. You can buy a bag of lentils, some onions and carrots, some potatoes, some oranges anywhere.

Re: Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2

#17

Post by adrian_b »

hifromwork wrote: post #7

It looks like they asked (a large number of) participants what they eat, and checked a correlation between their health and how closely they follow their Planetary Health Diet[1]. First, I don't see any attempt to control for the fact that people who eat "healthy" diets (vegetarian, vegan, avoid sugars and red meat, etc) are often the same people who care about exercise, do routine health checks etc. So even if the d…

What I would have liked to see and which should exist in the full paper, but it is not described in the summary or in the snippets, is the exact method used to compute the score for a given diet.

It is not possible to compute any kind of valid score for an aliment taken in isolation, because no aliment is healthy if one would eat only that.

The various aliments complement their contents of nutrients and a pair of certain aliments can be very healthy, even when eating only one in the absence of the other would be unhealthy.

Moreover the quantity of an aliment matters a lot. For small quantities, most aliments are neither healthy nor unhealthy, they do not provide any noticeable contribution, positive or negative. For medium quantities, an aliment can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on which are the other components of the diet. For large quantities, almost any aliment becomes unhealthy.

So computing a realistic score for a daily diet is quite difficult and just giving vague guidelines like eating "mostly" vegetables with "a little" animal protein, while correct is completely unhelpful for providing any quantitative conclusions.

I hope that the full paper includes a valid methodology for characterizing a diet, but I somewhat doubt this, because I have never seen such a precise methodology yet.

The first step for computing a score would be to have for each component of the daily diet both the daily intake and the array of values with its content for all of the about 50 essential nutrients that are required by a human to live. The content values should take into consideration the digestibility of that aliment by humans.

Then by multiplying the nutrient contents with the daily intakes, one would obtain an array of about 50 values with the daily intakes for each essential nutrient. For each nutrient there is an optimal range for the daily intake, and the values that are either higher or lower must be penalized the farther they are from the optimal range.

To this initial score, various correction factors must be applied. The food must require a certain amount of chewing effort, in order to preserve the health of the teeth. If that is not true a diet must be penalized. The food must contain some amount of indigestible fiber, to help the transit through the intestine. If that is not true a diet must be penalized. There are many vegetables or fruits for which there is decent evidence that they contain something that improves health, especially cardiovascular health, but it is unknown which are the exact substances with favorable effect and which is the mechanism that explains their action. A diet containing such vegetables or fruits should be scored better.

Re: Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2

#18

Post by cj »

jeffbee wrote: post #16
cj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way I’ve found (that works for me) is avoiding regular grocery stores at all costs and only shopping at health food stores. The same stores will have more brands of granola than they do brands of regular cereal. They most often don’t carry things like Oreos, and many won’t carry nation-wide brands at all. (You won’t find Heinz ketchup, for instance) I find it extremely difficult to shop healthy at regular gr…

You can find real food at any grocery store. You just have to keep walking past the froot loops. You can buy a bag of lentils, some onions and carrots, some potatoes, some oranges anywhere.

I think the problem is I don’t have the self-control to just keep walking past those things!

Re: Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2

#20

Post by Jtsummers »

cj wrote: post #6
thunkle wrote: post #2

The diet: > The food-based reference diet for generally healthy individuals aged ≥2 y emphasizes high consumption of high-quality plant-based foods (e.g., whole grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes, and unsaturated plant oils), low to moderate amounts of animal-sourced foods, and low intakes of saturated fats, refined grains, and sugar.

The only way I’ve found (that works for me) is avoiding regular grocery stores at all costs and only shopping at health food stores. The same stores will have more brands of granola than they do brands of regular cereal. They most often don’t carry things like Oreos, and many won’t carry nation-wide brands at all. (You won’t find Heinz ketchup, for instance) I find it extremely difficult to shop healthy at regular gr…

My "trick" at regular grocery stores is to stick primarily to the perimeter: produce, dairy, meat. The only aisles I regularly go down are for spices, grains of some sort (typically rice), beans, and stocks (too lazy to make my own).

I've never had to bother with health food stores, though I guess it has the benefit of removing temptation. Whenever I've visited one, the prices made no sense to me for the things they were selling.

A better option to remove the temptation is some of the smaller grocery chains (Sprouts, Fresh Market). They have reliably had good produce and meat at reasonable prices (Fresh Market's meat and produce prices, when I lived near them, were reliably better than Kroger and Publix with better quality). Bulk items are a bit difficulty, Fresh Market sold rice at a terrible price so I'd still hit Kroger for that (the local one to me at the time had produce practically rotting on the shelf, spoiled by the next day if I ever bought any, but rice and dry beans are hard to screw up). Sprouts' rice and beans and lentils are priced reasonably, a bit high but not bad.

But the canned goods, chips, and other things at both of them are priced at twice what the regular groceries sell them for, and about 4x (or more) what Walmart has for the same items. Easy to walk past them and not spend that money.

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