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Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

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Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#41

Sardines are a household favorite for us. My kids love them. The secret is, don't buy cheap ones. Look for brisling or any other small fish packed in olive oil. $3-5/can is a good sweet spot, although you can pay $9 for a can of imported Portuguese sardines no problem. Speaking of Portugal, they do grilled fresh sardines. My 3 year old insisted on eating them daily when we were in Lisbon

So I wonder what the diabetes rate is in Portugal, then

Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#42
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speaking of Portugal, they do grilled fresh sardines One of my Portuguese guilty pleasures, along with (ethically questionable, I know) octopus salad. Highly recommend trying this if you can get your hands on some fresh sardines. Edit: grilled sardines are also a Japanese thing, so you might have luck finding them at an Asian market if your fishmonger doesn't have them.

Haven't sardines, like most other fish, been overfished, making them ethically questionable too?

I rely on SeafoodWatch.org to advise on fish sustainability, and it doesn't look good for sardines: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/recommendations/search?query=%3...

Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#43
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speaking of Portugal, they do grilled fresh sardines One of my Portuguese guilty pleasures, along with (ethically questionable, I know) octopus salad. Highly recommend trying this if you can get your hands on some fresh sardines. Edit: grilled sardines are also a Japanese thing, so you might have luck finding them at an Asian market if your fishmonger doesn't have them.

Aside from eating animals in general, what is ethically questionable of octopus salad?

Quite possibly the poster is referring to the intelligence of octopuses. Have a look at My Octopus Teacher (On Netflix) and you will see.

Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article seems to be akin to many others that promote carnivorous diets. "Drinking milk reduces X" or "eating [insert animal here] improves Y" might be true, but you don't need to consume the animal (and prolong the environmental impacts) to get them.

Wrong. There is a tremendous more amount of evidence that eating fish helps cardiovascular health. Unlike the “carnivore diet” where they just cherry pick RCTs. And for those who say “you don’t have to eat the animal to get the health benefits”, please tell that to any Inuit or Saami people. They lived on his diet for generations and it’s affected their genome as a result.

Taurine, omega 3, calcium, and vitamin D, the nutrients discussed in the article are all available from sources other than fish. If you take someone who has a diet that's deficient in one or more those and give them sardines, then it's not surprising to see improvements. But it doesn't show that sardines/fish are the only way to get those benefits or that adding sardines/fish to a diet that isn't deficient in those nutrients would have any benefit.

The fact that Inuit and Saami people have been able to survive on primarily meat diets only demonstrates that it's possible to survive on those diets, not that they are ideal in any way or better than any other diet.

Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#45

Sardines are a household favorite for us. My kids love them. The secret is, don't buy cheap ones. Look for brisling or any other small fish packed in olive oil. $3-5/can is a good sweet spot, although you can pay $9 for a can of imported Portuguese sardines no problem. Speaking of Portugal, they do grilled fresh sardines. My 3 year old insisted on eating them daily when we were in Lisbon

> Speaking of Portugal, they do grilled fresh sardines One of my Portuguese guilty pleasures, along with (ethically questionable, I know) octopus salad. Highly recommend trying this if you can get your hands on some fresh sardines. Edit: grilled sardines are also a Japanese thing, so you might have luck finding them at an Asian market if your fishmonger doesn't have them.

I've rationalized eating the very intelligent octopus with the fact that they live for a maximum of like 2 years.

Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#46
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speaking of Portugal, they do grilled fresh sardines One of my Portuguese guilty pleasures, along with (ethically questionable, I know) octopus salad. Highly recommend trying this if you can get your hands on some fresh sardines. Edit: grilled sardines are also a Japanese thing, so you might have luck finding them at an Asian market if your fishmonger doesn't have them.

Aside from eating animals in general, what is ethically questionable of octopus salad?

They're incredibly intelligent, and there's a healthy debate around whether they're actually conscious[1]. I tend to question whether I should be eating something that might reasonably be aware, were it alive, that it's about to die.

1. see e.g. https://qz.com/1045782/an-octopus-is-the-closest-thing-to-an...

Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#48
I don't understand their conclusion that no supplement can replace the sardine.

They indicate that it's probably the combination of DHA, vitamin D, and calcium, that is good, so just make a supplement containing this combination?

And if there are missing ingredients to the magic of sardine, just add them too?

I don't see what's impossible, except that they want to support their country's fishing industry.

Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#49
post #2

“Sardines will therefore have a protective element because they are rich in the aforementioned nutrients, whereas nutrients taken in isolation in the form of supplements won’t work to the same extent” : to me this reads as “we found a correlation but we are clueless about the root cause”.

Since supplements have been brought up, what's with the American's obsession over supplements? It's like people are just chomping them down like they're some sort of food stable like bread or rice (or maybe that's just what all the youtube videos want you to think). Its like every bodybuilder on youtube has their own brand of supplements now. Don't even get me started on pre-workout. "Don't feel like working out? Chu…

Certain segments of America tend to have poor diets. Especially the young, working class which happens to overlap with the bodybuilding class which makes whey protein a logical choice. Whey protein. It is very cheap; just add mix in a multivitamin and OTC stimulants like caffeine and you have a very marketable product with a 300% markup.

The YouTube body building demographic is in the same economic class so capitalizing on a product their audience already uses makes perfect sense.

Also, America is one of the few countries with consumer pharmaceutical advertising so marketing supplements is not out of the ordinary.

Re: Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes

#50
post #2

“Sardines will therefore have a protective element because they are rich in the aforementioned nutrients, whereas nutrients taken in isolation in the form of supplements won’t work to the same extent” : to me this reads as “we found a correlation but we are clueless about the root cause”.

These are very complex bio-chem processes, so there's probably no single "root cause", but a multivariable situation where certain combinations of nutrients in certain proportion causes these beneficial effects. Also nutrients in supplements often don't have the same bioavailability as in natural products, so it's possible that you take in the same amount of nutrients per label, but your body actually ends up absorbing only a small % of it. Supplements are not that strictly regulated, so many of them are fairly poor quality products making wild claims, counting just on marketing BS to sell.
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