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Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

theguardian.com

41–50 of 212 posts

Re: Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

#41
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a movie clip I’ve seen with Brad Pitt of all people, explaining how America isn’t a nation, it’s a business. A business you don’t own and can’t escape. And you’re on your own. Something to that effect anyway. I’d love to know the movie or show! Its such a perfect example of a truth we all know but that never gets spoken aloud. The Founding Fathers would be deeply ashamed of us, I think.

>The Founding Fathers would be deeply ashamed of us, I think. Sorry, but the founding fathers who held other humans in bondage for all sorts of free labor? Those founding fathers, or did I wake up in a parallel universe this morning? Let me check wikipedia…

> the founding fathers who held other humans in bondage for all sorts of free labor

Actually, slavery was a bitter dividing line among the founders of the USA. It is intellectually lazy to ascribe slavery to all of the founders of the USA. It also insults those who were vocally and politically against slavery, from the very earliest days. You can find many examples with any effort at all.

Re: Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

#42

Classic principal-agent problem. It's why you can't usually trust experts who aren't aligned with you. One way is skin in the game. But I suppose "if you aren't paying, you're not the customer" applies as well to nutrition and medicine as it does to free webmail.

In light of this news, how should we reevaluate some of the recent admonishments to "trust the experts" and "don't do your own research"?

Re: Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

#43

My hard and fast rule in america is that everything aside from unions do not work in the interest of the people. The sooner this is taught to our kids, the better off they'll be from being indoctrinated from the trash on instagram/tiktok.

Unions also don't always work in the interest of everyone they represent. For instance, they tend to be protective of older and longer working members in exchange for limiting upward mobility of younger members. Or building policies that encourage the growth of the union as an organization, despite potential costs.

When you become an older worker, and experience firsthand the vulnerability of seniority, you realize why your union was always so protective of older workers. I would think many tech workers over ~35 can relate.

Re: Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

#44
post #26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Carbs are necessary macronutrient for everybody. This is a wild claim to make and doesn't seem to hold true scientifically. Humans require fat, protein, and various vitamins usually received from vegetables. There is no requirement that comes from carbohydrates as they effectively are just empty calories.

Nothing gives me quick, accessible energy like carbs though. Energy to think and love my body. Yes I’ve seen documentaries on low carb high fat ultra athletes, but they still have their fats with a bowl of pasta. God only knows their saturated fat intake too. A carbless diet does not seem well rounded, and is thus unhealthy. So carbs are essential.

So you go from "does not seem well rounded" to "therefore is essential"?

Here's some facts.

There are nine essential amino acids that our body needs to function properly and cannot produce by itself from something else.

Meat provides those amino acids and carbs do not.

Carbs are a source of energy but so is fat, proteins, ketones and alcohol.

In addition to reversing diabetes, people on low carb / high fat diets, including carnivore, often report increase in overall energy levels and lifting of a mental fog that they experienced on standard carb and sugar heavy diet.

That energy spike that carbs and sugar give you is a glucose spike in blood and the downside of it is that often it goes in the other direction (i.e. lethargy) when you come off of it.

That's the "nap after heavy meal" effect.

This is not an anti-carb just anti what you do, elevating carbs into some unquestionably good, unique energy source necessary for you to think or love your body.

Consuming carbs in moderation is fine.

The problem is that our modern diet and what is available in grocery stores or restaurants make it almost impossible to consume carbs in moderation.

And apparently plenty people like you don't even understand that carbs are, in fact, bad for most people.

U.S. stats on this are shocking: 73.6% americans over 20 are overweight and 42.4% obese (all obese people are overweight but not all overweight people are obese)

Re: Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

#45
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Founding Fathers would be deeply ashamed of us, I think. Sorry, but the founding fathers who held other humans in bondage for all sorts of free labor? Those founding fathers, or did I wake up in a parallel universe this morning? Let me check wikipedia…

> the founding fathers who held other humans in bondage for all sorts of free labor Actually, slavery was a bitter dividing line among the founders of the USA. It is intellectually lazy to ascribe slavery to all of the founders of the USA. It also insults those who were vocally and politically against slavery, from the very earliest days. You can find many examples with any effort at all.

Almost all of the founding fathers either owned slaves or weren't willing to stick their necks out to stop it. We absolutely should question their judgement.

Re: Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

#47
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more complete and histocally evidenced rule is that all institutions eventually just work to continue and/or expand their existence in itself. They can get founded in the genuine interests of some cause (and often are), but each transition in leadership tends to find itself more professionalized in some way and more divorced from the founding cause, with process (and/or corruption) becoming their effective mandat…

"First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of th…

I found this revelatory at one point in my career, but this shouldn't have been a surprise as the administrators literally control all promotions and will thus turn the organization into one that serves the managerial class over actual technical ability and knowledge.

As a technical worker, your best option is to try to become extremely valuable and make it known that your continued employment is predicated upon promotions when they should be due. For example, if senior engineer is available at 5 years and you're working your butt off, you need to make it known that you're expecting it or they may just push it out to 6 years if they think they won't lose you. If you're really good at your job and it would be difficult to replace you and put your manager behind schedule, they'll be incentivized to take care of you. It's all a game.

On the flip side... don't try this if they're trying to get rid of you. Be prepared to walk away if you can if they're not taking care of you.

Another thing I learned is that if you want to join management, you have to pretty much stop acting technical. They usually don't like adding technical staff to management as 1.) it may make them look incompetent, 2.) you provide more value to the company doing technical work at a lower salary, and 3.) it shows you might actually not be a good fit for that kind of work, although this isn't necessarily true.

Re: Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no credentials here, but I'm often working in this space and your take is the polar opposite of what I normally hear from the endos and diabetes researchers that I've worked with. More accurate terms might be diabetes and morbid diabetes. That the cutoff for prediabetes is close to the median level is a statement that much of the population is actually unhealthy in this regard.

No, it's a statement that the "cutoff" was chosen on questionable grounds. Defend it.

Did you check the litterature?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20697688/

Hba1c 6.0 to 6.5 (so called prediabetic range) has 2.5 times the hasard ratio of below 6.0.

Increasing Hba1c is the leading indicator of future health issues and by far.

Re: Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

#49
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing about carbs themselves that is bad for diabetics. Carbs are necessary macronutrient for everybody. If you mean certain foods that also have a high percentage of carbs then sure but carbs are not the problem. Take this line from the article itself, for example. > It can be challenging for many people with diabetes to forgo the breads, sweets, pastas and starches that form the basis of many diets. What…

>Carbs are necessary macronutrient for everybody. This is a wild claim to make and doesn't seem to hold true scientifically. Humans require fat, protein, and various vitamins usually received from vegetables. There is no requirement that comes from carbohydrates as they effectively are just empty calories.

Carbohydrates are not necessary for survival, but there are circumstances when they are necessary, for instance when a very intense effort is required to be sustained for a long time it is impossible to achieve a maximum performance without eating carbohydrates, because they can be absorbed and used for energy production faster than the alternatives.

Moreover, there is not enough data to decide whether a diet lacking almost completely carbohydrates results in optimal health in the long term, even if it may have favorable effects when replacing a worse previous diet.

Carbohydrates are also the cheapest kind of food. While eating them in excess is bad, obtaining less than 50% of the energy intake from carbohydrates still results in a much lower cost of the food than replacing all of them with expensive fats and proteins.

For diabetes prevention, it is likely that it is more important to avoid sugar than it is to avoid starch, because in many traditional societies where starch was a big fraction of their food, diabetes was nevertheless uncommon.

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