5 ms·
I find that there's actually a good bit of research-based and evidence-based thinking going over these "vast piles of medical research" you mention and finding
by xiaoma 16y ago
I find that there's actually a good bit of research-based and evidence-based thinking going over these "vast piles of medical research" you mention and finding that they don't really support the current accepted dogma of nutritional recommendations, and that indeed this research is pretty flimsy itself, if you were to believe Taubes, Lustig, Cordain, Eades, others, and tellingly now there is an alarming increase in obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases as an apparently direct result of the public by-and-large complying with common-wisdom "healthy" recommendations.
I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say "current nutritional dogma". What I was talking about was the fact that the longest lived people in the world eat rice as a primary nutritional staple, or a combination of rice and wheat. All of the countries with the worst obesity and life-style disease epidemics are countries which consume far more protein than necessary and a great deal of meat in general. Not only that, but the proportion is linear-- the US and Mexico consume the most animal products and have the worst rates of lifestyle diseases, with Canada and the UK slightly behind that, and so on all the way to the leanest and least "paleo" countries in eastern Asia.
Even in the healthiest of countries, i.e. Japan, S. Korea, etc, those people who have adopted higher-protein western style diets are the same people starting to manifest some of the same lifestyle diseases westerners have had for decades. Those eating more traditional, mostly plant-based diets are not.
As someone who has lived in Asia for the most of my life it sickens me to see fat people who eat too much meat grasp and Atkins, paleo and other fad diets that involve eating even more of what made them sick in the first place. I know a lot of people who eat rice or noodles every single meal and not a single one are as fat as the average person I see when I go back to visit the US.
The avoidance of highly processed food is sound, but the overall diet is anything but.
- starkfist 16y agoI'm no paleo advocate, but your statistics are totally wrong. Denmark is the world leader in per-capita meat consumption, followed by New Zealand and Luxembourg. The USA is number 4. Canada is in the top 10, but the UK and Mexico are not. Mexico isn't even in the top 30. Likewise, consider two of the main diet-influenced lifestyle diseases: heart disease and diabetes. Countries in Eastern Europe are all ahead of the US in heart disease incidence and deaths per capita, as are Germany, Norway, Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia. There is a higher incidence of diabetes per capita in Germany, Argentina, South Korea, Spain, Mexico and Puerto Rico vs. the US. If you don't adjust per-capita, the countries with the most heart disease and diabetes are China, India and Russia.
- xiaoma 16y agoLooking at meat along (as opposed to animal products), Mexico doesn't make it to the top, but it is still far above Asian levels (even China). The US is cited as being at the top in many places, though it's possible Denmark is ignored due to having a smaller population than some US cities. United States Leads World Meat Stampede http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1626 http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1626 It's also worth pointing out that S. Koreans have a longer life expectancy than people in either the US or Denmark, despite being less economically developed and have a much smaller social system. Note that the countries topping the life expectancy rankings, Japan and HK are both big rice eaters, and that #3, Iceland gets most its meat as fish. That said, after reading your post and once again researching the statistics, I'm absolutely shocked how quickly rich countries other than the US have been increasing their meat consumption. I couldn't find lists that looked at total consumption of animal products, but the rankings in terms of meat itself have changed a lot. I'm still 100% sure that eating rice at breakfast, lunch and dinner is part of the traditional Japanese diet, and that they out-live the heavy meat/cheese/butter eaters in other rich countries.