I mean seriously, what the medical community swears will prevent it changes and people have heart attacks on every diet.
Supposedly prevention was the high carb low fat diet but now that’s up for debate and some say it’s high fat, low carb: the opposite!
Both sides show studies proving that their diet prevents heart disease, both sides have people dying of heart disease while practicing their diet, both sides provide lots of data to prove that the other is wrong.
What gives?
Do we have no f*@#ing clue and all of this is just sales for different companies to profit on different diet fads?
Is it basically the same as people trying to prevent hair loss and regrow hair for male pattern baldness? No one has any idea how to prevent it and it is probably inevitable but bald people will keep forking over cash for hope so companies will keep promoting ideas that sell the false hope that it can be prevented.
Either it’s all complete nonsense and sales pitches or there is enough data that makes one side a clear winner. It cannot actually be this murky, that’s just not possible.
So what is it?
What does the majority of the data support as the true heart healthy diet? Or is there only conflicting data and we must conclude that there is no such diet?
You strike at a key societal issue in the 21st century.
What is presented as “dietary science” is little more than lazy pseudoscience.
Harvard published data recently that showed something like 80% funding bias in such studies.
I can’t tell you how frustrated I get when I read thru a study and find that the conclusion at the end isn’t even strongly supported by the data. That’s not how science is supposed to work
What’s to gain (for doctors, pharmaceutical companies) if people follow the standard American diet? A LOT!! Wouldn’t you want to be on the team that had 80% of the population as drug addicts and you’re the one selling the drugs?
Now, consider the keto diet. What’s in it for doctors or pharmaceutical companies? (Insert sound of crickets here.)
Following the money trail, I can tell you one diet I don’t really care to be a part of despite the number of studies they produce. If they were really on the right track, why would so few of their patients ever get off their medicines? Why would so many never really heal or get better?
Conversely, in the keto community, there is very little to gain because people generally get rid of their medications or at least drastically reduce them, they get healthier, they lose weight, they have more energy, and they eat real food while getting on with their lives… without their need for their drug supplier hanging the noose over their head at every opportunity so that the threat of unbearable torturous death is ever imminent.
I will admit that there may be people who do better or worse on various diets. I really have a hard time with people in positions of medical authority telling people to eat the bulk of their food as even good carbs considering that something like 80% of the population have some level of insulin resistance.
But hey, believe what you want. I do.
PaulL
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?)
#6
What is well-documented is that heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, dental caries, gout, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, and many cancers—all the conditions that form part of metabolic syndrome, also called “the diseases of Western civilization” or “the diseases of the Western diet”—are extremely rare in societies eating their traditional diet, and that these diseases start appearing in a population shortly after it Westernizes its diet.
You can see these diseases becoming prevalent among the upper classes in India a few centuries ago as sugar began to be refined there, and you can see them becoming prevalent among the British upper classes as sugar reaches Europe (it was still very expensive at that point). With the establishment of sugar plantations in the British West Indies, the advent of modern methods of milling flour and refining sugar, and the consequent drop in the prices of white sugar and white flour, you see the same diseases moving beyond the British upper classes and into the middle class and the poor. You see these diseases increase in prevalence as increasing quantities of refined grains and refined sugar are consumed in a society. Gary Taubes points out that the rates of metabolic disease in Japan parallel those in the United States when the United States was consuming a comparable level of sugar (usually about a century earlier).
British colonial physicians compared the health of the Masai, whose traditional diet is exclusively milk, meat, and blood, with that of the neaby Kikuyu, who ate a largely plant-based diet, and the Masai were taller and healthier by every metric. When Masai began moving to the cities and Westernizing their diets, they too began to suffer from metabolic disease, while those Masai who remained on the traditional diet remained largely free of such diseases.
The obesity epidemic in the United States began shortly after the nation adopted dietary goals that involved eating much less fat and much more carbohydrate, and began spreading worldwide as other nations adopted the same dietary guidelines for themselves.
So I’d say that actually we have a pretty good clue, but that economic forces have done a good job of preventing good science from being done and an even better job of selling the world on a very unhealthy way of eating. There have been many efforts to prove that saturated fat in the diet causes heart disease, but no study has yet managed to prove it, and the few that have been twisted to justify the hypothesis have holes in them wide enough to drive a Mack truck through.
For a comprehensive review of all the science, read Gary Taubes’ book, Good Calories,Bad Calories, and Nina Teicholz’s book, Big Fat Surprise. They’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about what is established science and what is simply wishful thinking on someone’s part.
Thank you. All of this comes from a desperate frustration in that I want to eat keto and I don’t want to have heart disease but too many studies point to plant foods based diets (high carb, low fat) as the cure/prevention.
I want to look into these books you referenced but I have a question first:
Do they address the fact that for every Masai tribe who was healthy eating fat and meat and got sick when switching to mostly plants there are two or three Okinawans or other similar societies who were healthy eating plants and low fat and got sick when switching to higher fat and more meat?
I hear about plant based food societies living longer and being healthier all the time and rarely hear about ketogenic societies at all, albeit when I do they also live longer and are healthier.
So it seems like the observation that can be made about humans in general is that there are a significant amount of people who eat a plant based diet that is low in animal products and that they are healthy and that the same is true of a ketogenic diet eating society. In between is where we have trouble, where people eat huge amounts of plants and huge amounts of animal products. Edit: And/or huge amounts of sugar and white flour.
Anyway, is this addressed by the authors you mentioned? This obvious problem in the high carb low fat vs low carb high fat debate that makes it extremely difficult to declare a winner?
I am not a physician, but it is my understanding that the Coronary Calcium Scan (CT imaging) is determinative for the presence of heart disease. If it were more widely implemented, thousands of lives per year would be saved. Especially among those who drop dead without prior warning. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3384065/
You should consider that Masai and Okinawans did not have man made food that we have these. HFCS, vegetable oils, potato chips etc.
Some folks choose to cycle between full Keto and seasonal whole food carbs.
It all comes down to self experimentation and choices.
Too many variables to conclude what’s best.
PaulL
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?)
#12
As far as I can tell, whether a traditional diet involved meat or plants, the key difference between it and the Western diet was the lack of refined sugar and processed grains.
Gary Taubes points out that for a long time Japan lagged about a century behind the U.S. in per capita consumption of refined sugar, and so did their rates of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. But at each stage the rates of those diseases were comparable to what they had been in the U.S. when U.S. consumption of sugar had been at the same level.
So obviously it it’s the rate of consumption that determines the prevalence of disease. Since the U.S. consumes about the highest amount of refined sugar and processed grains in the world, its rate of obesity is also among the highest.
However, perhaps I worded it poorly, what I meant was that predicting who will develop heart disease before it actually has manifested may be impossible.
