Misleading title, it is not "western diet" what is bad for health, it is fast food, and sugar sweety food what is.
What Americans were eating 70-50-30 years ago was healthy and "western".
It has been people eating industrial foods instead of someone making the food what has changed. I use to look at obese people shopping cart and I see a lot of Coca Cola, pizza, industrial bread, industrial buns,cookies, chocolate,no fresh vegetables, no fresh milk or cheese, fresh fish or meat, no fress anything.
Artic Circle people have a huge problem in winter, only fish is fresh, so they eat potato chips with are easy and cheap to store for months(specially if they use trans fat).
I can't believe someone can live eating only with this. I'm from north of Spain and we like people from France used to eat very well, but people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet.
>Artic Circle people have a huge problem in winter, only fish is fresh, so they eat potato chips with are easy and cheap to store for months(specially if they use trans fat).
Not entirely surprised that someone else on HN knows of this obscure problem, yes it's very bad. Essentially, the Inuit and Inuvialuit used to be self-sufficient with a diet that had evolved over hundreds of years. Fish, caribou, polar bear in the winter, etc. But hunting and preparing these things in the inhospitable arctic ain't easy.
Then the Canadian government decided to try to domesticate them by sending the children to school down south, where they learned the RRR's instead of the traditional -50 degree climate survival skills passed down from generation to generation.
They'd come back reliant on the government to ship in food and other necessities, and the government resorted to chips and pop and since it's the only thing that can sit on store shelves for the long winter months (when there's too much ice to ship anything else) and not spoil. Obesity, health, and cultural problems were the result.
A classic case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. A good friend of mine is running research and intervention projects up there attempting to find healthier alternatives to replace the pop and chips, I hear a lot about it.
So, then, what is the "Western diet" if it isn't what the Western people eat? (I see your point, though; it's been changing over time, and you're right: it is getting more and more processed and less balanced {and dare I say "healthy"}).
Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy. It's when the calorie ratio skews in favour of calories in that you start to put on weight―and in some cases its dramatically in favour of calories in.
Unfortunately people are even more adverse to exercise as they are to changing their own diets.
Most damaging in my opinion is how this affects children, not only due to its health risks: being obese as a child is often a social death sentence, and that has all kinds of repercussions.
but people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet.
maybe it is more about people taking less time for cooking as a result of falsely put priorities - people do have time to watch countless of hours of TV every single day, but no time for preparing fresh meals - not about having less and less time (I doubt people 100 years ago had more spare time than today, anyway).
Something else I've read (Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food) is that diets are connected to the culture they are in as well. So taking an Inuit diet and moving it to Spain would indeed not work, but then taking a diet that works in Spain and moving it to the Arctic won't work either. The food you eat is balanced out by what your daily activities are and vice versa. To that end the modern Western diet does not work well with a modern Western lifestyle, which leads to problems.
It was a doctor's observation. While operating on Afghan soldiers who have limited access to processed foods and a western lifestyle the fat deposits were not found as abundantly internally.
It serves as a launching point to describe the point of the article and book.
Your premise and statistics are a bit on the hand-waving side, of course no one is calling Afghanistan and Pakistan models of health.
And life expectancy is not a proper measure of health either, as per capita (~2006) Afghan people had $29 as the total expenditure on health per capita. The United States? $6,714. We may live longer but we have a lot more help in getting there.
You cannot take life expectancy at birth as a model for how healthy adults are. That statistic is massively distorted by infant mortality (which is an astounding 13.3% for Afghanistan).
Reminds me of a cartoon with a caveman thinking, "Something's just not right - our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past 30." :)
It would be more interesting to limit the comparison to those who die of causes other than, say, gunshot wounds. It would also be interesting to see a comparison of health, rather than just length of life.
The perpetual use of military hardware might have something to do with life expectancy in these countries however. I think your counter point to the argument is valid, but you support it with a stat that is completely without context in this discussion.
Good question and answer at the end of the article. Fat is not what's making Americans fat. It's the prevalence of carbohydrates in our diets, and overeating of the same. I was in KY last week interviewing my great aunt who is 108 years old. Do you think she never ate bacon, beef, etc? Haha, their diets would be today's poster child for meatlovers. They didn't eat too much sugar, or carbs, but more importantly they never over indulged, and worked hard everyday.
Now, we consider an 8 hour day in front of the computer as a hard day at work. But eat like we've been working in the fields...
When my friends ask about nutrition, explaining fat is the very first thing I try to do.
Eating fat does not necessarily make you fat, nor is it in itself a bad at all. Many fats are among the best things for your brain and heart. At the same time, fat-free foods can quite easily be bullshit.
A pound of sugar is fat-free, after all, but has an insane calorific value. (110 per oz)
Sugar is 100% total carbs.
A ounce of feta cheese has plenty of fat, and less calories per ounce than zero-fat sugar (feta is 75 per oz).
Feta cheese is 75% fat, 20% protein, 5% total carbs.
Then I try to show them some fat-free products that nonetheless has immense amounts of sugar and calories.
I think that using this topic as a lead-in has been the most effective way to get my friends to change their diets and consider what they eat.
That explains why mediterranean and asian diets, which are high on carbs but low on sugar (or artificial fructose), don't cause nearly as much obesity.
I know what you mean. My great-grandparents lived well into their 90s and some of the stuff they ate was "terrible" but it was all cooked from home. Meats and sweets
I've been overweight my entire life, and honestly, I blame the Surgeon General in the 1980s for telling my mom that feeding me low fat foods (which end up being high carb foods) will make me skinny.
Everyone believed this cargo cult "science" and it has had a devastating impact for hundreds of millions of people.
I'm asking this sincerely, but don't people from traditionally healthy Asian countries eat a hell of a lot of rice? That's my first thought every time someone mentions how bad carbs are. But I have trouble finding any non-antecdotal data.
I want to believe the obesity problem is more of a portion control thing, for example, when McDonald's opened, did a normal adult actually eat a hamburger and small fries for lunch instead of a big mac and large fries? But once again, I always have trouble finding any real data to verify my hypothesis.
I actually recommend them in reverse order. Good Calories, Bad Calories is information dense and the consequent fact that essentially nobody has actually read it and everyone is working off of third-hand summaries of summaries, even the people here on HN, is plainly obvious every time the topic turns to that book. Start with "Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It" and back up to GCBC if you still want more history and a list of citations longer than your arm (and slightly older science).
Also, I would adjust some expectations. The common "science" understanding seems to be that it's Gary Taubes, crazed whacko, against nutritionists, bearer of the holy and uncontested Peer Review. In fact it's Gary Taubes advocating that we take mainstream 21st century endocrinology seriously, with its actual biochemistry and explanation for the behavior of fat accumulation in the body in general, beyond mere obesity, and discard a scientifically unsupported nutrition philosophy unchanged since the 1960s that can not explain the matter of fat accumulation except in terms so broad and vague (and, ultimately, wrong) that I can't hardly even understand why it is still taken seriously when there's another branch of science that utterly subsumes it. This juxtaposition becomes much more clear and refined in his second book, though it is technically pretty much all there in GCBC if you go looking for it.
That is, not "nut vs. science", it's "science vs. science", and yeah, I make no bones about which science I think explains a hell of a lot more than the other.
He also has qualifiers on what "food" is, most of which are reasonable; stuff you can pronounce, stuff that your great-great grandmother would recognize as food (put away the chemistry set!)
Once we realize that obesity is (by and large) a modern lifestyle disease caused by needless stress and a diet consisting of mostly fake food perhaps we'll return to eating a whole food diet consisting of real food?
e.g. margarine (which has color added to it to make it look yellow, otherwise it'd be gray) is NOT a healthy alternative to butter.
the paleo diet is a growing diet/lifestyle based on eating real foods. If anything else its very interesting to read about. http://freetheanimal.com/ancestral-life-way is a great blog for anyone interested.
Do you think we'll ever get to a point where people make food choices and limit their intake based mainly on a rational weighing of available information? I like to think we will but so far the track record is not too encouraging.
I think it would be more accurate to say "Western life style" is making the world sick. Meaning work all the time, mostly sitting down, and have no time to exercise or prepare a healthy meal. This leads to eating fast food and high preservatives foods that last a long time but aren't really healthy.
You could eat healthy but still not be healthy without a proper life style change. Meaning exercise, lowering stress and other harmful habits.
It's also making people tall. Every-time I'm in South Korea the difference between the height of High School kids and even people 10-15 years older (read: folks who didn't grow up under any kind of severe hardship or food shortage) is remarkable. I'm a fairly average height American guy 5'9", and often find myself looking up to youngsters over there.
A lot of broad conclusions are made in this article without citing specific sources of research or evidence. Mostly, it's just anecdotal evidence (fictionalized at that) and obscure references to plotting curves (I assume on a graph, though we don't get to see it).
You mean the inability to digest anything that hasn't been heavily machine processed to an extreme glycemic index? Granted, we required cooking of food to support the energy requirements of our large brains, but that's pretty much just a fire and a slab of meat. Is it really a good evolutionary path to depend on a whole industrial complex of food procesing machinery that is a big natural disaster away from being completely broken down?
You mean that people able to resist or live longer under such a diet will survive and that we will evolve to support such a died? If so, you are probably wrong.
It is not about survival it is about the ability to pass down genes. If the diet's problems appear later in life, it will not have a direct impact. It may have an indirect impact.
Starting to get off topic but I really don't think evolution is happening in humans anymore, at least in the first world. Sanitation, medicine, and surgery has advanced so far we've almost completely eliminated natural selection. In fact I'd be surprised if some "de-evolving" isn't happening.
I dont think its western diet, i am orginally from southern india and the number of diabetes there is one amoung the worlds highest. This is mainly due to the traditional vegetarian south indian diet (processed white rice & veg curry)
The TL:DR is: Rich people (what he calls Westerners) are fat. Poor people (like afghanis) aren't. Rich people get more diabetes which costs them money. Poor people don't. He's cut both types of people open and looked at their fat.
[+] [-] forgottenpaswrd|15 years ago|reply
What Americans were eating 70-50-30 years ago was healthy and "western".
It has been people eating industrial foods instead of someone making the food what has changed. I use to look at obese people shopping cart and I see a lot of Coca Cola, pizza, industrial bread, industrial buns,cookies, chocolate,no fresh vegetables, no fresh milk or cheese, fresh fish or meat, no fress anything.
Artic Circle people have a huge problem in winter, only fish is fresh, so they eat potato chips with are easy and cheap to store for months(specially if they use trans fat).
I can't believe someone can live eating only with this. I'm from north of Spain and we like people from France used to eat very well, but people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|15 years ago|reply
Not entirely surprised that someone else on HN knows of this obscure problem, yes it's very bad. Essentially, the Inuit and Inuvialuit used to be self-sufficient with a diet that had evolved over hundreds of years. Fish, caribou, polar bear in the winter, etc. But hunting and preparing these things in the inhospitable arctic ain't easy.
Then the Canadian government decided to try to domesticate them by sending the children to school down south, where they learned the RRR's instead of the traditional -50 degree climate survival skills passed down from generation to generation.
They'd come back reliant on the government to ship in food and other necessities, and the government resorted to chips and pop and since it's the only thing that can sit on store shelves for the long winter months (when there's too much ice to ship anything else) and not spoil. Obesity, health, and cultural problems were the result.
A classic case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. A good friend of mine is running research and intervention projects up there attempting to find healthier alternatives to replace the pop and chips, I hear a lot about it.
[+] [-] beaumartinez|15 years ago|reply
Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy. It's when the calorie ratio skews in favour of calories in that you start to put on weight―and in some cases its dramatically in favour of calories in.
Unfortunately people are even more adverse to exercise as they are to changing their own diets.
Most damaging in my opinion is how this affects children, not only due to its health risks: being obese as a child is often a social death sentence, and that has all kinds of repercussions.
[+] [-] sasvari|15 years ago|reply
maybe it is more about people taking less time for cooking as a result of falsely put priorities - people do have time to watch countless of hours of TV every single day, but no time for preparing fresh meals - not about having less and less time (I doubt people 100 years ago had more spare time than today, anyway).
[+] [-] tomkr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antihero|15 years ago|reply
Why exactly is this? Surely Capitalism has created a wonderful system where we all have more money and time due to technology?
[+] [-] aantix|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splish|15 years ago|reply
It serves as a launching point to describe the point of the article and book.
Your premise and statistics are a bit on the hand-waving side, of course no one is calling Afghanistan and Pakistan models of health.
And life expectancy is not a proper measure of health either, as per capita (~2006) Afghan people had $29 as the total expenditure on health per capita. The United States? $6,714. We may live longer but we have a lot more help in getting there.
http://www.who.int/countries/afg/en/
http://www.who.int/countries/usa/en/
[+] [-] mdemare|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shasta|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sn0wright|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] run4yourlives|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deveren|15 years ago|reply
Now, we consider an 8 hour day in front of the computer as a hard day at work. But eat like we've been working in the fields...
[+] [-] simonsarris|15 years ago|reply
Eating fat does not necessarily make you fat, nor is it in itself a bad at all. Many fats are among the best things for your brain and heart. At the same time, fat-free foods can quite easily be bullshit.
A pound of sugar is fat-free, after all, but has an insane calorific value. (110 per oz)
Sugar is 100% total carbs.
A ounce of feta cheese has plenty of fat, and less calories per ounce than zero-fat sugar (feta is 75 per oz).
Feta cheese is 75% fat, 20% protein, 5% total carbs.
Then I try to show them some fat-free products that nonetheless has immense amounts of sugar and calories.
I think that using this topic as a lead-in has been the most effective way to get my friends to change their diets and consider what they eat.
[+] [-] steadicat|15 years ago|reply
That explains why mediterranean and asian diets, which are high on carbs but low on sugar (or artificial fructose), don't cause nearly as much obesity.
[+] [-] mikecarlucci|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viggity|15 years ago|reply
Everyone believed this cargo cult "science" and it has had a devastating impact for hundreds of millions of people.
[+] [-] kgo|15 years ago|reply
I want to believe the obesity problem is more of a portion control thing, for example, when McDonald's opened, did a normal adult actually eat a hamburger and small fries for lunch instead of a big mac and large fries? But once again, I always have trouble finding any real data to verify my hypothesis.
[+] [-] 3am|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|15 years ago|reply
Literally.
[+] [-] frankus|15 years ago|reply
If you're not so interested, he wrote a TL;DR version called Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It.
He also has a blog: http://www.garytaubes.com/blog/
[+] [-] jerf|15 years ago|reply
Also, I would adjust some expectations. The common "science" understanding seems to be that it's Gary Taubes, crazed whacko, against nutritionists, bearer of the holy and uncontested Peer Review. In fact it's Gary Taubes advocating that we take mainstream 21st century endocrinology seriously, with its actual biochemistry and explanation for the behavior of fat accumulation in the body in general, beyond mere obesity, and discard a scientifically unsupported nutrition philosophy unchanged since the 1960s that can not explain the matter of fat accumulation except in terms so broad and vague (and, ultimately, wrong) that I can't hardly even understand why it is still taken seriously when there's another branch of science that utterly subsumes it. This juxtaposition becomes much more clear and refined in his second book, though it is technically pretty much all there in GCBC if you go looking for it.
That is, not "nut vs. science", it's "science vs. science", and yeah, I make no bones about which science I think explains a hell of a lot more than the other.
[+] [-] mikecarlucci|15 years ago|reply
Michael Pollan says it best: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|15 years ago|reply
So maybe Michael Pollan's advice has to be reduced to "Eat food. Not too much."
[+] [-] aaronblohowiak|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wmboy|15 years ago|reply
e.g. margarine (which has color added to it to make it look yellow, otherwise it'd be gray) is NOT a healthy alternative to butter.
[+] [-] ryanfitz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sklivvz1971|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcheong|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gjm11|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnny22|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radioactive21|15 years ago|reply
You could eat healthy but still not be healthy without a proper life style change. Meaning exercise, lowering stress and other harmful habits.
[+] [-] bane|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] postfuturist|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xodarap|15 years ago|reply
(Although of course they approach it from an ethical perspective. But it makes you just as healthy.)
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wil2k|15 years ago|reply
The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health
http://www.amazon.com/China-Study-Comprehensive-Nutrition-Im...
[+] [-] gstamp|15 years ago|reply
http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...
[+] [-] seanalltogether|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andys|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OstiaAntica|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] igrekel|15 years ago|reply
It is not about survival it is about the ability to pass down genes. If the diet's problems appear later in life, it will not have a direct impact. It may have an indirect impact.
[+] [-] ams6110|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gopi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amitraman1|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhangen|15 years ago|reply
We're fatter because we have more to eat.
[+] [-] d2|15 years ago|reply