>patients are known to be highly inconsistent when reporting their own alcohol consumption. Answers patients provide depend on many factors, including the doctor-patient relationship. And patients’ spouses often disagree with their partners’ assessment of their drinking. The MACH15 trial had some sophistication built in to it, including the use of random smartphone-based check-ins for patients. But while some evidence suggests that smartphone-based self-reporting on alcohol consumption often contradicts patients hindsight reports, MACH15 had no ability to tease out which patients would adhere to the smartphone check-ins, and which were providing accurate accounts of their consumption. In essence, the NIH was making a $100 million gamble that volunteers would portray their alcohol consumption accurately.
This doesn't seem like a problem with the study design to me. You're effectively assessing the effect of telling people to drink "zero" vs "moderate" alcohol as opposed to the the effect of actually drinking those quantities, but since one major use for a study like this is to figure out what doctors should be telling people this still seems valuable.
There’s too much judgement in the standards. If you admit to very moderate social alcohol consumption, you’ll get tagged as an abuser. Risky move these days.
While I disagree and think your assessment is a bit hyperbolic, I do see that there may be some stigma in whether patients admit to their doctor that they drink. My dad apparently lied to his doctor quite a bit about his junk food consumption prior to his double bypass. Patients feel guilty about things they know or think to be unhealthy and for some reason think that lying will help them in any way. It's weird. Like, why are people more afraid of what some random person thinks than they are of seriously fucking up their doctor's ability to treat them?
We are all told that red wine if consumed in limited amounts every day is very beneficial for health in the long term. Of late, I heard that this scientific marketing was also sponsored by the alcohol industry and high chances that this notion is fake and preposterous.
Discussions about diet have been massively muddied by things that don't really matter. A lot of people have completely lost faith in nutritional science, because what they hear in the news is often confusing and contradictory.
A glass of wine per day might have a very slight benefit, or it might be slightly harmful. We're not entirely sure, because the effect size is very small either way. Have a glass of wine, don't have a glass of wine, it doesn't really matter.
We are very confident that eating fruit and vegetables is good for you. The majority of Americans eat significantly less than the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables. We are very confident that drinking more than a small amount of alcohol is bad for you. 30% of Americans drink more than the recommended amount. We are very confident that being obese is bad for you. 40% of Americans are obese.
We should probably just ignore any new studies in nutrition, because we're failing to act on stuff that we've known about for decades, stuff that most people would agree is common sense. We need to focus our efforts on getting the basics right.
I have a genotype that causes moderate drinking to lower risk of CHD with a p value of 0.008. Check out the odds ratios for the different groups as well.
I always assumed that this had to do with antioxidants in grapes and nothing to do with alcohol itself. That's not so far fetched to me, but why not just drink grape juice?
On one hand that's bad. On the other hand, not eating them might actually increase your risk of cancer.
Perceived risk from harm due to pesticides on food is overestimated by many people, and the risk of not eating more fruit and vegetables is underestimated.
"If just half the U.S. population were to increase fruit and vegetable consumption by a single serving a day, an estimated 20,000 cancer cases might be avoided each year. That’s how powerful produce may be.
But because the model was using conventional fruits and veggies the pesticide residues on those extra fruits and vegetables might result in ten additional cancer cases."
Well, if you’re already getting your vitamins elsewhere, eating a grape might not be terribly different from eating sugar. It is very odd fruits and veggies are mixed together like this when they have such a different nutritional profile.
And how about the phytochemicals (plant compounds that are under research with unestablished effects on health and not yet scientifically defined as essential nutrients).
It would be good to have pesticide and hazardous chemical amounts per serving listed along with the other ingredients. What an eye opener that would be. I wonder what it would take to accomplish this given that contamination happens throughout production and distribution.
Could blockchains help detailed tracking in
studies somehow? Maybe tie RFID in the products into a blockchain tracker. The blockchain could anonymize the data, but provide quantitative tracking.
I'd also wish for some way to provide funding to studies but obscure the direct pay. So they pay into a funding that gets anonymously distributed to coinholders.
Of course there are, this is pervasive. This has been done for decades by the tobacco industry, by the meat, dairy and eggs industry and others that try to buy scientific studies that favor their product.
You lump them all together as if they are the same
(tobacco, meat, dairy, eggs) yet you conveniently left out the Grain farming industry and Vegetarian/Vegan food industry, these industries buy scientific studies and food & nutrition organizations too.
There's an order of magnitude difference between the marketing and lobbying budgets of the animal agriculture industry and the others you mentioned. There is no "big broccoli" funding dodgy nutrition studies.
There is however plenty of "Anti-meat/Meat Causes Cancer" dodgy nutrition studies pushed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Vegetarian/Vegan agenda by The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
Fasting doesn't make anyone money and is against desires of most people. So unlikely there's going to be any significant industry push even though it's one of the few non surgical options proven to reverse type two diabetes.
> What’s up with this internet argument style where people think that pointing out an obvious exception is a valid retort?
Because it's not so obvious exception as you think it is, in fact it's the exact opposite, it's a very common type of allergy (Mediterranean, middle east, asia) and usually overlooked by many, that's why.
> Are you seriously suggesting that they needed to provide a disclaimer about allergies to their general statement about lentils being healthy?
Anti-nutrients (beside the allergies) in lentils/legumes is a real issue, so the "lentils being healthy" statement is highly debatable.
Alternatively, when I hear about food information that might affect me, I try to investigate the mentioned studies (at least read the abstract and the results), and also other studies about the issue, to see if there's any reasonable consensus about the results.
The whole nutrition field is an absolute disgrace, giving a bad name to the medicine and science.
We basically resort to having beliefs instead of depending on science, with the parent confirming husband own biases in only a couple of words.
When something like 80% of studies on nutrition are either compromised or never confirmed by independent sources, it’s no wonder that people turn to the alternative medicine promoted by Fake News media outlets, no wonder that anti-vaxers are a thing in the 21st century.
Not really. Most studies support the consensus findings of nutrition studies for the last several decades. Unfortunately the meat and dairy industries have managed to muddy the waters enough to get most people to just throw up their hands and eat what they want.
Processed foods are bad for you. Refined carbs and sugars are bad for you. Saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you. A diet centered around whole fruits, vegetables, legumes and grains will do more to extend your healthy lifespan than any other.
Saturated fat has been vindicated by a majority of modern studies while polyunsaturated has been crucified. Selling us industrial vegetable oils as food was clever. That doesn't mean we should eat a aide of bacon a day, but avoiding whole unprocessed foods containing saturated fats for any reason other than calorie count is flawed. And dietary cholesterol does not correlate with ldl, nor does ldl strongly correlate with death.
The saturated/polyunsaturated issue to me points to the complexity of the science, not necessarily to anything nefarious.
Consider the response of both to heat. There's a good explanation for why polyunsaturated fats are more healthy when raw, but also good reasons to think that they're less healthy when heated to cooking temperature. But studies, and people, tend to ignore the distinction as if there's no chemical changes in response to 400F heat.
Add to this the fact that, for example, "sunflower oil" can vary wildly in it's actual lipid structure because of genetic variation, things get even more complicated.
Sure, there's manipulation in nutrition science, but it's not that different from other biomedical sciences. A lot of the confusion is that, but a lot of it is just random sampling variation, and problems people have with interpreting meta-analyses rather than individual studies; but some of it too is the actual inherent complexity of the topic.
I'm sorry, but I'm crying out wolf ... the American Heart Association basically told people to replace saturated fat with sugar.
This is a fact. Even now the recommendation is for people to eat refined carbohydrates in their daily diet because they are "fortified" with things like B vitamins or other nutrients which previously came from fatty meat.
I mean, OK, in 1950-1960 the field was new, mistakes were made, but to keep this going in 2018 is criminal.
They are criminals because people die of type 2 diabetes or of cardiovascular diseases that, surprise, are also caused by hyperinsulinemia (the result of all these refined carbohydrates) and they are side stepping the issue, probably because a lot of big companies (like Coca Cola) would lose a lot of money otherwise.
The result is that our children are being fed a diet that is making them obese — even if you protect your children at home, you can't protect them at school. Our children are getting sick, refined sugar should be declared a harmful drug and just like tobacco or alcohol, children should not be allowed to consume it.
Numerous direct intervention studies have shown the clear causal link between dietary saturated fat and blood cholesterol levels. You can obscure this fact by playing games with population meta studies because individual baseline levels vary a lot and are genetically determined.
Why are you concerned with blood cholesterol as opposed to e.g. calcium scoring or actual inflammation markers you can measure almost as easily as a lipid panel? One does not spontaneously develop atherosclerosis from elevated blood cholesterol. That just doesn’t make sense from a metabolic perspective.
Elevated LDL is very highly correlated with heart disease. Studies that show that people born with genetically very low cholesterol levels are practically immune to heart disease reinforce this. The mechanism for this is well understood.
The study I linked is one of the largest studies ever made on dietary fat and low fat dieting, done on 50,000 women, spanning 8 years, an incredibly expensive endeavor and cannot be easily dismissed.
This isn't just some random study among dozens of others. Most studies on nutrition are far smaller than that and far more superficial.
So random weirdos on YouTube that want to explain how fat makes you sick have to account for this particular study without invoking conspiracy theories (e.g. the "milk and diary industry", oh noes).
Invoking conspiracy theories without substantial proof is not how science works. Also his medical knowledge is obsolete ever since the 90s ;-)
> Consumption of sugar and sweeteners is definitely unhealthy
I'm unconvinced that anything is "definitely unhealthy", especially when lumping "sugar" (which sugar?) in with "sweeteners".
First, I want a credible mechanism of action (e.g. "Sugar, the bitter truth", on Youtube, since you seem to like Youtube videos), then I want credible studies, which we're terribly light on, before reaching any conclusions.
> but it also peaked in 1999:
Assuming obesity (after some delay, according to whatever theory this is) did not also peak, that merely refutes the theory that obesity is directly proportional to sugar consumption (in whatever way measurement methodology that article used).
AFAICT, that theory is a strawman.
A more nuanced theory would include all intake of fructose, to the exclusion of glucose (e.g. sucrose only counts half but HFCS is variable depending on formulation), with an accounting of absorption prevention by the presence of fiber (as in fruit).
An even more nuanced theory wouldn't depend on a simple linear proportional correspondence but would assume a minimum "safe" daily fructose dose above which obesity effects would be triggered. Perhaps, above that, the degree of obesity in the individuals suffering from it would follow a proportional curve, but the rate incidence in the population wouldn't be expected to go down until the rate of consumption fell below that minimum threshold for enough individuals.
Assuming that threshold corresponds to 40g of sucrose daily [1], all the numbers in the article are so far above it, a 15% drop fails to refute such a theory.
> On average, Americans’ total consumption of caloric sweeteners like refined cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup is down
Most importantly, this kind of statistic would have to be considered suspect on its face, because it's unclear if fruit juices, a source of highly-concentrated, fiber-free fructose, are included. Is it considered a "sweetener" if it was there all along and almost everything else was removed? The body doesn't care, but the government statisticians might.
We need not look to chicken and cheese if "refined" sweeteners have just been swapped out for "natural" ones.
[1] the US RDA for all sugars is 50g, according to the article. A better estimate for the threshold, according to such a theory, would be pre-obesity US sugar consumption, such as from the 1950s.
There is no link between high cholesterol and heart disease, I.e. correlation is not causation.
If we are speaking of anecdotes, I eat a lot of fat, I’m on a keto diet and my cholesterol dropped to normal after I began keto.
And this is actually consistent with the claims of high fat proponents... that it’s insulin that triggers the metabolic syndrome, causing problems with LDL too, and insulin levels and resistance go up because of the sugars and the refined carbs in our diet.
Fats and protein also stimulate insulin release and a steak triggers a bigger insulin response than a bowl of white pasta. Check any chart of insulin responses to confirm this.
Losing weight by any means will lower your cholesterol. But the typical high fat low carb keto diet has the highest mortality rate of any popular diet.
This is why modern low-carbs diets are "high fat, moderate protein".
Also, this is NOT a war against all carbohydrates, but against refined carbohydrates, like sugar (corn syrup) or white flour. These refined carbohydrates in our daily diet have raised the insulin resistance of the population to the point that we have a type 2 diabetes and obesity epidemic on our hands and the problem is worse year by year.
N.B. our bodies can recover from insulin resistance, there are numerous reports of people with type 2 diabetes getting rid of their disease after a low carb diet. However it can take years for your metabolism to go back to normal and in the meantime things like potatoes (which otherwise are healthy and satiating) are unfortunately bad for you. Of course, you can blame refined carbs for damaging your body, and NOT potatoes.
> But the typical high fat low carb keto diet has the highest mortality rate of any popular diet.
We agree that refined carbs are a bad idea but avoiding complex carbs is also a bad idea.
Plus you should at least consider that a diet high in animal products has a massively higher environmental footprint than a plant based diet. If everybody ate the way most keto proponents suggest we should then we as a planet and species would be screwed.
This is really the key, and would do wonders for a majority of the population. Even if eggs and bacon is not ideal, switching out PopTarts/donuts for an egg and slice of bacon is a healthier alternative. Add some mushrooms and a tomato on the side and you have breakfast.
The other half of this equation is exercise. The benefits are enormous, yet few people do it consistently.
This is no less ideological than what you purport to oppose, which is the problem in a nutshell. In the absence of religion, most of us have become religious about little, largely inconsequential lifestyle choices, with food being the most common hill to die upon, and producing some of the most strident adherents. Beware anyone telling you what you should or should not eat, because they're invariably a charlatan pushing some agenda. Ideally, you'd make some experiments and see what your body tolerated the best, but it's far easier to just cargo cult onto the trendy or virtue-signalling diet trend.
As long as you're not trying to live on pixie sticks and cheetos, you're going to be okay.
Those stagements are pretty much consensus among educated (as opposed to self-propelled) nutrition experts. There is little controversy in saying such a thing.
Note however that the person said "centered around" not "should consist of". That allows for leeway in any direction.
Another discussion is that of dietary choices being "inconsequential":
Food production has large consequences, and small individual choices can on a population level be far from inconsequential.
There are a mountain of studies supporting this kind of diet. And it's the diet the healthiest populations in the world eat. The only diet religion is people trying to somehow claim that stuffing yourself with butter and bacon is healthy.
Oh, there are certainly a multitude of diet religions out there. Paleos, vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, non-celiac glutenphobes, ketos, the list goes on and on. Recently my mother-in-law read a book blaming all of the ills of the world on lectins that she took to heart, and wouldn't eat beans or tomatoes or grains for months.
The most aggravating thing about the diet religions is that nobody seems to be able to keep to themselves and practice quietly, they are compelled to evangelize and convert the heathen to the True Way. It's very tiresome when you have more important things to be concerned about than what you are putting down your gullet.
Isn't that exactly what you would expect if the threats were real? I'm not a believer in conspiracies but some of the large tech companies are well known for trying to silence critics. Although the same could probably be said about any company with so much money and power.
Silicon valley tries to maintain a squeaky clean image, but as we're finding out from Facebook, some of them are no better than say Comcast.
From what I've seen, tech companies generally outsource all the shady bits so they have someone to point fingers at. I've been at companies they've outsourced this work to...
It was a critique a couple years ago about how big G lost its way, possibly betraying the original wishes of the founders. Contained what may have seemed like insider information, but was largely a summary of Glassdoor reviews and scattered Reddit comments.
Reply was something like "Hi this is so and so from legal, if we hurt you personally you should contact us so we can work through this (yeah right), we take our reputation very seriously". Never checked if it was legit, and stopped using my account soon after.
An "industry-funded study" is an oxymoron. That's about as compelling as sports players also being the referee. All the studies that have shown that alcohol is not negative to health have been funded by the industry. To continue my analogy, the player/referee signaled for a touchdown when he wasn't even on the field. This is all propaganda bullshit pushed by alcohol companies to sell more shit. And really, anyone who stops to think about such ideas that a glass of wine a day--in other words a small addiction to alcohol, the most devastating commonly used drug in the world--could be beneficial, and doesn't question the validity by using his common sense is a fool who believes what he wants to believe. To sell addiction to the masses through manipulated studies is both genius on the part of alcohol companies and something that should be punished severely, as in disbanding the company. Except that nih and other federal departments are too dumb/corrupt themselves to not take the money. In the meantime, millions of people are and have died, gotten cancer, cirrhosis, and other problems because of their incompetence and willingness to sell the alcohol companies' take that a little alcohol addiction is not bad. Of course, for people that trust such government institutions, there is no hope and their trust, as we can see, has been the downfall of millions. But that's another issue altogether.
I picked up the book Food Politics by Marion Nestle, mentioned in the article, on a whim several years ago and could not recommend it more highly for anyone interested in... well, the politics of food.
A rule of thumb needs to give you approximately the right answer more than 50% of the time without spending any effort to examine the particular problem in order to be useful.
So it really does not need to be pointed out every time this ‘law’ is broken.
The original headline was "How many others are out there?" Which makes it not a yes/no question, and therefore Betteridge's Law of Headlines does not apply.
I can't speak directly for the NIH being funded by the companies, but in the UK and Ireland, there are Drinkaware foundations which are almost entirely funded by alcohol companies. It works quite well here
I don't have a huge amount of time to dig into this right now but the impression I get from the ONS is that the numbers are trending in the right direction - sort of. Will explore more later
My grandpa is into his 80s without many health issues while drinking occasionally but not everyday or anything. His brothers all loved drinking more and died earlier in much worse condition. Hence I will just drink smaller amounts of alcohol and not obsess over such issues
Its not a retoric, its according to the latest science. There is this social perception that drinking in moderation is ok for human health and even beneficial, when in reality alchool is a toxic substance with no known safe usage limit.
Cancer in western countries are in general the highest compared to other cultures, so having an average rate among the highest in the world is not saying much.
No. Alcohol is a "known carcinogen", and there seems to be no minimum dose below which it does not affect cancer risk.
That says nothing about the potency. Just like nitrates and cured meat products in general. We know that they do affect the risk of contracting cancer, but the potency is quite low, compared to something like tobacco smoke or radiation exposure.
A lot of the things people consume everyday are "toxic substances", depending on the dose. Almonds can kill you, so can apple cores.
Is alcohol to blame for higher rates of cancer in western countries? Probably not, as people in other parts of the world also consume a lot of alcohol, it's a human constant and not unique to the western world.
Moderate and responsible consumption of alcohol has extremely minor effects on physical health, but the social and relaxation benefits are immense. If having a cold beer after work helps you to de-stress and relax more for the rest of the day, that's a net positive. I would posit that stress is a lot more dangerous than occasional consumption of alcohol. I am absolutely not defending binge drinking and abuse.
There is a lot of modern-day puritanism and outright shaming going on lately, of everything that is deemed to be "unclean" or "unhealthy". It's not a good state of mind to be so judgmental of other people.
In the end people can do wathever they want, its their live after all.
There are other ways to reduce stress, like finding remote work or changing jobs.
The problem is that one beer quickly becomes two, 3 and 4 and there are a lot of people that just cant control it, its almost never just one beer.
I wish alchool would become like cigarretes: at least everyone knows it causes cancer, some people still use it and thats up to them.
But with alchool we are not there yet, a lot of people still dont know it causes cancer and there is no safe usage limit, they even think that it has some beneficial health properties, everything in moderation.
I wish it would be so socially acceptable not to drink, as it is to drink. In a lot of places, you are actually socially expected to consume alcohol, still today, which is insane given what we know about the link between alchool and cancer.
Don't blame poor self control on the drink/cigarette/junk food, it's a personal choice to indulge. Obviously if you can't control it, stay away. But please don't start any legal changes or persecution that affects the large majority that have absolutely no issues managing their intake.
If you find that the company you keep consider it unacceptable to not drink alcohol, you really should find other people to hang out with. Seriously, they're a bad influence.
I'm glad that everyone I hang out with don't give a shit if you drink alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages, as long as you're a nice person to hang out with. If there are people whose company you can only stand when one or both of you are drunk, something's seriously wrong.
