Welcome and glad to have you. And while you're not a shill, I find your site misguided, in overly relying on equating natural, traditional diets with healthy, leading you to some recommendations that are orthogonal to healthiness, like fermented veggies and sprouted grains, and some that are unhelpful to health, like red meat and butter. The people of Finland drastically improved their health metrics when they transitioned to a modern mainstream European diet away from their natural, traditional Finnish diet of lots of red meat and butter.
Modern scientific findings, properly analyzed, are an astonishingly better guide to human health than any traditional collection of folk wisdom.
To add to adolph's comment, could you point a citation to back up this?
And while you're not a shill, I find your site misguided, in overly relying on equating natural, traditional diets with healthy, leading you to some recommendations that are orthogonal to healthiness, like fermented veggies and sprouted grains, and some that are unhelpful to health, like red meat and butter. The people of Finland drastically improved their health metrics when they transitioned to a modern mainstream European diet away from their natural, traditional Finnish diet of lots of red meat and butter.
Additionally, how does a "modern mainstream European diet" compare to a traditional Finnish diet?
I've been reading Kristen's blog for a long time. I don't agree with everything I read, and I tend to be skeptical of strong opinions on either side of an equation. That said, I can't help but agree with the basic premise of the post: food producers are not entirely truthful about what's in the stuff they produce and we put into our bodies. And our health and producers' bottom lines do not always line up. For example, did you know that factory farmed chickens are fed arsenic, and that often ends in the meat you purchase from the supermarket[1]? And this went on for many years before the FDA put a stop to it?
I was thinking of a scientific study I read a couple years ago, the citation for which escapes me at the moment. How I long for the day when I can install the Google brain history page implant beta. But five seconds on the present-day Google uncovered both: (1) a Wikipedia page on Finnish cuisine that shows a picture of a butter-slathered pastry and mentions stuff about hunting, red meat, buttermilk, and fruits and vegetables being unavailable nine months out of the year until recently; and, also on the first page of results, (2) a scientific review paper in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons by an M.D.-Ph.D. Yale professor indicating that Finland has both the world's highest consumption of saturated fatty acids and the world's highest ischemic heart disease mortality rate, and the highest rate of myocardial infarction of any of the countries surveyed in another study; and that "it is generally established that the Finnish diet of fatty red meats, butter, and bread, is highly conducive to heart disease." The best part is, it's a review article that cites 64 other scientific articles, so you can follow up with those to learn more. Here you go, with my bonus url cruft:
The study I had remembered reading, which I'll track down this weekend sometime when I'm not on Hacker News while getting ready to go to work, was more recent and shows new improvements in Finnish health metrics as they have moved away from their traditional diet and begun eating a lot more food from the rest of Europe.
And I share your agreement with this particular post on Kristen's blog.
My sense, from following Kristen's blog, is that she might be a bit appalled by the traditional Finnish diet, too. She pushes a lot of grass-fed beef and butter produced from the milk of grass-fed cattle, but she also pushes lots of vegetables, among other things.
The red meat, butter, and buttermilk that abounds in the traditional Finnish diet are from moose and reindeer whose own diet in the Finnish woods is at least as all-natural, wholesome, and organic as the grass grazed by Kristen's cattle, but that didn't stop the Finns from being the world leaders in heart attacks. The LDL cholesterol in your bloodstream doesn't care what the cows you ate were eating when they were alive. Kristen's brand of feeling good for rebelling against the food-industrial complex and folksy pattern-matching of traditional must mean good are no substitute for the scientific method, and in this case it's (on average and over the long term) a life-or-death distinction.
Am I? Are you sure? The Finns, not the Sami in particular, have been observed to be the world's foremost eaters of red meat in general, as noted in my other post. To the degree that non-Sami Finns dieted on pork and beef instead of moose and reindeer, they have tended to consume all the more saturated fat.
At the same time, moose and reindeer are not cattle, and they are cold-weather animals, which means they have a lot of extra body fat. Extrapolating conclusions about moose and reindeer to cattle is not necessarily correct and there are reasons to believe it isn't.
There is a significant difference, but it works the opposite way, so that beef is worse for you. Cattle have been bred under ten thousand years of domestication to have fattier meat, whereas undomesticated sources of red meat are much leaner. Off the top of my head I can point you to the index of Guns, Germs and Steel for citations.
>Cattle have been bred under ten thousand years of domestication to have fattier meat, whereas undomesticated sources of red meat are much leaner.
I can see that applying to deer, elk, rabbit, etc -- but moose? Furthermore, there's a considerable market for lean beef especially in the modern era, and I know that pigs have rather recently been selected for leanness. My current knowledge of the health effects of red meat as a whole is that the data are conflicting:
The fact that Finland's diet was confounded with lots of butter and other fatty things makes the whole thing rather unconvincing as a data point saying that red meat is any more unhealthy than ordinary nutrition labeling (x grams of fat, y grams of carb, z grams of protein) would lead you to believe. I can buy a pound of 90/10 beef at the store with 12 grams of fat, ~3 grams of carbohydrate, and 23 grams of protein "per serving", which really doesn't sound terribly unhealthy next to e.g. a bag of potato chips.
Breeding for leaner red meat is a phenomenon of the last few decades, compared with breeding for fattier red meat which has been going on among domesticated cattle and swine for the last 10,000 years. Relatively leaner and relatively less processed red meat are relatively better for you, and there are various data about how relatively healthier the relatively better red meats are. But there are also clear and unconflicted data that vegetarians have far better health outcomes than omnivores, and that pescetarians, like Steve Jobs, who eat seafood and plant-based foods but no other meat, have still significantly better health outcomes than vegetarians.
I haven't commented on Hacker News for a while now. But let me rake in the downvotes and say that this kind of answer is the reason I can't be bothered anymore. Let's face it, this is a geeky forum. And geeks just can't refrain from giving their opinions and facts. They only need to spend a night reading Wikipedia articles about nutrition to have the right to shit all over someones comments that are marginally overlapping on their new domain of expertise. The tone above, jesus christ. She wasn't even asking for an opinion.
Worst community ever. The arrogance that comes with smarts.
When someone takes it on herself to actively evangelize an analysis she acknowledges is controversial, she should expect to be treated like an adult and be presented with honest opposing views, in whatever venue she chooses to take part in. And I'd find a forum disappointing if its default ethic were to reaffirm to all its participants that their current coding knowledge, startup idea, or pseudoscientific views were equally valid and had no room for improvement by frank feedback. I'll let you get back to your much more civilized forums where people simply present their rational analysis and supporting evidence rather than tossing around exclamations of "shit" and "jesus christ" at other participants, especially as part of a call for civility. Oh wait.
Bullshit. If you make your views publicly known, they are open to criticism. bfe was incisive but not uncivil. Your pious attitude and haughty implication that bfe's knowledge is only a result of an evening's browse through Wikipedia is far more offensive to me than anything he/she wrote.
Really? Um, which body of pre-modern folk wisdom relies on citations to evidence? To be fair there are a few, but their cited authorities of preference are scriptural. I cited a scientific review of large studies of specific health outcomes from specific dietary habits in my other reply, but that itself is the practice of science. If you don't find that explanatory power a convincing epistemological clue, there is no end to the venues more willing than HN to spend time debating the equal dignity of traditional folk wisdom with the scientific method - churches, humanities departments, newspaper op-ed pages, etc.
Originally I was just trolling you for making a bare assertion. After thinking about it a bit, sure, do you have any citations for "Modern scientific findings" being "astonishingly better" than "any traditional collection of folk wisdom" for the purpose of "human health?"
First, I haven't made an assertion that folk wisdom relies on citations. My impression is that folk wisdom is generally broader than religion, but I won't bother you with a citation request for that assertion. "Modern scientific findings" appear to rely on citations and you provided one that says the traditional Mediterranean diet is associated with some positive health outcomes; the Finnish one, not so much. Here's one for you about the negative health affects of a modern science-derived diet and lifestyle on folks migrating from a traditional diet and lifestyle to a modern one.
Type 2 (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes mellitus, migration and westernisation: The Tokelau Island Migrant study
Summary. The migration of Tokelauans from a traditional atoll in the Pacific to urban New Zealand is associated with an increased prevalence and incidence of Type 2 (non-insulindependent) diabetes mellitus over the period 1968-1982. During the same period, a lesser but definite increase is seen among non-migrants in Tokelau. The age standardised prevalence rates rose from 7.5 and 11.7 to 10.8 and 19.9 per 100 respectively in the male and female migrants compared with an increase from 3.0 and 8.7 to 7.0 and 14.3 per 100 in the nonmigrant males and females respectively. The incidence of diabetes is shown to be consistently higher in the migrants compared to the non-migrants giving relative risks of 1.5 in males and 1.9 in females. The factors most likely contributing to this difference, are changes to a higher calorie, high protein diet, higher alcohol consumption, a greater weight gain and altered levels of physical activity in the migrants. A number of populations in the Pacific have been shown to have a low rate of diabetes in their traditional setting, but may have a genetic predisposition for diabetes which responds to factors in the urban industrialised environment and life-style. The social and economic changes taking place in Tokelau are also clearly increasing the risk of diabetes. To reverse these trends and prevent the development of complications of Type 2 diabetes, it will be important to institute preventive programmes and to follow up the population in both environments for long-term outcomes, including mortality.
That is quite the switcheroo you pulled by declaring a "modern science-derived diet and lifestyle" to be the more calories and more booze and less exercise of the Islanders in this study. How is that "science-derived"?
The point I was making is that the scientific method is our best bet in trying to accurately learn about how the universe works, including as it comes to our health and how our diet affects that. That really doesn't have anything to do with Pacific islanders adopting Westernized habits of, averaged over a population, eating more and drinking more booze and exerting less physical activity and having negative health outcomes because of it...
...except that this study itself is also an exercise in the scientific method, and is part of the scientific method helping us learn better how to optimize our health.
Kristen's blog basically espouses the view that there are lots of new, awful health outcomes that have coincided with the rise of modern food industries and habits, so there are obviously major problems with those habits and the industries that are facilitating those awful health outcomes. So far so good. She has done some valid analysis on a terribly urgent problem.
But then she seems to have decided, well, everything in our traditional cuisine from before modern food industry, and that contrasts with today's modern food industry, must have been beneficial. For example, our ancestors seem to have consumed lots of beef and butter, but from free-grazing grass-fed cattle, which isn't how modern food industry prefers to operate today. So that must be part of what was healthy about our traditional diet, that has since been corrupted.
This represents a too-hasty conclusion to the analytical process. It willfully ignores lots of recent, rigorously performed research to the contrary. She bought into an analytical framework that had some partial validity -- modern industrial food processing has introduced some new deleterious health effects -- but then she was satisfied to stop there and not continue searching for further answers in all available avenues of skeptical and rigorous inquiry. She found a pattern that produced some obvious advantage over the status quo, but then fell into premature whole-hearted acceptance of that pattern and is content just to try to keep matching that pattern, instead of continuing to seek out the best evidence and refusing to stop trying to learn from ongoing research. Additionally, since her partial analysis has yielded a clear antagonist in the form of modern food processing industry, she has allowed her pride in rebelling against that antagonist sustain her faith in exactly her present beliefs, instead of continuing to accept ambiguity and an ongoing openness to even better evidence and better answers than the partially better ones she has already devoted herself to.
Her devotion to that insufficient pattern-matching has even become insidious enough that she refuses to consider overwhelming, rigorously obtained, scientific evidence that lots of red meat and full-fat dairy might also be deleterious to human health -- because she has devoted herself to simplistic pattern-matching based on the initial conjecture that modern food processing equals bad and anything from previous to modern food processing equals good, which includes red meat and full-fat dairy. Her devotion to her halfway-valid analysis has left her willfully defying the best knowledge that we are able to obtain.
(By the way I was even shocked to discover how badly everyone's misconceptions are about what the typical American diet was like previous to modern food processing. There wasn't nearly as much red meat and butter being consumed as most people might assume. Did you know that various beans and chili peppers were major diet staples in early 1800's America as far north as the Canadian border? The reality was actually a lot healthier than the Little House on the Prairie TV version.)
The scientific method as applied to nutrition has revealed that certain traditional cuisines were relatively quite healthy, such as traditional Mediterranean and Japanese cuisines. It doesn't by any means mean EVERY traditional cuisine was equally healthy, such as the Finnish lower boundary condition I mentioned above. The scientific method as applied to nutrition also continues to teach us new and better knowledge of healthy cuisine than any traditional cuisine from anywhere on Earth has ever had. Every traditional cuisine came about in an evolutionary process that depended partly on survivors' bias, partly on anecdote, partly on luck, etc. Like any evolutionary product, they are all imperfect, even the healthiest examples. We only even have the capability of evaluating which are the healthier ones and which the less healthy, through our modern methods of science. What does a traditional Japanese cuisine mean? Does it mean lots of white rice and udon noodles, or lots of seafood, soy products, and seaweed salad? Which are the healthiest? The Mediterranean Sea coast has a lot of surface area. What does a traditional Mediterranean diet mean? Paella? Fettucini Alfredo? Grilled fish and Greek vegetable salad with olive oil? Couscous and goat meat? Unleavened bread and hummus? Only the methods of science allow us to compare all the evidence in valid ways and distinguish among the patterns. If we ate largely traditional Japanese cuisine but with little to no white rice or simple carb noodles, or traditional Greek cuisine but without the feta cheese and substituting whole grain bread, could that be even healthier than any traditional cuisine humanity has yet known? There are no simple answers to anything. And only continuing to explore rigorously, with a sound understanding of the most foolproof methods of exploration, and an acceptance in the meantime that our knowledge remains tentative and must remain open to the best analysis of the best available evidence as we continue to search and discover, will yield the best knowledge and the best outcome. That is what I mean by relying on science.
Ok, maybe the migratory Tokelauans ate something other than some hypothetical health-optimized science-based diet. The science behind it was probably production-efficiency optimized. Where's the citation for some science documenting a group of people getting better health benefits from "modern scientific findings?"
Your claim:
Modern scientific findings, properly analyzed, are an astonishingly better guide to human health than any traditional collection of folk wisdom.
Modern scientific findings, properly analyzed, are an astonishingly better guide to human health than any traditional collection of folk wisdom.