New Study Finds 'Mediterranean' Diet Significantly Reduces Brain Shrinkage (bbc.com)

schwit1 writes that 562 elderly research subjects cut their brain shrinkage in half just by changing their diet. (Paywalled article here). The BBC reports: A study of pensioners in Scotland found that those with a diet rich in fresh fruit, vegetables and olive oil had healthier brains than those with different eating habits. They suffered less brain shrinkage than those who regularly ate meat and dairy products. The study was carried out by University of Edinburgh researchers.... Scientists found that those who adhered most closely to the diet retained significantly greater brain volume after three years than those who did not... Lead researcher Dr Michelle Luciano said: "As we age, the brain shrinks and we lose brain cells, which can affect learning and memory. This study adds to the body of evidence that suggests the Mediterranean diet has a positive impact on brain health."

Comments

And the next food craze starts

[Opportunist]

It starts to remind me of the old times in the East Bloc where "scientists" came up with any sort of revelation every time something was in shortage or for some odd reason there was suddenly a surplus. You could bet your ass that the revelation was that eggs are an important source for any kind of vitamins but meat makes you sick.

Same shit now. What happened, did the olive harvest turn out to be the harvest of the century?

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

When you sell something, you need "research" to back it up so you're not accused of lying.

I bet after a few years we hear that olives and fish make you more like Trump. Probably right around the 2020 election.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Opportunist]

Don't get me wrong, I certainly ain't anti-science. But with this kind of research we get contradicting results every other year. First milk was important for you, now milk is harmful. Eggs used to be the way to an early grave, now eggs are the fountain of youth. Cholesterol was deadly, now we need it like a drug.

Or maybe it is already the other way around again, I don't keep track to be honest.

And in between all that we have various other food crazes from low-carb to neanderthal diet. What the fuck, people?

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy to eat healthy when all you can do is scavenge for fish and nuts because your economy is in the shitter.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[TheRealMindChild]

How, exactly, is milk harmful?

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

You could drown in it.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[SNRatio]

Whether or not research proves it to be the "best" diet for most people, the Mediterranean diet has been recommended and researched for ~50 years now. So not exactly a craze.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[rfengr]

Seems though that poor people eat mostly carbs. Spaghetti is cheap and filling, and tastier with greasy meat sauce. Ditto for rice and potatoes.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

This relates to your question and the one above it.

  The long story short is special interests (in dairy and agriculture) wanted higher profits so they demonized certian substances (fats) and said other mass produced items were what you needed (starch). This is why the food pyramid is totally bogus. Research it yourself. I didn't do any of my own research and just believed the narrative I was taught (indoctrinated) in schools. So I ate bread oatmeal and had a small cup of orange juice everyday and couldn't figure out why I was still gaining weight. All of that stuff turns into sugar in your body. It's unequivocally unhealthy. It's true cholesterol kills but not all cholesterol is the same. Some (like found in eggs and real butter) is not harmful and is heavily stigmatized.

In particular regards to milk just look up the story of Jane akre and Steve Wilson. http://projectcensored.org/11-the-media-can-legally-lie/

Re: And the next food craze starts

[PopeRatzo]

Spaghetti is cheap and filling, and tastier with greasy meat sauce.

Now you're making me hungry.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[nine-times]

You're right that we keep getting contradictory information, but the problem often isn't that the studies are bad in themselves, it's that the reporting on the study is bad.

One group does a study that shows a correlation between diet and "brain shrinkage". That's all. One study finds some kind of statistical correlation. Further study is needed. First, the study should be replicated before really trusting the results. Someone would also have to hypothesize what the causal link is, and then study that, because (sorry, I know it has become a cliche, but...) correlation does not equal causation.

But ok, let's assume for the sake of argument that it's determined that the exact diet described here as the "Mediterranean diet" prevents "brain shrinkage". Ok. Now what? What is "brain shrinkage"? Is brain shrinkage bad? What are the negative effects of it? Are their positive effects of brain shrinkage? Oh, and are there other negative effects of the Mediterranean diet that outweigh the benefits of preventing brain shrinkage?

Nobody really knows. I'm sure an expert could provide some information in response to their answers, but they won't have a complete answer.

But reporters don't necessarily understand all of that, and in any case, that kind of nuanced and intelligent reporting won't sell ad time on CNN. You know what will grab people's attention? The headline, "Drinking olive oil will make you smarter!" So that's what they report, and suddenly the common wisdom is that we should all be guzzling a gallon of olive oil per day.

And then a few years later, there will be another study where there's some correlation between olive oil and an increased risk of some particular rare form of cancer. There will be all the same uncertainties and complications of interpreting the results of the study, but reporters won't report on the complications. There will just be a headline, "Olive oil causes cancer!" Now everyone decides we're supposed to cut olive oil our of our diets.

Science may eventually find that the studies themselves were flawed, or the results were misinterpreted, or the correlation was just a statistical anomaly. Or we may eventually find that there is a correlation, but the causal link is something unexpected. Maybe people who cook with olive oil are less likely to eat butter, and butter causes brain shrinkage. Or, it's possible, just possible, that olive oil does in fact help to prevent brain shrinkage as well as increase the risk of a rare form of cancer, but that it does each of these things to such a minor degree that it's not worth considering when choosing what to eat.

It's also true that some studies are bad. Unfortunately, we don't put much priority on repeating studies to confirm results. However, the far bigger problem is that most of our news outlets suck. Even the respectable ones like the BBC and New York Times are just awful. Honestly, I'm not sure how to improve them, because another big piece of the problem is that *we, the audience*, suck. We insist on clicking on clickbait, watching tabloid junk, and superstitiously believing whatever our chosen news outlet reports.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[raind]

Antibiotics and steroids come to mind.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[allcoolnameswheretak]

I think the problem is, every year you have tens of thousands of new medicine and biotech students needing to write their thesis or doctorate about something. They research just one of the many moving parts, since they only have a limited time, and by cherry picking the results that fit with whatever it is they are trying to prove, they can pretty much get any result they want. Then they have to defend their work in front of their peers, so they obviously want to make it look as good as possible. Therefore every new research is presented as if it's a groundbreaking achievement, a few news outlets get impressed, pick up the story and it ends up on Slashdot.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[nospam007]

"How, exactly, is milk harmful?"

It's sugary, fatty water, with about the same calories as soda, destined to give a calf a nice pelt.

BTW, I like your hair.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Rei]

Since when have nutritionists pushed starch? Fats were indeed treated as bad - first all fats because studies showed links between fat-rich diets and heart disease. It was later shown that it wasn't "all fats", just saturated fats. And nothing has changed that; it's still widely accepted my medical science that saturated fats are associated with heart disease. The problem was all in manufacturer responses. Manufacturers largely responded to requests for fat reduction not with increases in fiber, protein and healthy fats (monounsaturated, omega-3) as nutritionists preferred, but with with carbohydrate increases and replacing saturated fats with trans fats - both of which were on their own harmful, and in some cases worse.

The fact that the negative health effects of things like saturated fats were discovered later than the negative health effect was a consequence of them being little used previously but increasingly used after the health effects of saturated fats. So it's not negligence on the part of nutritionists, they were just investigating the health issues in the diets that were the most common at the time. To be fair, it would be nice if the food industry would do a lot more of the precautionary principle (including nutritionists).

Concerning this: note that you almost have to have either some dairy, egg, or meat in your diet; or, to take supplements. Because primarily of B12. It's not produced by plants. It's not even found in many unicellular species like spirulina. It's only produced by certain types of primary unicellular producers that are not generally consumed by humans.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Rei]

Wow, I can't type. That should be:

"The fact that the negative health effects of things like saturated fats were discovered later than the negative health effects of saturated fats was a consequence of them being little used previously but increasingly used after the health effects of saturated fats were discovered.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[shess]

But ok, let's assume for the sake of argument that it's determined that the exact diet described here as the "Mediterranean diet" prevents "brain shrinkage". Ok. Now what? What is "brain shrinkage"? Is brain shrinkage bad? What are the negative effects of it? Are their positive effects of brain shrinkage? Oh, and are there other negative effects of the Mediterranean diet that outweigh the benefits of preventing brain shrinkage?

Maybe it's like the "brain cloud" from "Joe Versus The Volcano"?

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Foods with fat molecules can block up the capillaries and the major blood vessels. Build up would lead to hardening and narrowing of the arteries. Cholesterol was one indication of this.

Eggs , bacon and sausages for breakfast in the morning were known as "a cholesterol special" or "a heart attack on a plate".

For me, even a couple of glasses of skimmed milk or a spoonful of cod liver oil will make me feel tired.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[zephvark]

But with this kind of research we get contradicting results every other year. First milk was important for you, now milk is harmful. Eggs used to be the way to an early grave, now eggs are the fountain of youth. Cholesterol was deadly, now we need it like a drug.

We don't, really. The foundation of a lot of the confusion was the U.S. government recommendations of 1977, which were often not based on any science. I suspect corruption, but incompetence might have been a factor. There were some voodoo notions about calcium, cholesterol, sodium and fiber. Even the Feds have since retracted the idea that dietary cholesterol is meaningful.

Milk is fine in reasonable amounts, if you can digest it; probably 1/3-1/2 of the recommendations. You don't need the skim crap. Eggs have always been fine. Sodium is fine up to at least three times the U.S. recommended maximum. You probably want only half of the recommended fiber intake. That's what my research suggests but, bodies differ, and experiment for yourself.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[AthanasiusKircher]

You're right that we keep getting contradictory information, but the problem often isn't that the studies are bad in themselves, it's that the reporting on the study is bad.

I agree with this, but I don't quite agree with the restricting the blame as you do...

But reporters don't necessarily understand all of that, and in any case, that kind of nuanced and intelligent reporting won't sell ad time on CNN. [...] However, the far bigger problem is that most of our news outlets suck.

Etc.

That may all be true, but it's a far deeper problem than that. It's fundamentally tied up with science funding. Here's what actually happens:

(1) Researchers do research and write detailed findings. ("A correlates with B.")

(2) Researchers know that studies which get citations will help their careers, and studies that get more attention will help get them future funding. So, they include a lot of stuff in the "Discussion" section of their study that's incredibly speculative, but it makes it look like their findings will lead to a cure for cancer or something. (E.g., "We've shown correlation between A and B, but some preliminary studies show a connection among B, C, and D, and if C and D are true, then we might even have future research leading to E," where E is "curing cancer.")

(3) A university press office wants to draw attention to its faculty and its prominence as a university, so when it writes up the findings, it plays up the "MAY lead to cancer cure!" angle. The press office interviews the faculty member in charge, who gives an interview agreeing about what the study "MAY" ultimately lead to, but this gets bumped to the first paragraph of the press release, while the hedging "this is just a preliminary finding..." quote gets buried in paragraph 4 of the press release (whereas the hedging was integrated in the discussion section of the original paper). Now we effectively have the correlation between A and B buried deep in the press release, while C and D (which most people will have heard of) get the main story, and the speculation on E is foregrounded.

(4) Now science reporters finally get a crack at this. They see the university press release and its "may cure cancer!" in the first paragraph, which the mainstream news reporters now upgrade to the headline. They bury any hedging even further into the story, where few people will ever read it. They also find three other "experts" who are eager to get their names in the press, and who also present somewhat hedging statements, but the quotations are selected and broken up in ways that exaggerate the importance. In this case, A and B are now completely left out of the story (even though that's what the study measured) because average people don't know about them and wouldn't understand that. E becomes the headline, and C and D are used to support it.

So, while I agree with you that the news media is sensationalizing things, it's actually endemic to the whole process. Everyone from the actual researchers to the university press offices to the mainstream news media wants to get the study noticed.

Moreover, if you look at what actually happens AMONG SCIENTISTS is the same thing. Unless they are specialists in the particular area, they often just read the abstract of the old study, and if the original researchers includes some speculative sentence about the "broad ramifications" of the study in the abstract, the study frequently gets cited as if it PROVED this. I've seen instances of this in some fields where some "well-known" fact gets cited all the time, but when you track it back to the original study, what you actually find is a hedging very preliminary claim made in a discussion section that was never very well supported by the data (and the original researchers often explicitly hedge and SAY "more research is needed" or whatever).

I'll definitely agree with you that there are problematic elements here. And the news media is a part of it. But it's certainly not the only (and maybe not even the main) part of how bad science becomes accepted dogma.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[rfengr]

I want some honey boo boo "sketty"; a couple pounds of fatty ground beer, Great Value corn syrup sauce, and double bleached spaghetti noodles.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[ShanghaiBill]

How, exactly, is milk harmful?

It isn't. The problem is that the GPP gets his nutritional information from tabloid headlines, which do indeed contradict each other regularly, and assumes that the tabloids accurately reflect the scientific consensus.

The truth is that the benefits of eating vegetables, fruit, and mono-unsaturated fats (such as olive oil) have been known for 40 years, without any significant "contradicting results".

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Vegan Cyclist]

It isn't the studies, it's the industries behind the studies. Livestock is big business in the US and Canada, and have powerful lobbies and influence school programs very heavily. Cow's milk is practically devoid of nutrition (short of protein, which virtually ALL of us are already well in excess of), and there are plenty of other common foods that provide the same nutrients in higher amounts, and without the 'baggage' (like saturated fat, hormones, fecal matter, blood, pus, etc). Milk is credited with having iodine for example - fresh milk straight from a cow doesn't have much iodine, it's in the milk because they use iodine to disinfect the machinery. They may as well brag about there being soap in it as well. Vitamin D? It's an additive, an ingredient they add.

There are some interesting books that cover the history of the industry, Cash Cow and Got Milked? are two specifically on dairy, and reveal how cow's milk was lobbied into our fridges, and science and nutrition really had little to do with it. The milk industry has their inane 'Got Milk' campaign, and were willing to provide 'nutritional' information to schools, so long as it helped sell their products. (No human should be consuming ANY animal milk past being weaned, let alone the singularly bizarre act of consuming the milk from ANOTHER species! Give up ALL dairy for a week, then dig into a cheese pizza - you'll really start to see how ill equipped our bodies are at digesting dairy. Most people are just used to feeling a certain way, and don't realize the negative impact it has on how they feel since they've never considered living without it.)

Do some research into the 'four food groups' - why on earth are meat and dairy fully 1/2? Study after study after study after study shows that the more animal products you consume (almost always at the cost of reducing plant-based foods), the more diseases you're likely to inflict on yourself. Yet we get the impression that they ought to be at least fully half our diet. Going further back in time before this influence, there were 8, 12 or more food groups - back when dieticians called the shots, and not industry.

Plant-based food lobbies have much less sway. Just look at the wacky story of Hampton Creek, and the collusion between the egg industry and government agencies because their 'mayo didn't have eggs in it'. Oh, the horror. Unilever (Hellman's) was a part of this as well, and after losing stuck their own eggless vegan mayo on shelves. (Shows how critical eggs are to mayo.)

I could go on, but look at where the studies come from before what the studies say, and it becomes clear why we hear what we hear. These trends (high fat, high protein, gluten-free, paleo) come about because there are industries making profits with products and books to sell, and people desperate for an answer to their health issues. Ever ask why they almost all all focus on increasing animal-based foods?

Want to be healthier? Start where there's less money to be made: eat plants. Fruits, veggies, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds. Center your diet around these, and chances are you'll find yourself feeling better and see your health improve. Simply put: if you see a commercial for it, chances are you're better off not eating it.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Luthair]

Sorry, but the research is far from settled that grains are bad. In fact if you look at the Mediterranean diet its part of the biggest segment.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[ColdWetDog]

Well, it's a tad (more) complicated. Yes, at first glance, saturated fats are (relatively) bad, fiber is good (although, as you point out, we're aren't ruminants), you need some carbs, some protein.

Deciding what is 'best' for a population is damnably hard. Humans grow slowly relatively to human attention spans. So it's difficult to time experiments well. Ethics boards tend to frown on sticking people in metal cages for the entirety of their lives (although the same can't be said for the US legal system, those nasty ethics folks frown on experimenting on prisoners). Fruit flies likes like a banana. Rats like Big Macs, but then again, they like the wrappers as well.

Running experiments for three years means your using proxy measurements. With lots of assumptions. And those are higher quality experiments.

Coupled with the usual bias and weird financial incentives you are ripe for a giant mess that ends up looking like Soylent (or meat loaf).

Fortunately, humans are pretty omnivorous so a varied, slightly calorie limited diet will probably suffice for most folks.

But if following some weird ass diet turns you on, go for it. Life is short, no matter what your diet is....

Re: And the next food craze starts

[AthanasiusKircher]

Since when have nutritionists pushed starch?

First off, the parent post didn't say "nutritionists push starch" -- the post referred to SPECIAL INTERESTS. And the post you're responding to specifically cited the food pyramid, which was endorsed by the U.S. government and nutritionists. The base of that pyramid (i.e., the largest portion of daily food intake) was "Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta."

This is what one of the leading nutritionists at the USDA said later about what happened in the 1980s:

When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. For instance, the Ag Secretary's office altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed it'd hurt sales of full-fat products; it also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers happy. [...]

Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings (changed to 5-7 servings a couple of years later because an anti-cancer campaign by another government agency, the National Cancer Institute, forced the USDA to adopt the higher standard). Our recommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed to a whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed baked goods made with white flour -- including crackers, sweets and other low-nutrient foods laden with sugars and fats -- at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they be eaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the "revised" Food Guide, they were now made part of the Pyramid's base.

Normally I'm not a believer in "conspiracy theories," but here we have the story told by a former director of nutrition at the USDA. To my knowledge, no one has come out to contradict her account in the years since she made those claims.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

studies showed links between fat-rich diets and heart disease. It was later shown that it wasn't "all fats", just saturated fats. And nothing has changed that; it's still widely accepted my medical science that saturated fats are associated with heart disease.

No, that's actually completely false, and contradicted by current medical science. Yes, nutritionists and doctors have been propagating that message for years, and continue to do so even today. But that message is not based on science, it's based on tradition, and they should be held accountable for the crime they're committing on the American public.

There is a link between saturated fats and cholesterol, and another link between the ability of statins to lower cholesterol and, simultaneously, to reduce the incidence of heart disease. That suggested a link all the way from saturated fats to heart disease, but to this day, that link has never been found. The American Heart Association famously stated, in recommending that Americans consume less saturated fats, that the correlation was so strong that it was only a matter of time before a definitive link could be proven, and we should base our eating habits on the assumption that they would find that link. In point of fact, they never did.

In fact, the AHA has recently admitted their failure, but not in such a way that would make them look guilty of the atrocity on the American people that they are responsible for. Since statins really do lower the incidence of heart disease (independent of saturated fat consumption) they are now suggesting that nearly everyone take statins, not just those who have high cholesterol. This is a tacit admission that the link never existed.

What's appalling here is not only the fact that the AHA almost single-handedly made America obese over the last 40 or so years, but that the established science is *still* controversial -- so controversial that by posting this, a bunch of trolls are going to attack the messenger (me) because the message flies in the face of what they think they know.

Fat doesn't cause heart attacks. Saturated fat doesn't cause heart attacks. Trans fat is still bad, as far as anyone knows.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Sartr]

That explains all those genius Muslims.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Ralgha]

Milk was never important for you. It started because somebody, somewhere was starving, decided that they liked it, and kept drinking it. Once it became a growth industry, that industry started marketing it as, "good for you," because they wanted more money. Would you drink human milk? No? Then why would you drink milk from a different species? Milk that's designed to develop a tiny baby into a two-thousand pound being. There's nothing good about it, people just like it, and grasp at straws to make themselves think it's not bad for them.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

Sorry, but the research is far from settled that grains are bad. In fact if you look at the Mediterranean diet its part of the biggest segment.

That's a correlation, but not a causation. We know definitively that an excess of carbohydrates (and yes, grains still count as carbohydrates) tends to cause diabetes. The trick to the mediterranean diet is that the carbohydrates are balanced against other things that slow down the glycemic reaction.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

> But [clickbait reporting by "news" orgs is] certainly not the only (and maybe not even the main)...

No, it's definitely the primary cause of this bullshit. That's not to say that there aren't lazy researchers (or researchers who just don't have enough time to do their job correctly (but then, are they _really_ researchers)) that fail to read and understand the works that they cite! But news orgs citing weak or preliminary conclusions as if they were solid, verified, fully-understood results (and stripping all of the conditionals and qualifications attached to those conclusions in the reporting) is a _huge_ part of the problem.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

Spaghetti is cheap and filling, and tastier with greasy meat sauce.

Contrary to popular belief, the greasy meat sauce is actually pretty good for you, assuming there's no trans fat in it. It's the other stuff that will kill you.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely it explains why Italians, on average, live FOUR years longer than US citizens, you jerk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:And the next food craze starts

[mspohr]

There is a long chain of scientific articles over many years exploring the benefits of the Mediterranean Diet.
I understand that you may be skeptical of a single article but this research goes back many years.
The following will give you the references you need to make an informed decision:
https://scholar.google.com/sch...
(About 509,000 results)

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened, did the olive harvest turn out to be the harvest of the century?

No, there's actually been a shortage recently, so I guess it's more likely that you're an idiot instead:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

Plus, given the fact that Italians live FOUR years longer than the americans ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), not only you should follow this diet advice, but you might want to use the quotation marks for the word "scientists" when you refer to the american ones instead.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[ChrisMaple]

Would you eat human flesh? No? Then why would you eat flesh from a different species? Your argument is nonsense.
If a person is not allergic and has the ability to digest milk, it can be a valuable part of a good diet.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

"How, exactly, is milk harmful?"

It's sugary, fatty water, with about the same calories as soda, destined to give a calf a nice pelt.

BTW, I like your hair.

The difference between milk and soda is that the fat in milk will slow down the glycemic reaction, whereas soda is just sugar and water (and a bit of flavor) and so the glycemic reaction is higher. The glycemic index for 250ml of both milk and skim milk is 31. The glycemic index for 250ml of Coca Cola is 63. (Source)

On top of that, milk contains protein, which also slows down the glycemic reaction.

So yes, we can objectively point to well-tested and (importantly) repeatable scientific experiments (glycemic indexes are calculated and published by a number of different organizations around the world) that point to the fact that milk is healthier than sugary soda drinks.

Shocking.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Video done by a pediatrician:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzyFZcuHmeI

The part I remember best is that it can cause intestinal bleeding if you drink too much.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a UN agenda to get people to stop eating meat. Check research for ties to that.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

And here you are. You're skeptical and you get downmodded. What has happened to the world when you get downmodded on a so called tech site for being skeptical about a research.

Every year, especially when the new wine is bottled, we get French scientific studies claiming red wine prevents heart diseases. Here in Belgium the same kind of study says the same about beer. In the Netherlands a similar study claims the same about diary. Now a Scottish study claims diary shrinks the brian. Another EU study now claims Diesel engines in cars pollute but Diesel engines in trucks or busses don't.

Of course you need to be skeptical about all those studies. Being skeptical doesn't turn you in an evil alt-right racist...

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Italians happen to have a higher median personal wealth than americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note that the rank for the mean value is the opposite. That's called: very bad wealth distribution in the US.

Besides the fact that your observation wouldn't really be very encouraging for the average american anyways. It's not really nice to die four years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), being fat, ill, and looking like a hippo.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn U.N., trying to increase the value of their shares!

Re:And the next food craze starts

[nine-times]

Honestly, I don't have enough real insight into the research, publishing, and review process to agree or disagree with you about their share of the blame. I would say this, though: Part of the job of reporters is to research the topic they're reporting on and vet their sources. If we assume that the universities and researchers are misrepresenting their results on a regular basis, then reporters should start refusing to air stories about these "discoveries", or at least report them with a tone of skepticism.

It'd be like if the political reporters were simply repeating the politicians' press releases, without even a superficial check to verify that the information in the press release isn't inaccurate propaganda. Unfortunately, that's actually something that a lot of reporters seem to do. They just take whatever story some business or political group is pushing, interpret it uncritically, and then publish it with a sensational slant that will be pleasing to their viewers/readers.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Blaskowicz]

Perhaps there are studies showing animal fats are good for you, because animal fats are good for you? (or saturated fats)
See e.g. the French paradox, which is no paradox because all the science was wrong anyway. BTW, the sugar industry advertises now and then and we can thank it for fraud and obesity/diabetes pandemic.

Yes mayo has eggs in it, like egg sandwich has eggs in it. I don't know how you can name egg-less mayo, and make the name stick across a few continents.
I don't want to not eat eggs to please you, because I don't think I will find that many protein and fats in a carrot or something, because it is not meat (I can agree it sort of technically is meat, but not the same) and it also passes the cheap test and unadvertised test. There is a very strong correlation between cheap and environmentally friendly.
Duck and goose fat : that's great hahaha. Why throw the best part away? Pure animal fat.

Now, cheese is where I'm most "sinful". Buy a cheese pizza, and add more cheese before heating it up! Where I live cheese is like wine, it's mostly branded from where it comes from, ditto with cheese that comes from the next country over, e.g. you may go in the worst supermarket and if you find "mozzarella" or "parmersan" there, then it better be mozzarella or parmesan else lawsuits will be coming in fast.
Of course, if you're going to eat dairy - cheese or cream, the more fat in it the better. I have powdered milk for a few drinks (now sugar free since I got some sugar free powdered chocolate) but otherwise milk is for kids.

Eat a shit ton of vegetable and stuff? Surely the right idea but as people tend to increasingly live alone and impoverished, that's not very easy.
Imperishable, cheap stuff is easier to afford (cheese and eggs last for a while). Canned vegetable mix can help some.
Ditto with organic. I'd like to see organic vegetable stuff that is industrial, processed, low quality and cheap, and sold along the "normal" stuff not in separate aisles or stores please :). It has to be for everyone, not just for middle class snots who save the world by lecturing people and being a better little consumer soldier than you.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we don't get contradicting results from science every year, you fucking idiot. We get contradicting results from publishers who want to sell The Next Big New Diet. Getting your science from blogs and airport bookstores? You're doing it wrong.

Please, point out the contradicting results about fruit, vegetables and olive oil being good for you one year and bad the next. Here's a clue by four, you dense motherfucker - there isn't any.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Science has become a religion. Like the Pope its practitioners are infallible, unbiased and incorruptible.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Rei]

From the Wikipedia article on saturated fats and health, with links to the organization statements:

Medical, scientific, heart-health, governmental and intergovernmental, and professional authorities, such as the World Health Organization,[2] the American Dietetic Association,[3] the Dietitians of Canada,[3] the British Dietetic Association,[4] American Heart Association,[5] the British Heart Foundation,[6] the World Heart Federation,[7] the British National Health Service,[8] the United States Food and Drug Administration,[9] and the European Food Safety Authority[10] advise that saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), and recommend dietary limits on saturated fats as one means of reducing that risk.

There is a difference between "... a study says...." and "... the body of evidence as a whole says...". And it's not for a WSJ author to decide the difference, it's for major medical associations to decide. The article goes into several dozen studies, which is in turn just a tiny fraction of the entire corpus.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Rei]

As for what AHA says about saturated fat, link.

In particular, the end:

There’s a lot of conflicting information about saturated fats. Should I eat them or not?

The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated fats – which are found in butter, cheese, red meat and other animal-based foods. Decades of sound science has proven it can raise your “bad” cholesterol and put you at higher risk for heart disease.

The more important thing to remember is the overall dietary picture. Saturated fats are just one piece of the puzzle. In general, you can’t go wrong eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fewer calories.

When you hear about the latest “diet of the day” or a new or odd-sounding theory about food, consider the source. The American Heart Association makes dietary recommendations only after carefully considering the latest scientific evidence.

Yes, because recommending eating "fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fewer calories" is totally a recipe for "almost single-handedly made America obese". Damn those fattening fruits, vegetables, whole grains and reduced-calorie diets.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Vegan Cyclist]

Please show me one credible study that shows animal fats are "good for you". There have been some recent studies indicating they may not be "as bad" as some other studies suggest, but I've not come across any that say they're "good", as-in, everyone should increase how much you eat. Every nutritional body (ADA, WHO, etc) recommends restricting animal fat consumption. For example:

Less than 30% of total energy intake from fats (1, 2, 3). Unsaturated fats (e.g. found in fish, avocado, nuts, sunflower, canola and olive oils) are preferable to saturated fats (e.g. found in fatty meat, butter, palm and coconut oil, cream, cheese, ghee and lard) (3). Industrial trans fats (found in processed food, fast food, snack food, fried food, frozen pizza, pies, cookies, margarines and spreads) are not part of a healthy diet. http://www.who.int/mediacentre...

Do a little research into how much egg is in mayo. (Spoiler: very little.)

You say milk is for kids, yet cheese is concentrated milk. It's like saying Kool Aid is for kids, but eating the packets without water is okay.

Fruits, vegetables, grains, etc, are typically cheaper than animal products. Here in Canada, animal products are heavily subsidized. So while someone might pay $4/lb for hamburger, the actual cost is a lot higher, and it's taxpayer money that makes it more 'affordable'. Produce doesn't get nearly the 'help' from governments. Still, with a little effort, you can save a ton buy sticking to plant-based foods. Certainly more than eating animal products. For a few dollars I can get enough brown rice to last me 15-20 meals. What animal product can you get that will add a substantial amount to 15-20 meals for a few dollars?

For the record I live below the poverty line, and 'consume' less than nearly anyone I know, but thanks for playing. Best you stay out of the profiling industry. ;)

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Food as America's newest religion

Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written some interesting stuff about this.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Food as America's newest religion

Messed up link in prior post

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Oligonicella]

Once it became a growth industry, that industry started marketing it as, "good for you," because they wanted more money.

Milk was a component of the European diet long before any 'growth industries'.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Aighearach]

You're confusing the research with the reporting in the media.

Researchers said decades ago that some type of saturated fat was dangerous, but they weren't sure what kind yet, and said not to change your diet, and that the same dietary advice as always still applied; eat a balanced diet of mostly non-processed traditional foods.

Media reported that as "saturated fat is bad, stop eating butter, stop eating this, stop eating that, instead substitute this more-highly-processed stuff."

People who believed the media when they claimed they were being sciency then blame the science. People who read the science already knew the media was full of shit, and when the culprit was narrowed to transfat they were not at all surprised that the dietary advice of the researchers (traditional, minimally-processed foods) was shown to be best.

Here, the actual science is showing that a traditional diet is healthier than the modern processed diets. "Mediterranean diet" when used by researchers isn't talking about a fad diet or some cookbook with the word Mediterranean in the title, it's talking about the traditional diets of southern Europe.

This science has NOT vacillated. The reporting in the media has. Your mistake is obvious, and was warned against by the scientists all along.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[king neckbeard]

Unless you belong to the 75% of the population that is lactose intolerant, or if you have a milk/dairy allergy. Milk is pretty nutritionally complete, as it is used as the primary food source for newborn mammal offspring. However, processing milk as adults, and processing the milk of another species is a fairly novel evolutionary adaptation picked up by groups of nomadic herders. There are still some kinks, and there's definitely reasonable limitations on too much milk, even for the minority that doesn't have any issues with moderate amounts.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it is already the other way around again, I don't keep track to be honest.

Thus giving you no room to criticize and rendering your observations moot at best.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

It was later shown that it wasn't "all fats", just saturated fats.

Not even saturated fats anymore, just trans-fats. The whole "saturated fats are bad" was just propaganda by the industry to sell their hydrogenated oil.
Random link on the topic: https://chriskresser.com/new-s...

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Which has been refuted time and time again. But hey, found the vegan.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[butchersong]

Well, if you are of European decent then milk has likely been extremely important to you. It is commonly thought that the ability to digest diary was what gave our recent ancestors a leg up on other populations in the area. There is evidence of diary and cheese making as far back as the 8000 years ago.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[butchersong]

I would not call cheese "concentrated milk" well, not the way you are portraying. That is almost like calling cows concentrated grass. We label creamer as non-diary if it has had the lactose removed. Cheese and yogurt making involves the fermentation and conversion of lactose to amino acids. I won't drink store bought milk and don't have access at the moment to the raw stuff (no diary cow on the farm atm) but I still buy whole milk at the store and let it turn into viili yogurt or kefir. This type of yogurt is super easy to make btw... anyone that is interested I suggest you order some cultures and give it a try.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[butchersong]

Where would you expect to get your calories of you are avoiding fats if not starches? Here is a link to an image of a 1990s food pyramid: http://www.healthy-eating-poli...

Re: And the next food craze starts

[butchersong]

We're moving away from this model. I haven't heard anyone except vegans talk about fat in this way. Cholesteral is the repair mechanism and is triggered by inflammation. The popular theory now is that the causal link between higher cholesterol levels in the blood is something to do with omega 3/6 ratio and lack of vitamin d from sunlight. At least, that is what I've been hearing from nutrition podcasts for the last few years.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[butchersong]

If you include the various government health agencies and private doctors in the media rather than science category then I guess I can agree with this.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Blaskowicz]

For the record I live below the poverty line, and 'consume' less than nearly anyone I know, but thanks for playing. Best you stay out of the profiling industry. ;)

I'm not in much disagreement at all, but I somehow wanted to end my post with a cheap shot at straw people. I do disagree about supposed harm from saturated fats as I doubt such harm is much demonstrated. "Eat salmon and avocado", I'm tired of hearing and reading that! but I know you're not advocating for these, I credit you for that. In the same vein, fuck the "lean meats" : that fat-free cut of chicken tastes like cardboard. So yes, I do like to eat vegan-ish much of the time.

Seen another poster make the point that vegetables aren't subsidized, that's a good point, may also come from scaling factor of subsidies (in Europe at least, the bigger you are the more subsidies you get, at small scale you hardly get anything and do well if you survive. I don't know first hand, never had any land)

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Aighearach]

Yes, "private doctors" hired by the media are just media talking heads, they are not working as doctors while they're on the air. That is obvious.

Government officials are not medical researchers, and primarily their job is to promote industry when talking about anything that is part of the economy. That's not even bad, but it also isn't health research.

People are this stupid, and then they blame the researchers, who they ignored. The researchers and doctors were always saying the same thing, eats traditional less-processed foods as part of a balanced diet with an emphasis on fresh fruits and vegetables. I've seen it a thousand times, the media idiot asks the researcher, "So this means people should stop eating [whatever], right?" "No, people should not change their diet, the recommendations remain the same, eat a balanced traditional diet including lots of fresh fruits and vegetables!" "There we have it folks, [whatever] is horrible and you should stop eating it!" "No, that isn't what..." [cuts to commercial]

Re:And the next food craze starts

[jandersen]

Don't get me wrong, I certainly ain't anti-science. But with this kind of research we get contradicting results every other year. First milk was important for you, now milk is harmful. Eggs used to be the way to an early grave, now eggs are the fountain of youth. Cholesterol was deadly, now we need it like a drug.

Or maybe it is already the other way around again, I don't keep track to be honest.

And in between all that we have various other food crazes from low-carb to neanderthal diet. What the fuck, people?

I think you - and perhaps the majority of intelligent people - should stop reading popular science; or rather start learning what real science is actually like, so they can see through what popularisations of science say. Popular science is entertainment, simply; all attempts at making science "exciting" or "fun" are simply entertainment - it's like talking about "the biggest horse that ever was", which may give you a "wow", but it won't teach you much about farming. Real science is not primarily exciting - it consists of years of careful collection and analysis of data, little by little accumulating enough knowledge that either confirms or disproves one or more hypotheses. For every big "Wow!" there is usually a long, long series of "Hmm, this seems to point that way, but we need further study".

To a scientist reading this header over an article, it says "There has been a study that shows a correlation between brain health and diet - this is compatible with other, similar findings in other studies". It seems plausible, in my view, that a Mediterranean diet would be beneficial for the brain, unlike fad diets like low-carb or paleo. The reason I say this is that we have already known for many years, that people tend to be healthy and live long in certain areas - without even trying - and the main difference seems to be the diet. On the other hand, low-carb and paleo-diets are built mainly on speculation; we don't know the least bit about what humans ate 100K years ago - well, we do now, actually, and it was a lot of plants and fruit and not too much meat - plus, of course, we don't know much about how long they lived due to lack of data. As I understand it, they didn't often get as old as 50 or 60.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[StikyPad]

In other news, my anti-tiger device has been working perfectly.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

99% fat free chicken or turkey shouldn't taste like cardboard. You are cooking it wrong. Like super I don't understand how wrong wrong.

Trailer trash one pot for everything easy way:
Polypropelene bowl (microwave safe)
Add hot water from tap, and chicken, nuke on high for four minutes or so, (more if frozen) optionally add hard carrots or something too.

Add dry pasta like thin spaghetti (cooks fastest), nuke another 7 minutes.

After eleven minutes or so, chicken and thin pastas are cooked. Pour boiling water over your plate in sink to heat it up as you drain. Then dump it all on your plate. Pour sauce from fridge on top, mix. Add spice it taste ( black pepper, etc) It should be hot enough to heat the sauce and cool the meat enough to wolf it down before vegans can whine about plastic bowls.

If you are making it for more than one, adjust times and nuke the bowl with sauce for a minute or so at the end too.

If you want to get fancy, skim the draining for fat to reuse.

Same thing works for ground beef too, or sliced steak, etc.

 

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

It starts to remind me of the old times in the East Bloc where "scientists" came up with any sort of revelation every time something was in shortage or for some odd reason there was suddenly a surplus. You could bet your ass that the revelation was that eggs are an important source for any kind of vitamins but meat makes you sick.

Same shit now. What happened, did the olive harvest turn out to be the harvest of the century?

No you dumb shit, this has been that regions diet for the past 3000 yrs if not more.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

Unless you belong to the 75% of the population that is lactose intolerant, or if you have a milk/dairy allergy.

Both of which are orthogonal to the question of whether milk is nutritious.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

Yes, because recommending eating "fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fewer calories" is totally a recipe for "almost single-handedly made America obese". Damn those fattening fruits, vegetables, whole grains and reduced-calorie diets.

Then what do you suppose was the trigger that caused the entire population to shift radically toward obesity starting in the 70s?

Re: And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

There is a difference between "... a study says...." and "... the body of evidence as a whole says...". And it's not for a WSJ author to decide the difference, it's for major medical associations to decide. The article goes into several dozen studies, which is in turn just a tiny fraction of the entire corpus.

Yes. And every one of those institutions based their conclusions on the "science" of Ancel Keys (or his proteges), whose errors and outright falsifications we are still discovering today. And every one of those organizations that currently recommends against saturated fats will, in the next 20 years, either walk back that message or stand unsupported by more recent science. Most of them are already standing on pretty shaky ground, and that will only continue to accelerate.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

Cable tv?

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Vegan Cyclist]

10kgs of cow's milk goes into making 1kg of cheese. How can you possibly say that's not 'concentrated'?

By your standards, they shouldn't call 'concentrated orange juice' concentrated either...it's only 3 cans of water to make 4 cans of OJ, and is significantly less concentrated than the 1:10 cheese ratio (at least, by every other standard than yours. ;)

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Vegan Cyclist]

Well, no, you targeted me specifically. Cheap shots rarely improve a conversation as well, as something to consider.

Why do you disagree about saturated fats? What do you know that nearly every other dietician doesn't know, and that countless studies have determined? Just because you like how something tastes doesn't mean you should eat it. Dogs love the taste of antifreeze, but it'll kill them every time.

You're probably right about the subsidies, smaller scale agriculture gets even less subsidies. Crops like soy, wheat and corn are helped quite a bit, but part of the reason is that 70% or more of all that's grown is fed to livestock (at least here in Canada and the US.) It's all pretty slanted, and not towards what really improves our health.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[wyHunter]

Well if you have a whey allergy or lactose intolerance...

Re: And the next food craze starts

[wyHunter]

Less exercise?

Re:And the next food craze starts

[strikethree]

And in between all that we have various other food crazes from low-carb to neanderthal diet.

I recently had to cut carbs from my diet. I have lost 5 belt notches worth of weight in the past 4 months. It may be a craze, it may not be. I would highly recommend it though.

FYSA, I did not cut carbs to adhere to that particular diet, I cut carbs to manage blood sugar levels. It is amazing, in retrospect, at how bad carbs are. They are quite tasty though... pastries, pasta, pizza, all gone. :(

On the bright side, I love steak, eggs, and cheeses so I get to eat as much as I want! It is weird how the weight just evaporates despite eating more than I usually do. WTF is up with carbs? Is it the sawdust and other fillers? I don't know. Carbs in modern society (processed foods) are pure poison.

Oops. Off topic. What were we supposed to be talking about again?

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Hognoxious]

Milk isn't nutritious at all if it makes you shit your arse inside-out; it's probably anti-nutritious.

It's fairly nutritious if it doesn't.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Hognoxious]

Cheese and yogurt making involves the fermentation and conversion of lactose to amino acids.

Twaddle. in yoghurt the lactose is converted to lactic acid. Lactic acid doesn't contain any nitrogen.

If there are amino acids in cheese (some of them smell like it) then that's from proteins.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Hognoxious]

In the Netherlands a similar study claims the same about diary.

Are fresh dates better than dried ones?

Re:And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

Milk isn't nutritious at all if it makes you shit your arse inside-out; it's probably anti-nutritious.

It's fairly nutritious if it doesn't.

Again, that's not a measure of nutrition. That's a measure of whether an individual can tolerate it. The milk doesn't change on the basis of who drinks it -- it's the same substance regardless.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[zieroh]

Gym memberships are near an all-time high. So are gyms.

And we have pretty solid data that supports the notion that when saturated fat (or any fat, since that was the generalized target during the 70s - 90s) is removed from the diet, it gets replaced by carbohydrates. And we know what effect carbohydrates have on blood glucose levels, and in turn we know what effect elevated blood glucose levels have on insulin. And finally, we know *exactly* how insulin levels cause the body to store fat.

But you're going to go with "exercise" as an answer?

Interesting.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think fermented, curdled orange juice should be called orange juice. But maybe in your alternative chemistry cheese is just "concentrated milk" because it is made from milk.

Re:And the next food craze starts

[airdweller]

"people tend to be healthy and live long in certain areas - without even trying - and the main difference seems to be the diet. "

It may seem so, but it isn't the diet. It's the way of life - close-knit families and communities, less stress, moderate economic development, more time outside and more physical activity, diverse cuisine (incl. seafood) and almost no heavily processed or very sweet foods, cleaner environment and good healthcare...
Most centenarians don't live in big cities. They mostly live in (semi)-rural areas in (moderately)-developed countries (also moderate climate).

Re: And the next food craze starts

[Ralgha]

Creatures the world over eat meat, almost exclusively that of other species. Not one that I know of, with the exception of humans, drinks the milk of another species, and none, with the exception again of humans, drink milk after they "grow up." Milk is designed to develop an infant, that's it. It's actually pretty disgusting if you give it some rational thought.

Re: And the next food craze starts

[wyHunter]

Not in the slightest. As for gym memberships being at an all time high, I'd be more interested in seeing the utilization of these memberships. I see it every January - from 2 January - > 20 January gyms are crowded. By 1 February, not so much. I agree with you about the whole fat thing - replacing fat with carbs is a bad idea. But I also know this: Coca Cola used to come in 16 ounce bottles for "regular consumption" aka what you bought out of a machine. Now, they are 20 or 24 ounces. The "small" soda cup at Burger King is what used to be a "large" one. Ditto for individual packages of potato chips, etc. My point is more than people are eating more of EVERYTHING not just carbs versus fat.

But did they account for the people?

[KreAture]

What about mediterranean people living and eating elsewhere?
Do they exhibit the same effects?

Re:But did they account for the people?

[ledow]

These were pensioners in Scotland.

How far from the Mediterranean would you like to go?

Re:But did they account for the people?

[tinkerton]

I've read that these days the mediterranean diet is closer to what the Germans eat than to what the Spanish eat, the Germans moving away from meat and beer and the Spanish moving towards it.

Re:But did they account for the people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not think you can do such generalizations for a nation or for people living in certain country (that is important distinction not only for Germany now).
In Germany there are Germans eating only veggies because and there are Germans eating quite a lot of meat as they used to. Then there are ex-Mediterranean people from Italy living in Germany and trying to eat as they used to but not getting it quite right as well as ex-Mediterranean people from southern shores that do not eat pork for instance and because there is lots of them their diet has a baring on how 'Germans' eat. I reckon this is the same in a Mediterranean country of Italy and Greece as well as Turkey and Lebanon and Israel. The problem is that you got confused by the term - it refers to geography but it does not mean all people living around this bulk of salty water eat the same. I reckon some Scots may eat this Mediterranean diet but most not. What does this make Scots - healthy or not?

Re:But did they account for the people?

[KreAture]

No, I meant were they Mediterranean pensioners in Scotland!
And if not, did they look at such a group as a control...

Re:But did they account for the people?

[PopeRatzo]

These were pensioners in Scotland.

Maybe it's all the cursing that reduces brain shrinkage.

Re:But did they account for the people?

[nine-times]

All the way.

Re:But did they account for the people?

[tinkerton]

I am talking about statistical findings.

Re:But did they account for the people?

[ScentCone]

If there's a change in national food consumption in Germany these days, it's towards Middle Eastern fare.

Re:But did they account for the people?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because Mediterranean people living in Scotland who tried this diet switched away from deep-fried Mars bars.
It's very hard to get the same strong signal in your studies if you conduct them elsewhere.

Re:But did they account for the people?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth anyone from the Mediterranean basin would want to be a pensioner in Scotland?

Being from one of such places, and living in Central Europe, I always feel a huge difference in my health and energy levels when visiting home, though this is of course, an immensely biased anecdote, the question remains though.

Re: But did they account for the people?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the deep fried pizza with batter or the extra large chip butties

Re:But did they account for the people?

[matbury6017]

I lived in Spain for 8 years and Italy for 1. Yes, their diet seems to be changing a little towards more (processed) convenience foods. I think what's most significant about Spanish and Italian culture with regards to diet is that they are very family oriented and take a long (3 - 4 hour) lunch break. This means that most people go home and eat fresh, home-cooked meals together as a family (often at their parents' home).

They also have worker productivity levels on a par with the USA's and UK's so called workaholic/protestant work-ethic workers, fewer sick days (They also get statutory paid sick leave), more vacation days (also paid), and most jobs pay double in December (for Christmas) and some pay double in July or August (for summer holidays).

They have the best work-life balance I've ever experienced.

A wee joke

[Harold Halloway]

Q. What's the Scottish definition of a salad?
A. Cold chips.

Re:A wee joke

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a joke either.
Cold chips: "Salad"
Actual salad: "Crap Salad"

Those are the genuine definitions in Glasgow. Regional variations may ... vary.

Eskimo diet?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the seal meat and whale blubber you can eat? Do their brains shrink?

Re:Eskimo diet?

[walterbyrd]

They don't live long enough to test. Stroke is very common when you live on that diet.

Re:Eskimo diet?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't live long enough to test. Stroke is very common when you live on that diet.

Completely untrue!

Actually the Inuit culture was one of the anomalous cultures that were left out of Ancel Keys research that came to the erroneous conclusion that fats in the diet caused heart disease. Long story short Ancel Keys cherry picked his evidence to make his research look like there was 100% certainty that any fat in the diet caused heart disease and the government based their dietary recommendations on that erroneous set of conclusions in the Nixon Administration and we have been getting fatter, more diabetic and heart disease has been on the rise ever since.

You know how you increase your good (HDL) cholesterol ? You consume more saturated fat in your diet. Plain and simple fact that has been known for decades yet seems like it is brushed under the carpet because we don't want people eating more saturated fat and getting healthy do we?? NO!!

The real nutrient that is a problem is carbohydrates for 2 simple reasons.

1- It is not an essential nutrient, your body has no need for carbohydrates in the diet.
2- Over consumption of carbohydrate impairs your body's ability to burn stored fat and to process fat in the diet.. this is where heart disease comes in.. you impair your fat processing mechanism.. you get fatter and you can't burn it off no matter how hard you try, you just burn carbohydrates and feel like you are dying when you run out of glycogen in your liver and muscles.

The dietary recommendations in the US are the cause of it's diabetic and obesity problems. The problem is the dietary recommendations are basically upside down and backwards of what they should be.

they recommend a high carb low fat moderate protein diet.

what is needed is a high fat low carb moderate protein diet.

This has been shown again and again but there are elements within the scientific community that ignore it despite a mountain of evidence and research going back to the 1930s Some people are beyond learning it seems. The greatest obstacle to learning things is what we think we know sometimes. This is a case of that "Sometimes".

Re:Eskimo diet?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably trying to be funny, but a simple search on the web will reveal that the average lifespan (female) of modern Inuits is 72 years. (Compared to 81 for the rest of Canada.) And I recall a TV documentary that said that modern obesity and associated obesity-related health problems among the Inuit has a strong correlation to their switch to a western-style, high carbohydrate diet.

And another search will reveal that historically, the leading cause of death was accidents, not cancer, stroke, or heart disease.

Mediterranean Diet?

[Big Hairy Ian]

They suffered less brain shrinkage than those who regularly ate meat and dairy products.

Pizza (Most are full of meat & dairy products) originated in the Mediterranean

Re:Mediterranean Diet?

[rfengr]

Yes, but not stuffed crust pizza with double meat and cheese. That is wholly an American invention.

Re:Mediterranean Diet?

[rfengr]

Not to mention there is probably not a trace of olive oil in typical American chain pizza. They also look at you funny if you want anchovies. I like Spin Pizza myself.

Re:Mediterranean Diet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to Italy. Eat a real pizza in a restaurant. Understand fully the profound limitations of 'originated' in this sentence.

Re:Mediterranean Diet?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing real pizza (i.e., the one you are served in Italy) with the one you're usually served in the US. Furthermore, Italians eat pizza once a week, not every single day. And the Mediterranean diet also includes olive oil on basically every dish (vitamin E and polyphenols), oranges (vitamin C) and fish (that with the "good" fats, like omega-3). It's very healthy if compared with other diets.

Re:Mediterranean Diet?

[iggymanz]

what you'll get depends on which part of Italy you're in. Crust coated with olive oil, smoked tomatoes and basil leaves is one possibility. Crust with cheese and the above another. Weird things like potatoes and hot dog on a crust also possible in Italy.

Re:Mediterranean Diet?

[Aighearach]

I buy frozen pizzas made in Italy and they're almost identical to hippy pizza in the US; a little bit of sauce, a little bit of cheese, vegetables are the main ingredient.

It is true that it doesn't resemble Chain Store Delivery Pizza, but then again, neither does higher quality American pizza. ;)

The whole "pizza is American" meme is just an urban myth based on a no-true-Scotsman.

Re:Mediterranean Diet?

[Aighearach]

I had an awesome pizza in San Francisco at a little place on Haight Street, it was potato, garlic cloves, spinach, and feta, over a pesto sauce. Incredible!

I'm in a small city in the US, but all the more expensive pizza places in town serve at least 5 or 6 varieties of authentic Italian regional pizza variants.

People who eat at Processed Monoingredients R Us(TM) give themselves an inaccurate understanding of American food.

Misleading summary

[tomhath]

According to the article, eating red meat and poultry didn't make any difference.

Re:Misleading summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite.

...while limiting consumption of red meat and poultry.

Those who stuck closest to the diet gained the most benefits.

Re: Misleading summary

[tomhath]

Read a bit farther, eating less meat didn't make any difference. In other words, fresh vegetables, olive oil, or red wine might help, but meat didn't seem to hurt.

Re: Misleading summary

[Aighearach]

Evidence has shown for a long time that it really doesn't matter what the protein source is, as long as you get complete protein.

With the exception of soy, which is not really a healthy staple unless fermented.

"A study of pensioners in Scotland"

[Applehu Akbar]

Was this study conducted in the Mediterranean part of Scotland? Even the Church of Warminetics Operating Thetans I have been reading about think it will be another ten years before Skye gets olive trees and bougainvillea.

Re:"A study of pensioners in Scotland"

[PPH]

it will be another ten years before Skye gets olive trees and bougainvillea.

It can't happen soon enough. Personally, I'm waiting for the reappearance of some good wine making grapes in Vinland.

Re:"A study of pensioners in Scotland"

[Aighearach]

A No True Scotsman where the Scots aren't Mediterranean enough, it was pretty good before you added that blether at the end about aliens.

Rich People Diet

[Anonymous Coward]

So rich people who can afford fresh fruit and vegetables and olive oil will benefit. Shocking!

Yeah, we already know that being rich is good for all aspects of health.

Also, water is wet.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Anonymous Coward]

The unit cost of fruits, vegetables and even some cuts of meat tends to be well below that of most processed foods. This is true in relatively wealthy areas, as well as poor ones.

The biggest difference is that wealthy individuals comprehend basic economics, and can understand the concept of unit cost. They realize that spending $2 on a bag of apples gets them a far greater volume of food than spending $1.50 on a bag of chips that has a quarter of the volume of the bag of apples.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Ostracus]

Long as one can consume it all before the expiration date, otherwise it's wasted money.

Re: Rich People Diet

[PPH]

Rich people can comparison shop. If your local market doesn't carry a variety of fresh fruits and veggies, you just jump in the car and drive a couple of miles to one that does. So every grocery store has to compete on this level or go broke.

If you live in a poor neighborhood or a big city without access to flexible transportation, you have to use the corner bodega. Distance is a major factor in shopping decisions. These urban village markets know this and stock more high profit processed foods. And price isn't even that big a factor. I've stopped by some of the little hipster stores in the city. Their selection is shit and their prices on comparable items in suburban stores is often higher.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Noodles: $0.20
Broccoli: $3.00

You were saying?

Also, snow. Permafrost. Not all of us live somewhere with three growing seasons.

Re: Rich People Diet

[hey!]

The unit cost doesn't begin to capture what's going on here. Meat is amazingly cheap if you consider what a meat animal is: an extraordinarily complex, balky, and inefficient converter of commodity crops like feed corn to concentrated protein. I don't say this because I'm anti-meat -- I love meat and eat a lot of it. But boneless pork chops for $3.99/pound are a by-product of federal agricultural policies that include over twenty billion dollars of subsidies.

The influence of industry political contributions distorts the US food supply, making commodity crops like corn, soy, and sugar beets over-plentiful and cheap and actually discouraging farmers from growing vegetables and fruit to be marketed directly to consumers. So it turns out that high quality produce, which is not subsidized, can actually cost more than meat.

Consider an apple. Unlike a peach (if you've never had an actual ripe peach off the tree you don't know what you're missing), apples ship and store extremely well. So it's not particularly remarkable that a Red Delicious apple cost only 25% as much on a weight basis as a boneless pork chop if you consider the labor inputs. It ought to cost even less.

The real problem is that "Red Delicious" as a term is a triumph of marketing mendacity. A Red Delicious is indeed red, but it tastes like Styrofoam. If you want a good eating apple, say a Honey Crisp, you'll be paying as much on a weight basis as you would for a pork chop. Last year Honey Crisps hit $4.50 a pound. And the tomato -- normal market price is about $0.75 per pound, but if you want a tomato that is marginally tastier than the plastic it's packaged in you've got to go for a hothouse tomato that cost twice that. And for a good tomato you're paying almost as much as you would for a piece of meat.

No wonder people hate vegetables. Very few people will buy a tomato if it costs as much as a pork chop, and since the pork chop is subsidized and tomatoes aren't, that means most people have never tasted a good tomato. Or a really good peach. Many have never even tasted a good apple.

Re: Rich People Diet

[ChrisMaple]

Feet are flexible and walking two miles each way is not an unreasonable burden.

On the other hand, genuine olive oil is expensive. Making olive oil requires a lot of processing, and olives aren't exactly large fruits.

Re: Rich People Diet

[PPH]

walking two miles each way

Easy if you have the spare time and don't have to haul food to feed a family. And since each urban grocer is more likely going to use the same strategy to serve their locked in market, nobody nearby is going to compete for a small additional number of customers. So, while I can drive 2 miles to the next store, urban dwellers might have to leave town to find decent produce. And if you live in some no-cars city like New York or Seattle, no business has to worry about the small market share that can shop elsewhere. Who do you think is behind the urban village concept anyway?

Re: Rich People Diet

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor people look at the absolute price, like you're doing. Rich people look at the price per some common unit, such as weight. When we look at the price per weight unit, broccoli ends up being cheaper. Each currency unit spent gets more broccoli than noodles, in terms of weight or calories.

Re: Rich People Diet

[BlueStrat]

Feet are flexible and walking two miles each way is not an unreasonable burden.

Found the young person!

Wait until you get old and have arthritis and other physically-limiting health issues and are stuck surviving on Social Security Disability (~$900USD/month) plus $60/month in food benefits and have to walk to, and carry home groceries from, the closest grocery you can find ('residential zoning' so sorry, no grocery stores allowed nearby and the city had to cut bus routes for budget reasons) in snowstorms and 15F/-17C temps in the middle of January in Michigan and much of the walk having to be out on poorly-plowed main roads dodging traffic as there's no sidewalks because everyone owns a car, right?

Every year there's stories in the local news about seniors having died and discovering they had been surviving on canned dog food.

"Mediterranean diet", yeah, sure! Hell, fatty hamburger, heavily-processed anything, and bleached noodles are absolute *luxury* for many!

Strat

Re: Rich People Diet

[Blaskowicz]

Wow, this shows how evil the "zoning" really is.
Also, it is perfectly fine if the house's side walls touch with other houses's side wall, and there's a sidewalk next to the front door instead of a front yard. You still can have a backyard.. I even suspect that in this arrangement, much everyone grown vegetables in that backyard, they stopped doing it post WW2.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Blaskowicz]

Terrible tomatoes including canned tomatoes can be thrown into the frying pan so that you make your own tomato sauce, at least. I wonder how many people never even tasted that.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Cyberax]

Ah... Tomatoes... I _love_ good tomatoes and it's incredibly hard to find them in the US. You can buy "heirloom" tomatoes at farmers markets but they are often not really better than supermarket plasticy varieties. This is understandable - good tomatoes are extremely hard to transport or store for extended periods.

What angers me most, is that we actually used to have wonderful GM tomatoes that were tasty and easily transportable. But no, greeny idiots forced them out of the market.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Aighearach]

I made a tomato sauce with garden tomatoes and it was so strong and acidic that none of the processed-food-eaters could even keep it in their mouths; they would just spit it right out onto the plate!

Of course, people used to eating traditional foods really loved it. That's why Italian pizza has less sauce; you only need to smear it across the bread, you don't need a whole drippy water layer.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Blaskowicz]

That's interesting! Must be why some (people or recipes) call for sweetening the sauce with carrot or even sugar, but I would hate to do that. Not only that I don't like sweet much ; there's just no need, as there isn't much anything acidic in the tomatoes.

I did try some canned "tomato sauce" that was sweetened, contained only tomato, carrot and some starch or syrup (!), and was the lowest end I've ever seen. *That* one was worth spitting out. Small jars with bolognese, napolitan, provençal sauce are very common in supermarkets, are popular and a lot better than the absolute worst I was talking of.. but still worse than cooking with low quality ingredients.
I'm sort of craving soup right now.. :)

Re: Rich People Diet

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, Hey! You should try papaya very very slightly over-ripe the day of harvest. I always thought papaya was garbage. You seem to appreciate the better fruit in life. If you can ever pay for at-least-within-3-days good papaya, even at $10/lb, do it that one time.

Berries... the sour painful blackberries which ship so well and can so easily be automated are so bad. Lots of other berries, too, are dramatically better hot off the plant. At least blueberries keep well - but at more than meat, gosh, those are a hard sell.

Re: Rich People Diet

[wildstoo]

The tomatoes sold cheaply in supermarkets here in the UK are almost universally watery, mushy garbage, grown fast and cheap under intensive conditions in Spain, Morocco, Senegal, etc. and yanked from the plant before they have a chance to develop any flavour at all.

Of course, all these supermarkets have their own brands of "premium" tomatoes - often domestically grown - and these are generally much better, but the cost is usually in the region of 150-170% of the standard fare, and even more if you want them organically grown. At this point, the tomatoes are more expensive, by weight, than "budget" (i.e. intensive farmed) chicken breasts.

You've heard it all before: we (and North America and parts of western Europe are the worst offenders here) don't accept that produce is seasonal any more, we want everything available all the time at rock-bottom prices. Something has to give, and sadly that thing is usually quality, which with food means flavour, aroma and texture.

I have no problem with GM as a technology. As a means for multinational bio-tech and agri-tech companies to control and extort money from farmers, I do have concerns. That, however, is another issue entirely.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Jaime2]

Consider an apple. Unlike a peach (if you've never had an actual ripe peach off the tree you don't know what you're missing), apples ship and store extremely well. So it's not particularly remarkable that a Red Delicious apple cost only 25% as much on a weight basis as a boneless pork chop if you consider the labor inputs. It ought to cost even less.

The real problem is that "Red Delicious" as a term is a triumph of marketing mendacity. A Red Delicious is indeed red, but it tastes like Styrofoam. If you want a good eating apple, say a Honey Crisp, you'll be paying as much on a weight basis as you would for a pork chop. Last year Honey Crisps hit $4.50 a pound.

Learn what's in season. In the fall, Honey Crisps are available for around $1.00 a pound. There's almost always something in season. When there isn't, pineapples travel well, so they're decent all year long. On the vegetable side, you can always fall back on broccoli and carrots when there's no other produce in season. Also, canned tomatoes are better than whole during the off season.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Jaime2]

Tip - blueberries are cheap twice a year in the US. Once when the US harvest comes in (exactly when depends on your latitude) and once when the South American harvest comes in (around now). They drop from $10 per pound to $3.25 per pound and the quality goes way up. Stop mold growth with a vinegar/water rinse and dry thoroughly and they'll keep for a week. Freeze them and they'll be good enough to use for cooking until the next season comes around - but don't expect them to be suitable for snacking.

Also, for anything but snacking, consider buying frozen. I always buy the cherries I use in my breakfast frozen. I can get big, sweet, pitted cherries for $3 per pound any time of the year.

Re: Rich People Diet

[Hognoxious]

I'm old enough to remember when food really was seasonal. They didn't airlift sodding string bastard beans in from Kenya or anything like that.

So when it was in, you pigged yourself immobile on it. By the time it was going out, no matter how much you loved it, you'd had enough - and something else was coming in that you haven't had for nearly a year. And so it goes.

Re: Rich People Diet

[PPH]

Wow, this shows how evil the "zoning" really is.

Not all zoning is evil. But it shows how urban planning has been co-opted by merchants who push no car urban villages. Just so their customer base can't leave and shop someplace better. Take a look at the property and rental values of storefronts in these villages. They stand to make huge profits selling shitty products to a locked in market. Out in suburbia, the big box grocery stores with big parking lots run on razor thin profit margins. And if they don't get the price/quality point right, customers just abandon them. And they get boarded up.

Re: Rich People Diet

[BlueStrat]

But it shows how urban planning has been co-opted by merchants who push no car urban villages.

This is the exact opposite. People are expected to own a car or use (the often totally absent or severely limited) public transportation. Sidewalks are typically only found on the residential blocks and apartment complexes themselves, and even then are often absent or only partial in coverage. And due to 'no-fault' insurance laws and the inability to legally purchase auto insurance across State lines, just keeping insurance coverage current can rival housing costs as a percentage of personal expenses even with a relatively clean driving record.

One pretty much has to be employed full-time at above-minimum-wage or otherwise have significant money available to own and legally drive (liability/collision insurance is mandatory) in Michigan, even if the vehicle is owned free and clear. It causes many to drive without coverage or go without transportation, especially the less economically secure portion of the population. It's not much better elsewhere in the US, in some places it's even worse.

Strat

Just a wee thing.

[Ostracus]

New study finds Mediterranean diet significantly reduces brain shrinkage.

Be popular if it reduces, ahem...the other kind of shrinkage.

Is it too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it too late to get Trump voters on this much needed diet?

What a Scottsmin calls a dressing?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh look, fancy pants sayed sumfin funnay!

So what would be a good dressor or there too much would fer yea berry?

Re: What a Scottsmin calls a dressing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use English here, please.

Re: What a Scottsmin calls a dressing?

[Aighearach]

He said, Scots wha hae, hae, Scots wha hae nay, hae nay.

Hae ye hae?

Whit do ye cry the dressor, want tae write it doon fur iz!

Ye dinna ken, guid luck! Bumpin yer gums o'er a hashet of varaflame dressor like a bog bin howker, aye.

It's not the diet

[Anonymous Coward]

Mediterranean types never use their brains, so they never shrink or show any sign of fatigue ever. Unlike we Germans. That's why Germany rightfully rules the EU and Italians must obey.

Re:It's not the diet

[azav]

Deutschland Deutschland Über Alles!

Re:It's not the diet

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be wrong with Germany above all other nations? Germany leads by example. It's too bad the rest of Europe has trouble catching up.

Re:It's not the diet

[Anonymous Coward]

Germany?! Lol! Obese, alcoholic, cretins who have been ridiculed and wiped out in every war you've been involved in your poor, irrelevant history. Let me remember you that your country was firstly dismembered into four parts, then two, and finally allowed to exist by the USSR and the US.

At least Italy has the most stunning architecture on the planet, 51 UNESCO World Heritage sites, a huge history, amazing food and clothing.

You are these losers here instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:It's not the diet

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't "rule" anything or anybody, honey. Germany hasn't had any actual sovereignty since 1945, no real armed forces, and it has been used as a shared cesspool by both my country (the US) and Russia for 70 years. Most of your gold reserves are kept inside the NY Federal Reserve, and you can probably guess why: they are not really yours. And the EU is simply dying, Brexit is just the first stage of an avalanche, just like the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

The Italians don't have actual sovereignty either, but at least they live in probably the most beautiful country in the world, so they just don't care. When they wake up they see Rome, Venice, Florence. You wake up and see Berlin, Hamburg or Leipzig instead. LOL.

Re:It's not the diet

[airdweller]

I'm not German or a German apologist, but that's stupid on so many levels...

Re:It's not the diet

[airdweller]

Let me guess. You've never been to Berlin or Leipzig, have you?

Good

[azav]

More meat for me.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well who needs a brain anyway... I have my smartphone ;-).

Another way of preventing brain shrinkage

[Anonymous Coward]

Attach anti-shoplifting RFID tags.

only healthy people can eat the diet

[Anonymous Coward]

only people who are already healthy can tolerate a diet high in acid and undigestable roughage... and these are elderly people ...so what are they proving?

Newsflash

[codeButcher]

Newsflash: eating food that people have eaten for thousands of years and thrived on, is better than eating highly processed, deep-fried, and/or chemical additives-rich junk that incidentally makes money for their manufacturers and sellers.

Eat more food grown on plants and less food manufactured in plants.

(To be sure, a smallish component of meat and dairy is often advised, but if your diet consists of only this (and perhaps bread or your locale's starchy staple) then health problems shouldn't even be surprising.)

Why do people believe that food consists only of Carbs, Protein and Fat? Perhaps with a sprinkling of vitamins and minerals, which can just as easily be gotten from supplements? There's stuff like probiotics, enzymes, and elusive co-factors and who knows what else that science has not yet even discovered, let alone understood and described.

Re:Newsflash

[ChrisMaple]

Eat more food grown on plants

So ... aphids?

Re:Newsflash

[Aighearach]

Eat more food grown on plants

So ... aphids?

If you've got a "sweet tooth," it is probably a lot healthier than the other snacks you could turn to!

Crybaby

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary was unelectable. Deal with it.

Re:Crybaby

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Trump was unbeatable because he was willing to do what no other candidate was willing to do: completely lie about his policy positions and tell people exactly what they wanted to hear.

Fiber and micronutrients

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically they're saying:

Eat a diet with enough fiber in it daily, and get adequate amounts of micronutrients, and your brain won't get fucked up as much

..so I'll just eat my oatmeal and take my $30/month supervitamins, and eat reasonable amounts of fruits and vegetables, rather than have to eat the bushels of them that you'd have to eat otherwise. Or, in other words: keep doing what I've been doing for years and years now.

Re:Fiber and micronutrients

[Aighearach]

Actually, vitamin pills do not improve health outcomes, they harm them.

Micronutrients is mostly stuff you have to get from plants. Some of it is known, much of it isn't, but you can't get it from a pill, sorry.

If you want to increase your micronutrient intake a lot, the method is to use a masticating juicer. That way you can eat the micronutrients from more vegetables than would fit in your stomach in just a small glass of liquid. Health outcomes improve if you just do that; eating vitamin pills reduces your health in every metric where it causes a change!

The only time that eating vitamins is beneficial to health outcomes is when you have a measured shortage of a specific known nutrient and are unable to ingest it for some reason.

By all means, keep doing what you're doing. But if you think it is healthy, you're wrong. And probably nobody cares or wants to change your diet.

Re:Fiber and micronutrients

[Anonymous Coward]

While what you are saying is true, please do not spew this bullshit about supplements being bad for you. It is incredibly harmful.

Save your brain!

[Anonymous Coward]

Save your brain!

Read the paywalled article now!

A man thinks with his penis

[Tokolosh]

Therefore many of us will be adopting this diet in an effort to reduce shrinkage.

Re:A man thinks with his penis

[Aighearach]

Maybe you should try some Horny Goat Weed drizzled in olive oil?

Epimedium alpinum (aka Bishop's Hat) is the variety native to the Mediterranean region.

So explain this

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's true why are dago's and wops so dumb?

Re:So explain this

[Ann O'Nymous-Coward]

...asks the AC racist who's too moronic to even use an apostrophe correctly.

Anti-inflammatory

[ArtemaOne]

I've been greatly increasing the amount of anti-inflammatory foods over the last many years. It is very good for every part of your body. Doctors who have studied the right mixture of nutrition and diseases can attest that most things are the result of inflammation, including many chronic diseases. People in the Mediterranean areas often have much lower instances of these inflammation related diseases, and that is largely due to their diet of olives and use of (real) extra-virgin olive oil.

genetics

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a DNA test made.
It says that at leass for body weight, the Mediterrainean diet will have absolutely no effect. But, if I do exercise, I will gain more weight loss than the average person. Exercise is also known to influence the prain ina positive manner.

No loss of neurons through aging

[HuguesT]

Loss of neurons due to aging has been shown to be a measurement error before.

Haug, H. (1985). Are neurons of the human cerebral cortex really lost during aging? A morphometric examination. In Senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (pp. 150-163). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Unfortunately the article is paywalled. However it says that there is no statistical evidence of neuron loss in healthy people due to aging. Previously widely reported loss was shown to be a systematic bias in measurement.

The point...

[coofercat]

Translation:

"Scottish person found eating vegetables"

photo

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the photo supposed to depict a diet of fruit, veggies and "healthy fats like" olive oil? Because most of what I see in the photo is cheese, a dairy product. It is new to me that a Mediterranean diet should exclude eating meat and dairy regularly. Btw olive oil can be quite unhealthy if you overheat it. Other fats, including butter, are healthier for frying.