The British medical journal, The Lancet, has unveiled what may be the biggest health crisis facing the world…a suboptimal diet.
The study which attempted to quantify the impact of sugar, lack of vegetables, processed meat and fruit consumption to long term diseases.
The problem with this type of study is it doesn’t really prove anything.
All it can show is a correlation.
For instance, the people in this country eat three grams of salt per day, and this many people have high blood pressure.
But this doesn’t prove the salt caused the increase in blood pressure.
But the mainstream press picked up on the story dutifully reporting the story as if it is gospel. The press release from the study’s authors said:
“In many countries, poor diet now causes more deaths than tobacco smoking and high blood pressure,” said Ashkan Afshin, an assistant professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
And it’s not just that people are choosing unhealthy options such as red meat and sugary sodas. Just as critical, said Afshin, the lead author of a 27-year global diet analysis published Wednesday in the journal the Lancet, is the lack of healthy foods in our diets, along with high levels of salt. “
The problem with this is “what’s a high level of salt?”
In this article in Freedom Health News, we explored the biggest study on salt and risk of death.
It turns out that people who eat more salt than the Lancet article thought was healthy live longer.
This study was financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and seems to follow the conventional wisdom on what constitutes a healthy diet, but doesn’t ask the real question “what is a healthy diet?”
For instance, the Maasai are a pastoralist tribe living in Kenya and Northern Tanzania. Their traditional diet consists almost entirely of milk, meat, and blood.
Two-thirds of their calories come from fat, and they consume 600 – 2000 mg of cholesterol a day.
To put that number in perspective, the American Heart Association recommends consuming under 300 mg of cholesterol a day.
In spite of a high fat, high cholesterol diet, the Maasai have low rates of diseases typically associated with such diets.
George Mann first noted this in 1962 and subsequent studies have confirmed this apparent contradiction between objective reality and the American Heart Association’s theory of what constitutes a healthy diet.
Scientists went as far as to theorize that there was something genetically different with the Maasai, but they were compared to a neighboring tribe which ate vegetables and bread and they shared the same genes.
But the agricultural tribe had heart disease that was unknown in the Maasai.
The other problem with the study is it doesn’t account for other groups like the Inuit people (commonly known as Eskimos).
They don’t have access to fruit and vegetables yet have no known disease risks.
Yet this study is likely to affect what you can eat for years to come. The Gates Foundation press release said:
“The large study size means these findings are relevant to everyone, no matter where they live, said Andrew Reynolds, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who was not involved in the study.
“The findings of the paper will inform policy decisions that shape what food is available in Western countries, how it is marketed and potentially what it costs in the coming years,” Reynolds said.”
Which means that what is considered “healthy” by mainstream scientists will probably be forced on everyone again.
This will affect what you can eat at all government funded institutions which serve food including public schools.
When you look past the press releases and ask serious questions most of these studies just don’t stand up to objective facts.
