Re: Whole dietary patterns vs. reductionist approach

From: Jan (shantigiri_at_luukku.com)
Date: 07/29/04 

Date: 29 Jul 2004 03:25:30 -0700

rangerhasten@yahoo.com (Wolfbrother) wrote in message news:<6eb8f6eb.0407282052.627f9fd8@posting.google.com>...
> shantigiri@luukku.com (Jan) wrote in message news:<c0a6758c.0407280717.5436f22@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > So, we should rather focus on the research of complete dietary
> > patterns, which is a way to get a very good overall picture about a
> > healthy diet. This is a way to get a solid basis on which you can
> > build on. Fortunately there are already results of this kind of
> > research. It has been found from the Nurses' Health Study and the
> > Health Professionals' Follow-up Study that the prudent dietary pattern
> > is characterized by vegetables, fruit, legumes, whole grain, fish or
> > omega-3 oils and olive oil. The western dietary pattern, which
> > shortens life and increases the risk of heart disease, consists of
> > meat, processed meat, refined grains, full fat dairy, butter and
> > potatoes.
>
> Maybe you should follow your own advice and indeed look at complete
> dietary patterns and do it of a wide range of population groups with
> different diets and in different time periods in order to truely
> single out what foods are healthy and what foods are unhealthy. The
> way you lump healthy foods like meat and full fat dairy together with
> unhealthy foods and your insistence on referencing flawed or corrupt
> research shows how uninformed and blind you are. Many different
> traditional populations that eat meat and dairy and other high animal
> food diets without the processed junk are very healthy and live long
> lives without modern diseases and with that your "picture of a healthy
> diet" is shown to be very flawed.

We don't have to focus on American population only to find evidence
for these kind of results. World's longest lived people live in
Okinawan Islands where there are more centenarians than anywhere else.
Their diet has been studied extensively and it consists mostly of
vegetables, grains, tofu, fish and green jasmine tea. Their diet it
loaded with phytochemicals (which you don't get much if you rely on
animal foods). Okinawans live longer, have less heart disease, less
cancer, are less obese and have less diabetes.

Traditional Mediterranean diet is another diet where very little meat
or animal fat is consumed, and as the Lyon Diet Heart Study shows, it
is very heart healthy. No evidence seems to be enough for you,
Wolfbrother.

-Jan

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