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by soldehierro 1720 days ago
I've got to say, I'm shocked to see this piece chock-full of fallacious logic in the Guardian.

> Is mother nature a psychopath? Why would she design foods to shorten the lifespan of the human race?

Mother nature isn't an anthropomorphic being and "she" doesn't design anything. There are plenty of poisons found in plants and animals.

> “Base your meals around starchy carbohydrate foods” – another nugget of government “healthy eating” advice that is contradicted by robust science and well overdue for a rethink. In February the Pure study, which followed 148,858 participants in 21 countries over nine years was published. It concluded that: “High intake of refined grains was associated with higher risk of mortality and major cardiovascular disease events.”

Government authorities typically recommend against the consumption of refined grains. So, the author is actually citing evidence against this argument.

> Fruit contains lots of sugar. A small banana has the equivalent of 5.7 teaspoons of sugar, whereas an egg contains none.

A cup of canola oil doesn't contain sugar either. This makes the mistake of conflating all simple mono and disaccharides as "sugars" without consideration of the context. A cola and a piece of fruit both contain sugar, true, but the fiber in fruit slows absorption and moderates spikes in blood sugar (this is why fruit juices are almost as bad as sodas). Dairy also contains sugar, which makes it even more strange that the author would target demonize the sugar in fruit but ignore it when praising dairy.

I could go on.

I'm not going to make the claim that this article is sponsored by some lobby, but it certainly reads that way.

2 comments

> Government authorities typically recommend against the consumption of refined grains.

For a long time in the U.S., this was emphatically not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#/medi...

I’ve felt like the guardian has gone downhill in the last few years. I first started paying for it because I believed that they would do the right thing in a post-Snowden world.

Instead, in the last two years major incidents have happened and coverage disappears by the next day. Perhaps this is the result of a poor UI but the tendency towards clickbait rather than holding authority to task - e.g. the UK PPE scandal - has been really disappointing.