| I’ve seen it before and watched most of it again. It is crazy how he was shocked he could have gotten metabolic disease by following the food pyramid. Honestly, I thought everyone, but especially MDs, knew the food pyramid is complete and total bullshit in terms of health and was created by the food industry itself. Granted the food pyramid is now the food plates, but that too I thought was generally recognized as bullshit in terms of health and created by the food industry. I also don’t understand as a practicing physician how he initially concluded diabetes is caused by obesity. Sure there is a strong correlation, but as everyone loves to point out, plenty of skinny people have T2D and plenty of obese people do not, maybe he just didn’t see that very often in his practice and his patients were skewed to mostly/only diabetics with obesity. It’s also not lost on me that changing ones diet and removing sugars/carbs is simple but that doesn’t make it easy, which is just as much a part of his new study as diet. I don’t understand people that admit removal of carbs/sugar can prevent 100% of T2D case even reverse some existing cases, but don’t advocate for those dietary changes because there may be some other cause to the T2D. Take Attia, he talks about reversing his metabolic disease/pre-diabetes through dietary changes, we all know what they were (any physician will tell you how that is done), but he doesn’t state once in the TED Talk what those changes were. The reason he doesn’t say it is probably the same reason I was down voted above, people don’t want to hear it. I’d love to see a study on why people get turned off, angry, anonymously downvote online anytime they hear the specific dietary changes that can prevent T2D or reverse disease/pre-diabetes/T2D like Attia did. |
In respect of the carbs in particular, why would you think that?
Most countries have similar advice. For example, the UK NHS says a third of your diet should be starchy carbohydrates: "Base meals on potatoes, bread, rice, pasta or other starchy carbohydrates". This is broadly similar to the US food pyramid, despite no food industry funding.
The British Heart Foundation says try to eat "plenty of starchy foods such as bread, rice, potatoes and pasta".
People on HN say this stuff all the time and quote poor quality obscure studies, but high quality meta-analyses frequently find that diets that are 50%-60% carbs are healthy.
What is the alternative, credible source backing up this idea that carbs are harmful? It's only recently that the medical industry was saying all fat is bad - and much of it still is.
Clearly something is wrong with the standard western diet and processed foods. Refined sugars, carbs etc. may play a role in that, but the idea that everyone knows what's wrong and what we need to do to fix it is absolutely clearly NOT the case. Dietary studies are, by and large, low quality observational studies. Many doctors have little to no dietary training and operate largely on anecdata and educated guesses. The average member of public will know even less.
But it's far from clear that refined grains or sugars or anything else are causing the problem, and if they are, why they are. We know removing them sometimes helps, but that could be incidental, and if they are bad, why do we want to eat them so much? Plenty of diets were heavily based on carbs and refined sugar in the past and few people got fat or developed diabetes. Meanwhile some diets are very heavily fat and protein based yet they struggle enormously with T2D (see Tonga where spam, mutton flaps and other low quality meats are heavily implicated in their awful obesity problems). Some people blame fructose in HFCS, but Europe doesn't use fructose to nearly the same extent and is suffering the same epidemic of metabolic syndrome (albeit a decade or two behind the USA). Sugar intake has actually been decreasing for decades in the UK, while obesity/metabolic syndrome/T2D is continuing to rise enormously. For all we know at this point, it could be plastic pollution or a virus causing this problem.
FWIW I have cut out carbs as much as I can from my diet due to the doctor saying my carb based diet was damaging my liver, and started eating cheese, as my diet of whole foods and beans/chickpeas/lentils cooked from scratch has triggered a gut disease. I've had to stop being vegan as a consequence, despite many other vegans I know being healthy, happy and thin on a similar diet to what I had before. Yet other doctors in the past commended me on making the healthy decision to be vegan. I'm relatively certain nobody knows what's going on. Maybe food is just tastier now so we eat more of it...