chlorox There’s actually a lot of controversy about the Blue Zones. Some of the longevity has been hyped and some of the narrative has been hijacked by vested interests. I’m not saying the whole thing is meaningless- not at all but there’s more to it. Its of equal value to consider the various hunter-gather tribes (yes some still exist) like the INNUIT - incredibly healthy and eat almost exclusively animal fat and blubber - ie a diet of a VERY high % Sat Fat. Same is true of the The Maasai: 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 (Wikipedia). The common thread here is ZERO processed food and ZERO seed oils
Is Coffee healthy ?
The soybean oil lobby especially has caused tremendous undeserved damage in the west against the palm oil industry painting palm oil as being dangerous to cardiovascular health due to the fsct that 50 per cent of palm oil is saturated fat. Of course at the same time they push PUFA oils as being heart friendly. This has real world consequences on the economies of various developing countries apart from the public health ramifications. (In fact, the other 40 per cent of palm pil is monounsaturated fat and only 10 per cent is PUFA).
chlorox I disagree. Obesity “comes along for the ride” but its an association NOT a causation. The SAD (Standard American Diet) is 60% comprised of what I call The Trifecta of Evil. Added sugar, processed carbs, seed oils. For a whole variety of reasons these food are delectable, highly calorific, devoid of nutrition, toxic and addictive. The root cause of the metabolic disease is what happens in the cells and the endocrine system. That’s what causes cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, type2 diabetes and so-called auto-immune diseases. It also explains why you can be fat but perfectly healthy, or thin and very unhealthy!
DavecUK 100% ! Beer is calorie laden and specifically sugar laden. All my ProLongevity clients get CGMs (Continuous Glucose Monitors) so I can see the sugar spikes in real time. Raised sugar leads to raised insulin which leads to metabolic syndrome/type2 diabetes/fatty liver and general tragic health. And yes the deranged lipids, high BP, terrible sleep.. need I go on! I’m NOT anti-alcohol (a glass or two of red wine is positively healthy) and I love a beer. Its a question of “the dose makes the poison”
One of Zoe Harcombe’s best ever presentations - she was a Veggie for 20 years so speaks from experience as well as knowing the science
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Edited because I’ve done it again.
Just gonna bow out and keep my opinions to myself.
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I have read some criticism of the blue zones but i thought some of the criticism was really overstated (for example the idea thta records in some societies was poor and parents could be mistaken for children - it cannot be seriously accepted that parents could be mistaken for children in okinawan society which was so highly interconnected and where even outside family, it was customary for okinawans to be part of non familial friendship groups of 5 on average that lasted their whole lives)…
On inuit, modern day inuit have poor health compared to other Canadians with life expectancy 10 years at least less than he national average. This is likely contributed to by modern life factors but even for inuit living 2000 years ago, i found this article that pointed out that their mumified remains ahowed evidence of high levels of arthrosclerosis - which indicates that reports of them being free of heart disease may be wide of the mark …
https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2015nl/apr/eskimos.htm
On the masai, I found an article that referenced an autopsy of 50 masai men which found extensive arthrosclerosis in their blood vessels corresponding to far older American men. Althoigh they did not die of heart attacks it was also found that they had abnormally large blood vessels which was probsbly why the gathering plaque had not completely occluded those vessels. The possible cause of such abnormally large vessels could be the fact that masai men walked 19km a day more than modern Americans would, which in fact caused them to be in caloric deficit and which caused almost all of them to be very slim and thin. As well it also turned out masai only ate meat 1-5 times a month nd that they got most of their calories from milk which doesn’t comfortably place them in the category of almost purely meat eating humans.
https://nutritionstudies.org/masai-and-inuit-high-protein-diets-a-closer-look/
Thus article in fsct also presented historical references that showed that the inui did commonly suffer from heart disease.
Furthermore the masai life expectancy is among the lowest in the world - 42 for men and 45 for women! Even if it is assumed that their high fat diet is not the cause, they could be dying of other causes before the gathering plaque finally causes the heart attacks that were impending…
Perhaps the true situation is more nuanced than our current understanding can tell us…
Granted those factors you mentioned may exacerberate the condition, but it must be remembered that even in ancient times there was cancer and arthrosclerosis and dementia though the lower life expectancy in earlier times and societies meant that people died of other causes before they sometimes could manifest thereby leading to the fallacious conclusion that such issues did not exist in ancient times. So even when there were no PUFA oils and no highly processed foods and no refined sugar in existence, those health problems bedevilled humanity even then…
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Popped up 2 days ago!
chlorox He was on Tim Spector’s ZOE podcast recently. I suspect that was what stimulated this
Has anyone tried ZOE? I turned down a job with them fairly recently but got a good insight to their product during the interview process. Seems like a really interesting concept.
I’ve not actually tried it though.
chlorox Yes quite right the modern day INUIT who have adopted significant aspects of the Western lifestyle have paid a price. Same is true of the Okinawans on an even grander scale.
On the Masai - you are right there IS a debate. Yes they found atherosclerosis but the point is it didn’t kill them unlike those eating a Western diet. Since cardiovascular disease is essentially an inflammatory process something in their diet was dampening this and stopping them from dying from strokes and heart attacks. One theory is that they have a vey high % omeaga-3 fat in their diet and that dampens inflammation. I agree they are not extremely high MEAT eaters but that wasn’t my point. The point I was making is that they have a very high % of Sat Fat in their diet which (per Ancel Keys) should kill them. Clearly it doesn’t. There’s a debate, too, about how much they walk. I’m not convinced the 19km/day is correct
Not we turn to life expectancy: another misnomer. The argument is “people died before they developed diabetes and other western diseases”. NOT SO. In the case of the MASAI as with our hunter-gatherer forbears, there were HUGE death rates in child birth and before age 5. But if you lived beyond that life expectancy was not that much less than today.
So in the last 100years AVERAGE life expectancy HAS grown enormously. But that disguises the very high rates of death in the young and very young. Life expectancy AT BIRTH was much less. True! But the life expectancy of a 20y old 100years ago wasn’t much less than that of a 20y old today
This BBC article explains it rather well:
chlorox Granted those factors you mentioned may exacerberate the condition, but it must be remembered that even in ancient times there was cancer and arthrosclerosis and dementia though the lower life expectancy in earlier times and societies meant that people died of other causes before they sometimes could manifest thereby leading to the fallacious conclusion that such issues did not exist in ancient times. So even when there were no PUFA oils and no highly processed foods and no refined sugar in existence, those health problems bedevilled humanity even then…
Actually cancer and ASCVD were virtually unknown until 120y ago. The first report of an MI (heart attack) in the entire world literature was published in 1912 by James Herrick. But no one was interested because heart disease was vanishingly rare. So ask yourself “Why has a disease virtually unknown till 1912, become the world’s single largest killer”?
Go back to the 1900s: cancer, type2 diabetes, dementia were virtually unknown and obesity was incredibly rare. What changed?
Ernie1 Has anyone tried ZOE? I turned down a job with them fairly recently but got a good insight to their product during the interview process. Seems like a really interesting concept.
I’ve not actually tried it though.
Yes I know Tim Spector pretty well.. we’ve presented together and I’ve followed his progress. For those unfamiliar, Tim studies twins- a controlled human experiment. The Van Tulleken’s are his best-known identical twins. Chris just published a book on the dire consequences or our junk food diet. I think there’s a lot to what Tim is doing, albeit I don’t agree with him on everything. Would I recommend his program? Quick answer YES … more nuanced answer “it depends” I highly recommend his two early books The Diet Myth and Identically Different. He’s a great communicator
DavecUK well kind of. But for perspective by making a series of incremental lifestyle changes you could add another 10 or more healthy, vital years to your life. Now what value would you place on that?
Whilst on the subject of health. Some members may recall me mentioning in’ another place’ about the importance of regular eye tests. Glaucoma is an insidious thing that creeps up on you without you noticing. When it is found it may be possible to halt / slow its progress with eye drops or it may need invasive surgery which still may not completely halt its progress.
In addition to Glaucoma (pressure build up which damages the optic nerve) the eye test can pick up other problems which you may not notice.
After multiple eye drops and multiple lots of surgery I am now blind in one eye and only partially sighted in the other .
Get an eye test= regularly.
Ernie1 I haven’t tried ZOE and after seeing Tim Spector’s what I eat in a day video I won’t be signing up. I’m sure the health advice is sound but I also get the feeling it’s cashing in on people who have eating disorders. I could be totally wrong about that.
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Unfortunately the inuit appears to have evidence of commonly having heart disease even in the 1940s and of course the mummified remains of 2000 year old inuit corpses show arthrosclerosis. So it appears not only a modern issue but it has alwaya been an injit problem which would explode the myth of inuit invulnerability to heart disease as being something arrived at erroneously by anti ancel keys people?
On the masai, it is apparently true that there is high infant mortality though reporting of death is complicated by the masai social custom of not mentioning rhe dead. However aa this study shows l, the story on mortality doesn’t end there because adult mortality is also very high as well. Among others they have very high rates if mothers dying in childbirth, among the worlds highest hiv infectioj rates due to their serial promiscuity and the dangers of their pastoral lifestyle such as stepping on land mines! So it appears that the 42 to 45 year mortality rate is not caused just by infant mortality rate but by adults dying too early as well…
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/264/
The same poor and inaccuratereporting of death would also constain and loqer the rate of accurate report of death due to heart attacks etc. Anyway whatever it is about the masai that causes them to have lower reported rates of each due to heart disease despite having much evidenceof arthrosclerosis, is it translatable to other people of other cultures and ethnicities? Either it is due to their extremely high levels of moderate cardiovascular exercise of walking 19 km a day more than modern Americans m (which BTW is similar to Mediterranean shepherds in blue zone lifestyles) or it is due tl a genetic adaptaiton due to their diet iver thousands of years, it is not able to be reproduced and enjoyed by others…