Maggie's Farm

That is a crazy counter-culture myth. Frctose doesn't harm your liver. Alcohol does, many illegal and legal drugs do but fructose is benign to your liver. The liver is an amazing organ and does many jobs for our body. One of those jobs is to convert frcutose to glucose. It is what your liver is supposed to do. The low informations people with food biases have attempted to interpret this simple fact as bad i.e. "Fructose is hard on your liver". Ironically they are the same people and it is the same philosophy that 40 years ago favored fructose and made many of the same negative claims about sucrose. Sugar is the most studied food in the world. Most of those studies were intended to find something, anything bad about sugar. But the bottom line is the only negative thing they could discover about sugar is it causes dental caries.

Crazy isn't it? It's like a full length feature film of fear uncertainty and doubt. A scary movie with sugar as the mass murderer. And yet we all (most all) consume more sugar every year and our life expectancy increases every year. So who spends their time and money to make such a propaganda film and what else are they wrong on?

If there actually was a cancer, heart disease or stroke epidemic I would be right there with you. But in fact it is not true. Cancer rates are pretty much the same, more lung cancer for smokers but most cancers, heart attacks and storkes are age related and it is because we are living longer that they "appear" to have increased. Certanly not related to sugar or HFCS.
As for obesity that is a major scam that we have become obsessed with. In 1998 they changed the way they evaluated "obesity" and overnight the percnetage of Americans who were obese doubled without anyone gaining a pound. Then there is the fact that obesity is largely genetic and the percentage of our population from those ethnicities prone to obesity has increased with the inevitable result that our overall obesity rate has increased. It isn't because of our diet, obesity is genetic.

"The natural, raw, non-meat diet is, with its abundance of complex sugars, profoundly healthier than the American alternative". I wish it were true. There are more magical diets then you can shake a stick at and everyone of them have their acolytes. Believing in them is an act of faith not logic. Everyone of them has rules that are contrary to each of the others and everyone of them is unproven and appear to be unprovable.

"Interesting that you would invoke faith in a comment devoid of anything but proofs by conventional wisdom."
Exactly! You get it! There are numerous fad diets all claiming to give us longer life and prevent disease and they are all based on faith. You finally understand.

"we have absolutely nothing to fear consuming a diet that creates chronic disease in the age of what has always been chronic disease."
But then you digress and try to claim these faith based diest must be right because your faith based propaganda proves it to be true. There is less chronic disease in the West not more. And this is in spite of the faith based diets you seem to believe in. Go figure!

"this constancy of disease and death - is either the justification of God or of science and there's nothing that reams of evidence to the contrary have to say about it."
Somewhat confusing. You are aware that we do indeed know what causes diseases and what the treatments are for diseases. While it's true that some serius diseases cannot always be treated effectively and it is true we are all going to die of something I see nothing on the horizon in either science or religion to change that. I can assure you that you will die of something and it will most likely be one of those diseases that your faith based diet claims to prevent. Most of use die from heart disease with cancer being a close second and strokes coming up third. All the fad diets in the world will not prevent it and to imply science doesn't understand it is, well, uninformed at best.

I am the lord of sarcasm and irony but apparently you are no fan of it.

"Do you know the per capita instances of all major diseases in the contemporary West versus the rest of the world"
Yes. But do you know why? Simply because in the 3rd world moat people die young from horrible diseases that we in the West avoid through science and medicine. Thus we have the good fortune to live longer and die from diseases of old age. Some, those who don't understand statistics, think that because we have high rates of heart disease and cancer that it must be something in the water. You need to look deeper into the statistical data to understand it.

yada, yada, yada follwed by "The American diet is rife with poison". You gotta be kidding! There it is. The nutty left wing, hippie, counterculture, pro-vegan anti-meat craziness. I simply cannot understand that mentality.

"Obesity, heart failure, cancer, and all the rest of the West's lovely legacies of poor lifestyle and choices are not "hereditary" without the triggers of abysmal nutrition, industrial poisoning, a sedentary lifestyle..."
More of the same hippy-dippy thinking. If we just ate organic and no meat we would all live to be 100. But, no, your hippy mysticism is simply wrong. Most heart disease is indeed genetic and many, not all, cancers are genetic as well. Then too these big three killers (heart disease, cancer and stroke) are diseases of old age. In the third world the biggest killers are Malaria, respiratory infections, measles, diarrhea, AIDS and violence. BUT, if they avoid all this and live past age 60 the leading cause of death then becomes heart disease, cancer and stroke just like in the West.

Obesity is genetic. Obesity is far more common in Africa and Mexico then it is in the U.S. Not suprisingly obesity in the U.S. is far more common among people of African and Mexican heritage then people of European heritage.

"an answer to the elementary question if diet is unrelated to disease"

"unrelated" well it depends. Some diseases require or benefit from a specific diet. That's related. But your point is and always has been that our decadent Western diet is responsible for most diseases and obesity. There is no evidence of that. There are theories and opinions galore. There are fad diets each with their cheerleaders making astounding claims. But no real and convincing evidence that our decadent Western diet causes disease. For example your claim that our diet causes heart disease. If true then we could take your basic healthy 18 year old and feed him this Western diet and withn a few years he would have a heart attack. In fact it would work for everyone if your theory were true. But it doesn't. There are 300 million examples of people in the U.S. eating this horrible Western diet and most live to a ripe old age with no heart disease. The evidence to suport your thesis is simply not there.

But wait! But wait! What about cancer? Indeed cancer is a scurge and our forefathers never got cancer, right? But they did, that is if they avoided all the diseases that were common 100 years ago and lived to an old age their chances of getting a cancer were no different from ours. But why aren't the history books full of stories of people dying horribly from cancer? Why does it seem to be so common today but so uncommon centuries ago? Well the simple answer is centuries ago when you died they buried you and probably were unaware of what actually killed you. Yes indeed before the modern Western diet people died of cancer and they did it in the same percentages we do today. It isn't and never was about diet.

Most myths about fad diets are the result of wishful thinking and mass hysteria. We really really want to be in control of our health. If only eating kale or not eating wheat would make us healthy and immune from disease... If only mega doses of vitamins C and D would keep us from getting sick... If only... Of course the next step is to believe, to believe out of faith. Oh, it helps that there are quacks who are always ready to take advantage of our ignorance and human need for answers and they write books; "good calories, bad calories" or something else catchy and we read it and we believe! We want to believe. We are humans and science and truth come hard and myths and superstitions that affirm our biases come easy to us. Simple as that.