Maggie's Farm

The governments track record for dietary advice is incredibly bad. When the process used to decide what is good for us and what is bad is observed it becomes clear it is 99% biased personal opinion. I would be quite happy to have a real and science base (evidence based) guidance on diet for better health. I believe that this would be complicated by the fact that all people are not alike and a diet that may actually be harmful for one might be harmless for another. But even in spite of the complications I do think that some basic dietary advice could be created that would be useful. However I don't think it will ever happen for a number of reasons. The article cited one good reason i.e. that special interest groups would want to slant the information to favor them or disfavor others. But probably the single largest conflict would simply be that the only people who ever get into this discussion have an agenda and their goal is to push their agenda and science be damned. Consequently I have little to no faith in any government pronouncements on food, diet and health.

Diabetes is a more serious problem with indigenous people, or more accurately with people more recently converted from meat eating hunter gathers to diets that farming societies eat. Why? Probably because diabetes is managed better on a low carb high fat and protein diet and in these cultures diabetes would go unnoticed well past breeding age allowing the genetic diabetes disease to more easily pass from generation to generation. Once the diet changes to a farming cultures diet the diabetes symptoms show up earlier thus less likely to live long enough to pass on to their children.
Northern Europeans have much lower rates of diabetes because with a farming cultures diet the diabetes untreated was more likely to self eliminate.

So the Indians can go back to a hunter gathers diet and hard physical lifestyle with some success. BUT it will not cure or prevent the diabetes. They will still have it at the same rate but the symptoms will be less severe for awhile until it kills them assuming it is untreated. A better answer is to treat it.

Thank you for proving my point. I would never have spent that much time finding a dozen or so phony articles posing as science. The 'diet causes diabetes' myth is an essential component of the whole strange diet cult thingy. After all in a field with few facts and many conflicting realities it is difficult to prove to a thinking person that a hamburger will kill you or that tofu will make you live to 100.
I do wonder where they thought the pre-Columbian natives of Canada got the flaxseed and cinnamon.

There is this persistent myth that you catch diabetes from your food. You do not. Diabetes is genetic and you catch it from your mother and father (or grandmother and grandfather). What confounds people when they ponder diabetes is they think the symptoms are the disease. In your youth you may well have diabetes and never know it because you are very active and whatever you eat is processed and used quickly so you experience few symptoms if any. After your early 20's and especially after marriage your running around slows down and your symptoms seem to simply happen suddenly. In your mind you went from being healthy to ill so something you did must have caused it. Then when the doctor puts you on a diabetic diet it all gels in your mind and no science or facts are needed to prove it to you. You caught diabetes from your food! The fact that only 6-8% of people of Northern Europe have diabetes while 20-30% of most 'native cultures' people have diabetes and almost 100% of aboriginal Australians have diabetes never sways them from their bias. It must be the diet and it must be sugar that causes diabetes (after all it was once called sugar diabetes; do you need more proof than that?). From that point on it is fun to watch the gyrations they go through to continue to blame sugar while somehow preserving the sanctity of fruit and vegetables. Fructose has a bad name because... well, just because. BUT if your fructose comes from a fruit it is magically good for you. If your dietary sugar comes from chick peas it is good for you but if it comes from refined wheat flour your gonna die!!!
Science? Logic? Too late your mind is made up and no amount of facts is going to change it. And that is how a food bigot is made.

Wishing you a merry Christmas.


P.S. Don't eat the candy canes.