Planetary health diet

[7Wannabe5]

Probably more interesting if forum members declared their eating and exercise protocols along with their key blood numbers (cholesterol total hdl ldl lipids etc). I try and eat low carb with very infrequent exercise unfortunately due to a lot of traveling. I have previously posted my numbers on here

"Everybody" (vegans and paleos) agrees that sugar is bad for you, but I eat way too much sugar and have very good numbers. I like a steak every once in a while, but meat does not make me happy like coffee and sugar makes me happy. Also, unless I die young from an estrogenic cancer, I am already probably going to live way too long (likely into my 90s) , because I am 54 and still haven't gone through menopause. I would also note that to the extent that an individual can tolerate sugar calories, they are very efficiently grown, and, therefore, highly unlikely to contribute to planetary environmental issues.

[Frita]

"Everybody" (vegans and paleos) agrees that sugar is bad for you, but I eat way too much sugar and have very good numbers. I like a steak every once in a while, but meat does not make me happy like coffee and sugar makes me happy. Also, unless I die young from an estrogenic cancer, I am already probably going to live way too long (likely into my 90s) , because I am 54 and still haven't gone through menopause. I would also note that to the extent that an individual can tolerate sugar calories, they are very efficiently grown, and, therefore, highly unlikely to contribute to planetary environmental issues.

@Wannabe5

Given that I went through menopause early (age 32) and am now 50, it seems that my life expectancy will be several years shorter. When I did a bit of research, the irony is that my life expectancy is LOWER than if I had diabetes.

Anecdotally, I could tolerate sugar calories well until my mid-40s. Now I eat a mostly whole foods diet with minimal sugars (Both added and natural, I have always preferred vegetables over fruit.) drink a lot of water (3 liters/day minimum), and am quite active. I do enjoy a good, strong coffee daily and the occasional microbrew. My weight is back to my normal from my high school/college days (112-115 # range, small frame, 5'7").

[7Wannabe5]

@Frita:

I'm sorry to hear that you have the same/opposite problem. Hormones (age and gender) are very important when determining ideal diet for individual. For better or worse, I take after my mother who is about the least fit/most healthy person you can imagine. At 79, she is like some big old luxury car, with an engine and transmission and a rust-proof paint job that just keep going (she's not very wrinkly), but the left rear bearings are fried (knee shot)and the suspension is shot to hell and the rear bumper is almost dragging on the ground because the trunk is so overloaded with junk. She exercises far less and eats more cake than even the average American, but she has no symptoms of diabetes or heart disease or osteoporosis. OTOH, she only rarely drinks alcohol, eats lots of fruits and vegetables and meat along with the cake, has never smoked and did not complete menopause until her late 50s.

Sometimes I wonder if we really have much choice when the metaphorical bartender gestures and says "Pick your poison."

[7Wannabe5]

I meant to attach this above:

https://www.nhs.uk/news/diabetes/men-de ... re-easily/

Synopsis being that men really do need to focus on staying trim after 40 for metabolic syndrome reasons, women not so much. So, it might be better for some women to look ahead to later life issues such as osteoporosis and keep up calcium intake and muscle mass.

[BRUTE]

Science works by successive approximations, with increasing accuracy [..] What won't happen though, is a 180 degrees turn. Science doesn't pivot on its axis.

clearly false in the case of dietary science. what bigato is explaining is the romanticized version of science, not the actual one.

[Bankai]

clearly false in the case of dietary science

What are recent examples where dietary science made a u-turn on well established position?

[BRUTE]

fat good (1920s), fat bad (1970s), fat good (2000s)

[Frita]

@Wannabe5

I believe our choices help to turn off our genetics too. My mom is obese with high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She is not active, eats a lot of processed food, and frequently talks about serving sizes, diets, etc. She has never smoked and doesn't drink. So I continue to work on changing that programming and to make different choices for myself.

[7Wannabe5]

@Frita:

It's true that genetics seem to have only moderate influence over such matters. I have developed an unfortunate tendency towards catastrophizing every little thing that goes wrong with my body since I turned 50. So, minor muscular hip injury turns into "doomed to become like my mother."

Anyways, I downloaded a little slider app that lets you adjust the Planetary Health Diet to your age, gender, activity level, and some of your dietary druthers. It will, obviously, work very well for me in conjunction with my perma-culture project. My DD27 took me out for my birthday to a restaurant that only uses locally produced ingredients in its recipes, and quite a few of the menu items were inclusive of just a bit of meat for flavor, as in the recommendations for planetary health, and the dish I tried was delicious.

[Frita]

@7Wannabe5

LOL to automatic thoughts! My dad died in a plane crash when he was 37, so mine to any setback is, "I'm not dead yet."

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded the PHD app and plan to fiddle with it.

Happy birthday! It sounds like your DD hooked you up with a gear restaurant option. We have several locally sourced eateries with many non-meat options. I must admit that I typically choose something with beef and split it with my son.

[BRUTE]

Source: https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/128/2/449S/4724049

and complete reversal since ~2000:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/maga ... t-lie.html

(humans who still believe saturated fat is bad are 20-30 years behind the science)

[Freedom_2018]

@bigato..I think we are saying the same thing in the first part (personal diet plan vs what might work for the planet...a rather complex multivariate problem to solve and a continuously moving target too).

I don't think having biases are necessarily a bad thing if one is aware of them (which is a process of self growth) and one does not always look for confirming evidence. I think knowing oneself and correcting for inherent tendencies is a better approach to living than trying to read everything under the sun in the hope that biases even in reports/ publications cancel themselves out....unless of course one wants to spend enormous amounts of time online reading, arguing and discussing on the internet. Takes too much time and no one seems to convince anyone else. In diet it is easy to do trial and error and extrapolate from that. Also in my experience diet needs and benefits change over one's life and what worked once might not work as effectively again (for example I have found keto type diets to be less effective each time I fell off the train and tried to get back on...the body somehow senses it has been there before and the pounds are more reluctant to come off...of course I am older too). So important not to be too wedded to any one approach. Besides in my nomadic life I have to be flexible with the methodology while the directional goal remains consistent. There is no one magical answer...though some approaches work better for me. Everybody will have to find their own.

[BRUTE]

NIH: National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
https://medlineplus.gov/dietaryfats.html

without having read that, that's even worse - instead of having reversed their opinion 180 degrees to the truth, they continue murdering humans to protect their egos.

oh well. let it burn. this is why brute finds the romantic scientism on here naive sometimes

for reference if any humans are interested, brute thoroughly enjoyed reading the following books:
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes (author of the article linked above), chock full of scientific references
The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz

both of these debunk and bring to light the shenanigans that had overcome dietary science for over a generation.

[Bankai]

instead of having reversed their opinion 180 degrees to the truth, they continue murdering humans to protect their egos.

In every topic on diet, brute keeps making these extraordinary claims without ever providing any sort of credible scientific reference (articles or books by journalists are not credible) or ever responding to the evidence presented to the contrary. Does brute really believe all the leading nutritional scientists (we are talking thousands of people across all the leading scientific/government institutions) are collectively in denial and work to murder people?

[7Wannabe5]

I think the point that is often missed in the debates between affluent vegans and paleo-type diet followers, is the lack of diversity in the SAD. IOW, it may be less the case that eating a moderate amount of "white" food will kill you, but rather that eating almost exclusively white food will kill you. Thus, when your stereotypical vegetable-avoidant middle-aged mid-century Midwestern man simply changed his diet from nothing but steak and fried potatoes and iceberg lettuce with high-fat dressing to nothing but chicken breast, iceberg lettuce with sweet dressing, and "whole" wheat bread, the diversity of his diet really hadn't improved much.

[7Wannabe5]

One further note about the PHD would be that I wouldn't feed it to a very young child unless that child was primarily breast-fed for the first 2 years of life, and I would only slowly introduce the foods that are known to frequently cause allergic or other adverse reactions. My kids take after their very skinny father's phenotype as adults, but they were very healthy and "obese" until around age 3.

[Kriegsspiel]

I think the point that is often missed in the debates between affluent vegans and paleo-type diet followers, is the lack of diversity in the SAD. IOW, it may be less the case that eating a moderate amount of "white" food will kill you, but rather that eating almost exclusively white food will kill you. Thus, when your stereotypical vegetable-avoidant middle-aged mid-century Midwestern man simply changed his diet from nothing but steak and fried potatoes and iceberg lettuce with high-fat dressing to nothing but chicken breast, iceberg lettuce with sweet dressing, and "whole" wheat bread, the diversity of his diet really hadn't improved much.

The economist Adam Smith... was equally taken with the potato. He was impressed to see that the Irish remained exceptionally healthy despite eating little else: "The chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution- the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions- are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root." Today we know why: the potato can better sustain life than any other food when eaten as the sole item of diet. It has all essential nutrients except vitamins A and D, which can be supplied by milk; the diet of the Irish poor in Smith's day consisted largely of potatoes and milk.

1491, Mann

[7Wannabe5]

Yeah, I've read that bit about the Irish previously. That's why I wondered about the preference for wheat, corn, and rice over starchy vegetables in the PHD. Corn, in particular, is not a very complete food. Anyways, it is quite probable that the early industrial era Irish did supplement their primarily potato calorie diet with other less caloric vegetables and greens, since these foods are basically freebies in a subsistence farming/gathering situation with plentiful rainfall.

[Kriegsspiel]

Could it be because wheat/corn/rice are easier to transport due to less water weight? Or maybe they are easier to harvest? I'm pretty sure potatoes yield the most calories/acre. Though I did see that they're working on C4 photosynthesis rice, which might be the winner now.

[7Wannabe5]

@Kriegsspiel:

It might be because potatoes are more difficult to store for long periods, so matter of food security? The infographics in the PHD report show both Americans and Africans eating WAAAAY more potatoes than recommended. Still, I don't know why starchy vegetables shouldn't be included in the same category as the starchy grains?

One of the reasons I thought about dietary diversity is that I think a fairly high proportion of people might be put off by the strangeness of the example meals pictured in the report. I sometimes eat dollar store cookies, but I would also be willing to try peanut worm jelly. Picky eaters, whether fat or skinny, usually strike me as otherwise unhealthy.