The lingering health effects of the Civil War
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
No mention of controlling for a predilection for sweet tea, fried everything, and vegetables being limited to fried okra or green tomatoes. I loved southern cuisine when living in the South, but the cultural effects seem to have a much greater impact than biological. Take as a control anyone who has the biological makeup described and grew up in the South but then moved. It seems like poor study design to me.
The South as a region is very distinct from the rest of the country: settled by different ethnic groups (no, not all 'whites' are genetically identical twins; consider the different genetic BMIs by country in http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n11/full/ng.3401.html ), different cuisines, different industrial patterns, different weather and climate... It is eyebrow-raising, to say the least, to bring in the Civil War as at all relevant and speculate even more wildly that it has intergenerational effects.
If they want to talk about that, they should be trying some sort of regression-discontinuity or other natural-experiment design involving borders or Civil War activity, not, effectively, saying 'look at how different the South is! the Civil War?!' Uh, yeah, I think we all know the South differs. That's not very helpful.
I wonder what the results would be if you applied that method to, say, Poland, or north-eastern France.
You left out collards, green beans, field beans, turnips, turnip greens, etc. Personally, I find the traditional southern sides as tasty as the BBQ/Fried chicken.
Well traditionally those are cooked in some sort of animal fat, so yes, people seem to love them.
My father in law thought he loved Black Eyed Peas. Then as his health got worse as he got older and did less his wife tried to make food healthier so dropped the ham hock from the pot. Turns out he didn't like Black Eyed Peas at all, he just liked the taste of ham.
Its not all fried food in the South. The sides are definitely where it's at.
To me the fried stuff and BBq is the once a week or less meals that are considered reserved for a big family sit down dinner or special occasions, they aren't an everyday thing. I wouldn't say we eat more of it then say any other region eats pizza, burgers or other traditionally unhealthy foods.
That said the years of poverty does have a distinct effect on the culture and work ethic here. I wouldn't be surprised if it had an effect on diet and physiological effects.
Our dinner last night was some baked chicken with italian seasoning, and potatoes and carrots similarly baked with same seasoning. Wasn't that healthy, albeit healthier than most non-vegetarian meals, but certainly wasn't fried.
That said, I know quite a few people with heart disease, etc, and honestly, I can say diet definitely played a role in it, as well as possible smoking/drinking.
(EDIT: I was wrong, the article is literally only talking about the biological and physiological effects. You make a good point. The cultural impact seems as important, if not more so, than any physiological one.)
For me, this idea is actually quite intuitive. When you don't know where your next meal is going to come from you don't turn down the opportunity to eat. Once you rise out of poverty you can get that opportunity steadily, but your mindset won't change so fast, so you overeat.
It takes a few generations for the hunger to be forgotten, I think.
Not controlling for this is a HUGE oversight, to the point of invalidating the study.
Hence the leap to "Civil War --> Heart disease"
To be fair, most of the article alludes to those factors and effects in a way indistinguishable from if he had mentioned cultural elements instead. I just assumed that one of the paragraphs I glossed over would have mentioned diet.
All of which were probably intelligent adaptations to living in a post-war economic backwater. The trouble now would be that folks have enough money to drink enough sweet tea and eat enough fried foods that the formerly-subsistence-level foods are now obesity-causing.
Right... and therefore, people might have developed a cultural and perhaps even physiological preference for those foods composed of and derived from animal products. Hence, meat and fried foods.