Disclaimer: Not every T2D is purely from a bad diet. But many are.
The EBT program here in the US completely distorts the situation.
My local grocery store serves a very poor community, most of the customers pay with EBT. I get to see what kind of things these folks buy, it's idiotic. We could do a lot of good if EBT were only applicable to fresh perishable goods like produce/eggs/milk/fish/meat.
It almost seems like people on EBT hate themselves for being poor and lean in on being self-destructive while at the store paying for things with EBT. They largely buy processed/prepared junk food, it's unbelievable, but if you view the food they buy as another drug prodding the reward centers of their brains, it's making them feel good in the short-term while giving them diabetes and other ailments in the long-term. EBT enables affording it by being almost equivalent to cash.
On a personal note: I agree with you. It‘s hilarious what people buy even when they are on a tight budget.
Perhaps it's the people with poor impulse control and lack of education that end up economically poor. Maybe they never learned better.
Taking pleasure from those less fortunate than yourself is a trick of the ego. It makes you feel better about yourself by labeling someone else inferior. It comes from a place of insecurity about one's own worth.
By simplifying the problem to a group of people simply being inferior, you miss all the nuance, the complex system of factors that created the result.
It's much easier to dehumanize. But if we don't counter these primitive tribal urges, we are bound to repeat the tragedies of history.
This isn't true, at least in the US. Or maybe we have a very different idea about what "healthy" food is.
Rice, beans and starchy vegetables are problematic for various (different) reasons and non-starchy vegetables generally aren't very nutritious from a macro perspective, which makes them relatively expensive.
Unless you only buy organic, then you might go broke while hungry.
Produce may look cheap, but if you add up the macros (and also some of the micros), it doesn't look cheap at all.
I don't think there's a common understanding of how much time working class people have to spend on work. It's frequently on the order of 50-60 hours across more than one job, plus the attendant transit and pre-work chores. Your job doesn't provide you with cheap, healthy food on-site. You frequently can't eat on the way to or from work, per transit rules or enhanced police presence on your route. Lunch breaks are a strict 30 minutes, and being late can get you fired (hope whatever you're eating doesn't have too much fiber). You may have to go out of your way to shop, if you live in a food desert, and apartment fridges preclude buying in bulk. Oh, and for a racial angle, produce in cities (and, not uncommonly, in majority-minority suburbs) costs more than in white suburbs and rural areas.
We have so many UX experts on here, is it really that difficult to think of this problem as an experiential narrative instead of an engineering problem that can be solved by tweaking a few variables?
That depends on ripeness [0], I eat a mostly green banana every morning and it doesn't have much sugar at all while keeping my bowels very regular.
It's been my breakfast for decades, I'm quite healthy, and eat a diet almost entirely composed of raw produce. The rest is nuts/seeds/legumes and canned fish. I rarely ever cook, and if I didn't go for organic produce this would be a very cheap diet except for the nuts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistant_starch#Nutritional_i...
You get virtually all of your macronutrients from the nuts, seeds, legumes and the fish - not the produce.
> I rarely ever cook, and if I didn't go for organic produce this would be a very cheap diet except for the nuts.
So it would be cheap if it was something else, but it's not.
In any event, I consider any diet high in grains/legumes a science experient which may or may not work out. I don't consider it a healthy diet.
By volume most of the "nuts" are roasted unsalted peanuts, which are very cheap, and as you know actually legumes.
I just have a taste for expensive walnuts and cashews, and like organic produce, but I'm not poor.
Everyone can afford peanuts, or peanut butter. I prefer roasted intact peanuts since there's less opportunity for fuckery like replacing peanut oil with palm oil and adding sugar.
People also eat donuts for decades, that means nothing.
People didn't eat beans for hundreds of thousands of years. They're not a "natural" part of the diet. They contain poorly researched plant toxins and anti-nutrients, which can are known to cause issues in sensitive people.
Can you "mitigate" the problem with proper preparation? Apparently, but that doesn't mean we know they are actually healthy as opposed to "sustainable". Populations across the world which have no choice but to rely on grains and legumes as a staple do suffer from malnutrition.
> In observational studies „anti-nutrients“ are mostly associated with better health outcomes.
Observational studies are mostly useless, because anybody who buys into "legumes are healthy" will focus on living a healthy life in other aspects as well. As I said, swapping in legumes in place of donuts is going to be a benefit. That doesn't mean it's optimal.
"More than half of the world populations are affected by micronutrient malnutrition and one third of world’s population suffers from anemia and zinc deficiency, particularly in developing countries."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4325021/
> I only have to show you that beans are just as much part of human diets as are other foods.
Again, that literally means nothing. Humans can survive on very poor diets.
> For donuts we see a direct correlation between sugary processed foods and obesity, T2D and other diseases. For beans you can not show this.
Of course, I never said beans cause T2 diabetes or any other "disease of civilization". They cause nutrient deficiences in populations that are underdeveloped. As for what it does with those few people in developed nations who choose to adopt a plant-based diet, there's just no good data, yet. That's a recent phenomenon.
> The only thing you can show is some mechanistic data, where we can speculate.
Of course we have to speculate, because we don't know. You can always ask for more evidence that this-and-that is or isn't harmful in some dose. Somehow, people are very wary about synthetic toxins or pesticides, but when it comes to natural toxins that plants produce to defend themselves, we don't really pay the same kind of attention.
What's the evidence that heavy metals, or dioxin, or any of the other pollutants are harmful in the doses that we allow them in? There isn't any, that's why we allow them. Does that mean harmful effects don't exist? No. It means we don't know any better.
Legumes just happen to be the biggest offenders of natural toxins in our diet. They all have a rich history of requiring preparation to become digestible at all. We're not evolutionarily prepared to handle them, we haven't eaten them as a staple for more than a few thousand years. That's a red flag.
> In my personal opinion you are the victim of an industry that wants to sell stuff like Gundrys supplements like „Lectin buster“ and the like.
I don't care about Gundry opinions or his supplements, he's no better than your nutritionfacts guy. Also, it's not like there isn't a whole industry behind selling the plant-based diet. A much bigger industry in fact, also fueled by ideology, ethics and virtue signaling. Red flags.
Also, in the west, a lot of the culture of preparing these foods (such as fermenting or vigorous soaking) is bypassed.
> Bean consumption is typically a good predictor for survival in elderly people.
That data suffers from the usual issues related to nutritional studies. Consuming beans in place of donuts may be a good predictor of health, that doesn't mean that beans themselves are healthy relative to other healthy foods.
I don't know if poor Americans are doomed to diabetes, but it is certainly orders of magnitude easier for the poor to eat poorly compared to the rich. Boosting morale in the poor is difficult without cheap fatty/sweet food and drugs, other poor people have nearly nothing else to get by excessive stressors except exercise. Running a perfectly clean life is admirable and very difficult with limited resources, social standing and spare time.
(1)https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20120315/white-rice-link...
Rice in itself is a healthy food, especially when it is brown. I read a study some years ago where a doctor even cured mild forms of diabetes with high loads of rice instead of junk food. Don‘t have a link handy though.
Americans are not doomed to diabetes. Diabetes T2 is one of the easiest diseases to prevent. Vegans for example have 60-70% less diabetes according to observational studies like Adventist Health II.
I would say we spend way less on food than your typical American. It's really THAT cheap. Also we have a lot of food for CoViD-19 as we store a lot of food in our cellar all year around (lentils, whole oats, canned beans, etc.).
Ah, and we are not poor in any way. I'm among top 5% in Germany. I think it's just healthy and sustainable (for the same reason we don't own a car).
You also probably get way too much sugar from sugary fruits which you overindulge in because your diet otherwise is so "healthy". Instead of soft drinks you have fruit juices, which have effectively the same amount of sugar. Again, just a guess.
You probably got your nutrition advice from ideologically based publications, or you're just "winging it" based on what makes sense to you, in which case you're likely going to be wrong as well.
Heme iron is associated with disease in all major studies. I don‘t see a reason to ingest it.
I have a great O3/O6 ratio. I don‘t use oil at all and avoid foods that are filled with plant oils. My breakfast contains lots of flax seeds. Our usual foods contain hemp seeds. All good sources of O3. And all without pollutants from fish.
I get a lot of information from nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger offers free information as in free beer. No ads, no sponsors, even the earnings from his books are given to charity. I highly recommend you check him out. He certainly has his biases but still way less than most other doctors.
If you didn't have any animal foods, you're going to be missing out on B-vitamins, because of low bioavailability[1].
> Heme iron is associated with disease in all major studies. I don‘t see a reason to ingest it.
An excess of many essential nutrients and vitamins is associated with disease, that doesn't mean you should cut them out. Non-heme iron is way less bioavailable, especially in combination with plant antinutrients[2], so you can end up iron-deficient.
> I have a great O3/O6 ratio. I don‘t use oil at all and avoid foods that are filled with plant oils.
You probably should be using oil, just not plant oils.
> My breakfast contains lots of flax seeds. Our usual foods contain hemp seeds. All good sources of O3.
Unfortunately not, because those sources also have low bio-availability.
> And all without pollutants from fish.
Pollutants are unfortunate, but when it comes to nutrition, you have to pick your poisen. Salmon roe is a good source of Omega 3 that is low in pollutants.
> I get a lot of information from nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger offers free information as in free beer. No ads, no sponsors, even the earnings from his books are given to charity. I highly recommend you check him out. He certainly has his biases but still way less than most other doctors.
A plant-based diet is ideology that is cherry-picking and misrepresenting some insights of nutrition science while sweeping others under the rug. With his exaggerated claims[4], Greger isn't any more credible than certain people on "the other side".
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2843032
[2] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/91/5/1461S/4597424
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24261532
[4] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illnes...
Your thoughts on bioavailability are also outdated. It has been shown for protein, iron and some vitamins that bioavailability in practice is very good for plant sources. E.g. iron is converted as good as heme iron when combined with vitamin C. And it‘s hard to avoid C on a plant based diet.
May I ask where you get your information from?
Perhaps, but we're talking about nutritional deficiencies, have you tested for all of those? A vitamin deficiency can take up to a decade to manifest in symptoms.
> If you want to believe that animals are essential for human health, go on.
I don't want to believe that, I would prefer not to have to believe that. On the other hand, many people want to believe that animals are not necessary, for ethical reasons. That causes distortion and misrepresentation, because it would be inconvenient if a plant-based diet was not entirely healthy and nutritionally complete.
> Your thoughts on bioavailability are also outdated.
Those aren't "my thoughts", that is scientific data. Show me yours.
> It has been shown for protein, iron and some vitamins that bioavailability in practice is very good for plant sources. E.g. iron is converted as good as heme iron when combined with vitamin C. And it‘s hard to avoid C on a plant based diet.
Source?
> May I ask where you get your information from?
I get it from all available sources. If Doctor So-and-so claims this-and-that, I look at the scientific publications supporting that.
On top of that, I try to look at what's plausible from an evolutionary history perspective. A plant-based diet doesn't seem plausible. That doesn't mean it's not good, of course - especially compared to a junk food diet. However, there's a lot of "ethical incentive" to misrepresent it as better than it is. You gotta watch out for that.
The problem with B12 is more with low cobalt in the soil and genetically low absorption. There are now even bioactive plant forms of B12 like water lentil.
That's why I say a plant-based diet is science experiment with no plausible basis in evolutionary history. I'm not saying it's bad per se, I'm saying we don't actually know if it's good.
Looks like you have done your homework and are not in fact deficient, at least in terms of those biomarkers and reference values. A lot of plant-based dieters are not that diligent, affluent or educated.
You just have to get off your ass and actually go buy perishable fresh groceries regularly and plan for the week ahead.
Laziness and convenience prevails.
If it's a lack of time, then it's a lack of time to even hit the grocery store. Which depending on where you live, if it's a food desert situation, may be valid.