Eating sardines regularly helps prevent type 2 diabetes
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Sardines are a low-carb, high-fat food. Eating them replaces a big load of the carbs people usually consume, and just like that they reduce the amount of insulin they have to produce, reducing their insulin resistance and so on. Omega-3 fatty acids are just a slight benefit, probably, and not so much for the diabetes.
But "Just eat a can of sardines every now and then" is just a lucky guess. There are a lot of additional, more effective ways to reduce insulin sensitivity.
Strength training, and good sleep to support the training, also help a great deal, but is not as easily managed as adding something relatively tasty and convenient to one's diet.
Eating a high quantity of diverse vegetables every day is a great idea but the practical effectiveness stumbles due to the difficulty of the habit change.
Sleep is essential, yes. Get screened for sleep apnoe if you have any reports of snoring. Sleep apnoe messes with insulin resistance.
The most effective way is fasting, at least 16 hours a day, called "intermittent fasting", and ideally a few days up to a few weeks regularly. Fasting absolutely demolishes insulin resistance.
I had to inject insulin for a few weeks recently, then I fasted for a few days and was able to quit Insulin totally. After a fast of about 2 weeks I had blood sugar levels in the lower normal range and you wouldn't know I ever had a problem. Interleaving periods of fasting and a low-carb diet with 16h-8h intermittent fasting I lost about 20 kg in 2 months.
Sardines in the other hand are served headless but otherwise whole, they're very meaty and would be weird and mooshy on pizza.
Insulin resistance is a very basic physiological mechanism at the root of both obesity and various illnesses. There are scientifically proven ways to reduce that insulin resistance. And low-carb diets have been very successful in comparison studies...
The secret is, don't buy cheap ones. Look for brisling or any other small fish packed in olive oil. $3-5/can is a good sweet spot, although you can pay $9 for a can of imported Portuguese sardines no problem.
Speaking of Portugal, they do grilled fresh sardines. My 3 year old insisted on eating them daily when we were in Lisbon
One of my Portuguese guilty pleasures, along with (ethically questionable, I know) octopus salad. Highly recommend trying this if you can get your hands on some fresh sardines.
Edit: grilled sardines are also a Japanese thing, so you might have luck finding them at an Asian market if your fishmonger doesn't have them.
1. see e.g. https://qz.com/1045782/an-octopus-is-the-closest-thing-to-an...
Though I can't prove it, I'm edging toward the belief they share resources with each other, including water and nutrients through the root system.
All these facts and ideas are easily undone by particularly defining "awareness" and so this is largely a terminological problem.
The discussion quickly becomes, "Define awareness." or ... more generally ... "Define consciousness," which we see with machines, insects, plants, even single celled organisms.
Here's what science does tell us repeatedly: Those things which humans as a species are convinced have no consciousness is decreasing. Most, even today, would not believe an octopus is conscious, but we now think they are. Dolphins. Birds, even fish now have scientific studies indicating they are self-aware.
So, yeah, justifying the eating of plants because they lack self-awareness isn't a valid argument in my book.
That doesn't absolve us of a mission to reduce suffering for the things we eat.
Plants can certainly suffer and it's trivial to identify.
I believe the dog is happy and excited and eager to greet its friend of another species, but many, many people believe that dog is exhibiting purely mechanical behavior driven by instinct alone.
As usual when we apply "random ideology" we fall in an end road. From this point all are exceptions and excuses to fill the plot-holes, so the new guardians of the moral can keep asking for donations
You can also made them in the oven wrapped in aluminium paper if you don't have a proper grill.
https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SH.STA.DIAB.ZS/r...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardines_as_food
On a more serious note, I just tried this excellent sardines recipe this week; Fisherman's Eggs [0]. Great for a high protein breakfast...
[0] https://www.thesophisticatedcaveman.com/fishermans-eggs/
Would it perhaps help to look backwards through a pair of binoculars while eating, so as to give the impression that the dish and its fishy contents are still small, thus maintaining the "giant" illusion?
This could be further aided by using a somewhat oversized plate.
Or perhaps use some particularly small eggs? (I think you'd be looking for some "Pullet eggs" in this case)
Brain: This is an entire fish.
Brain: The body is too small for me to pull off regular bites with my hands.
Brain: I must be a giant.
Chawmp
I see you’ve studied this topic extensively. Therefore I bow to your superior wisdom and I shall say no more about it.
- if you take "sardine" supplement pills and go on eating burgers and fries, do not expect a miracle with respect to type 2 pre-diabetes,
- if you eat sardines as part of a meal, I suspect that you are likely to *replace* parts of your current diet with the (fatty) fish, rather than keep your usual diet and add fish on top of it.
For instance, a funny paragraph from section 4 (Discussion) hints that the SG (Sardine Group) must have added less olive oil to the rest of their meals:
> Another possible limitation of the study to bear in mind is the use of canned sardines in olive oil, which, despite easing distribution and consumption, present differences in MUFA content as compared to fresh sardines. Although this may have modified the pattern of lipids consumed, the SG group decreased their overall MUFA consumption. This could be due to the fact that the use of olive oil added to meals did not occur when they consumed the canned sardines and, therefore, there are no differences in its consumption with respect to CG.
NB: I don't want to dismiss any part of the article, I only want to insist that it is hard to isolate causes because of this effect of "communicating vases".
The way I generally describe the result of switching from no intentional diet to any trendy/FOTM/recent diet is mostly just that a person begins to give a shit about what they're eating, which results in an array of positive benefits not directly related to that diet. Ketogenic diets are a good example. People go from not caring about what they eat, regularly eating fast food, sugary snacks/drinks, deep fried carbohydrates, etc. to spending a bunch of money on expensive butter and grass fed beef. They then lose weight. Sure, ketosis is a big deal, but in reality the biggest factor in a person's weight loss/health improvement is just replacing high calorie, high sugar, high carb, high fat food with no sugar, low/no carb, reasonable calorie food. (This is not an attack on the ketogenic diet. There is plenty of research for and against it. As with all diets, if you find positive outcomes while trying it, keep doing it! The goal is health).
I think the real test would be, what positive benefits _do exist_ when a person changes nothing else but includes a pack (tin? can? box?) of high quality sardines weekly. If nothing, I feel like it kind of just falls into the category of "being specific and intentional about dietary choices brings health benefits", which isn't necessarily new or ground breaking.
I credit this to totally eliminating the omega-6 fats. But this is just me because I’m a genetic freak with hyperlipidemia.
Preworkout is a bit different because it actually is marginally useful for workouts, and I think most actual bodybuilders take some form of it. But it’s super cheap to produce so most of the expense is on marketing. You can make homemade PWO with stimulants and “pump supplements” for super cheap if you buy the raw compounds
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31336935/
In my case taking magnesium helps with insomnia and ADHD symptoms (although it's impossible to tell if the ADHD improved directly due the magnesium, or due to better sleep)
In dosage?
Basically, make sure the magnesium tablet is anything but magnesium oxide - our digestive systems cannot absorb that. Just about any other form (there's like... six of them) will work. Magnesium oxide only helps with constipation, which is also important I guess but a completely different problem.
The YouTube body building demographic is in the same economic class so capitalizing on a product their audience already uses makes perfect sense.
Also, America is one of the few countries with consumer pharmaceutical advertising so marketing supplements is not out of the ordinary.
The sardines are a very high-fat food item that will satiate you and potentially replace a big load of carbohydrates. Which would affect the prediabetes.
On the other hand, there might also be a bit of Spanish cultural bias at work there (Spain is the second-largest consumer of fish after Japan). On the other other hand, it would fit into the mystery of the mediterranean diet.
I just meant that, as is often the case, great discoveries are often made before we really understand them. For example, isn’t this what happened with antibiotics?
<s> Quite. If you read the paper -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-59643-7.pdf -- the word 'sardine' doesn't appear once; 'fish' doesn't either.
The trouble with observational cohort studies is that causality is very hard, if not impossible, to identify. Their main result is based on multivariate logistic regression. I like logistic regression as a technique, and it is very powerful, but if, for example, there is an unmeasured cofounding or causal variable that manifests itself as a linear combination of a number of measured but perhaps more acausal variables, it _will_ confidently give you the wrong result. </s>
He did tell me back in the 90s that processed carbohydrates were really bad for you, so I think he was ahead of the curve!
Surely this applies to any kind of fatty fish?
(If you’re in Europe, try Rödel sardines at least once in your life. They’re completely unavailable in North America.)
Another fantastic recipe is pasta con le sarde. It's a classic Sicilian pasta with sardines, fennel, saffron and nuts.
- red onions sliced and cooked in brown sugar and vinegar (quick pickle), cook until the onion is cooked down.
- Toast up a piece of sourdough
- Spread with mustard
- Add slices of tomato, sardines and red onion pickles on top, add some parsley or basil if you like.
You can also had some capers if you're so inclined.
or drizzle some lemon juice and/or olive oil on top
It's simple result from the fact that least available essential nutrient is the most important for health outcomes.
If you have a rain barrel full of holes, only fixing the lowest hole changes the water level. Fixing all other holes starts to have an effect after you have fixed the lowest one.
Anyone who wants to lose weight and get healthy, this is the food that will make a huge difference.
The only way i can understand this statement it that Rizzolo doubts that anything in the sardines are actually affecting type 2 diabetes. So perhaps the oily taste is suppressing apatite for 'sweet' and decreasing the patients sugar intake (decreasing them cheating on their diet).
Anyway a 152 patients study is not very conclusive, in larger studies there may not be any effect there at all.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
So they significantly changed the macro nutrient ratios of the intervention group, along with the addition of sardines. I would like to see an intervention versus a control group with matched macros, to see if the effect is due to more sardines, or to more fat and protein and fewer carbohydrates.
Aren't canned fish heated to 100C+ and then sealed in an anaerobic environment? What parasite can survive this?
They indicate that it's probably the combination of DHA, vitamin D, and calcium, that is good, so just make a supplement containing this combination?
And if there are missing ingredients to the magic of sardine, just add them too?
I don't see what's impossible, except that they want to support their country's fishing industry.
Is there something in between?
Looking for any specific recommendations for brands, websites etc.
> The ratios of omega−6 to omega−3 fatty acids in some common vegetable oils are: canola 2:1, hemp 2–3:1, soybean 7:1, olive 3–13:1, sunflower, flax 1:3, cottonseed (almost no omega−3), peanut (no omega−3), grapeseed oil and corn oil 46:1.
My understanding is that there's some Omega-6:Omega-3 ratio to shoot for, and most western diets are far more biased toward Omega-6, so adding some Omega-3 (sardines) along with a bunch of Omega-6 and no Omega-3 (sunflower oil) would actually work against that goal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid#Plant_sourc...
There is no healthy food, only food that is healthy for you, and that will be determined by your genetics. Wheat is not healthy for celiac and short chain PUFAs and bad for me.
But too much of any food or nutrient can override genetics as well.
And for those who say “you don’t have to eat the animal to get the health benefits”, please tell that to any Inuit or Saami people. They lived on his diet for generations and it’s affected their genome as a result.
The fact that Inuit and Saami people have been able to survive on primarily meat diets only demonstrates that it's possible to survive on those diets, not that they are ideal in any way or better than any other diet.
When they do not adhere to these diets they have worse outcomes.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1343
So those diets are better FOR THEM, not for everyone. But the same could hold true for you or me. I know it is true for me because I have Saami heritage and the diet cures my hyperlipidemia.
And Taurine, omega 3, calcium, and vitamin D are not the only thing in the fish. There is a synergy that humans could never find with logic.
Perhaps, but there is no science that demonstrates that.
It sounds like you are looking at this research and coming to stronger and more general conclusions than they claim. Again, most of it seems to be of the form "we took some people who were deficient in [some nutrient that is found in fish], gave them fish, and found that they did better than a control group who weren't given fish". Eg, the paper you link to shows that Greenland Inuits are genetically adapted to higher levels of PUFAs in their diet. It doesn't make any claims that those PUFAs have to come from fish. The paper that that one cites as showing that "fish oil supplementation is associated with increased concentrations of plasma insulin-like growth factor–1" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22337227/) does indeed show that association, but it doesn't show that non-fish oil sources of DHA (eg, algae-sourced DHA) don't also produce the same effect because they didn't test that.
That you've found a diet that cures your hyperlipidemia doesn't mean that that's the only diet that could achieve that or even that it's the best one.
Your previous comment:
> And for those who say “you don’t have to eat the animal to get the health benefits”, please tell that to any Inuit or Saami people. They lived on his diet for generations and it’s affected their genome as a result.
Actually sounds like an argument against a meat/fish heavy diet. If eating it for generations results in genetic changes that produce problems like hyperlipidemia, maybe it's not something that we should recommend or promote.
(An aside, as someone who's also of partial Sámi descent (Northern Sweden, represent!), I do want to point out that the Sámi diet was/is not strictly carnivore; it also traditionally includes a lot of flatbreads, berries, and foraged plants like mountain sorrel and wild celery).
I agree with you on the Saami diet, I was generalizing for the Sake of brevity in the comments. I am in no way any kind of carnivore or Paleo freak. I only have general guidelines and loose interpretations about what I should eat.
You’re right though, I have no scientific Evidence for synergy. But it is our arrogance to think we know everything that is in food And how it affects our bodies. This could never be tested scientifically.
But you’ve mistaken my argument as well. The genetic changes of the Inuit make them more susceptible to disease only when they are on a western diet. when they are on their ancestral diet they have no problems. Eating that much seafood makes them dependent on eating seafood. Do you understand that better?
Just like living in Africa change the color of people skin it actually makes them more dependent on getting sunlight. Does a sunlamp replace the sun? Hard to say.