Look at the chart: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf The chart is simply striking. We should all be investigating what are the Asians doing right that all of us should learn from.
Considering that Japanese use an absolutely terrifying amount of plastic for food packaging and aren't landwhales, I'd say the theory from TFA's headline is bunk.
Less scientific, but a couple years ago I decided to transition to a more meat-lite diet and ended up turning to Asian cookbooks to make that happen. Veg entrees are just a novelty to western cuisines and everyone is stunlocked on meat substitutes instead of just doing well with the stuff that grows right out of the ground.
[1] https://www.farmanddairy.com/top-stories/a-brief-history-of-...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/28/ameri...
That is, fed subsidies for corn ultimately made high fructose corn syrup dirt cheap. That price point. made it more appealing to add sweetness to more food products. Or made sweet products (e.g., soda) cheaper.
Lower prices...higher consumption... Hello obesity as a cultural norm.
Asians have as much or more heart disease and type 2 diabetes as any other race which is the outcome that actually matters.
It seems to be a broader problem in medicine. A lot of ranges and typical levels on blood tests or other quantitative tests are calibrated to native populations. With more immigration and genetic mixing the levels don't make a lot of sense.
Does it really make sense that Western diets basically just ignore a whole kingdom of foods? Plants, Animals, Fungi. Those are the three. Why do we eat so few of the latter?
Not that this detracts from the rest of your point at all, but yogurt is fermented by bacteria. There are milk drinks that are fermented by SCOBY though, like kefir.
1- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-lab-rats-are-...
There was a 2010 study that did suggest lab animals were fatter than previous years. However, it was not statistically significant for rats. Only mice. It did not specify a causal factor.
The OP article does make this claim, though it does not cite a source. The only source for this claim that exists is the study I referenced, which you can read here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081766/#!po=35...
But this nonetheless bolsters your larger point, which is that we need to better appreciate how diseases manifest and evolve across different populations, with an eye toward shared but less obvious (i.e. less superficial) similarities and pathways. And studies--or at least their conclusions--which fail to do so should receive greater scrutiny than they currently do.
[1] Notably, East Asians tend to be more prone to intra-abdominal (visceral) fat, which more strongly correlates with type-2 diabetes than BMI. Plenty more East Asians are walking around with diagnosed metabolic syndrome than you would guess simply by how they look. So fat might still be directly involved, just not the obvious, subcutaneous fat which people of Caucasian and African ancestry put on faster and more evenly distributed across the body than some other populations.
Imagine if you looked only to food to explain why the Dutch are taller than the Vietnamese. At best you'd get a small part of the answer.
Isn't Dutch height supposed be due to natural selection (taller men have more children, who are in turn tall), better nutrition (such as more high-quality dairy/cheese), and better sleep (promoting growth)?
Nutrition may be an important part of the equation.
(in other words: "it's not the diet dummy", just like it's not the plastic)
I think it takes living in Europe and also living in rural America to really understand just how different we are across the Atlantic, so broad demographic differences like this aren't something we can neatly attribute to one cause, nor should we aim to.
Genetics would exactly fail this test.
When someone tells you otherwise, it’s a good sign they don’t understand statistics. (Scientists commonly don’t understand statistics, since it’d be harder to get papers published if they did.)
Strictly speaking it’s never true, because the environment could always contain a cure for your genetic disorder and your environment just happens to not have contained one so far in your life.
But personal shame and shame avoidance has been the single greatest tool for my own success.
shame is a fantastic motivator and holy cow is it one of the most caustic things ever to the recipient's psyche.
And shame can make for some pretty powerful leverage.
I’m a hyper critical individual especially when it comes to myself. If I didn’t work to avoid shame, it’s very likely I’d be a lot more miserable and a lot less successful.
Ok, I am not going to say that is incorrect or anything; you know you far better than any internet strangers.
I would say that having a motivation which is based on avoiding negative outcome rather than being drawn towards positive outcome is by definition an unhealthy motivation, and that's my point about shame. It does work, it brings success, it brings money, and so on, and deep down, every last person motivated primarily by aversion to negative outcome is going to be very unhappy in their core. Those people know that just a small number of honest mistakes will bring failure and those feelings of shame, even if the source of the shame is completely internal and the mistakes that got them there trivial.
These people are not happy. Not really; they are only going in the correct direction because the bad direction is artificially acutely punitive, far more than it would be on its own.
Western culture does not recognize this very well at all; we are a results-driven society. In public, we openly scorn parents shovel shame onto their children, and the parents learn (via shame from the public) that they should simply do this privately, rather than openly. Shame begets shame.
Fear of failure should never be a stronger motivator than the desire to succeed.
this isn't a door which can be pushed from one side or pulled from the other to achieve the same result. motivation and the reasons you are doing something matter. a lot.
imagine you are a slave working a field so you can eat, vs a farmer working a field so you can eat. do you really believe there is no difference? the difference is effectively infinite.
I was so ashamed of them growing up that I was motivated to never allow myself to become that way.
shame is something put upon you, and not a decision you make on your own.
breaking the cycle you were in is no small feat; please do not misunderstand. what you did was difficult. I would not say that you were shamed into doing it, by what you've said.
They’re also getting strangely more common in porn, maybe because their society is getting so old.