Mediterranean diet may lower dementia risk by a quarter, study suggests
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It is just my very biased opinion but Brits' diet seems to be one of the causes of why so many Britons dying sooner than expected [0]. The average Londoner eats rather poorly. So many greasy sandwiches and crisps, even their salads have to be all greased up in ways that would make my grandmother cry. Fish and seafood are seen as a "chic experience". Copious amounts of beer. And then all the snacks, munching on stuff the entire day (it says "healthy" in the package so it's good right?). Are we cows to be ruminating all day long? They're not even good snacks like some nuts or whatever. Massive breakfast, then a mid morning break for "coffee" (it's just milk and sugar), then lunch (sandwiches or salads filled with sauces), then midafternoon snack then several pints of lager after work and a dinner to finish the day. It's a lot of calories, and lot of bad nutrients. No wonder so many people are obese, if you don't have a very active lifestyle it's easy to get really fat.
By no means I'm saying my country is perfect, I see there people moving further and further away from what our ancestors usually ate and it shows on obesity rate is increasing, kids are getting more diabetes diagnosis and so on. But here in the UK it's just too much, a walk through Tesco makes me cringe.
I have been working pretty hard to improve my diet and now mostly eat vegetables and meat. Very little processed food, and we prep our food daily.
The last time I was there for some reason I started looking at what everyone else had in their cart. 90% of people just had straight garbage. A lot of snacks, processed foods, almost no vegetables. I never really paid attention to it.
Maybe it is caused by two parents working and just not having the energy to prep food? Social media and shorts stealing free time? Or poor education?
I outsource mine to someone who does it for a living, it costs more than the majority of people can afford. The idea that you can work a full time job, have time to cook, clean and eat and also have enough money to buy ingredients that aren't sugar by another name is laughable.
My wife and I both work full time and have a toddler. You can cook soup, prep ingredients before hand, use a slow cooker. You can meal prep. You can cook more, so there is left overs, I could go on and on. If there is a will, it is easy to eat mostly home cooked meals.
No. Full stop.
Cooking steak and eating it with fresh veggies is one of the fastest meals you can imagine to prep. It probably feels more expensive to people, but when you actually compare the nutrient and protein profile, the steak+veggies will be a lot closer in price compared to carbohydrate junk food.
> The idea that you can work a full time job, have time to cook, clean and eat and also have enough money to buy ingredients that aren't sugar by another name is laughable.
I do this and also have time to play videogames and spend hours hiking with my dog (also cooking for my dog sometimes). It's hard, but not impossible. But then so are most things worth doing in life.
Whatever they could find so not to starve.
The idea that people in the past had a diet they could keep to is completely laughable the second you start reading the accounts of the number of famines _in the 19th century_. This gets progressively worse the further back you go.
People today seriously underestimate how common famines were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines?useskin=vector
If you filter by country until the 20th century you had a famine roughly every 5 years.
A lot of people will eat "meal deal" for launch and that "meal" often means a pack of crisps and a soda. The better ones are usually a greasy sandwich or salad and bowl of fruits.
Before getting my first white collar job in the UK, I worked for a few months as a waiter in 5 star hotels and upscale restaurants and I actually had much better food than the average white collar worker since being fed a proper food at job is part of the deal. I got in shape in those 3 months(good food + no sitting at work), only to ruin it once re-joined the laptop class.
The meal deal is a tragedy, the bottom and the top of the pay-grade eats much better at work.
Oh, also being poor or rich helps with the food at home too. Cheap neighbourhoods with lots of immigrants have excellent street markets with good quality vegetables and immigrant shops directly importing good quality Mediterranean stuff like olives and cheese. The more well off neighbourhoods have all that too but its "gourmet" or "speciality", the neighbourhoods in the middle tend to have only Tesco/Sainsbury's/M&S and the vegetables sold here tastes dull and everything is packaged for longevity of the product.
Reduction or even prevention of systemic/chronic inflammation should be the prime goal of any diet and all the rest ((mental) health, weight, ...) will follow automatically. I guess a lot of research is still needed but a mediterranean diet is at least a small step in the right direction.
I would note that nobody is forcing anyone to eat like this. Perhaps the root problem is one of self-control and health awareness. Also see: smoking.
The UK is a food disaster, and is the reason so many people here are overweight and obese (64% of adults) and die early.
The meal deal is the staple of almost any office workers lunch, and easily packs around 1000 calories in the form of a sandwich (400-600), pack of crisps / chocolate bar (300) and drink (up to 200).
Anecdotally, from what I experience in my office, home-made lunches aren't much better. As you stated, it's always washed down with a pack of crisps and soda (or multiple). When people do cook, it falls under the British triumvirate of home cooking:-
- Spag' bol' (pasta, beef mince and sauce) - Stir fry - Pasta bake (pasta with sauce and cheese and things thrown on top)
Where I live, and when I go to the gym, I see Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats delivering constantly. All high fat, high calorie, salty and oily fast food (eg. McDonalds) or standalone takeaway joints (arguably worse). There's a huge trend in my city (Leeds) for people to eat lunch out, which is not only expensive, but calorie expensive too.
Supermarkets are 80% junk food. Do we really need 100 types of biscuits and cakes? Take a glance at the basket/trolley of the people around you, and there's typically a lot of crap in there.
You also tend to see a lot of fat kids (22% age 4-5, 37% age 10-11) everywhere. High school kids flood the supermarkets after school every day, eating huge packs of crisps and cakes (designed for multiple people and portions), and university students (from what I remember at uni) seem over-reliant on takeaways and ready meals.
I haven't looked it up, but I'd wager the average British energy intake is around 3000 calories, despite most people living completely sedentary lifestyles.
I've always received weird responses to eating fish (unless it's battered and served with chips, in which case it's a national delicacy), and people seem to make out as if it's something fancy, despite the fact we live on an island.
This, coupled with lack of exercise, is a ticking time bomb for our country. Everybody is just slowly killing themselves with various beige-coloured food.
People in the southern Europe also like to gather and talk a lot, so I suspect that might help too (the article mentions it in the final paragraph).
So you live in a beautiful country, you eat well, you interact a lot with your friends and neighbours; you don't need much else.
I would also add garlic to your grandfathers' list.
It's not necessarily the modern diet of mediterranean countries, but it is inspired by the local traditional cousine.
Yep, they eat the same shit as everybody else does these days: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-adults-who-are-o...
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alzheimer...
Edit: I did look it up. It seems that this is indeed the case.
https://www.healthline.com/health/dementia/can-you-die-from-...
but I do not have a truly reliable source.
Or Singapore being right at the very bottom, 40 times less that Malaysia, and 20 times less than Japan.
It feels like this might be a table of countries that do and do not often include dementia as a cause of death.
That would probably be the strongest incidence gradient signal in medical history. Dementia research would be laser-focussed on the Albania-North Macedonia-Bulgaria axis and the Singapore-Malaysia axis as they'd be near-ideal comparative populations.
If the data isn't compatible, the table doesn't mean much at all, since it has merged reporting bias with the actual incidence rates.
(2) there isn't really a conclusion to be drawn from this map. Correlations are all over the place. Some western countries are high, but others are low. African countries are mostly high (because green is second highest for some reason). This map also does not correlate with age. I'm sure countries with a longer average lifespan have higher rates of Alzheimers/Dementia deaths. E.g. Russia has a lower average lifespan and a low rate of Alzheimers/Dementia deaths. That may be correlated.
Clearly much lower than
UK, US, Finland.
That is enough for me.
Yes, I do like some pork grease or beef but that's if I'm planning on drinking some heavy liquors.
TIL I eat a Mediterranean diet, by coincidence. I just do this because it is the stuff I like though.
I see what you mean, for example for tomatoes as well, but it's a compromise, cooking destroys other valuable things
The mushrooms you posted definitely are absorbed better in the body by cooking them. All mushrooms have chitin in the cell wall that needs to break down by cooking to digest.
I also came to be on a high fiber diet for a while, as you describe, but I got some stomach issues from it and had to adjust it.
Anything that is not the above, many variations low carb high fat or carnivore - will make your risks of modern chronic diseases (aka, hyperinsulinemia, diabetes, chronic inflammation, dislipidemia) go down dramatically. Especially if you are strict about your feast and fast cycles.
Humans are not omnivores we are obligate carnivores with a beneficial tolerance for a tiny number of plants. Plants have anti-nutrients that many are sensitive to.
Now bring on the downvotes I know they're coming.
Even my dad randomly started railing against seed oils once the nonsense started popping up on his youtube recommendations.
Fortunately, it's pretty easy to redpill yourself by looking at outcome data: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
I think you're making a logical flaw in saying that "excess {blah} is bad, therefore any {blah} is bad" which is untrue.
Regarding your second point - our dental structure is roughly the same as the great apes (who are NOT obligate carnivores), but with less emphasis on canine teeth (which are used for display in the apes) - so when did we develop the carnivore teeth then develop teeth that match our fellow great apes? Our dental structure is not suited for a carnivorous lifestyle, but somehow the rest of our digestive track is?
Edit: Sorry, should specify, I meant "I am not an OBLIGATE carnivore". I still eat meat.
100% agree.
There's clearly nutrients that have better sources in meat and can be vital - if one suffers from heavy menstruation sometimes the only solution to prevent anemia is heme iron, which is found in animal flesh.
> "A clean tooth never decays. Brush your teeth after every meal, and visit your dentist twice a year. These slogans carry the faith of our people. It is said and believed that we have the best dentists in the world, that we have more tooth brushes, and use them more, than any other people. Many agencies, from kindergarten to university, from town council to and through the governments of city, state, and nation, strive for the spread of dental knowledge and the enforcement of its discipline... During the same time the ether was filled and the magazine pages were crowded with advertising which told that mouth chemistry is altered by a paste, a powder, or a gargle so as to prevent decay; that a special kind of toothbrush reaches all the crevices; that a particular brand of fruit, milk, or bread is rich in elements for tooth health. There were toothbrush drills in the schools. Mothers throughout the land were scolding, coaxing, and bribing to get children to use the preparations, eat the foods, and follow the rules that were said to guarantee perfect oral hygiene. There was endless repetition of the slogan: A clean tooth never decays. Meantime there appeared a statement from Dr. Adelbert Fernald, Curator of the Museum of the Dental School, Harvard University, that he had been collecting mouth casts of living North Americans of all racial derivations from blond to black, from the most northerly Eskimos through Canada and the States south to Yucatan. The best teeth and the healthiest mouths were found among people who never drank milk since they ceased to be suckling babes and who never in their lives tasted or tested any of the other things which we usually recommend for sound teeth. These people, Eskimos not as yet influenced by white men, never used tooth paste, tooth powder, toothbrushes, mouth wash, or gargle. They never took any pains to cleanse their teeth or mouths. They did not visit their dentists twice a year or even once in a lifetime. Their food was exclusively meat. Meat, be it noted, is not mentioned as good for the teeth in the advertisement sponsored by the Commissioner of Health of the City of New York. Teeth superior on the average to those of the presidents of our largest tooth paste companies are found in the world today, and have existed during past ages, among people who violate every precept of current dentifrice advertising."
But I'm not just talking about whether we have cavities or not. I'm talking tooth structure itself. Humans have teeth and digestive tracks that are built to consume plants alongside meat. There are no other apes that are obligate carnivores and our teeth haven't (substantially) changed since before we mastered fire.
And yet we have a unending amount of evidence that consuming plants results in better health outcomes...
Re: cows. They have a rumen. And they are aided by bacteria to convert the plant matter into usable energy.
And yes, cows are specifically adapted to consume plants and their guts are noisy. I'm using this as an example that just because you sensed a quieting in your intestines it doesn't mean it's positive. I'm admitting I don't know what it means and provided an example where a loud gut is indicative of adaptation, but you seem to be under the impression a quiet gut is a good thing. If you're using fasting as the comparison that seems to indicate you aren't digesting much at all, and I don't know how that's positive if your intestines are full.
Also, they have an attitude that indicates they are absolutely certain that they are correct.
They'll probably tell me next that they enjoy having diabetes.
Anyone can try this diet for 90 days and transform their health for the better (even if they think they are already in top shape), yet almost everyone has a massive mental block and can't even conceive of trying it. It's a bizarre situation.
But keep farting and living with joint pain for all I care.
The guy whose comment this is in response to is arguing that he should fart because cows fart without considering the fact that he is not a cow. It is not worth my time to engage any further, but I will leave this comment here in case there are some genuinely curious onlookers.
Biggest diet dogma red flag. It sounds like you might be spending too much time in an echo chamber.
inb4 << a bunch of anecdotes >>
So it's worse than stereotypical veganism?
I get that some people think Trump won the 2020 election and some people think he lost the 2020 election, and so faux-sophisticates will just throw up their hands and say “who knows who is right?”, but I am of the camp that believes in reason and evidence.
If you think the vegans have the better argument then you are free to eat that way and further the destruction of the planet while rationalizing away your ill health, of course. Bummer for you, but it’s a free country.
May not.
No one knows.
But let's pretend this is a finding and we haven't just wasted our time.