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This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so-called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by American nutritionists, who can’t fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and blithely eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than we do on our elaborately engineered low-fat diets.
Walkability of cities, living wages, mandatory holiday time, and general cultural disdain of American fast food. Paris is nothing like even New York or London
Early in the twentieth century, an intrepid group of doctors and medical workers stationed overseas observed that wherever in the world people gave up their traditional way of eating and adopted the Western diet, there soon followed a predictable series of Western diseases, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. They called these the Western diseases and, though the precise causal mechanisms were (and remain) uncertain, these observers had little doubt these chronic diseases shared a common etiology: the Western diet.
Still dont know why but still do know that this happens every single time and that returns to traditional diets reverse most if not all of the impacts
A few years ago, Rozin presented a group of Americans with the following scenario: “Assume you are alone on a desert island for one year and you can have water and one other food. Pick the food that you think would be best for your health.” The choices were corn, alfalfa sprouts, hot dogs, spinach, peaches, bananas, and milk chocolate. The most popular choice was bananas (42 percent), followed by spinach (27 percent), corn (12 percent), alfalfa sprouts (7 percent), peaches (5 percent), hot dogs (4 percent), and milk chocolate (3 percent). Only 7 percent of the participants chose one of the two
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Thank you years of military nutrition and molecular biology classes for giving me the tools to answer this question correctly
In the summer of 1982, a group of ten middle-aged, overweight, and diabetic Aborigines living in settlements near the town of Derby, Western Australia, agreed to participate in an experiment to see if temporarily reversing the process of westernization they had undergone might also reverse their health problems.
Not everyone, though, bought into the idea that chronic disease was a by-product of Western lifestyles and, in particular, that the industrialization of our food was taking a toll on our health. One objection to the theory was genetic: Different races were apt to be susceptible to different diseases went the argument; white people were disposed to heart attacks, brown people to things like leprosy.
(And the tiny amount of B12 we need is not too hard to come by; it’s found in all animal foods and is produced by bacteria, so you obtain B12 from eating dirty or decaying or fermented produce.)
1: tell that to my pernicious anemia
2: the second part about fermented foods has been found false in practice as the b12 isnt bio-available. have a slice of quality cheese every now and then