Some diet questions - LCHF, Paleo, Tim Noakes etc

[ian]

I think the standard joke for Americans in Japan is the 'is this the starter?' American portion sizes have gone beyond parody. There's something deeply troubling about seeing someone slurping a 32 oz soft drink between mouthfuls of half-pound burger. That's not a drink, it's a hot tub. But it becomes normal. Even our portion sizes are large and you don't really realise it until you travel outside Europe and North America.

[mattc]

... and I've failed more than once before.


 But I'll still hold to the principle of consuming less that I require

Despite the failures?

[mattc]

The "traditional" Japanese diet is, or rather was, much lower in sugar and other high GI carbohydrates than American and most European diets. Much lower. It's a low glycaemic load diet, rich in Omega-3 (fish oils) and almost devoid of Omega-6 fats (vegetable oils).

It's changing now. They're adopting a more American style diet - and "enjoying" a steady rise in T2DM and obesity as a result, so I guess we'll see the average life expectancy following suit.

There doesn't seem to be any genetic advantage either - American Japanese in the Framingham Heart Study were found to be every bit as likely to have Western lifestyle diseases, as everyone else.

This shows how complex diet/lifestyle is. Looking at one culture will totally fail to "prove" what is healthy*. There are too many variables.

The japanese are eating much less sugar than UK/US, more Omega-3-oils, getting more exercise, eating far less bread/potatoes, red meat ...
How on earth does anyone jump from this to any conclusions about HFLC diets???

Easily - the healthiest  (by a crude but unarguable measure) large population on this planet eats a high carbohydrate (very heavy on refined grain, moderate sugar) & relatively (compared to other rich, high life-expectancy populations) low fat diet*. Biggest experimental result in existence.

Is it?
How many japanes subjects in your "experiment"?\

How does that compare with the populations of US + wealthier Europe, who are consistently getting fatter as carb-rich food has become more affordable?

given all the other variables (and the lack of almost everything that a "good" experiment needs!), these are all pretty crap. Of course they are all interesting in guiding us towards harder research. For the moment I'm most convinced by the data on growing waistlines in the west.(mainly because the subjects are eating food very close to my own diet). YMMV.

[rafletcher]

... and I've failed more than once before.


 But I'll still hold to the principle of consuming less that I require

Despite the failures?

Absolutely - the failures were of my own doing - not making the changes permanent, using excuses such a stress etc. No-one said it was easy, least of all me. Just because I know how it works doesn't mean I can do it 

[mattc]

... and I've failed more than once before.


 But I'll still hold to the principle of consuming less that I require

Despite the failures?

Absolutely - the failures were of my own doing - not making the changes permanent, using excuses such a stress etc. No-one said it was easy, least of all me. Just because I know how it works doesn't mean I can do it 

Fair enough - but surely an "approach"* that almost everyone CAN stick to would be better?

Imagine your GP giving you a pain-killer:
"This stuff is great., but a really hard shape to swallow. Only 10% of patients manage it.
Good luck, give it your best shot.

Next patient please!"


*Mustnt call it a diet,
Mustnt call it a diet,
Mustnt call it a diet,
Mustnt call it a diet,
Mustnt call it a diet,
...

[Cudzoziemiec]

I very much doubt there is an approach that almost everyone can stick to. There are lots of different approaches that different people can stick to.

[ian]

I still think you're missing the point. The world is full of magic diets. They appeal to science, to evolution, to all manner of things, and they promise an escape from the drudgery of eating less. They may even occasionally work but unlikely due to the magic property of any particular item, more likely through the fact that fewer calories are consumed. Some of us have reservations about the long term effects of diets that significantly impact what we've become adapted to eat, when we promote the near absence of carbohydrates, or high levels of fats. There's little to no scientific evidence that any of these are either sensible or beneficial approaches to nutritional health. There are vast amounts of science about the benefits eating a balanced dietary intervention.

People are larger because calories are cheaper and we're eating more of them, lots more of them. That might suggest the solution is eating fewer of of them. Focusing on magic diets makes us miss the obvious.

Adherence to diets is an interesting question. My personal opinion is that when you label something a 'diet' you're often setting yourself up for an eventual failure. It's not a one-off intervention like a course of antibiotics. Now possibly something like paleo might work, but I dunno, a lifetime with carbs doesn't appeal to me, or I suspect many people. To my mind, a sensible approach to a balanced diet lets you keep all the things you like (though perhaps in smaller amounts than you'd like them). But if you want to eat more, exercise more. I do a lot of client lunches and dinners and I offset them with an extra hour in the gym or pool. I have a quid pro quo relationship between food and exercise, there's a little bit of calculus that happens when I peruse a menu and contemplate that tarte tatin. To my mind, regular exercise does a lot more than burn calories, it raises your metabolism, but also changes your attitude to food and as such is an underestimated component of any diet.

The irony is despite reading many, many pages about palao-type diets is that they skip the key element: hunger. I suspect your average cave-person spent a lot of time being hungry. Like most humans throughout history, and many of them today. There's an interesting balanced critique of the paleo diet here – one that kicked off a fairly nasty counter campaign by paleo-advocates.

And no, before I'm accused of it again, I don't think losing weight is simple or easy, or that fat people are greedy or lazy. But I do think it doesn't benefit us to blame someone or something else. I was fat because I ate too much. Yes, there were reasons behind that and I can make excuses but you can't get thin on a diet of excuses. Of course, when I explain to people the decisions I made and how much weight I lost, I often get the 'oh it was easy for you' like I'm blessed with some special power. Which annoys the fuck out of me, because it wasn't like I'd misplaced just a few pounds.

[Chris S]

I think we're all really close to agreeing on this  .

Call it a "fad" if you like, but LCHF is much less unbalanced than you might think. The basics are obvious - no sugar, no grains. Er... that's it.

My meals look very much like other folk's meals - 'cept for the potatoes/pasta/chips/rice. I've just had tea, and I had steamed salmon with salad and a little cheese. Obviously, that's how we lose weight on it - duh!, we have the same fat and protein as everyone else, we just don't have the carbs - so our macros look out of whack, but we run at a calorie deficit. If you don't want to lose weight, you eat a bit more, or you eat more fat - which you probably expel in poo, wee or breath (ketones).

A tea of salmon, salad and a little cheese can hardly be considered "controversial", and yet the macros are 75% fat, 20% protein and 5% carbs.

A tea of roasted chicken thighs with broccoli and cauliflower is about the same - a bit more fat, a little less protein.

There's very little in potatoes/pasta/chips or rice that add to this, other than just calories.

[SteveC]

I think there is something about 'modern' pre-prepared food which really doesn't help with the 'feeling satisfied' part of controlling what you eat.
An example (which I may have used before, in which case sorry for boring you)...
MrsC and I used to have pizza every Friday evening. I would do the Tesco run on the way home from work so something nice, quick and easy was in order, before settling down for a relaxing evening.
I make bread. I love making bread. I make just about all the bread we eat. I make a pretty good pizza when I put my mind to it. But, that takes time. However, it still annoyed me that the only bread based food we eat regularly which I didn't make were these pizzas. We used to get two of them, different flavours, the deep pan thick crust types. Half of each each.
Then I discovered in a Jamie Oliver book that if you part bake a pizza base, you can freeze them and use them from frozen. Problem solved.
First week we do this, I make up two pizzas, roughly the same size as the Tesco ones. We get half way through or there about and MrsC asks if we'd like pizza for lunch on the Saturday. We were both stuffed.
So the next week, we share one of these pizzas. Still too much.
We now make six bases from the recipe which was meant to be for four, and have half a pizza each. So roughly a third of the amount we were having before. It looks much smaller on the plate than the shop-bought ones, but it is satisfying. We don't end up wanting crisps later in the evening which used to regularly happen before.
Sometime later we did Weight Watchers so changed the toppings to include far less cheese (30g of Parmesan between us), but they still work on the 'I've had enough to eat' test.

I don't know what it is about that sort of pre-preared food, but it does not help people to keep control.
We all lead busy lives. Sometimes the option for a quick, cheap ready meal is 'sensible' on many levels; we still do have 'shop' pizzas on occasion. But there is a consequence.

[hellymedic]

My theory about modern food is that it contains a very calorie-dense mix of sugar + fat + starch, which can deliver megacalories before the consumer has any notion of how much they have eaten.
Drinking sugar is bad IMO.

The British diet in the 50s included few battered, deep-fried foods smothered with ketchup, sweet & sour sauce syrup.

[Bledlow]

The "traditional" Japanese diet is, or rather was, much lower in sugar and other high GI carbohydrates than American and most European diets. Much lower. It's a low glycaemic load diet, rich in Omega-3 (fish oils) and almost devoid of Omega-6 fats (vegetable oils).

It's changing now. They're adopting a more American style diet - and "enjoying" a steady rise in T2DM and obesity as a result, so I guess we'll see the average life expectancy following suit.

There doesn't seem to be any genetic advantage either - American Japanese in the Framingham Heart Study were found to be every bit as likely to have Western lifestyle diseases, as everyone else.

This shows how complex diet/lifestyle is. Looking at one culture will totally fail to "prove" what is healthy*. There are too many variables.

The japanese are eating much less sugar than UK/US, more Omega-3-oils, getting more exercise, eating far less bread/potatoes, red meat ...
How on earth does anyone jump from this to any conclusions about HFLC diets???

Easily - the healthiest  (by a crude but unarguable measure) large population on this planet eats a high carbohydrate (very heavy on refined grain, moderate sugar) & relatively (compared to other rich, high life-expectancy populations) low fat diet*. Biggest experimental result in existence.

Is it?
How many japanes subjects in your "experiment"?\

How does that compare with the populations of US + wealthier Europe, who are consistently getting fatter as carb-rich food has become more affordable?

given all the other variables (and the lack of almost everything that a "good" experiment needs!), these are all pretty crap. Of course they are all interesting in guiding us towards harder research. For the moment I'm most convinced by the data on growing waistlines in the west.(mainly because the subjects are eating food very close to my own diet). YMMV.

About 125 million Japanese, who for more than the lifetime of the average living Japanese have had incomes on a par with Western Europe (& higher than the W. European average for some of that), & higher life expectancy. Note that overall, life expectancy by country is positively correlated with income. Japan has long stood out because its life expectancy has been higher than one would expect for its income, just as the USA has been rather worse than one would expect from its income. Japan has also spent a slightly smaller share of income on health care than usual for its income level (proportion tends to rise with income), while the USA spends more.

There aren't just those Japanese in this experiment, though. There are huge numbers of others, e,g, the aforementioned USAians - who eat more fat, much more meat, & a lot more calories, than the population of Japan. I'm not sure who eats more refined grain, but since in Japan they eat a lot less of some other carbohydrates (e.g. potatoes, sugar) than in W. Europe or the USA, I'd say there's a good chance they eat more refined grains.

[simonp]

potatoes/pasta/chips/rice

I regularly eat all but one of those. Can you guess which? Hellymedic's post contains a clue.

The Tukisenta diet was studied and found to be 94%-3%-4%. That's carb-fat-protein. Extremely unbalanced and doesn't sound healthy yet they had far better glucose tolerance at all ages than Americans of the era (1965 glucose tolerance data). We're talking way before the obesity epidemic.

Why did the Tukisenta do better on an extremely high carb diet (sweet potatoes mostly) than Americans on a much more macronutrient balanced diet. My best guess is it's probably a lack of added sugar, and fried foods. But you can also bet they were more active.

If you look at the American diet what do you think the no.1 energy source is? Answer: cake. (Technically 'grain based desserts').

[hellymedic]

The BBC has just published this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31763205

I have seldom seen anything so poor and am amazed they gave it shelf web space.

[Chinaski]

Interesting thread.

A few comments first
* I eat HFLC, as a curious/skeptical experiment at first, but 18 months later still eat that way.
* Is HFLC ideal for everyone? Certainly not.

From a purely observational point of view, HFLC "movement" was probably inevitable. After 30/40 years of  advice low fat, at a population level in western world we are in dire straits. Is this because low fat is necessarily bad, I don't think so.

However the low fat diet as typically, with an avoidance of good protein sources(eggs meat etcc), essential fatty acids and micro nurtients, and an over reliance on processed junk with awful fat profile(trans fats, excessive omega 3), excess sugar is the route of the cause.

You can certainly have a healthy diet with 50/60% carbs but would need to be smart and pick low GL carbs with high nutrient density. Get adequate protein for your activity level and essential fats and Bob's your uncle. That is not my experience of what we in the Western world do; just have a look at your fellow customers trolley on next visit to supermarket.

In a diet, which doesn't hit it's micro nutrients requirements(irrespective of macro breakdown) on a regular basis through poor food choices, what is the body's likely reaction? Eat more probably, which for most part won't be organ meat with leavy greens, potatoes and a drizle of fish oil, but some junk.

Use the Japanese as a reason for eating high carb or Inuits for high fat is nonsense; all those populations observation prove is that we are an adaptable species in terms of fueling ourselves; we probably would be here otherwise.

@Ian has commented( in the middle of very interesting/authoritative posts) that fasting is stressful on the body. If you asked me 18 months ago I'd be all agreement but my experience of repeated intermittent fasting has been the opposite. For example today I got up at 5, started 200km audax spin at 7. Had an apple at 75km, 100g of nuts at 105km and a small piece of chocolate at 175km. 200km with ride with 2200m of climbing was covered at 26.5km/h without issue, hunger or any misery.
I normally get to 1pm most days before I feel hungry, with excellent energy/mood etc. If I'm hungry I eat; really simple.

The need to so regularly eat is in my experience a very western lifestyle thing. Sedentary people with 100,000 cals of fat on board constantly needing to fuel is indicative of skewed energy retrieval. Irrespective of macro breakdown adapt your body to access fat more probably would be a good idea for most.

[Bledlow]

...
Use the Japanese as a reason for eating high carb ... is nonsense

Indeed. Can you point to anyone doing it? Note that someone pointing out that they provide an example of how humans can thrive on a high carb, low(ish) fat diet is not the same.

... all those populations observation prove is that we are an adaptable species in terms of fueling ourselves; we probably would be here otherwise.

Absolutely right. That's why I get pissed off by arguments in favour of X or Y narrowly defined diet (often with an inappropriate name, such as 'paleo' (sic)) as The Answer.

[mattc]

[About 125 million Japanese,

But that is _considerably_ smaller than the populations of USA and Western Europe who are getting fatter on grains (and other cheap carbs).
So you really cannot justify this as:
" Biggest experimental result in existence."

(Before we get onto all the other bad science factors in your "experiment")

[ian]

I don't think fasting, in the context of being hungry during the day, is a bad thing. I'm not convinced by the current vogue for 5:2 type diets with prolonged periods of fasting. I'm hitting them with the fad stick.

I still am not persuaded that the composition of a diet is as important as the calorie load, which in most Western-style diets is too much. Even the guidelines for 2000 kcal / 2500 kcal (female / male) are generous (and add another 200 kcal if you're American), we know humans can be healthy and well nourished on far less. Dietary composition, however – and for obvious reasons – becomes more important on lower calorie diets.

What I do think is stressful about paleo and HFLC type diets is the protein and fat load. It's a lot more than we're adapted to deal with – even obligate carnivores adapted to such diets suffer common hepatic and renal problems in later life. We don't know what happens to humans who follow such diets for long periods. We are, on the other hand, pretty sure about the outcomes for balanced diets.

My other issue with such diets is that they're decadent. Decadent in the sense that only few people can afford to follow them. Carbohydrate feeds the world and it's a luxury to be able discard them and get energy from proteins and fats. That's not a value judgement, I'm a middle-class Waitrose shopper who eats a lot of fruit and veg, but I can afford to do so. Yes, I could do it for far less if there was a greengrocer or market, but like many people, it's pretty much the supermarket or the supermarket these days.

My personal theory is the we need to learn to tolerate hunger. We're really the first generation with food on tap. Instant calories and gratification. We don't ever have to be hungry. I live on a school route, twice a day a tide of them flows by my house, and the jetsam of junk food wrappers and soft drink cans left in their wake is quite awesome. I see kids snuffling their first packet of crisps at 8.45am. And those are the 'healthy' kids walking to school (and I live on a very steep hill, so they do get one daily workout). But the ubiquity of calories is everywhere, I was at the sports centre earlier, there's a bank of vending machines with more sugary drinks, chocolate bars, and crisps. We have them at work. And if you step outside, the streets are full of shops and restaurants. Food isn't difficult. There's no effort involved. Look around, everyone is eating. I sit in the office and it's a chorus of mastication.

And, of course, we're becoming increasingly sedentary. Not many people want to exercise and, well, gym memberships aren't cheap. Even activities like jogging and cycling and pretty much the preserve of the middle classes. More and more calories and fewer and fewer ways of burning them. I don't think that'll change until we re-establish a relationship with what we eat and drink, learn again to be hungry and to anticipate food. I'm not optimistic about this, turning down gratification isn't ever popular, but unless we start to do something the costs will be epic. There's really very little effort to engage with the problem, we have things like 'walk to school once a week'. That's it, once a week. What a dearth of aspiration. Which pretty much sums up our approach to obesity.

[mattc]

What I do think is stressful about paleo and HFLC type diets is the protein and fat load. It's a lot more than we're adapted to deal with – even obligate carnivores adapted to such diets suffer common hepatic and renal problems in later life. We don't know what happens to humans who follow such diets for long periods. We are, on the other hand, pretty sure about the outcomes for balanced diets.

Is that true? I think there's long-term data for the eskimo-types.[I cant say I've read into it much - I'm just mentioning its existence as a possible discussion topic. Mkay? ]

And, of course, we're becoming increasingly sedentary. Not many people want to exercise and, well, gym memberships aren't cheap. Even activities like jogging and cycling and pretty much the preserve of the middle classes. More and more calories and fewer and fewer ways of burning them. I don't think that'll change until we re-establish a relationship with what we eat and drink, learn again to be hungry and to anticipate food. I'm not optimistic about this, turning down gratification isn't ever popular, but unless we start to do something the costs will be epic. There's really very little effort to engage with the problem, we have things like 'walk to school once a week'. That's it, once a week. What a dearth of aspiration. Which pretty much sums up our approach to obesity.

Amen brother.

I think the rise of cheap motoring (despite the War On The Motorist) is the single biggest factor. Then we built all our infrastructure to depend on it.

If you have a solution, I'll back it - you seem to have answer for everything else

[campagman]

We don't know what happens to humans who follow such diets for long periods.

But the main point of Paleo is to get back (as closely as we can with modern food choices) to the diet we ate before we started farming ie, several millions of years.

[ian]

We don't know what happens to humans who follow such diets for long periods.

But the main point of Paleo is to get back (as closely as we can with modern food choices) to the diet we ate before we started farming ie, several millions of years.

But why would we do that? No one has unearthed a palaeolithic body and found it to be especially healthy, malnutrition was endemic and life was often short, brutal and desperate. That's the lot of most hunter and gatherer societies. It's the same story for modern day hunter gatherers. Of course, there's often a chronic lack of calories in such diets coupled with high activity threshold (animals generally don't give up that protein and fat voluntarily). There really is no evidence that such a diet was healthy (and there is plenty that it isn't). And of course, modern day interpretations of palaeolithic diets are unlikely to be representative and of course they generally omit the one thing such diets did have in common: a significant deficit of calories. Human civilisation as we know it is based on agriculture, and in a good part, carbohydrates.

The Inuit (and they're a very broad grouping) are an interesting dietary story. Things have gone to pot recently, and perhaps that's very illustrative of socio-economic, political and other issues, with a preponderance of junk food and alcohol. A traditional Inuit diet is certainly very low in carbohydrate and has high levels of fat and protein (fat is important, protein is toxic at high levels). However, there's quite a few studies indicating they don't get their carbs from gluconeogenesis nor are they in a ketotic state, but they're very well adapted to using glycogen from meat as a carbohydrate source. I can't find anything to say that such diets are especially healthy (certainly they don't live as long as flabby Americans) and while there's some data on better cardiovascular outcomes, there's counter for strokes and other events. And I think most dietary faddists would draw the line at drinking fresh seal's blood.

[hellymedic]

When life was 'nasty, short and brutish'...

Farming enabled the establishment of towns and literacy, so the accumulated wisdom of one generation could be passed on to subsequent.

[sojournermike]

Thank you all for your contributions. I'm enjoying reading everyone's view although the line between faad diet and scientifically grounded diet will, I suspect, remain unclear. In part this is a result of the historic (mis)information on the 'prudent diet' and the impact of ever increasing levels of processed food and the need to maintain/grow sales amongst the producers. I could head into a review of free market economics and the 'benefits' for wider society here, but that belongs elsewhere.

Some summary thoughts at this stage, but please keep the discussion going - my original questions were open and not focused on weight loss, so much as a diet being what we eat for life (not faddish):

- In the west we eat too much/indulge ourselves in general

- We eat too much refined/processed food with far too much sugar and refined carbs.

- We don't exercise enough - I think a baseline is an hour a day of moderate - a bit sweaty and out of breath - or a little it less if it's properly hard. Too much exercise, aka extreme endurance exercise, has negative impact compared to the hour a day baseline. Not sure about Audax, probably depends how hard you ride. As a society and individuals, we are full of excuses about how little exercise we 'nned' to do.

- I'm not convinced that absolute diet breakdown is that important, not least because humans have been and remain very adaptable omnivores. I strongly suspect that at all periods of human history, diets have depended on time and place and what you could get (yes hunder is normal fro time to time). However, in our culture it is easy to gorge on carb based sweet things and eat so much carb that our bodies get over burdened with the processing load leading to metabolic syndrome, and to eat too much of everything else too. The much vaunted ability of carbs to block fat useage through insulin response is clearly true in this circumstance.

- I also think that human adaptabiity should allow us to fuel with either fat or carb if we are eating sensibly and functioning normally. This is probably lost because we eat too much and have forgotten how to be hungry or accept hunger.

- Not withstanding the above and particularly for people wanting to ride a bike or run for a long time, these is a clear benefit to learning to burn fat as fuel and to conserve glycogen for shorter efforts. Given my racing history on foot at 800m up to 5km or 10km, my focus was always on speed and VO2 max, but even 20 years ago we knew that marathon runners needed to maximise fat metabolism at race pace to manage/avoid the 'wall'. Doing this probably requires an acceptance/use of 'nutritional ketosis' from time to time. Peter Attia, online at the eating academy, has some pretty impressive stats on fat burning after following a low to no carb diet, albeit one that is a little bit relaxed now.

- I retain an aversion to gels and supplements. I can't imagine myself drinking/taking '40ml of MCCT oil' or 8 gm of BCAA supplement. I like to eat food and have a strong belief that that's what we need. Sardine sandwiches are good. If I head down the supplements path then why not hit the testosterone patches, hGH and EPO, with some IGF3 etc whilst I'm at it. Fine as medication, but not as food.

- I know crossfit is associated with Paleo (correct spelling for the diet given its origin), but in some places its also associated with the chemicals mentioned above, as well as other anabolic agents. These weren't available way back when.

At the moment I'm eating less carb than historically, by intent and as an experiement. I feel better for it - but I've always eaten a lower level of carbs than some other athletes I knew, with the proportion really growing in sedentary times of life... However, it would be wrong to say I am following a low card diet, just one with a bit more moderation. I'm getting the turbo and running shoes out while my hand recovers from my recent fall.

One last thought for tonight - yesterday my Mum told me that the type 2 diabetes, artherioschlerosis and heart disease that they both suffer were not lifestyle diseases. Whilst I love them both dearly and they are two wonderfully kind people, they have done no visible exercise (they 'walk up and down the stairs a lot'!) and have eaten to excess and been overweight for as long as I can remember. The failure to see the connection and the consistent degrading of what counts as exercise is both symptomatic and, I suspect, causal in many of the health problems we face in our aging society.

I am looking forward to the ongoing exchange of views.

Mike

[hellymedic]

[Anecdata] The most eccentric of my uncles was drinking 2 litres of Tropicana orange juice per day (about 200 gram of sugar there) when he developed diabetes, followed by a mesenteric infarction, for which he need removal of some small bowel.
He was put on insulin but then started taking an obsessional interest in his diet.
He now eats no refined carbohydrates milk or meat but does eat fish.

He has 'weaned himself off insulin' and apparently has a normal blood sugar.

He see his diabetes, and many other Western illnesses as a consequence of Big Pharma, Big Food (including Big Dairy) raking in profits.

He has some valid points...

[sojournermike]

[Anecdata] The most eccentric of my uncles was drinking 2 litres of Tropicana orange juice per day (about 200 gram of sugar there) when he developed diabetes, followed by a mesenteric infarction, for which he need removal of some small bowel.
He was put on insulin but then started taking an obsessional interest in his diet.
He now eats no refined carbohydrates milk or meat but does eat fish.

He has 'weaned himself off insulin' and apparently has a normal blood sugar.

He see his diabetes, and many other Western illnesses as a consequence of Big Pharma, Big Food (including Big Dairy) raking in profits.

He has some valid points...

I completely agree. Lifestyle choices interact strongly with and are very heavily influenced by 'big organisations' and their sales/advertising processes

[ian]

[Anecdata] The most eccentric of my uncles was drinking 2 litres of Tropicana orange juice per day (about 200 gram of sugar there) when he developed diabetes, followed by a mesenteric infarction, for which he need removal of some small bowel.
He was put on insulin but then started taking an obsessional interest in his diet.
He now eats no refined carbohydrates milk or meat but does eat fish.

He has 'weaned himself off insulin' and apparently has a normal blood sugar.

He see his diabetes, and many other Western illnesses as a consequence of Big Pharma, Big Food (including Big Dairy) raking in profits.

He has some valid points...

Well, that's the thing about balance - drinking a couple of litres of fruit juice a day (especially if it's not complemented with balance of other items) isn't likely to be a good thing. A glass with breakfast on the other hand is fine. Living off 2 kgs of broccoli a day is similarly unlikely to be a recipe for good nutrition.

I'm not sure we can blame Big Anything for any of this. These are our choices. People would rather get home in evening and watch TV than chop up some veg. People would rather eat all the time than wait for a meal. If you're never hungry, how are you going to burn fat?