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Author | Topic: More on Diet and Carbohydrates | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jon Inactive Member |
Isn't the lesson from all this that folks should be maintaining a balanced and reasonable diet, a healthy level of physical activity, and regularly monitoring their weight, blood pressure, etc?
It's hard to miss the coincidence that Americans' health went to shit at the same time McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell, etc. were on the rise along with sedentarism, city-living, and a reliance on processed and prepackaged 'food'; and that the introduction of such 'foods' and lifestyles into other countries is occurring with similar coincidences of increasing obesity and cardiovascular diseases. I know blaming the government is fun. But how much is really their fault?Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Who knows in any precise way, but a substantial proportion. Really? You think their fault is substantial? I really doubt it is. I think the fault is mostly with people who take general guidelines to the extreme and forget that no amount of research or expensive studies change the fact that each person is unique and needs to do what is best for themselves and not what is best for a certain percentage of a random sample of people. I, for one, respond relatively well to a mostly-carb diet. I used to eat mostly pastas and bread. In the last few years, though, I've become a big fan of bacon, eggs, adding butter to foods, etc. Since then I've put on about 15 pounds and my blood pressure has gone up. We're all different. And we're each individually responsible for our own diets and health.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
I see words like 'advice' and 'guidelines'.
When someone forces you to do something with disastrous results, that's their fault. When someone throws something at you to use as you please, and which you continue to use even as the observable effects point more and more to its detrimentality, whose fault is that? If you follow those guidelines and find you've gained a few pounds and your cholesterol has gone up a little, then you say "damn government" and look for a better diet. But if you continue following those guidelines to an early death, then all you can say is "damn me". Was their advice bad? Probably. But who's responsible? The government, or the folks who kept following that bad advice even as they gained weight and saw their health go to shit? Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Whether or not you believe the government shares much responsibility, there can be no denying that the old guidelines were spectacularly wrong. I'm agreeing with you on that just based on some of the links in your other posts. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that the government guidelines were (still are?) wrong. But being wrong is a lot different than being at fault.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
It's not about correlation and causation. It's about blaming someone else for your problems.
People who have been following the government's guidelines yet still gaining weight should probably stop following them. They should also probably stop eating Big Macs. Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
You're repeating your position again having never addressed any of the detailed rebuttal. There's no detailed rebuttal. You want to blame the government for your bad health (or someone else's). I think that's a pointless thing to do and probably wrong as well. It doesn't matter how bad their advice was. It doesn't matter if everyone followed it. It doesn't matter if following their advice was the only change made to American diets. It's still not the government's fault that people got fat. And that's assuming the evidence is perfectly in your favor. That assumption, though, isn't supported by reality. A lot of changes in lifestyle and eating habits accompanied/preceded the decline in Americans' health. Was it fast food? Sedentary lifestyles? Marketing junkfood to children? Parents who don't know how the hell to say 'no'? People listening to the government? There're so many pieces to the puzzle; many of which seem better culprits than the government's advice. And that makes giving the government a substantial portion of the blame a completely irrational bunch of nonsense.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member
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The point I'm making isn't that only carbohydrates are to blame for obesity, because that's not even true, but that past government and mainstream dietary advice about fat and carbohydrates are to blame for the obesity/diabetes/heart-disease epidemic of the last half century and more. What evidence is do you have that 60% of the population followed that advice?Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member
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You just want to blame the government for your problems.
Even if everyone whose health was going to shit was religiously following the government's dietary guidelines, it still isn't the government's fault. But we don't even have that. You can't even show that people were following the government's guidelines, and numerous alternative causes of America's health problems have been mentioned by myself and by others. I hope I'm not wasting my time, but here goes nothing:
quote: Of course, the government's guidelines recommend increased carbohydrates and decreased fats in the diet, yet people have been increasing caloric intake from pretty much every source, and certainly have not decreased the amount of fat in their diet:
quote: The type of carbohydrates matters; people eat too many processed carbohydrates and sugars and not enough of the whole-grain carbohydrates recommended:
quote: quote: It's kind of hard to blame the government's guidelines when nobody's been following them. But it's not just diet, as I've mentioned. These numbers are telling:
quote: About 65% of Americans are overweight (including obesity) and about 30% are downright obese.
quote: I don't think the government recommended avoiding exercise.
Keep in mind I didn't blame only the government. I think we just believe differently about whether the responsibility for bad advice lies with those who give it or those who follow it. The government and certain organizations represented their dietary advice as deriving from the best scientific research available, and that wasn't true. Such hubris shouldn't be given a free pass. Your emphasis on government culpability ignores the real problem: increased consumption of calories overall, decreased quality of the calories consumed, and inadequate physical activity. On that second point, note the following:
quote: With eating and lifestyle habits like we see in Americaso far from the government's guidelines on healthy eating and recommended levels of daily physical activitythe hubris is not government's, but belongs to those who want to blame the government for Americans' poor health.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
I would disagree with this a bit. If the sole problem were visible things like being obese, then yes we do get some feedback that our diet is at fault. But if our diet is actually bad for our cardiovascular system without some visible sign, then that is directly caused by the bad advice. People can monitor their blood pressure and cholesterol levels. And if monitoring these things is not possible, then one must really ask how it is the people giving advice know it is good and take that into consideration before following the advice. But I think you and I are in agreement that regardless of how good the government's advice was, no one has really been following it, and so it is ridiculous to blame the government for the diet-related health problem that has ballooned in the U.S. in the last several decades. Blaming the food pyramid really takes focus from where it should be: on amount of food eaten, quality of food eaten, and level of daily physical activity.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Did you see the link in the OP? It definitely argues that the low-fat diet recommended by the USDA is less effective at maintaining overall health than a diet lower in carbohydrates and higher in fat.
quote: This suggests that the USDA's guidelines were possibly wrong or their idea of 'balance' was at least off regarding the portion of carbs to non-carbs involved in a healthy diet. Of course, it should be pointed out that there is no mention of overall caloric intake of the two groups. I find the final comment in the article humorous, because it demonstrates just how poorly most people understand the guidelines:
quote: Sugars are also to be avoided according to the guidelines, so the replacement of fats with sugars doesn't actually meet the USDA guidelines. So yeah, the guidelines don't actually appear to be the best, but no one's following them anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
"Did you see the link in the OP" I saw it. I don't see the impact on what I posted. I am sorry that you cannot see that.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
My reply wasn't aimed at your hubris comment. But I think we might be talking past each other.
So I'll leave it at that.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
It's only necessary to ask the rhetorical question that if nobody was following the government dietary guidelines about reducing dietary fat, who was buying all the reduced fat options in grocery stores? That's a good question to be asking you, since you're the one making this claim. As I and other have pointed out, consumption of fats, along with everything else, has been rising for decades in the U.S.
As I explained to Caffeine, while both fat and carbohydrate consumption increased, carbohydrate consumption increased more, causing the typical American diet to be proportionately more carbohydrates. That doesn't mean anything. The recommendations aren't just 'more of this, less of that', they set out specific amounts and proportions. For example, fats/oils are recommended to be consumed sparingly, yet, as I posted earlier in Message 47, in 2000, Americans consumed a full fifth as much fat/oil as carbohydrates. Furthermore, a serving of 15 grams of carbohydrates would give a daily intake of about 90 grams of carbohydrates if following the USDA guidelines. Even if the entire serving of grains is nothing but carbohydrates, the recommended daily intake would only be between 180 and 330 grams. Yet in 2000, Americans were consuming an average of 490 grams of carbohydrates/day. Americans have not been following the USDA's recommended proportions nor the recommended serving sizes.
Here's a link to the 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. You won't find any reference to whole grains. The mention of whole grains is pretty hard to miss if you read the one-page section on vegetables, fruits, and grains.
quote: They even emphasize the importance of fiber related to whole grains, which, as caffeine pointed out in Message 45, Americans have been consuming less and less of:
quote: But overeating that emphasizes fat carries far fewer health risks in terms of obesity, diabetes and heart disease than overeating that emphasizes carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates. But overeating isn't recommended by the USDA. It probably is better to follow a diet that lets you eat as much as you want, but that has no bearing on the USDA's guidelines, which set out specific proportions and serving sizes.
Keep in mind again that I didn't only blame government. You're blaming the people who gave the advice for America's bad health, despite the fact that nobody followed the advice and that even if they had, it's their health and their responsibility to figure out whether the advice they're getting is good or not. The advice-givers have almost zero culpability in the development of obesity and cardiovascular-related health problems in America during the last several decades. Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Think about it. Why would grocery stores be filling their shelves with increasing numbers of low-fat options if no one was buying them? Your evidence needs to amount to more than telling me to 'think about it'.
I never said they did. But the portions and serving sizes are a key part of the guidelines. If those aren't being followed, then the guidelines aren't being followed.
You're correct that Americans didn't follow the advice about numbers of servings of various food types, but they never have and never will, and that certainly wasn't what I meant when I said Americans followed the guidelines. I'm sure very few people eat meals that way. But Americans did follow the advice to consume less fat and more carbohydrates. And now they appear to be following the advice to reduce carbohydrate consumption. I think we've gotten where we need to be with this. It's clear that Americans didn't follow the USDA guidelines. It's pretty pointless to keep blaming those guidelines for the declining health of Americans.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
On a 0 to 100 scale I would give America a 70 for following the government guidelines and nutritional advice. Of course you would. You want to blame the government for everyone's bad health. But the truth is that it really is an all or nothing. When the government's advice is to eat so many servings of whole grains and so many servings of fat, you can't eat ten times as much of both and then blame the government's advice when you get fat. You're just being ridiculous. The government didn't give the best advice, but that advice is most certainly not to blame for 60% of American's being overweight. The fault for that lies with fast food, junk food, too much food, and lack of physical activity.Love your enemies!
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