It seems people are really sure that exercising a lot and not eating meat or whatever is the healthiest thing one can do, for weight and health reasons... But evidence says the complete opposite, most of the time.
People are so fascinated about the idea that exercise and certain foods are so good, that they don't even bother to check the studies and the evidence, they just know it's true for some reason. It doesn't matter that everyone you know is going to a gym or running (a million more times than, say, 50 years ago) and yet the populations are only getting more obese by the minute. Or how athletes are dying young and have many health issues everywhere... Or that indigenous people don't even hunt or do nothing at all for a week (between each hunting trip), and yet they are so thin and don't have cancer.
In other words, no one really knows yet if running several kilometers every day is good for you, or if it's actually killing you. And no one knows yet what exactly is "to eat correctly", though I'm pretty sure all the stuff we've read in those paid studies made in the last 100 years are just absolute garbage.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
They just take information out of (food-industry-sponsored) horrible studies, or just repeat the same old stuff they've been repeating since those first studies were published. That page even has the obligatory "stay active" in a "what to eat" recommendation. Five-star stuff.
No wonder we've all become obese since these studies and articles started to pop up...
Any proof?
> or just repeat the same old stuff they've been repeating since those first studies were published
No. They used to tell that milk was necessary for the health, but now they tell a different story based on actual independent research.
I'm not sure what young athletes could do to be healthier; I imagine most of their issues are environmental. I personally err on the side of preindustrial when any question of lifestyle comes up, but who knows.
It's possible some people do actually eat healthy and still get very unlucky. But I bet a lot of what many consider healthy isn't. Also, we don't know what we don't know. People didn't know about lead poisoning was a problem until they did. I wonder how many unhealhty stuff we do/consume that passes totally invisible in front of our eyes. The type of things future generations will look back and say "no wonder those people were dying so young of cardiovascular diseases and cancer they were doing X! And get this, they even thought it was healthy/they didn't even know about it!"