The real question is, does that even matter?
High cholesterol is also associated with longevity. The ratio of cholesterol is more important. The ratio of waist to shoulder width is more important.
Also your blood a1c is more important for bad outcomes than high cholesterol.
There are zero interventional studies that show eggs to be unhealthy.
In other words no one has given eggs to one group, observed another group not eat eggs and shown that eggs CAUSE a negative health outcome.
Instead people have made statistical calculations on food questionnaires that are highly unreliable.
Also people have fed eggs to people and measured various blood levels and made a educated guess on what the long term effects could be.
If a study by Kelloggs shows eggs to be unhealthy how can it be trusted?
Likewise if members of the study are animal rights activist, vegans or some other ideology that could in one way or another effect their judgement that study shouldn't be trusted. Especially if it is not a interventional study. Of which there are none that show poor health outcomes.
Mostly because "healthy" is a bit subjective.
If some study finds a correlation between egg consumption and a +1% chance of developing a rare cancer - who really cares? When you look at how rare the cancer is, when you might develop it, and the small increase in probability - you're looking at maybe a -1 day life expectancy for a life-time worth of consuming eggs.
Why is living 1 less day "unhealthy" - especially compared to all the other ways one can be "unhealthy"?
Drinking zero Alcohol actually decreases the likely hood of you living to a ripe old age.
Is it that Alcohol is healthy in small doses? Probably not. Perhaps people who drink a glass of wine once or twice a month have a less stressful life than someone who never drinks.
That's why nutrition studies are so hard to be done right. You have to literally watch them consume it and you need a control group and it needs to take place over years.
There are books written about Bluezones that say eating meat shortens your life yet HongKong has the both the highest life expectancy and the highest per person meat consumption in the world.
You really have to take every single claim and study with a big giant grain of salt and a whole lot of skepticism.
There could also be confounding factors here, which is that people who drink no alcohol may have other factors in play. i.e. There might be a health-related reason they don't drink anything.
e.g. They may be people who are alcoholics that have ceased drinking. They may have drunk heavily in the years before, but being asked "How many units of alcohol do you drink in a week" they would answer 0.
They may be on (serious) medications or have medical conditions for which they are strongly recommended to not drink.
Seems this kind of invisible contextual factor could dilute studies on "health".
This hasn't been true for 18 years.
There is about 10x more unesterified (absorbable) cholesterol secreted into bile than one typically eats in a normal day.
> Eating cholesterol has very little impact on the cholesterol levels in your body. This is a fact, not my opinion. Anyone who tells you different is, at best, ignorant of this topic. At worst, they are a deliberate charlatan. Years ago the Canadian Guidelines removed the limitation of dietary cholesterol. The rest of the world, especially the United States, needs to catch up.
https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-pa...
The only caveat I would is that there is weak evidence for a "dietary cholesterol hyperresponder" phenotype that is more sensitive to dietary cholesterol than the general population.
I probably have (heterozygous) familial hypercholesterolemia, so my diet (even saturated fat) unfortunately doesn't influence the (very high) levels I have anyways. I'm envious of people like you, for sure.
High sugar in blood is bad. High sugar and high fat in the bloodstream is worse. Also, recent studies seem to show that cholesterol limits are arbitrary and don't mean much in a vacuum: there seem to be a correlation between high LDL levels and longevity—i.e. people that live longer tend to have higher levels of LDL than average recommendations. Go figure.
The important levels for health are: stable glucose/insulin system, lower triglycerides, lower trig/HDL ratio. Everything else is too noisy a signal, including just measuring dietary cholesterol.
As you mentioned, eating whole, healthily prepared eggs and meat makes a difference. If you were getting that much egg and beef from McDonald’s you would likely be buried in the ground by now.
I used to eat like you and my blood work was horrifying, though. I’d say I was eating around 95% whole foods by volume, though I had a weakness for rice noodles and fermented sausages. I stopped that diet though and now my blood work is excellent, too.
This is a contentious but super interesting thing. There are some factors here I suspect matter a lot, but haven’t been properly proven out yet. I do think in the next decade or two we will start to get a good grasp on it.
One is gut flora and enzyme production. Essentially, where is that food broken down and what’s present as it happens? This is a big science experiment with significant variance across individuals. One common variable that’s becoming very obvious though is that people who adopt “western diets” tend to lose a staggering amount of gut flora diversity. I think this matters a lot for anecdotal but also research-oriented reasons.
I had a chronic bacterial illness which required nuclear-grade antibiotic regimens and that completely crushed me. I was burping up the most putrid gases, getting awful cramps, and having bizarre GI motility issues for over a year after; I’d never had troubles with food in my life. I’ve wondered often if I’d done my blood work before that, when I didn’t feel like garbage eating that food, if it might have looked good like yours. I really wish I started doing blood work sooner. Regardless, I wonder if gut flora can protect us from the harms that the greater body of evidence implies high amounts of saturated and trans fats can cause.
I’m totally plant-based now, and I meet countless people who say “I can’t eat like that because I just feel like shit all the time”. And I think yeah, I did too. I had to do all kinds of stuff to build my guts back up and now I’m a plant crushing machine. Had I eaten like this when I ate a lot of meat, I’d be bloated and miserable all the time. There’s no way I could handle so much fiber and sheer bulk. What your flora and system is accustomed to seems crucial to both what you’re able to eat, what you want to eat, and how well it supports your health.
As for enzymes, we know various foods stimulate enzyme production and in their absence that enzyme will reduce or even vanish — sometimes permanently. What you eat with your eggs and steak, whether it’s with the meal or 12 hours later, very well could protect you from what harms others. This kind of thing is researched and there’s growing evidence for its importance, but it isn’t clear who/when/what happens since nutrition is so incredibly diverse. I can’t wait until we understand protective mechanisms (enzymes or otherwise) better. I suppose the best known is antioxidants, but there must be so many more.
Finally, there’s the genetic factor question. We know there are hyper responders to saturated and trans fats. Are there hypo responders? I haven’t read up on that. If so, the greater body of evidence would indicate that most people are not hypo responders at all, and that saturated fat intake (animal or plant) can easily become excessive and harmful.
All of this is to say that I doubt there’s a one size fits all in any case, but since saturated fat appears to become harmful in most populations, I think people should be careful and if it’s an option, so regular blood work. I’m also not aiming to be contentious or argumentative; I find this stuff interesting as hell and love to discuss it (and learn things — I’m by no means an expert and I don’t have all the data).
>If you were getting that much egg and beef from McDonald’s you would likely be buried in the ground by now.
This is my hunch too, when i really got serious about my diet and health I was worried eating all these eggs and meat was going to cause issues so made sure to get blood tests etc. This sort of started me down the rabbit hole of realizing that almost every single thing I had ever been told about nutrition was either misleading or just flat out wrong.
The gut biome stuff is fascinating to me and it feels like it's so underexplored. Can't wait to see what kinds of things we learn about it.
One reason I don't think i'm as optimistic as you is that it feels like society doesn't want us to understand this stuff. Between the billion dollar companies influencing regulations, massive marketing budgets of these food-poison companies, and then even the populace doesn't want to know the truth. Everyone just wants to cope and complain and do stupid fad diets instead of learn or change anything.
There are so many internal and external forces pushing us to take the immediately gratifying path of least resistance.
We already know (and have known for decades) that a diet including mostly whole foods based around mostly plants seems to yield populations with far less disease and longer lifespans. It may not fit everyone, but it would certainly work for most people currently suffering. We don’t need to know more about gut flora and protective enzymes to help them; we need to stop hurting them with an overly permissive health industry and sabotaging food processing industry. We’ve had generations of normalizing this stuff. We have intelligent people talking about how statins are game changers and various weight loss drugs are revolutionary. It’s a sort of tragedy to me that we aren’t focused on making these things redundant and eliminating the root problem. It’s like we’ve simply accepted excess and the innate self-abuse of our lifestyles.
I also had this diet for many years. Wait till you get older. This is a diet will run your cholesterol through the roof.
From what?
https://www.drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/lyndon-bain...
Unrelated:- I regard him as one of the best presidents.
I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room.
The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist
Coke gave millions to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation - both directly and through front groups like the American Beverage Association.
This picked up in 2011-2013 - when the Farm Bill and soda taxes were under consideration. https://nutritioninsight.com/news/cspi-report-criticizes-big...
The conversations inside these rooms was depressingly transactional:
"We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist."
The effort was successful, and the message was carried in thousands of articles between 2011-2013.
Coke's position was clear: soda is one of the cheapest ways to get calories - a flagrantly inaccurate statement when factoring in the health consequences.
I watched as the FDA funneled money to professors at leading universities - as well as think tanks on the left and right - to create studies showing soda taxes hurt the poor. They also paid for studies that say drinking soda DIDN'T cause obesity. https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-drinks-tax/soda-tax-war-t...
Soda companies are deeply embedded in the USDA - so much so that the agency carries discredited talking points like "there are no bad food, only bad diets."
This ignores fact that sugar is highly addictive and has negative nutritional value.
In the end: racial tensions flared, soda spending was kept in SNAP funding, and many of the soda taxes were defeated...
A lot of otherwise reasonable people that I had known at the time told me that I shouldn't be racist by voicing my support for these policies
I asked them to explain, but they would not, (do your own research, etc.) so I never really got a hold of their logic since the research that I pulled up always seemed so tenuous at best. I don't really recall if the taxes went through or not
This sort of shines a light on all of it though. Shows how susceptible we all are to this kind of manipulation =\
at the least, tax at sales tends to be regressive, affecting poor people more than not poor, which maybe you could claim is racist. but pa constitution doesnt allow anything but flat taxes, so unfortunately theres basically no progressive taxing here. sin taxes in general i find somewhat troubling, sure its a luxury but why is this luxury deserve more tax than that.
I think we have an accepted fallacy in logic where we apply: Assume ignorance before malice.
I do agree ignorance is far more probable than malice, but malicious people are incredibly skilled at exploitation of ignorance and they use that skill without missing a beat.
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> Level Four: “We’re the free speech platform without CSAM, infringement or hate speech!”
This is where you have to draw the line and say: "Nope, hate speech is too subjective. I disagree with what they are saying, but unless it's against the law I will defend their right to say it"
The freedom to say mildly offensive things on Twitter without getting punished by the state?
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I personally like society better when free speech is a social courtesy extended to everyone by everyone, but... society's values change, and right now "harm reduction" is king.
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What we really need is a legal designation of a "public square" online that protects free speech online
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>and when in doubt, lean towards individual freedom over society's view of something.
I think this is the right stance.
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We can build a society where free speech isn't technically dead because you won't go to prison for saying stuff, but it sort of is dead because your speech is auto-censored by algorithms to make sure you adhere to approved speech. Is this a healthy society?
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*the above are all comments by uwin, if there is an '>' it means a quote from another user
2) Even if the user quoted were "inconsistent" in that way--and because of #1 I don't think it is, but I want to note why I think your comment isn't as smart as you are hoping it is in more detail--one could easily take the comment to be born out of frustration at a world that decides lots of things should be forbidden but somehow not this one, whether coming from a place of sincerity or simply sarcasm: in a world where somehow there are a ton of things people can't say, why can they say this? A lot of times, I see people try to point out hypocrisy in online communication and in fact the two parties are just talking past each other, using the other's attempt to call out hypocrisy as a way to judge their position, ignoring that there are easier explanations.
It depends on what the goal is.
If one seeks an opportunity to punish the NAACP or to chill discussion of racism, focusing just on the NAACP might be a way to do that.
Otherwise, if one seeks to end harmful astroturfing[1], then directing punishment (eg: press+fines) at the companies/lobbyists that craft those campaigns seems more effective.
As for the non-profits that get duped by bad-faith corporate campaigns, being held up as a hapless corporate stooge should provide all the aversion anyone could want.
It's funny, I heard my father-in-law parroting this when complaining about soda taxes. I also don't care for the taxes, but I don't see them as inherently racist. In fact, hearing him say this made me think that the characterization of the tax being racist is, itself, racist, as it bears the presumption that various minorities more regularly make the irresponsible personal choice of drinking soda, and this is without any data to prove it.
The argument should be that regressive taxes like soda taxes, much like speeding tickets, affects the poor at a much greater clip. Who cares about a soda tax or a speeding ticket when you make 500k a year? If you make that much and you want soda or you want to speed, you're going to do it. However, if you make 28k a year, the calculation is much different.
In America, poverty and race are strongly correlated (and there's causation, but I digress). Because of that, it's easy, although inaccurate, to use classism and racism interchangeably.
Calling someone racist creates a larger emotional response and is more damaging to social equity than calling someone classist.
Hence calling soda taxes racist.
Also, wouldn't we expect that organizations that are explicitly anti-racist would conclude that because classist policies or laws have racially disparate impacts, addressing them still increases racial equity even if they are ostensibly motivated by race-neutral class concerns?
I would not contend that they were not racist. I wasn't implying that every classist action is actually racist or vice-versa. Just that some are incorrectly labeled for rhetorical effect.
> addressing them still increases racial equity even if they are ostensibly motivated by race-neutral class concerns
Yep, nearly anything that effects class equity in the US will also effect racial equity.
I'm always amazed at how many people flat out get angry with me when I say fast food is simply not cheaper than cooking yourself, provided you have a kitchen. I'm consistently told that that level of thinking is necessarily classist (and therefore a racist), because it's more time, effort, and in the short-term, money, that needs to be involved.
I do not understand how making stir fry with chicken breast/thighs, frozen veggies, and rice is somehow the most expensive, time-consuming task in the world, but apparently that's a high-class dinner to many folks on the internet, and I'm 100% convinced it's because of the lie they are told (and then perpetuate) that the dollar amount you see in front of you is the dollar amount in totality.
Don't do Reddit, folks.
Well, that's an easy fix. Ask your employer to cut your salary to ~$20k-$30k. Tell them that you're going to be in the office at 7 on-the-dot, and he can write you up if you're 5 minutes early or late; you're going to be there for 8-10 hours, w/ a 30-minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (again, write-ups for taking even a minute longer than alotted). Sell your car, get a used one (financed, of course), model year before 2012, 80k miles minimum; give the profit away (give away any savings you have, too; you can't access any of your retirement or investment accounts, either). Insist that any credit you have access to be cut severely and the rates jacked up. Sell anything you own other than your car that's worth more than $2k, give the money away. You are also now limited to going 20-30 minutes out of your way to the "good" grocery store, since you are moving to a food desert. Your mattress now comes in a box from Wal-Mart; get rid of any sleep or wake-up aids other than your cell phone. Hard mode: separate from your spouse, if you have one, and adopt as many kids as you need to get to 2 or 3.
People are not making poor individual choices. They are, collectively, subject to perverse incentives that are imposed by a regulatory-industrial complex that profits from the ill health they develop when behaving as might be expected of any normal human being of the past two centuries. Thank you for being frustrated at the state of the world; it means that you recognize that there are improvements to be made. First step: stop blaming the wrong people.
And for the record, I cook, but I only have time to because I'm unemployed.
I believe many people hold on to that sentiment because it's easier to blame a boogieman than to educate themselves on affordable, healthy diets and execute on learning to shop and cook for yourself.
I am, however, interested in bringing better educational resources and time-saving instruments to consumers. Many people grow up in an environment where they don't know how to properly shop in a grocery store. For example, you give someone a $50 gift card to the supermarket and they walk out with a cart full of crap, because it's all they knew growing up.
Then once you teach someone how to shop, they may not have experience cooking for themselves. For those of us who grew up cooking with our parents and continued to do so for ourselves, it's hard to imagine how overwhelming the learning process can be. If you grew up in a lower income environment with busy parent(s), chances are you never helped out in the kitchen with your mom or dad. They probably brought home a kid's meal from McDonalds on their way back from their second job.
Some fruits may be not much better than candy in that the sugar can metabolize quickly, but apples aren't one of those despite their fructose content.
There is as much protein in broccoli as there is fiber in apples.
To get your daily suggested intake of fiber (30 grams), you'd need to eat almost three pounds of apples a day.
I fail to see the harm. If I did feel wild one day and decide to down a dozen apples (I'm not sure I physically even could), I'd meet my fiber RDA for that day, and still have only eaten 504 calories worth of carbs.
You may object that I'm not getting any micronutrients this way, but most sources of micronutrients are nearly irrelevant calorically, so they don't really matter when you talk about capacity planning for macronutrients and calories.
Seeing no harm in eating apples is like seeing no harm in eating candy. Sure, eating a piece of candy once is trivial -- but you're insisting on candy as a part of my diet, not as an incidental, rare snack. Eating candy only has downsides.
You may want to factor in that the 20 minutes they have to acquire and prep a meal is already coming out of the 6 hours they have allocated for sleep.
Having done a decade of hunger-level poverty, I found it surprising busy.
Driving to Taco Time every day takes time, gas, and costs $20 for a meal.
Ironically, I microwave meals and such not because I'm poor, but to save time. I dislike going to restaurants and even McBurger because it takes too much time.
Another meal I like takes less than a minute. Pour some oats in a bowl. Add raisins. Add milk. Ready to eat. I doubt it costs 50 cents. Or make a couple cheese sandwiches with butter and a pickle.
They do not sound like something that can be done consistently by someone without regular transportation or pay.
> They do not sound like something that can be done consistently by someone without regular transportation or pay.
If someone has transportation to go to a fast food restaurant, they have transportation to go to a corner store and buy a can of beans. If they have money for one, they have money for the other. It's actually usually cheaper not to eat the junk food.
Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.
There's a number of ways this wouldn't be true and they aren't difficult to come up with.
Beyond that, the discussion is encapsulating somewhat broader points - the resources it takes to eat consistently healthy vs eating cheaply. It wouldn't make sense to only include fast food in the poor diet options.
Your seem to be asserting this: That someone living in a healthy-food dessert and without reliable access to transportation has no excuse to not consistently eat a healthy diet.
I counter that 60 seconds of thinking it thru would produce any number of scenarios that clearly speak against that assertion.
> Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.
This is meaningfully related, though it's a bit over declared. Some with limited access to resources may be able to put a healthy meal together if they're playing their A Game. But A Games are hard to come by for folks condemned to survival mode - maybe the sort where 5 hours sleep is the norm along with caregiving multiple people while working multiple jobs.
What are the poor people supposed to live off of? Potatoes, beans, and rice 24/7?
I think the challenge here is looking at numbers without factoring in reality.
A common scenario in poverty is money isn't available when it's needed. If one has $4 today for food now and will have $4 more tomorrow, their choices are to forgo eating until they can save up the ingredients or buy whatever food can be had today.
Edit: No, this is the same text, under the name of George Will from the day before: https://nypost.com/2008/12/29/lbj-the-egg-czar-other-govt-he...
Weird...
In 1966, the price of eggs rose to a level that President Lyndon Johnson judged, God knows how, was too high. There were two culprits – supply and demand – and Johnson’s agriculture secretary told him there was not much that could be done. LBJ, however, was a can-do fellow who directed the US surgeon general to dampen demand by warning the nation about the hazards of cholesterol in eggs.