And to make the story even more crazy; my grandfather used jigsaw to saw asbestos for all his life, even far after it was forbidden. Real men don't care about that kind of stuff :)
Anecdotal 'evidence' is wonderful he :)
But now we have 2 cases (actually more; my grandfathers brother + sister are the same age and do the same things; no problem); maybe smoking (I know bad_user his grandfather didn't), drinking and eating fat actually prolongs life if you manage not to have stress and eat from the land. Because that's at least one major difference I saw; my grandparents didn't have stress. Things just happened to them and they didn't think twice about it.
Sometimes I believe the office style of work that many celebrate; because it freed them from the fields and such; probably is the least beneficial change we have made.
We are not designed to be idle.
Look towards your grandfather's daily activities
and not just his diet
The point I tried making is that we cannot pinpoint yet the exact cause for the trends in heart-disease, obesity and diabetes. You simply cannot blame it all on meat, or on eggs, or on carbohydrates.
In fact it's quite the opposite ... by making changes to the diet of our grandfathers, we risk a ton of negative side-effects. People nowadays drink low-fat milk, but our grandfathers were drinking whole milk straight from their own cows without problems. And our metabolism is a complex mechanism - we forget that homo sapiens were unable to digest milk, but now we digest it just fine, so it's definitely a mater of context, like culture and genetics.
And personally I tend to blame this all on three things - sedentary lifestyles, stress and preprocessed crap that contains sugar, with sugar being the only common compound that is partly carbohydrate, partly lipid, while also being a nutrient that our grandfathers had little access to.
Over the last few decades, much fuss has been made over the societal switch from whole foods to processed foods. But people have been getting less and less healthy every decade, obesity rates have been increasing each decade, and food hasn't grown all that substantially more processed in the last few decades. (People in the 70s and 80s ate nearly as much processed junk as we do, and they were healthier on average. People in, say, Japan eat a metric fuckton of foods processed beyond our recognition, and they're healthier than we are).
Processed foods are probably to blame for our obesity crisis in some respect, but they're not the single issue. We should be taking a closer look at lifestyle factors, especially sleep and stress. Americans don't sleep enough, and lead more stressful work lives, than the citizens of almost any other developed country on the planet. (It's actually debatable if we're more or less sedentary than other nations, too. Pretty much everyone in white-collar work is sedentary these days, by the clinical definition of the term, and working out even an hour a day is not going to completely mitigate the effects of sitting on one's ass for the following 10 hours).
People in the 70s and 80s ate nearly as much
processed junk as we do
For instance in Romania we had no McDonalds until the early 1990s and they were amongst the first to enter, before other junk food providers like KFC, Burger King and such. One friend from the US visiting me was surprised that we only have 2 or 3 Starbucks joints in our capital that has a population of more than 2 million people.
And regarding preprocessed junk, the trend is very recent here. People used to laugh at such things as low-fat milk, or frozen French-fries / Pizza.
The result: I've never seen so many obese people in my life as I've seen in the US, but we're catching up.
And I don't deny that processed foods are major factors in the obesity problem, and probably necessary factors. But I'm saying that they don't seem entirely sufficient to account for the increased obesity rates within the US, which has been gorging itself on processed junk for 30+ years now.
Maybe, but there are trade-offs. For example, would you rather live to 100 but bust your ass every day, or live to 90 doing a desk job? Many people would pick the latter.
It's also in the context of the comment I replied to, which also contains conclusions based on personal experience. And when speaking about nutrition these days, most known facts are based on flawed studies or anecdotes.
And HN itself is filled with anecdotes. It's actually in this community's culture to talk in anecdotes.
So I don't get your call for refraining.
Also what is mentioned has been observed multiple times in several countries.
"Anecdote is not data waa waa waa" or in your example, " No. They don’t die. Mick Jagger. Keith Richard" it certainly does not condone drug usage, but it certainly shows there are exception to "drugs are bad and you will die early" (especially given the amount consumed)
But please let us know if eggs are good or bad for people this week.
I agree that we should all rely more on actual facts and studies and that we tend to perpetuate myths heard from a friend of a friend, which is just bad, especially for us since we should think like scientists. However it is not our job to do studies on nutrition and the available studies on nutrition are either biased or not conclusive of anything - listening to your gut feeling about what is right is actually the better path to take at this point in time.
Also, I could have added details, such as race (Caucasian), geography (Europe, temperate climate, hills), family history (war veterans, poverty after communism came, rough life), etc... but I usually don't because these are personal details and I like my privacy on the Internet, even though you could probably find plenty about me or my family if you wanted to, but that doesn't mean I have to make that info easy to find.
You also misunderstood me. I actually think that genetics, lifestyle, local culture are all factors that play a role, so I don't disagree with you. I also haven't said that my grandfather's diet would be healthy for everybody, I only said that it was healthy for him personally, so you have to be careful about making generalizations based on limited data and biases.
For the record, I'm not crash hot about this anonymous anecdotal evidence either. I think that eating unhealthily is bad no matter whether you are on a farm or not. But to tell someone to be quiet? That's a losing argument - refute it, don't silence anyone.
But "lived until 99" was not useless until very recently (in history terms)
So, there is something which we do called "observation." This is when we want to know the truth of something, so we set up some sort of meaningful experiment which we can do in the world, and find out. We go out and observe.
The reason that an anecdote is not an observation is because it comes to you first. That is, you already know the result of the anecdote before you select the data; it is something you "remember" when you hear about a new situation. This invokes all kinds of biases about how you remember, because you tend to remember anomalies -- and you tend to misremember their content. In anecdotes there is no "control group" and there isn't even a hope for a control; it's all been selected out anyway.
In this respect a single observation is not anecdotal, because they come from separate places. If a doctor puts a flow-meter in an artery after a bypass surgery to see if there is blood flowing at a normal cardiac rate, that is not an "anecdote", that is an "observation." It is not based on some sort of human reckoning; "I've done many bypass surgeries and I once saw an artery which looked just like that and was not, in fact, obstructed," but rather it's something reliable: at this time, a normal amount of blood was flowing through this artery.
Most health-related studies are not true observational studies. Rather, they rely on self-reported (i.e., anecdotal) "data" from study participants.
In some rural areas on my country it's usual to live around 100 - 120 years. In some places, even having a pork farm based economy and eating all sorts of different pork derivatives on a daily base.
IMHO, what kills us on cities is just contamination and stress.
My grandfather was eating between 5 and 10 eggs per day, every day. He also drank at least 1 liter of home-made red whine per day, while being a big consumer of dairy products (also made in-house).
Of course, because my grandparents lived on a farm and consumed what they produced or traded with neighbors, half of a normal week would go by without them consuming any meat. However my grandfather was also a big fan of raw and untreated pig bacon, the kind you never find in stores. It was one of his pleasures that he indulged whenever he could.
My grandfather died at 99 years old, 3 months before his 100 years anniversary. He died out of old age, never having any problems with his heart. He was able to work his land until 98 years old. And in his village, even though people live a really rough life, it's pretty common to see people past the age of 90 with no serious health problems.
So really, your own two eyes are biased by the culture you live in ;-)
Nowadays it's a common belief that living a healthy life means preferring fruits and vegetables ... however, be careful when sampling because it's possible that people taking more care of their health are healthy because they care more about their health, not necessarily because they consume less meat.