72% of calories come from carbohydrates compared with 52% in the US
14% from fat compared with 34% in the US, Tsimane also consume much less saturated fat
Both Americans and Tsimane have 14% of calories from protein, but Tsimane have more lean meat"
That really does seem counter to the low-carb diets that seem to be all the rage among internet communities (also HN).
But, maybe it's just the constant exercise the Tsimane people are getting:
"They are also far more physically active with the men averaging 17,000 steps a day and the women 16,000."
Lol. So... they are telling the 'news' that people who eat well, are very physically active, live in close communities with little individual isolation... and they are healthy?
Hold the presses! Seems like BBC had a day where they needed to put in some filler news articles.
One of the main intriguing things about this group of people is that they do not eat particularly well.
> That heart health is in spite of the fact that they consume between 2,433 to 2,738 calories per day ... strangely, their diets aren’t incredibly healthy, though we can still learn a thing or two from their lifestyle.
> One of the main intriguing things about this group of people is that they do not eat particularly well.
That is only if you take for a fact we know what a healthy diet is and there is a single clear definition.
For me, Healthy eating is a diverse diet that leads to good health. Particularly eating foods where caloric density is offset by nutritional value. Based on my own definition and the facts of the article, these people do eat healthy.
I think the surprise comes from people who think they know what a 'healthy diet' is.
As the article states, 'this is definitively not keto diet' - for me this means about zero to me. If that point is surprising to you or to a group of people, I think you are right, it is a surprising study from that point of view. Thanks for helping me understand the newsworthy part of this.
It's likely that beside the rice and maize, most of their carbs come from vegetables. It's one of the reasons why high-performance diets are usually heavy on the broccoli!
Another absolutely killer carb in western diets comes out of refined flour which makes it into a ton of stuff. My wife is gluten-free currently for health reasons and we've experimented with using more raw starch sources to great success. Most of these flour based foods don't need to be super-refined bleached flour.
Most "whole wheat" flour is literally the same refined flour from the same vat, but with some bran (fiber) and germ (nutrients) mixed back in. This could happen at the refinery shortly after refining, or weeks to months later using bran and germ sourced from a warehouse somewhere. Very unpredictable and not indicated anywhere on the label.
What seems consistent is that both diets high in whole grains and high-fiber diets in general have some heart health benefits. My guess is that refined+enriched flour in a high-fiber meal is not much, if any, worse than whole flour in a medium- or low-fiber meal. Those pastries and chips between meals, on the other hand...
Tangentially, there are two professors that swear by the idea of taking glucose readings soon after eating to know the impact of different foods in your diet. Theoretically, if you eat things that don't raise your glucose too much you can lose weight.
It sounds logical, but I don't know if it's really useful if you're not diabetic.
I’d say all things being equal if you have the same person on two timelines and on both they over consume calories but on one they spike their insulin and the other they don’t, the time line with the insulin spikes will carry more fat/dangerous adipose tissue. Insulin acts as a hormone and tells the body to store calories as fat and simultaneously enlarges cells throughout the body, especially fat cells, allowing the body to store more fat than otherwise.
It’s probably very useful to measure what spikes ones insulin so the individual can avoid those foods.
For example I know whey, a protein powder with zero carbs/sugars will spike my insulin (because it knocks me out of ketosis). Probably not a bad idea for a body builder who wants to replinish their muscle glycogen stores after a hard workout, but not going to be necessary and over long term even harmful to someone who isn’t depleting their muscle glucose/glycogen stores. In fact protein that can’t be used is generally converted into glucose which when not used is store in fat cells.
Carbs are great if you're actually going to use the energy! The best even! The problem with Western habits is we tend to carb load until we have a tremendous excess of energy which we then use to... sit down for several hours while our body gets busy turning all that unused energy in to fat.
Exactly. Humans are meant to move, and not moving makes us fat. Now that we're extremely sedentary, we literally have no use for the amounts of rice and pasta we consume. We're victims of our own success.
Anecdotally I've seen plenty of fat people that move a lot. When one can have a 2,000 calorie pizza delivered on a whim there isn't much that exercise can do to prevent weight gain.
Converting carbs into fat is fairly inefficient. It comes at about a 40% calorie loss. So you can put on fat eating carbs alone but it’s not easy. More often than not we eat carbs together with fat so your body will very happily just directly store the fat and burn the carbs for energy.
This is why things like french fries or pizza are so fattening.
When you eat fat and carbs, the fat is stored and the carbs used for energy. When you subtract carbs, your body still needs energy so it starts using fat.
There’s no magic in keto. People lose weight on keto because they wind up eating fewer calories, usually because they cut back on processed junk food as part of going keto.
"The Tsimane get 72% of their energy from carbohydrates.
The fact that they have the best indicators of cardiovascular health ever reported is the exact opposite to many recent suggestions that carbohydrates are unhealthy."
Refined carbs ARE unhealthy and it's a bit disheartening that they didn't make that distinction in the article.
> Non-processed carbohydrates are grown in the form of
rice, plantain, manioc, and corn via slash-and-burn
horticulture, and the Tsimane also gather wild nuts and
fruits.
Big difference between this and HFCS and table sugar.
According the the following, sucrose has a glycemic index of 65. Plantain has 55. Brown rice has 68. Does the glycemic index say anything about impact on blood glucose and insulin levels?
Keep in mind that food does not act in isolation. The actual glycemic index of the food you eat depends on the combination of food. So if you eat a combination of carbohydrates, fats and proteins it lowers the glycemic index. Famously, a Snicker's bar has a dramatically lower glycemic index than a slice of bread (though exactly what it is depends on what study you look at :-P ).
Another way to look at this is that refined sugar is the sugar with all the other things that would have lowered the glycemic index taken away. If you add it back, the index will be lowered again. If I eat refined sugar from sugar beets and accompany it with the fiber, etc from the processing, the glycemic index will be the same as eating sugar beets. So it doesn't matter where the carbs are coming from, it only matters if you are mixing it with fibre, fat and protein.
I assume because it is composed of a high level of fructose mixed with water :-) I'm not saying that "natural" food has a low GI; quite the contrary. I'm saying that if you take some food with a low GI and take away all the stuff that makes it low GI you are essentially left with sugar. If you add all that stuff back in, then you get the same GI again. Your gut doesn't care that it's a slurry, essentially.
To add to your point Okinawans once had the greatest life expectancy on Earth and the majority of their diet was carbs too.
Since the introduction of “western diet” post WW2 the majority of their diet is still carbs and yet they now show significant increase of Chronic disease (obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and kidney disease) and lowered life expectancy.
It turns out, though, that Okinawan long life expectancy was actually due to rampant pension fraud rather than long life. I can't remember the exact date, but it would have been around 2008, a reporter went to visit the oldest people in Japan (most of whom were living in Okinawa). They started at the oldest and found that the person wasn't home ("visiting relatives"). So they went to the next oldest. Similar story. They went through the top 20 and couldn't find any of them.
The government clued in and investigated and it turns out that Okinawan doctors were making a tidy profit by agreeing not to file death certificates. This enabled families to continue to claim pension benefits on behalf of their supposedly aged relatives.
After the the smoke died down the went back and looked at Okinawan life expectancy taking pension fraud into consideration and discovered that it was pretty much exactly the same as the rest of Japan. The original life expectancy/diet studies had relied on government information rather than actually interviewing people. I'm sorry I don't have a citation for you as I saw this in a documentary in Japan on TV.
However, I do believe they legitimately have the most centurions and I have read about autopsies on centurions which found they showed no signs of chronic disease. Of course that is surviorship bias, but assuming the total number of centurions is true, especially given the small population, I think there is more there there.
I am highly skeptical of this article given the lack of any comparison of both natural and artificial sugar consumption as a proportion of those carbohydrates, the foods listed tend to be quite low in sugars and it seems like an obvious factor to investigate and is given... absolutely no consideration. Ditto with their sodium consumption and the fish they're eating are probably isolated enough to not be a dangerous source of heavy metals like the fish we have access to.
I definitely don't think that fat is the best thing ever for you, but butter/lard (and other dairy fat) heavy diets have been around for a long time.
I am really concerned about what we as residents in democratic countries are permitting regulators to hand-wave into our food, there is something really bad that we're all eating or drinking and we're going to need to figure out what it is pretty quickly.
In common UK parlance carbohydrates don't include sugars although chemically speaking they should. I think metabolically speaking there is a useful distinction to be made, in fact people are making it here. In dietary context schools have categorised potatoes, rice, pasta, even bread as sources of "carbohydrates" and sweets as sugar sources.
> At the age of 45, almost no Tsimane had CAC in their arteries while 25% of Americans do.
> By the time they reach age 75, two-thirds of Tsimane are CAC-free compared with the overwhelming majority of Americans (80%) having signs of CAC.
The article doesn't mention obesity at all. 40% of Americans over 40 are obese[1]. Tsimane obesity rates
of adults (>20 years) are 5.6% for women and 1.6% for men[2].
Journalists love writing about dietary composition as if increasing your fish (or whatever) consumption is a magic bullet, but merely changing composition without losing weight is only a moderate improvement (maybe 30% fewer heart attacks, based on that retracted NEJM dietary study[3]).
It's almost as if human experiences don't fit into the carefully curated categories we have in modern society where individual aspects are considered in isolation and not handled in a holistic way.
It's as if: the need for meaning, relationships, sleep, body, teeth, eating, professional development, daily routine, sitting, walking, how we walk, our individual body constructs, personality archetypes, mental health, etc... were more than the sum of their parts and being overly dissecting such things leads to a lessening, not increase in understanding of the whole.
A great book on psychology like thinking fast and slow will do a great job at dissecting reality from that narrow point of view, just as other books will do the same in other fields. But I don't really know of any field that is respected that combines many elements to study how to maximize human potential/study the human experience as a whole.
I offer no solutions, just an observation in terms of how we deal with the human experience in modernity.
You are right, it is necessary to dissect. But I feel it's taken on a life of it's own.
Just as work to live in some places has been distorted to live to work.
We should create categories to understand, not understand to create categories.
I've seen it everywhere. My doctor trying to shove pills down my throat when I had developed some bad habits and he didn't ask me ONE question about diet or night routine. I've seen it in universities where professors attack each others field instead of finding the common thread. In the boss that says "that's not your job, thats marketing/QA/dev/business dev/growth team/etc". It's a lack of understand that a team should provide value to the overall and the categories should only be there to aid in overall progress.
> It's almost as if human experiences don't fit into the carefully curated categories we have in modern society where individual aspects are considered in isolation and not handled in a holistic way.
Well put. The challenge for any individual author is that it is much easier to write defensively in a narrow niche (cue: increasing specialization in research). It is very easy to start flinging accusations and ad-hominem attacks on an author who's ambitiously trying to synthesize connections between apparently disparate topics, which discourages any ounce of originality/creativity.
To start with, I wonder whether we can construct a better reading list for an audience with a more holistic bent, not just in relation to health, but for other domains too. Once a curated audience is established, authors might find more inducement to write such stuff. That said, once these floodgates are opened, filtering out the bullshit-mongers will take significant effort and judicious exercise of editorial discretion.
In case anyone is interested, some ad-hoc examples, based on what I've been reading lately:
- Christopher Alexander (full series of ten books, ostensibly relating to architecture, but actually reflecting on so much more)
- Writings by some cybernetics pioneers (eg: Norbert Weiner and Ross Ashby)
Yeah very strange they do a breakdown of what percentages each diet has, but not the overall caloric intake. If you consume 5000 calories a day, it really does not matter how healthy your macros are.
I wonder what the results would show if they did a similar study but compared people of similar body compositions. Who has the healthiest population of people with a BMI of ~20.
After a quick Google I found several older articles that do mention the caloric intake of the Tsimané [1]. It is curious that the BBC article left that out.
Yeah, comparing with Americans seems designed to overstate the effect. If you instead compared with e.g. some European country where the obesity rate is much lower, it would yield a better idea how the two diets compare if the caloric intake was about the same in both cases.
About 25% of France is obese. Europe is less obese than America but they're markedly more obese than they were a generation ago. Worlds off from hunter gatherer levels.
The fact that they walk a huge amount (16,000/17,000 steps per day) seems to be a very obvious factor.
Unfortunately, getting this kind of behavior, at least in the US, would be enormously challenging, because our land use policies and regulations are generally designed to make walking useless and/or painful.
I've lived in several parts of the US, currently live in Munich, only NYC felt close to Munich in walkability, and I honestly think I'd still give Munich the edge (even though it's not as dense and business convenience is worse). The other areas I lived in -- Silicon Valley, Seattle suburb, Utah, various parts of Alabama -- were all complete and utter garbage for walking. They're very obviously not even trying.
Are you unable to walk around your neighborhood in SV, Seattle and other places?
I live on Long Island (not NYC) but it's not hard to find places to walk around in safety. I put in 3-5 miles (roughly 6,000 - 10,000 steps going by Google) a day just aimlessly walking side streets for general exercise and clearing my mind.
When I visited SV it didn't seem too bad downtown. Can't speak for the other places though.
But if you want to put in the steps, you just need ground to walk on and preferably not be constantly dealing with highways (that would really suck).
Basic google tells me that your upper range (5 miles) is still only around 10k steps. You’ll need to walk another 60-70% more to achieve what they do, which is where much of the effort can be in.
I've been going 3-5 miles for over 5 years because it makes me feel good. I never heard of these people or their habits until yesterday.
By the way, if you can walk 5 miles effortlessly, you can probably walk an entire day with little breaks. I've done some 15+ mile walking sessions in NYC. By the end of it, it's really not bad if it's a nice day out (it can get ridiculously hot and cold in NYC).
Most people don't have 1-1.5 hours to spend each day walking purely for health reasons. That's why supporting active transportation is so important and useful.
> Are you unable to walk around your neighborhood in SV, Seattle and other places?
Of course walking is possible. It's just generally some combination of useless and highly unpleasant[1].
Let me give you an example of what I mean: in SV, I mostly recently lived in a mobile home park. The mobile home itself was largely fine, it was brand new when we moved in actually, and because it's a Silicon Valley mobile home park, the usual stereotypes don't really apply. However, it's true that in design, walking out of it was simply unpleasant: it's just bare asphalt, all the way out. Then once you exit, there's some typical America land use, there's sidewalks sure, but right past the sidewalks are small seas of asphalt in front of each business.
Then you get to the street. It's El Camino Real, a pretty normal sized arterial by US standards, but by the standards of Munich the road is ludicrously huge: there's enough space for car parking on each side, then 3 lanes of traffic on each side, and often one or two lanes for turning near intersections.
Right across the street from our mobile home complex, there's a large Korean grocery store that we liked, and as the crow flies it's only a few minutes' walk away. BUT, as you might guess, we have to walk to a nearby intersection to go across (it's far too wide to jaywalk, unlike most 'commercial' streets in Munich), where there's a crosswalk. The crosswalk has to cross about 10 lanes' width or so of road. In theory, if you look like you're trying to cross, drivers are legally obliged to stop. You can probably guess how well that goes: you have to either wait for a natural break in traffic, or put your life on the line and hope that drivers see in you time. It fucking sucks, and so far I've seen no equivalent to this in Munich, they're tremendously better with supporting pedestrian crossings (for example, pedestrian islands are easily an order of magnitude more common, maybe two orders of magnitude). It simply felt terrible to get to that store, and there's no way I'd ever send my 7 year old son to walk there by himself, whereas I'll gladly send him off to walk or bike an equivalent distance here in Munich to stores or school.
The Seattle suburb (Mercer Island), the apartment complex we lived in was actually quite nice, but there was almost nothing of interest within easy walking distance of it. It was just residential housing for quite a ways, which is standard in the US, but much less common here. Here on the outskirts of Munich, I think I have like 4 grocery stores (small ones, of course) within a ~5 minute walk, a couple different bakeries, a few fitness centers, and other various shops and the like.
Honestly, I could go on and on, the differences are absolutely massive. If Munich is an NFL team for walk-friendly land use and urban design, your average US city is a junior high school's backup squad. It's really that bad.
> But if you want to put in the steps, you just need ground to walk on
You're confusing an individual suggestion with possible societal solutions. "People should just, like, walk more" is never going to solve the problem. Period. The people in the article don't walk 16,000 steps per day for their health, they do it in the process of conducting their daily business. It being really healthy is just a pleasant side effect.
It's the exact same reason the Dutch are champions of active transportation (walking/biking) in the Western World: they've built infrastructure so that walking and biking are actually useful and comfortable, and so people naturally get exercise in the course of their daily routine. Telling people to pull themselves up by their exercise bootstraps as its own independent thing will never, ever work. You will find nowhere in the developed world, where people broadly exercise that much, consistently, for its own sake.
Sorry about that, I meant to put downtown SF not SV (got mixed up). Downtown in the sense that it was the city'ish area with large buildings. I only had a chance to really drive through the SV area.
Walking in general sucks in my area if you want to talk about being practical. If you don't have a car on Long Island then you're going to be in a world of hurt in most cases. You often need to drive 10 or 20 minutes to get from point A to B.
But maybe I just live in a weird area. I've been walking for the sake of walking for years and there's a number of people I consistently run into. It's a tiny percent of people compared to the general population but they are there. I see them every day and it's a small mix of people.
I was just saying you can walk for the sake of walking just about anywhere if you really wanted to.
SF is indeed one of the best places in the US for walking. And yet Munich still has like 5x the walking mode share. That's how huge the gap is with walkability between the two countries. Even the best US areas are chump change in comparison.
> Walking in general sucks in my area if you want to talk about being practical.
Right, and this is true nearly everywhere in the US. But it doesn't have to be. I see towns of a few thousand in Germany that are much more walkable than most US cities 100x their size.
> I was just saying you can walk for the sake of walking just about anywhere if you really wanted to.
Even in cities like SF and Seattle where it can be dense (in the city proper) it's still not quite dense enough with good enough transit systems to promote walking to 100% of your destinations. You usually have to Lyft/Uber most of the way still.
This is true, but it goes so far beyond that. Lack of mixed use zoning is also a big factor, as are little details like speed limits, road widths, pedestrian islands, cut throughs, plazas, walk/bike paths, size and placement of crosswalks, placement of traffic signals, etc.
Something as small as the curve of the corner of the sidewalk at the intersection, most people will never think about, but it absolutely impacts walkability (the larger and less 'sharp' the curve, the less walkable it is).
Well this article seems to be pushing for more carbohydrate consumption and putting that increased level of calories from carbs at the same significance as the massively increased level of physical activity they have.
Dietary composition _is_ the key. No hunter-gatherer group has ever exceeded 50% of total caloric intake coming from plants, especially not from simple sugars.
Judging from other "natives" I met, probably as much as they can(with Walmart being 1000 miles away, that would be little). I don't know if you were thinking in terms of "incriminating" veg oil in favor of butter etc, which is the trend in Atkins etc, but the takeaway message of such studies is exercise and the stress-free life, you become what you do and what you think! Eating is a part of thinking and doing, but only up to a point.
I was indeed thinking in terms of "incriminating" veg oil, but more in favor of omega 3 fatty acids (as is also the trend in Atkins etc,) not necessarily saturated fats in butter. (edit: Also silently implying here that n-3 to n-6 ratio matters. Omega-6 fats are essential, but in nature n-3:n-6 is found in more desirable ratios.)
I get what you're saying re: exercise and stress, but I have to believe that for some percent of the population, diet rules over the ability to have enthusiasm for exercise and the ability to deal with stress. Everybody's got stress. Some people feel it more than others.
Just to clarify, I am talking about natural exercise and natural non-stress :) In their small communities you get stress and excrete it, while in the average larger community you accumulate it. It is the background "stress radiation", low intensity nagging stress, that does all kinds of nasty things to us - more accurately, we do it to ourselves and each other. Similarly, I would not equate time in the gym or jogging in Manhattan to their exercise.
I don't know if by some fluke they have the perfect 3-6 ratio in their diets, but if you get your fresh food and exercise (and those beneficial worms ;) ), it does not matter.
So, what's their average total caloric intake? Hmm... 2400-2700/day[1] which is not in the Lancet article[2], but I did find that in an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reference[3]. It appears they get lots of exercise, which isn't surprising.
That is even more illuminating. They eat primarily unrefined carbs like rice, corn, and plantains, 2400~2700 calories worth of it a day (more than I eat!), and yet they are very healthy and fit. Considering the numbers, it really looks like the difference is the amount of physical activity.
I think that sedentary humans are just not supposed to eat as much as we think or want to do.
Small anecdote: I did travels through Europe a while back and did lots of walking. That's fairly normal in many European towns and cities. Really felt great and decided to do 20k steps a day after return. Which tapered off slowly and unconsciously. Need to get back to that level. Your body respond quickly in positive direction, I can recall that much.
I think a lot of people miss out on this when talking about their TDEE. Folks in some countries are more active as part of their routine, outside of planned exercises. I noticed this a lot when I traveled, too. I was walking everywhere, all the time. As were the locals.
You might be joking, but higher altitude also means less oxygen, which translates to reduced oxidation and less risk of cancer.
I'm on my cellphone so I don't have the paper on hand, but there was a big study where they compared lung cancer rates in different geographic areas and found that the highest cancer incidence was at sea level, whereas the lowest was at higher elevations. They tried controlling for other obvious variables but elevation was unquestionably the best explanation.
> Once a cholesterol plaque is there, it's generally there to stay. With effective treatment, though, plaque buildup may slow down or stop.
> Some evidence shows that, with aggressive treatment, cholesterol plaques can even shrink slightly. In one major study, cholesterol plaques shrank 10% in size after a 50% reduction in blood cholesterol levels.
> The best way to treat cholesterol plaques is to prevent them from forming or progressing. That can be done with lifestyle changes and, if needed, medication.
Vitamin K - Mk7, Vitamin V, and Magnesium seem to help with the removal of calcifications of the artillery. Though I couldn't really find referees other than reports on `Vitamin K intake and calcifications in breast arteries Angela`
Doesn't even mention sugar. Seems like that would be a very large and important difference.
Just says "72% of calories come from carbohydrates compared with 52% in the US", which might encourage a westerner to eat more carbs, but if they're eating whole rice and we're eating sugar that seems kinda important.
Comparison of gut bacteria would be interesting too, bet that's as important as the diet itself.
> One idea is that intestinal worms - which dampen immune reactions - could be more common and this may help protect the heart.
That worm infects most of the population:
> And about 70% of the population has a parasitic worm infection [Ascaris lumbricoides, a type of roundworm]. ... Up to a third of the world's population also lives with such infections.
Before latching onto exercise or diet as the primary factors, it's worth considering the effect of this worm infection. It could influence the heart indirectly through nutrient flow, immune suppression as suggested for the original article or the one on pregnancy, or directly via for example larvae/segments, etc.
BTW, the lifecycle of this thing is the stuff of nightmares:
> Ascaris lumbricoides, a roundworm, infects humans via the fecal-oral route. Eggs released by adult females are shed in feces. Unfertilized eggs are often observed in fecal samples but never become infective. Fertilized eggs embryonate and become infective after 18 days to several weeks in soil, depending on the environmental conditions (optimum: moist, warm, shaded soil).[5]. When an embryonated egg is ingested, a Rhabditiform larva hatches then penetrates the wall of the duodenum and enters the blood stream. From there, it is carried to the liver and heart, and enters pulmonary circulation to break free in the alveoli, where it grows and molts. In three weeks, the larva passes from the respiratory system to be coughed up, swallowed, and thus returned to the small intestine, where it matures to an adult male or female worm. Fertilization can now occur and the female produces as many as 200,000 eggs per day for 12–18 months. These fertilized eggs become infectious after two weeks in soil; they can persist in soil for 10 years or more.[6]
But is their health abnormal after accounting for the usual RRs associated with their BMI, exercise, fiber and trans fat intake? They don't drink or smoke, I presume?
The difficulty with "non-mathematical" sciences is that they tend to treat math as a tool for validation rather than expression. This is partially a failure of communication on the part of mathematicians.
Can we get the actual numbers and breakdowns for fats? They're so quick to say less saturated fat is the cause, but I bet the difference in polyunsaturated fats is even BIGGER and is probably the REAL reason they are healthier. PUFAs as they are called are incredibly unhealthy, and there is Big Business trying to hide this.
This is a perfect example of how everything in life is always a trade off. Do you want a healthier heart to live a few extra years or do you want to sit on your couch and browse HN while enjoying your BigMac? Pick one because only a fool would believe they could have both.
105 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread72% of calories come from carbohydrates compared with 52% in the US
14% from fat compared with 34% in the US, Tsimane also consume much less saturated fat
Both Americans and Tsimane have 14% of calories from protein, but Tsimane have more lean meat"
That really does seem counter to the low-carb diets that seem to be all the rage among internet communities (also HN).
But, maybe it's just the constant exercise the Tsimane people are getting: "They are also far more physically active with the men averaging 17,000 steps a day and the women 16,000."
"Is it only diet and exercise?"
Lol. So... they are telling the 'news' that people who eat well, are very physically active, live in close communities with little individual isolation... and they are healthy?
Hold the presses! Seems like BBC had a day where they needed to put in some filler news articles.
> That heart health is in spite of the fact that they consume between 2,433 to 2,738 calories per day ... strangely, their diets aren’t incredibly healthy, though we can still learn a thing or two from their lifestyle.
https://www.inverse.com/article/50572-tsimane-amazon-healthy...
That is only if you take for a fact we know what a healthy diet is and there is a single clear definition.
For me, Healthy eating is a diverse diet that leads to good health. Particularly eating foods where caloric density is offset by nutritional value. Based on my own definition and the facts of the article, these people do eat healthy.
I think the surprise comes from people who think they know what a 'healthy diet' is.
As the article states, 'this is definitively not keto diet' - for me this means about zero to me. If that point is surprising to you or to a group of people, I think you are right, it is a surprising study from that point of view. Thanks for helping me understand the newsworthy part of this.
Generally people discussing “low carb diets” really mean managing blood glucose/insulin spikes. So high glycemic carbs, refined sugars, refined carbs.
Not all carbs are created equal when we talk about impacts on blood glucose and/or the liver.
It's likely that beside the rice and maize, most of their carbs come from vegetables. It's one of the reasons why high-performance diets are usually heavy on the broccoli!
What seems consistent is that both diets high in whole grains and high-fiber diets in general have some heart health benefits. My guess is that refined+enriched flour in a high-fiber meal is not much, if any, worse than whole flour in a medium- or low-fiber meal. Those pastries and chips between meals, on the other hand...
It sounds logical, but I don't know if it's really useful if you're not diabetic.
Edit: the book is called "The Personalized Diet."
It’s probably very useful to measure what spikes ones insulin so the individual can avoid those foods.
For example I know whey, a protein powder with zero carbs/sugars will spike my insulin (because it knocks me out of ketosis). Probably not a bad idea for a body builder who wants to replinish their muscle glycogen stores after a hard workout, but not going to be necessary and over long term even harmful to someone who isn’t depleting their muscle glucose/glycogen stores. In fact protein that can’t be used is generally converted into glucose which when not used is store in fat cells.
This is why things like french fries or pizza are so fattening.
How can this be explained?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5326984/
There’s no magic in keto. People lose weight on keto because they wind up eating fewer calories, usually because they cut back on processed junk food as part of going keto.
The fact that they have the best indicators of cardiovascular health ever reported is the exact opposite to many recent suggestions that carbohydrates are unhealthy."
Refined carbs ARE unhealthy and it's a bit disheartening that they didn't make that distinction in the article.
Big difference between this and HFCS and table sugar.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce...
Another way to look at this is that refined sugar is the sugar with all the other things that would have lowered the glycemic index taken away. If you add it back, the index will be lowered again. If I eat refined sugar from sugar beets and accompany it with the fiber, etc from the processing, the glycemic index will be the same as eating sugar beets. So it doesn't matter where the carbs are coming from, it only matters if you are mixing it with fibre, fat and protein.
Since the introduction of “western diet” post WW2 the majority of their diet is still carbs and yet they now show significant increase of Chronic disease (obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and kidney disease) and lowered life expectancy.
The government clued in and investigated and it turns out that Okinawan doctors were making a tidy profit by agreeing not to file death certificates. This enabled families to continue to claim pension benefits on behalf of their supposedly aged relatives.
After the the smoke died down the went back and looked at Okinawan life expectancy taking pension fraud into consideration and discovered that it was pretty much exactly the same as the rest of Japan. The original life expectancy/diet studies had relied on government information rather than actually interviewing people. I'm sorry I don't have a citation for you as I saw this in a documentary in Japan on TV.
However, I do believe they legitimately have the most centurions and I have read about autopsies on centurions which found they showed no signs of chronic disease. Of course that is surviorship bias, but assuming the total number of centurions is true, especially given the small population, I think there is more there there.
I definitely don't think that fat is the best thing ever for you, but butter/lard (and other dairy fat) heavy diets have been around for a long time.
I am really concerned about what we as residents in democratic countries are permitting regulators to hand-wave into our food, there is something really bad that we're all eating or drinking and we're going to need to figure out what it is pretty quickly.
these aren't refined, but they arguably aren't the healthiest for you
> By the time they reach age 75, two-thirds of Tsimane are CAC-free compared with the overwhelming majority of Americans (80%) having signs of CAC.
The article doesn't mention obesity at all. 40% of Americans over 40 are obese[1]. Tsimane obesity rates of adults (>20 years) are 5.6% for women and 1.6% for men[2].
Journalists love writing about dietary composition as if increasing your fish (or whatever) consumption is a magic bullet, but merely changing composition without losing weight is only a moderate improvement (maybe 30% fewer heart attacks, based on that retracted NEJM dietary study[3]).
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3392307/ [3]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200303
It's as if: the need for meaning, relationships, sleep, body, teeth, eating, professional development, daily routine, sitting, walking, how we walk, our individual body constructs, personality archetypes, mental health, etc... were more than the sum of their parts and being overly dissecting such things leads to a lessening, not increase in understanding of the whole.
A great book on psychology like thinking fast and slow will do a great job at dissecting reality from that narrow point of view, just as other books will do the same in other fields. But I don't really know of any field that is respected that combines many elements to study how to maximize human potential/study the human experience as a whole.
I offer no solutions, just an observation in terms of how we deal with the human experience in modernity.
Just as work to live in some places has been distorted to live to work.
We should create categories to understand, not understand to create categories.
I've seen it everywhere. My doctor trying to shove pills down my throat when I had developed some bad habits and he didn't ask me ONE question about diet or night routine. I've seen it in universities where professors attack each others field instead of finding the common thread. In the boss that says "that's not your job, thats marketing/QA/dev/business dev/growth team/etc". It's a lack of understand that a team should provide value to the overall and the categories should only be there to aid in overall progress.
Well put. The challenge for any individual author is that it is much easier to write defensively in a narrow niche (cue: increasing specialization in research). It is very easy to start flinging accusations and ad-hominem attacks on an author who's ambitiously trying to synthesize connections between apparently disparate topics, which discourages any ounce of originality/creativity.
A more obvious problem is how our systems bias for an explosion of "content" and evisceration of nuance. For some thoughts on the topic, see https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/09/24/norbert-wiener-comm...
To start with, I wonder whether we can construct a better reading list for an audience with a more holistic bent, not just in relation to health, but for other domains too. Once a curated audience is established, authors might find more inducement to write such stuff. That said, once these floodgates are opened, filtering out the bullshit-mongers will take significant effort and judicious exercise of editorial discretion.
In case anyone is interested, some ad-hoc examples, based on what I've been reading lately:
- Christopher Alexander (full series of ten books, ostensibly relating to architecture, but actually reflecting on so much more)
- Writings by some cybernetics pioneers (eg: Norbert Weiner and Ross Ashby)
- Design as participation, by Kevin Slavin -- https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/design-as-participation
PS: Some of my current readings skirt "unfashionable" topics related to AI/ML, many of which are papers from the 80s :-)
1: https://www.inverse.com/article/50572-tsimane-amazon-healthy...
Unfortunately, getting this kind of behavior, at least in the US, would be enormously challenging, because our land use policies and regulations are generally designed to make walking useless and/or painful.
I've lived in several parts of the US, currently live in Munich, only NYC felt close to Munich in walkability, and I honestly think I'd still give Munich the edge (even though it's not as dense and business convenience is worse). The other areas I lived in -- Silicon Valley, Seattle suburb, Utah, various parts of Alabama -- were all complete and utter garbage for walking. They're very obviously not even trying.
I live on Long Island (not NYC) but it's not hard to find places to walk around in safety. I put in 3-5 miles (roughly 6,000 - 10,000 steps going by Google) a day just aimlessly walking side streets for general exercise and clearing my mind.
When I visited SV it didn't seem too bad downtown. Can't speak for the other places though.
But if you want to put in the steps, you just need ground to walk on and preferably not be constantly dealing with highways (that would really suck).
By the way, if you can walk 5 miles effortlessly, you can probably walk an entire day with little breaks. I've done some 15+ mile walking sessions in NYC. By the end of it, it's really not bad if it's a nice day out (it can get ridiculously hot and cold in NYC).
Of course walking is possible. It's just generally some combination of useless and highly unpleasant[1].
Let me give you an example of what I mean: in SV, I mostly recently lived in a mobile home park. The mobile home itself was largely fine, it was brand new when we moved in actually, and because it's a Silicon Valley mobile home park, the usual stereotypes don't really apply. However, it's true that in design, walking out of it was simply unpleasant: it's just bare asphalt, all the way out. Then once you exit, there's some typical America land use, there's sidewalks sure, but right past the sidewalks are small seas of asphalt in front of each business.
Then you get to the street. It's El Camino Real, a pretty normal sized arterial by US standards, but by the standards of Munich the road is ludicrously huge: there's enough space for car parking on each side, then 3 lanes of traffic on each side, and often one or two lanes for turning near intersections.
Right across the street from our mobile home complex, there's a large Korean grocery store that we liked, and as the crow flies it's only a few minutes' walk away. BUT, as you might guess, we have to walk to a nearby intersection to go across (it's far too wide to jaywalk, unlike most 'commercial' streets in Munich), where there's a crosswalk. The crosswalk has to cross about 10 lanes' width or so of road. In theory, if you look like you're trying to cross, drivers are legally obliged to stop. You can probably guess how well that goes: you have to either wait for a natural break in traffic, or put your life on the line and hope that drivers see in you time. It fucking sucks, and so far I've seen no equivalent to this in Munich, they're tremendously better with supporting pedestrian crossings (for example, pedestrian islands are easily an order of magnitude more common, maybe two orders of magnitude). It simply felt terrible to get to that store, and there's no way I'd ever send my 7 year old son to walk there by himself, whereas I'll gladly send him off to walk or bike an equivalent distance here in Munich to stores or school.
The Seattle suburb (Mercer Island), the apartment complex we lived in was actually quite nice, but there was almost nothing of interest within easy walking distance of it. It was just residential housing for quite a ways, which is standard in the US, but much less common here. Here on the outskirts of Munich, I think I have like 4 grocery stores (small ones, of course) within a ~5 minute walk, a couple different bakeries, a few fitness centers, and other various shops and the like.
Honestly, I could go on and on, the differences are absolutely massive. If Munich is an NFL team for walk-friendly land use and urban design, your average US city is a junior high school's backup squad. It's really that bad.
> But if you want to put in the steps, you just need ground to walk on
You're confusing an individual suggestion with possible societal solutions. "People should just, like, walk more" is never going to solve the problem. Period. The people in the article don't walk 16,000 steps per day for their health, they do it in the process of conducting their daily business. It being really healthy is just a pleasant side effect.
It's the exact same reason the Dutch are champions of active transportation (walking/biking) in the Western World: they've built infrastructure so that walking and biking are actually useful and comfortable, and so people naturally get exercise in the course of their daily routine. Telling people to pull themselves up by their exercise bootstraps as its own independent thing will never, ever work. You will find nowhere in the developed world, where people broadly exercise that much, consistently, for its own sake.
To be blunt, you don't have to just...
Walking in general sucks in my area if you want to talk about being practical. If you don't have a car on Long Island then you're going to be in a world of hurt in most cases. You often need to drive 10 or 20 minutes to get from point A to B.
But maybe I just live in a weird area. I've been walking for the sake of walking for years and there's a number of people I consistently run into. It's a tiny percent of people compared to the general population but they are there. I see them every day and it's a small mix of people.
I was just saying you can walk for the sake of walking just about anywhere if you really wanted to.
> Walking in general sucks in my area if you want to talk about being practical.
Right, and this is true nearly everywhere in the US. But it doesn't have to be. I see towns of a few thousand in Germany that are much more walkable than most US cities 100x their size.
> I was just saying you can walk for the sake of walking just about anywhere if you really wanted to.
For sure. People won't, though.
Something as small as the curve of the corner of the sidewalk at the intersection, most people will never think about, but it absolutely impacts walkability (the larger and less 'sharp' the curve, the less walkable it is).
I get what you're saying re: exercise and stress, but I have to believe that for some percent of the population, diet rules over the ability to have enthusiasm for exercise and the ability to deal with stress. Everybody's got stress. Some people feel it more than others.
I don't know if by some fluke they have the perfect 3-6 ratio in their diets, but if you get your fresh food and exercise (and those beneficial worms ;) ), it does not matter.
[1]https://coach.nine.com.au/2018/11/05/14/03/tsimane-diet-card...
[2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315262221_Coronary_...
[3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30383188
I think that sedentary humans are just not supposed to eat as much as we think or want to do.
Give it a few years and we'll start to see the bad affects of too much protein. Mark my words.
People who live a long time don't care about diets. Show me one who did.
Jack LaLanne?
He was one of the first modern evangelists of fitness and diet and lived to be 96, according to wikipedia.
Purely anecdotal but you did ask for a single example.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-short...
I'm on my cellphone so I don't have the paper on hand, but there was a big study where they compared lung cancer rates in different geographic areas and found that the highest cancer incidence was at sea level, whereas the lowest was at higher elevations. They tried controlling for other obvious variables but elevation was unquestionably the best explanation.
Oxidation may explain plaque in arteries.
Not much different from the Blue Zones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
Can you unclog your arteries by changing your lifestyle, ie diet and exercise, or is the clogging permanent?
> Once a cholesterol plaque is there, it's generally there to stay. With effective treatment, though, plaque buildup may slow down or stop.
> Some evidence shows that, with aggressive treatment, cholesterol plaques can even shrink slightly. In one major study, cholesterol plaques shrank 10% in size after a 50% reduction in blood cholesterol levels.
> The best way to treat cholesterol plaques is to prevent them from forming or progressing. That can be done with lifestyle changes and, if needed, medication.
Vitamin K - Mk7, Vitamin V, and Magnesium seem to help with the removal of calcifications of the artillery. Though I couldn't really find referees other than reports on `Vitamin K intake and calcifications in breast arteries Angela`
https://dresselstyn.com/JFP_06307_Article1.pdf
Just says "72% of calories come from carbohydrates compared with 52% in the US", which might encourage a westerner to eat more carbs, but if they're eating whole rice and we're eating sugar that seems kinda important.
Comparison of gut bacteria would be interesting too, bet that's as important as the diet itself.
That worm infects most of the population:
> And about 70% of the population has a parasitic worm infection [Ascaris lumbricoides, a type of roundworm]. ... Up to a third of the world's population also lives with such infections.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34857022
Before latching onto exercise or diet as the primary factors, it's worth considering the effect of this worm infection. It could influence the heart indirectly through nutrient flow, immune suppression as suggested for the original article or the one on pregnancy, or directly via for example larvae/segments, etc.
BTW, the lifecycle of this thing is the stuff of nightmares:
> Ascaris lumbricoides, a roundworm, infects humans via the fecal-oral route. Eggs released by adult females are shed in feces. Unfertilized eggs are often observed in fecal samples but never become infective. Fertilized eggs embryonate and become infective after 18 days to several weeks in soil, depending on the environmental conditions (optimum: moist, warm, shaded soil).[5]. When an embryonated egg is ingested, a Rhabditiform larva hatches then penetrates the wall of the duodenum and enters the blood stream. From there, it is carried to the liver and heart, and enters pulmonary circulation to break free in the alveoli, where it grows and molts. In three weeks, the larva passes from the respiratory system to be coughed up, swallowed, and thus returned to the small intestine, where it matures to an adult male or female worm. Fertilization can now occur and the female produces as many as 200,000 eggs per day for 12–18 months. These fertilized eggs become infectious after two weeks in soil; they can persist in soil for 10 years or more.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascaris_lumbricoides
Clearly, the juvenile state spends some time in the circulatory system, where it should have some opportunities to influence coronary artery calcium.
I looked for studies that examined the incidence of heart disease/CAC buildup among other infected populations but didn't immediately find anything.
https://laqm.defra.gov.uk/public-health/pm25.html
Let me get some of those worms!
The difficulty with "non-mathematical" sciences is that they tend to treat math as a tool for validation rather than expression. This is partially a failure of communication on the part of mathematicians.
http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturated-oils.shtml