With the audience on here, I doubt that internet is considered "non-essential". It sounds to me that he ate a pretty balanced diet. Not gourmet by any stretch of the imagination, but plain, and for the most part, healthy food.
I agree that it sounds like he ate pretty healthy, but stuff like this really freaks me out:
Lard is the highest calorie per cent food you can buy.
That just seems to be the epitome of penny-wise and pound-foolish for 99.9% of people, who would be far better off trimming their budget in other categories so they could eat healthier instead of viewing food as just a source of calories.
In fact, you can eat all "unhealthy" food and be far healthier than 95% of the people around you by keeping a calorie budget and exercising enough.
In my case, I buy vats of lard at the local grocer and use it liberally. It tastes delicious.
I also work out at least an hour a day. No one feels the need to moralize about people failing to work out an hour a day, and yet that will have 10 times the benefit of micromanaging the nutrients in your diet. I'm strong and fit and my cholesterol is low.
Despite the fact that everyone knows I'm fit, they still say, "Imagine how much healthier you would be and how much more energy you would have if ate "better"?"
!!
Since, I'm the one who's fit, shouldn't you be asking me for advice?
Moralizing about people's diets is part of the same line of thinking as the Progressive movement that sprung Prohibition on us. And, of course, the Progressive movement can trace its philosophical lineage to the Puritans, so there you go.
Eating lots of fruits and vegetables and low-fat foods is not a good in and of itself. A diet is only healthy or unhealthy to the extent that its quality is reflected in your own health.
In fact, you can eat all "unhealthy" food and be far healthier than 95% of the people around you by keeping a calorie budget and exercising enough.
So you're telling me that if you eat McDonald's for every meal for thirty years, you'll experience no health issues as long as you exercise enough? Tell you what: let's have this conversation again in thirty years, provided you're still around.
An anecdote about a personal experience over a relatively short period of time is of limited value to me. Study after study has shown that the western diet has severe detrimental effects in the long run, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Can you mitigate some of that by exercising more? Absolutely. But thinking that you can put whatever you want into your body with no ill effects as long as you exercise enough is ridiculous.
According to one 32,000 person study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1999), "fit persons with any combination of smoking, elevated blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol level had lower adjusted death rates than low-fit persons with none of these characteristics". The same study found that aerobic fitness had a far more important impact on longevity than obesity did.
Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil and Grossman, Chapter 22.
What about those who were not smoking, had no elevated blood pressure or elevated cholesterol AND ALSO were fit? I would expect them to be better off compared to both groups mentioned. It's not like one has to choose between smoking and obesity ...
How "fit" or "obese" were the people, and how "elevated" was the blood pressure and cholesterol?
If the study showed that incredibly "fit" people who smoked occasionally and had a sightly elevated blood pressure and/or cholesterol had a "lower adjusted death rate" (what is that, exactly?) than people who sat in front of the computer all day but had none of the above factors, that would be one thing.
If the study showed that slightly "fit" people who smoked heavily and had an extremely elevated blood pressure and/or cholesterol had a "lower adjusted death rate" than people who sat in front of the computer all day but had none of the above factors, that would be something else.
The same could be asked of the fitness vs obesity results. How fit and how obese?
Also, have the results of the study ever been replicated? Or do they conflict with the results of other studies?
The conclusions of the study were strong, and dose-dependent. I.e. casual exercisers did much better than couch potatoes and heavy exercisers did much better than casual exercisers.
The groups were significantly different. The "obese" people in the study had BMIs of over 30. The "very obese" group had BMIs over 35. The "thin" people had BMIs under 25. Similarly, people with diagnosed hyper-tension were compared with those of low-risk blood pressures. A variety of fitness levels were examined, ranging from couch potatoes to daily (but not competitive) runners.
The study found that fitness had a protective effect against each of the other risk factors. In fact, the only other statistically independent predictor of mortality for men and women was smoking.
>Also, have the results of the study ever been replicated?
Yes. There have been a number of very large studies that have produced similar results.
S.N.Blair et al. 1989 "Physical fitness and all-cause mortality" JAMA Nov;262: 2395-2401 (over 13,000 subjects)
I.M.Lee 2003 "Physical activity in women: how much is good enough?" JAMA Sept 10;290(10) 1377-1378
C.D. Lee, S.N.Blair, and A.S. Jackson 1999, "Cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and all-cause cardiovascular disease mortality in men." Am J Clin Nutr. Mar;69(3):373-380.
Care to provide some more details for your statement? I've never seen the film in question, but I've seen (and eaten) McDonald's "food". Fast food has been implicated in weight gain and insulin resistance by numerous studies. Hopefully your argument isn't that you can just exercise more.
> Fast food has been implicated in weight gain and insulin resistance by numerous studies.
Care to point to even a single one where the problem of fast food was not that people tend to vastly exceed their calorie requirements when eating fast food?
I'm genuinely curious. If you eat a "supersized" meal a day, you can easily exceed your calorie from that single meal depending on what you choose and how active you are. Of course you'll get fat and get other health problems in that case, but all that tells you is that eating too much is bad for you.
I know more than one person who have eaten virtually nothing but McDonald's for long periods of time, and who are not especially overweight. Mere anecdotes, of course.
I'm not saying that eating lots of fast food isn't correlated with being fat. However, I would say that since it's quite possible to be skinny and eat enormous amounts of fast food, fast food cannot be making people fat. I would expect that the same character traits which lead someone to eat lots of fast food would lead to being fat for people predisposed to that body type.
I would say that since it's quite possible to be skinny and eat enormous amounts of fast food, fast food cannot be making people fat.
What? The fact that some people eat enormous amounts of fast food without getting fat hardly means that fast food cannot be making anyone fat.
Additionally, you seem to be assuming that skinny = healthy, and fat = unhealthy.
Finally, I'm fairly certain that studies have shown that as western fast food restaurants expand internationally into new cultures, incidences of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease all rise in those cultures.
He's saying that there's no material implication. Fast food doesn't make you fat, and it's no silver bullet to health. The typical fast food reliant diet (more calories than you need) makes you fat.
Ceteris paribus, skinny tends to be healthier than fat, with longer life and better quality of life. One study cited here even indicates skinny people don't even have to be that healthy otherwise to outlive fat people. It's a simple "assumption" that requires more debunking than you have given here.
Studies have also shown that obesity is well linked to disposable income. Is it any surprise that restaurants also expand as disposable income increases?
It's pretty easy to eat healthy at McDonalds, get a grilled chicken sandwhich with no mayo, skip the fries and soda and get a bottle of water for dinner or lunch.
For breakfast get an egg mcmuffin, no hashbrown and grab a coffee or orange juice.
If you just stick to those two meals when you have to have fast food it does basically no harm.
Fast food gives you the rope to hang yourself with, you don't have to do use it.
It's a natural fat used around the world, nothing to be scared of. If you get "real" lard (not hydrogenated), it has no trans fats and can be quite useful in the kitchen. Hispanic grocery stores or butcher shops are a good spot to find it.
The word "natural" doesn't mean "part of nature" when speaking of nutrition, it means "part of our evolutionary history." We ate lard in the past(and survived because of it, and evolved toward making use of it.) We did not eat cyanide.
That's not the meaning of the word "natural" in the context of nutrition, from my understanding. Perhaps the word you're looking for is "traditional".
Semantics aside, I'll gladly grant you that lard is a food that has been eaten in the past. But, once again, that doesn't mean it's necessarily better than other foods that haven't been eaten in the past.
An good example is "golden" rice. An argument could be made (and has been made) that golden rice could save millions of people from devastating vitamin deficiency which they would continue suffer from were they to avoid golden rice for their "traditional" foods.
Plenty of traditional foods just aren't very nutritious or healthy.
I know that HNers will scoff at the citing of popular literature, but I find the arguments in "Diet for a Small Planet" and "In Defense of Food" quite compelling when it comes to "traditional" foods. Traditional diets are developed to make best use of the ingredients available in a region and are often the healthier than "scientific" diets. A good example is Mexican food. Corn and beans together make a complete protein.
I think that tradition, like cuisines, is an ever changing thing, however.
Also - do a quick google for B17 -- Since this whole chain of comments is a bunch of anecdotes - I've met two people who have been 'cured' of cancer taking that. After chemotherapy had failed / they had been written off.
(B17/Laertrile is banned in a lot of places US/Aus/etc - for links/containing/Cantbebotheredreadingthestudies Cyanide).
I may be wrong, but I think lard has less saturated fat then butter and possibly even cream cheese. So while not good for you in anything other then tiny quantities, it may be less bad for you then other stuff you have problem putting on your bagel.
