I wonder how accurate this is.
I’m a bit suspicious of their metric for a healthy diet. From what I know off the top of my head, the diets of the countries on the “worst” list are quite meat and dairy -centric. Not necessarily unhealthy overall, however.
Their metric for a healthy diet treats any and all meat as unhealthy, all fish as healthy (does that include shellfish or not?), any vegetables as healthy (except for saturated and monounsaturated oils). Talk about broad brushes…
So rich people have more options to eat healthy stuff, or quick-satisfying junk food, depending on their choice. No new revelation, really.
I mean, they kind of have a point. If you go to Chad, you are going to eat a lot of produce and whole grains, very little meat, sugar or oil, and basically no processed food. I live in a place culturally and climatically similar to Chad, and we basically ate greens, peanuts and in-season fruit.
I’m not sure how useful this information is to anyone, though.
Just remember that meat eating appears to have initiated the evolution of homo from apes. So meat = bad, vegetable = good denies our genetic heritage.
I am impressed by the fact that humans cannot survive a totally vegan diet without vitamin supplements. Even a hand full of ants a day will provide enough B12 for survival. Also getting most of your calories from carbs is not good and the high carb mantra is now thought by some to have set off the obesity epidemic.
I’m sure that in 20 years all the latest dietary advice will have been refuted. When will they finally get it straight?
when they dig up Ancel Keys and desecrate his corpse.
It’s accurate according to their definition of “healthy” and “unhealthy” … a couple of items of which are questionable but not most.
Dairy is included in their healthy list Elemenopy.
The actual article for anyone’s interest.
The key word is “relatively” in reference to high and low of the listed “healthy” and “unhealthy” components. The lowest quintile for unprocessed red meat (something that some here may question) was 23 g per day compared to 47 for the middle quintile and 84 for the highest. Alternatively the range lowest to highest quintile for processed meats (something that few would debate) went from 3.9 to 34. No Hari they do not promote veganism in this article.
The article’s take way is not aimed at making recommendations for individuals’ diets, but digging into regional dietary patterns. Their point was that the way the news article linked in the op reports their findings, citing only the “overall” numbers, misses the variation in regional diets:
“They” have had it pretty much right for years, very little is different now than what the American Heart Association said 15 years ago, with full appreciation of the limits of the extant data and full cautions when conclusions were based off of limited information; the media’s portrayal of what “they” say however consistently sucks. Yes, what “they” have been saying and still say with some changes around the edges, is to emphasize compete dietary patterns, lots of vegetables and fruits, fish, legumes, nuts, moderate lean meats and to limit foods that contain high amounts of saturated fats, highly processed foods, and to get carbs more from unprocessed whole foods and not from refined carb sources low in fiber.
The fact that the media and Big Food Inc conspired to sell that as something other than that is not something that “they” can either control or are responsible for.
Interesting alternative take on the healthiest dietary patterns by location here:
Highly doubtful that the basic themes of a diet heavy in vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, and fish, while relatively less than the typical American amounts of red meat, and avoiding highly processed foods be it processed meat or refined carbs or sweetened beverages, which has been the core of what “they” have been saying for decades, will be refuted in 20 years.