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.
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...
> 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'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 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.
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.
I don't see how any of that stops someone from "making stir fry with chicken breast/thighs, frozen veggies, and rice" as OP put it. Maybe the chicken is the most expensive part of that. What does your retirement account or mattress have to do with taking a few minutes to cook some veggies and rice?
Because it's not "just a few minutes". It's the time to learn how to make it well; it's the cooking equipment to make it well, consistently; it's the navigation of an ever-shifting retail environment with way too much choice and featuring the kind of sensory input meant to overload your decision-making abilities, just to get the ingredients; it's the way that poor sleep (mattress) also affects those decisions; it's the way that financial precarity means juggling concerns of the now with concerns of the future (retirement), and how that kind of anxiety also short-circuits your decision-making; it's knowing that eating "chicken and frozen veggies and rice" for every meal is going to leave you malnourished in short order, too, but that because the internet rando who's more focused on balancing a silver spoon on his nose than the points of discussion at hand will ALWAYS find fault in what you do (if he cares at all), maybe throwing all of that stress out the window and ordering Subway is the right call after all. Your inability to "see" doesn't preclude what I talked about from being there and material and true. And they are.
And for the record, I cook, but I only have time to because I'm unemployed.
So much of what you described happens because people intentionally make those bad decisions. That being said, you can still feed yourself well in the above scenario. What the parent described is nutritious and not expensive, and people get food stamps to cover food if they cannot pay for it. The actual problem is that people refuse discipline and don’t want to give up their vices and bad decisions. People hide behind blaming large ephemeral “complexes” and industries because they want to hide from their own irresponsibility and because some just want to have more control over other people including over other people who don’t choose bad decisions.
Ironically, this kind of post is your own attempt to hide from your responsibility as a member of a community and society that is setting up the wrong structures and incentives for people to naturally make the right decisions.
You are correct. The argument of "people are forced to eat fast food because it's too expensive to eat healthy" is not intellectually honest at all.
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.
> 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 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.
You are describing idealogues and zealots and bureaucrats who want that problem to continue to exist no matter what. Because they have an agenda which involves taking control of whatever they can if they can. They would be deeply distressed if food insecurity was solved without needing their top-down control.
I've heard the same thing, and I usually respond with prices of decent, filling food at the grocery store - like potatoes, a can of beans, a bag of apples, etc. As for cooking, you can buy a used microwave at the thrift store for about what a soft taco costs at Taco Time.
> I've heard the same thing, and I usually respond with prices of decent, filling food at the grocery store - like potatoes, a can of beans, a bag of apples, etc. As for cooking, you can buy a used microwave at the thrift store for about what a soft taco costs at Taco Time.
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.
Takes me 2 minutes to microwave a $2 can of chili. The can is worth about 2 meals. The trip to the store, once a week.
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.
FYI, half-decent Chili at Safeway is now more like $3.50-5.50. The days of canned food being cheap are over, even the tiny cans of super high sodium 200%+ DV Campbell's Chicken Soup costs like $2-3.
What are the poor people supposed to live off of? Potatoes, beans, and rice 24/7?
That diet is a tough sell. Especially since people in a low socioeconomic position are frequently quite busy trying to hold life together between 2-4 jobs and a family which includes children. I can understand why someone in this position would spring for something quick, easy, flavorful, and requiring as little expenditure of mental and emotional energy as possible.
The lack of empathy demonstrated throughout this thread for less well-off folks is not surprising but still a disappointing non-deviation from the HN stereotype. Why is it so hard to imagine being in someone else's shitty position? Being poor obviously sucks, it wears people down and disrupts and interferes with making optimal long-term decisions. This is obvious and I can't say I've ever truly been in this exact situation.
> These sound like things that can be done by someone who has resources when and where they need them.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Apples don't contribute much to a healthy diet: they're sweet, acidic enough to damage tooth enamel, and packed with fructose. You'd be much better off leaving fruit out of your diet and occasionally treating yourself to a little bit of brown rice or raw broccoli in between your meals of beans and potatoes.
Apples are a lot healthier than the same amount of fructose in isolation. they have a huge amount of fiber, which is both filling and good for your microbiome. And I'd bet on some good vitamin content though I'm not sure which off the top of my head.
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.
One hundred grams of apples (with skin) consists of 86 grams of water and 10.5 grams of sugar (mostly fructose), 2.5 grams of fiber, and negligible everything else. The only vitamin present in apples in non-trivial quantity is vitamin C.
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.
Assuming what you say is true, an apple provides you with about 1/27th the amount of carbs the FDA recommends in a day, and 1/12th the amount of fiber recommended in 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.
The harm is that the apple is acidic, damages tooth enamel over time, its nutrition value comes only from sugar (most of which is fructose), and it's not actually filling. Ask any fruitarian how soon after a meal of fruit they feel hungry again.
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.
I personally remember when Soda taxes were being proposed in Philadelphia. I did and do see soda as a luxury, so it sounded reasonable enough to me compared to alternatives
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 =\
they went through, its like $3-4 for a 2 liter. even diet so its not even about sugar, though diet soda isnt really much better. and i think the latest study is less than half the money went where it was supposed to.
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.
It depends on the food item. Ready to eat things like premade sandwiches or frozen food may have some taxes. Raw ingredients - produce, meat, eggs, bread, rice, oils, milk, cheese, etc- tend not to.
> "We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist."
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.
I think it's more of a blending of what's racist vs what's classist in America.
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.
I agree, but isn't it necessary to reckon with the fact that historically, explicitly and intentionally racist policies (for example, Jim Crow voting laws) often laundered themselves, when convenient, through classism in order to escape scrutiny? Put differently, would you contend that poll taxes were not 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?
> would you contend that poll taxes were not racist
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.
> If this is true, shouldn't there be consequences for NAACP?
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.
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.
1) The user you are trying so hard to catch in some contradiction seems to be arguing against the control large platforms have to effectively police speech into a box more narrow than the law, and (looking only at the provided snippets) does not seem to claim that the law can't or shouldn't provide some boundaries itself. Like, I don't know this user's opinion on whether truth in advertising laws are legitimate, only about whether it makes sense for Twitter / Facebook to be the ones who get to make the decision. In this case, they are asking why it isn't illegal, not why it isn't randomly being self-limited by the Internet-age speech carriers.
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.
Some spine on that guy. Why wouldn't you resign under that kind of directive? How can that possibly lead to a better outcome for the administration unless the outcome they wanted was for eggs to be cheaper for people who don't believe or listen to US surgeon general. I guess this was the President who took open door shits in front of staff and colleagues so I'm not sure its unexpected.
Is the fact that Johnson died at 64 of a heart attack somewhat ironic, or was he speaking from personal experience about the dangers of eggs (and the bacon everyone ate daily)?
I think the dietary cholesterol == bad thing is just totally wrong. Sample size of 1 but i eat about 4 eggs a day and steak almost every day but it's not processed fast food and my cholesterol, blood pressure, etc. are all _excellent_
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.
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.
Yes and no. Cholesterol by itself ain't bad, in fact it is necessary to synthesize sex hormones and vitamin D, among other things.
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.
ApoB levels are the most predictive of cardiovascular disease, which represents the number of atherogenic particles in your blood. You may have high LDL, but a low particle count, and therefore be fine. Sugar and metabolic disease causes your body to produce larger numbers of smaller and less effective particles.
There is little relationship between cholesterol consumption and serum cholesterol levels. It's a large molecule and can't be directly absorbed through the digestive system. Almost all of the cholesterol in your body was endogenously synthesized.
The outsized emphasis on dietary cholesterol, a molecule, and its relationship to blood "cholesterol", a type of solid particle (many aggregated molecules) composed of fats held together by cholesterol and proteins, is mostly a verbal confusion. Your "blood cholesterol" is the number density of lipoprotein particles in your blood. It is not the concentration of dissolved cholesterol qua cholest-5-en-3beta-ol.
I agree that the cholesterol factor seems pretty well debunked, but I think the mistake originally appeared because dietary cholesterol is typically present with saturated and trans fats. These are known to typically function as a lever for blood lipid levels. If you eat them, your blood lipids will temporarily rise and gradually fall. The fact that this doesn’t become chronic for you seems abnormal (but great), and I spend so much time trying to understand it better. Very intelligent people are on both sides of this thing, saying blood lipids aren’t the issue or that they’re the core issue.
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.
couldn't agree more, I hope we can move to a situation where at least these processed food companies are viewed the same way tobacco companies are (they've even become one and the same in the case of Kraft haha). I had a period in my life where I lost 50 pounds over the course of a year or so and the disappointment people felt when they asked how and I just said "I ate less and exercised more" instead of "1 weird trick" really discouraged me
He was a chain smoker who had had multiple serious heart attacks before taking office. He quit cold turkey to save his own life, then lit a cigarette the minute he stepped out of the White House. Smoked until it killed him.
There have been several studies that have shown eggs to be healthy. There are several studies that show they are unhealthy. Bias is a real problem in nutrition science.
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.
> There have been several studies that have shown eggs to be healthy. There are several studies that show they are unhealthy. Bias is a real problem in nutrition science.
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"?
It's just such a nuanced topic people have a really hard time reasoning about it. For example, Drinking Alcohol every day clearly increases your chances of developing disease.
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.
>Drinking zero Alcohol actually decreases the likely hood of you living to a ripe old age.
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.
Most people who switch to a mostly red meat diet do see a rise in blood cholesterol. I certainly did.
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.
The secondary question is if the quantity of cholesterol in a food causes the body to have higher cholesterol, or if it’s more complex than that. Because yes, per gram eggs have many times more cholesterol than red meat. But what if it’s something else present in red meat that increases metabolization or production of cholesterol? We just don’t really understand the body well enough to say for sure.
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.