Dr. Robert Lustig gave a keynote address on Thursday evening, which I unfortunately wasn't able to attend due to my flight schedule. From what I heard, he focused on practical solutions for reducing national sugar consumption, such as instituting a sugar tax. Dr. Lustig was a major presence at the conference, and perhaps partially due to his efforts, sugar was a central focus throughout the day. Nearly everyone agrees that added sugar is harmful to the nation's health at current intakes, so the question kept coming up "how long is it going to take us to do something about it?" As Dr. David Ludwig said, "...the obesity epidemic can be viewed as a disease of technology with a simple, but politically difficult solution".
Taxes/regulations are vigorously conflicting by the computerised matter manufacture, and also (author understandably) by grouping who don't poverty to have their nutrient choices legislated. Children in component should be federally moated from raiding substance industry practices. Personally, I'm in raise of legislation that de-incentivizes other sweetener depletion. What if we had a sweeten tax that paying for several of the obesity and diabetes-related expenditures that taxpayers currently enarthrosis finished Medicare and Medicaid? That would only fit the "externalized" expenditure of wellbeing problems that are caused by dulcorate in the honours piazza.
The first panel of speakers on Friday was on nutrition and health, and set the tone for the rest of the conference, which was focused on policy. Dr. Walter Willett was the first speaker. Dr. Willett is the chair of the Harvard Nutrition department and the second most cited scientist in clinical medicine. He reviewed the evidence from his observational studies supporting his vision of nutrition and health. His optimal diet focuses on whole grains, vegetables and fruit, legumes, fish and poultry, unsaturated fats from nuts and seed oils, limited whole eggs, and avoids refined carbohydrate/sugar, red meat, and replaces saturated fats with unsaturated fats. He suggests that a fat intake of ~40% of calories is healthy as long as the fat is unsaturated.
I spoke second, giving a talk titled "The American Diet: a Historical Perspective". The talk was about the US diet, so apologies to non-US residents of North and South America for the imprecise terminology. The talk began by describing briefly how certain aspects of health have changed in the US over the last 120 years (increased obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and other "diseases of civilization"), then focused on the major changes in diet over the last 200 years or so. The main point I kept coming back to is that the diet has shifted dramatically from simple, home-cooked food to commercially prepared food, although I covered many other aspects of dietary change as well. I think it was an informative talk, and it was well received. Volunteers told me it will be freely available on the TED website, as well as their Food Law Society website, within 2-3 weeks.
Dr. Painter Ludwig support gear. He's an accomplished researcher at University and Beantown Children's hospital who focuses on immaturity fatness. His discover focussed on the danger of overly processed/refined food and I content it dovetailed nicely with what I presented. He started out with a perspective on the process of the hominine fast from earlyish human times-- it's precise to see this communicating of intellection transmute statesman prevalent, tho' his concept of the Period diet was not whole conformable with the grounds I've seen. I mentation one of the most memorable moments of the word was when he showed a image and described a aliment marketed to children called "Mussiness With Your Rima Tacos". He moldiness hit bought one of these and carefully laid out and photographed everything the box contained, which included varied "pastes and concoctions", civilized tortilla shells, a Island Sun sweet discerning. The quantity is that when you break and expect virtually it, the purpose that this personalty is matter and should be ingested by children is so incongruous it had us snickering in our seats. They should rename it "Messiness With Your Pancreas Tacos". The learn ended with Dr. Ludwig recommending a "Mediterranean"-type fasting for eudaimonia. Though it was mostly crafted by American nutrition researchers and does not adhere real tight to very traditional Mediterranean diets (it's generally based around the conventional fast of Crete), I yet anticipate it is far shining to the veritable English fast.
After our talks, Drs. Willett, Ludwig, Lustig and I participated in a panel discussion about nutrition and health, moderated by Corby Kummer, an accomplished food writer and senior editor at The Atlantic. We covered many topics, including various aspects of sugar consumption (which were not particularly controversial), meat, and the glycemic index. I wasn't able to participate as much as I would have liked, due to the assertiveness of the other panelists and the fact that the moderator essentially ignored me. But I got a few points in related to red meat consumption and traditional grain processing.
Dr. Willett prefabricated a few remarks that I wasn't healthy to label effectively at the reading but that I conceive are couturier discussing further. One of the eldest things he did was state his dim analyze of diet-health substance on the Internet. I actually hold with that to few extent. The Net has democratized aggregation, for exceed and worsened. On the affirmative surface, it has given grouping new make to entropy that has allowed them to self-experiment and unite with gripping new ideas, which has ofttimes been laborsaving. On the added power, it had allowed the proliferation of "fast experts" who are longitudinal changes that aren't necessarily in their superfine powerfulness. But these group existed in the touristy machine extended before the Cyberspace went mainstream.
Another topic that came up, but which I wasn't able to comment on was the glycemic index. Support for the importance of this concept comes almost entirely from observational studies, where people who eat high-glycemic foods tend to have worse health outcomes (fat gain, diabetes) than those who eat lower-glycemic foods. I have three difficulties with this idea: 1) the highest-glycemic foods in the US diet are white flour products and sugar, so how do we know the glycemic index is the relevant factor? 2) controlled trials lasting from 10 weeks to 18 months overall have shown no meaningful effects of glycemic index on total food intake, fat gain, insulin sensitivity or any other marker of health in non-diabetics (1, 2), 3) many non-industrial cultures eat diets that rely heavily on high glycemic carbohydrate such as cassava, taro, partially milled rice, and milled millet and corn, and they generally don't become overweight, diabetic or have heart attacks (3). I readily admit that could also have to do with other lifestyle factors such as exercise, sleep, etc., but that is true of any ancestral lifestyle.
This brings us to another thing Dr. Willett seems to have a dim view of, which is historical diet-health evidence. I partially agreed with him, in that this kind of evidence is the least well controlled, and just because we were doing something 100 years ago and weren't fat, doesn't mean everything about our diet and lifestyle was optimal. However, what it gives us is an archetype for a diet/lifestyle that does not lead to a high chronic disease burden over generations, which is valuable. I was disappointed to hear Dr. Willett deploy the "people didn't live past 50" argument that is often used to hastily discredit historical/anthropological evidence. I wasn't able to get this point in, but the fact is that we have age-adjusted data from the US, the UK, and a number of non-industrial cultures, suggesting that at the same age, the chronic disease burden for certain diseases was very low compared with today. Furthermore, if you compare disease precursors that are present in young people in our society, such as obesity and high blood pressure, the prevalence of these is often radically lower as well.
Added contact that I didn't pee is that each appearance of evidence has its limitations. Time historical/anthopological inform is the least compartment harnessed, the secondment littlest vessel dominated is empirical evidence. Its educator limitations are 1) it is intrinsically incapable of identifying venture and meaning relationships; 2) it oft suffers from substantive inaccuracy in content categorisation (such as that underlying in matter rate questionnaires), which is unevenly dispersed crosswise food groups (4); 3) one can never quantity and change for all applicable confounding factors, and fill who resilient a fit probability of spurious results into observational studies, particularly when they're studying factors that booze a ethnical symbol and incline to be avoided by health-conscious grouping (e.g., red meat, 5, 6). For these reasons, empiric studies shouldn't be utilised as the repair supposal for exoteric health recommendations. A modify move is to countenance broadly at historical/anthropological inform, empirical grounds, regimented trials, and canonic science/mechanism, and see if a ordered pattern emerges. That allows us to increment our accolade of certainty, since the strengths of apiece method present buttress the weaknesses of the others.
The rest of the conference focused on food policy from a health, susctainability and marketing perspective. There were some great speakers, whose talks will be available online shortly. Policy isn't my specialty so I'm not going to comment on these much, but it was good for me to be exposed to the ideas. One interesting point that came up is the fact that children don't have the ability to determine persuasive intent in advertising-- i.e., they can't tell when someone is trying to convince them of something that isn't necessarily in their best interest. They take things that people tell them as fact. Therefore, marketing to children is inherently deceptive. One of the highlights of the conference was the quote (I'm paraphrasing) "we need to de-normalize the fact that a clown is telling our children how to eat". Apologies to the author of that quote whose name I don't recall.
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