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Comment by AimForTheBushes | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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> 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.

What is the difference?

They have different impact on blood glucose and insulin

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?

https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce...

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.

Then why does watermelon have a higher glycemic index (76) than sucrose (65)

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.

What is that disease attributed to? Do you know?

An inflammatory diet from western influence. That's what my assumption would be.

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.

That’s a great story and I’ll look into it.

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.

>Most of the rest comes from family farms growing rice, maize, manioc root (like sweet potato) and plantains (similar to banana)

these aren't refined, but they arguably aren't the healthiest for you

Why not?

I'm not the OP, but I assume the OP is diabetic, so avoiding anything with a high glycemic index is a necessity.

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