- if you take "sardine" supplement pills and go on eating burgers and fries, do not expect a miracle with respect to type 2 pre-diabetes,
- if you eat sardines as part of a meal, I suspect that you are likely to *replace* parts of your current diet with the (fatty) fish, rather than keep your usual diet and add fish on top of it.
For instance, a funny paragraph from section 4 (Discussion) hints that the SG (Sardine Group) must have added less olive oil to the rest of their meals:
> Another possible limitation of the study to bear in mind is the use of canned sardines in olive oil, which, despite easing distribution and consumption, present differences in MUFA content as compared to fresh sardines. Although this may have modified the pattern of lipids consumed, the SG group decreased their overall MUFA consumption. This could be due to the fact that the use of olive oil added to meals did not occur when they consumed the canned sardines and, therefore, there are no differences in its consumption with respect to CG.
NB: I don't want to dismiss any part of the article, I only want to insist that it is hard to isolate causes because of this effect of "communicating vases".
The way I generally describe the result of switching from no intentional diet to any trendy/FOTM/recent diet is mostly just that a person begins to give a shit about what they're eating, which results in an array of positive benefits not directly related to that diet. Ketogenic diets are a good example. People go from not caring about what they eat, regularly eating fast food, sugary snacks/drinks, deep fried carbohydrates, etc. to spending a bunch of money on expensive butter and grass fed beef. They then lose weight. Sure, ketosis is a big deal, but in reality the biggest factor in a person's weight loss/health improvement is just replacing high calorie, high sugar, high carb, high fat food with no sugar, low/no carb, reasonable calorie food. (This is not an attack on the ketogenic diet. There is plenty of research for and against it. As with all diets, if you find positive outcomes while trying it, keep doing it! The goal is health).
I think the real test would be, what positive benefits _do exist_ when a person changes nothing else but includes a pack (tin? can? box?) of high quality sardines weekly. If nothing, I feel like it kind of just falls into the category of "being specific and intentional about dietary choices brings health benefits", which isn't necessarily new or ground breaking.
I credit this to totally eliminating the omega-6 fats. But this is just me because I’m a genetic freak with hyperlipidemia.
Preworkout is a bit different because it actually is marginally useful for workouts, and I think most actual bodybuilders take some form of it. But it’s super cheap to produce so most of the expense is on marketing. You can make homemade PWO with stimulants and “pump supplements” for super cheap if you buy the raw compounds
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31336935/
In my case taking magnesium helps with insomnia and ADHD symptoms (although it's impossible to tell if the ADHD improved directly due the magnesium, or due to better sleep)
In dosage?
Basically, make sure the magnesium tablet is anything but magnesium oxide - our digestive systems cannot absorb that. Just about any other form (there's like... six of them) will work. Magnesium oxide only helps with constipation, which is also important I guess but a completely different problem.
The YouTube body building demographic is in the same economic class so capitalizing on a product their audience already uses makes perfect sense.
Also, America is one of the few countries with consumer pharmaceutical advertising so marketing supplements is not out of the ordinary.
The sardines are a very high-fat food item that will satiate you and potentially replace a big load of carbohydrates. Which would affect the prediabetes.
On the other hand, there might also be a bit of Spanish cultural bias at work there (Spain is the second-largest consumer of fish after Japan). On the other other hand, it would fit into the mystery of the mediterranean diet.
I just meant that, as is often the case, great discoveries are often made before we really understand them. For example, isn’t this what happened with antibiotics?
<s> Quite. If you read the paper -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-59643-7.pdf -- the word 'sardine' doesn't appear once; 'fish' doesn't either.
The trouble with observational cohort studies is that causality is very hard, if not impossible, to identify. Their main result is based on multivariate logistic regression. I like logistic regression as a technique, and it is very powerful, but if, for example, there is an unmeasured cofounding or causal variable that manifests itself as a linear combination of a number of measured but perhaps more acausal variables, it _will_ confidently give you the wrong result. </s>