The domain is owned by a copy writing firm called http://www.wonderworkingwords.com/ . I can't prove it but I am willing to wager that a juicer firm commissioned the article. The firms motto after all is 'words that sell'.
Modern scientific findings, properly analyzed, are an astonishingly better guide to human health than any traditional collection of folk wisdom.
And while you're not a shill, I find your site misguided, in overly relying on equating natural, traditional diets with healthy, leading you to some recommendations that are orthogonal to healthiness, like fermented veggies and sprouted grains, and some that are unhelpful to health, like red meat and butter. The people of Finland drastically improved their health metrics when they transitioned to a modern mainstream European diet away from their natural, traditional Finnish diet of lots of red meat and butter.
Additionally, how does a "modern mainstream European diet" compare to a traditional Finnish diet?
I've been reading Kristen's blog for a long time. I don't agree with everything I read, and I tend to be skeptical of strong opinions on either side of an equation. That said, I can't help but agree with the basic premise of the post: food producers are not entirely truthful about what's in the stuff they produce and we put into our bodies. And our health and producers' bottom lines do not always line up. For example, did you know that factory farmed chickens are fed arsenic, and that often ends in the meat you purchase from the supermarket[1]? And this went on for many years before the FDA put a stop to it?
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=13793945
EDIT: Fixed italics.
http://nutrilearning.com.ar/docs/articulos/interes/alimentos...
The study I had remembered reading, which I'll track down this weekend sometime when I'm not on Hacker News while getting ready to go to work, was more recent and shows new improvements in Finnish health metrics as they have moved away from their traditional diet and begun eating a lot more food from the rest of Europe.
And I share your agreement with this particular post on Kristen's blog.
My sense, from following Kristen's blog, is that she might be a bit appalled by the traditional Finnish diet, too. She pushes a lot of grass-fed beef and butter produced from the milk of grass-fed cattle, but she also pushes lots of vegetables, among other things.
I can see that applying to deer, elk, rabbit, etc -- but moose? Furthermore, there's a considerable market for lean beef especially in the modern era, and I know that pigs have rather recently been selected for leanness. My current knowledge of the health effects of red meat as a whole is that the data are conflicting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Health
The fact that Finland's diet was confounded with lots of butter and other fatty things makes the whole thing rather unconvincing as a data point saying that red meat is any more unhealthy than ordinary nutrition labeling (x grams of fat, y grams of carb, z grams of protein) would lead you to believe. I can buy a pound of 90/10 beef at the store with 12 grams of fat, ~3 grams of carbohydrate, and 23 grams of protein "per serving", which really doesn't sound terribly unhealthy next to e.g. a bag of potato chips.
Worst community ever. The arrogance that comes with smarts.
Bullshit. If you make your views publicly known, they are open to criticism. bfe was incisive but not uncivil. Your pious attitude and haughty implication that bfe's knowledge is only a result of an evening's browse through Wikipedia is far more offensive to me than anything he/she wrote.
> properly analyzed
Modern scientific findings, properly analyzed, are an astonishingly better guide to human health than any traditional collection of folk wisdom.
First, I haven't made an assertion that folk wisdom relies on citations. My impression is that folk wisdom is generally broader than religion, but I won't bother you with a citation request for that assertion. "Modern scientific findings" appear to rely on citations and you provided one that says the traditional Mediterranean diet is associated with some positive health outcomes; the Finnish one, not so much. Here's one for you about the negative health affects of a modern science-derived diet and lifestyle on folks migrating from a traditional diet and lifestyle to a modern one.
Type 2 (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes mellitus, migration and westernisation: The Tokelau Island Migrant study
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u9693ul1q81474u9/
Summary. The migration of Tokelauans from a traditional atoll in the Pacific to urban New Zealand is associated with an increased prevalence and incidence of Type 2 (non-insulindependent) diabetes mellitus over the period 1968-1982. During the same period, a lesser but definite increase is seen among non-migrants in Tokelau. The age standardised prevalence rates rose from 7.5 and 11.7 to 10.8 and 19.9 per 100 respectively in the male and female migrants compared with an increase from 3.0 and 8.7 to 7.0 and 14.3 per 100 in the nonmigrant males and females respectively. The incidence of diabetes is shown to be consistently higher in the migrants compared to the non-migrants giving relative risks of 1.5 in males and 1.9 in females. The factors most likely contributing to this difference, are changes to a higher calorie, high protein diet, higher alcohol consumption, a greater weight gain and altered levels of physical activity in the migrants. A number of populations in the Pacific have been shown to have a low rate of diabetes in their traditional setting, but may have a genetic predisposition for diabetes which responds to factors in the urban industrialised environment and life-style. The social and economic changes taking place in Tokelau are also clearly increasing the risk of diabetes. To reverse these trends and prevent the development of complications of Type 2 diabetes, it will be important to institute preventive programmes and to follow up the population in both environments for long-term outcomes, including mortality.
The point I was making is that the scientific method is our best bet in trying to accurately learn about how the universe works, including as it comes to our health and how our diet affects that. That really doesn't have anything to do with Pacific islanders adopting Westernized habits of, averaged over a population, eating more and drinking more booze and exerting less physical activity and having negative health outcomes because of it...
...except that this study itself is also an exercise in the scientific method, and is part of the scientific method helping us learn better how to optimize our health.
Kristen's blog basically espouses the view that there are lots of new, awful health outcomes that have coincided with the rise of modern food industries and habits, so there are obviously major problems with those habits and the industries that are facilitating those awful health outcomes. So far so good. She has done some valid analysis on a terribly urgent problem.
But then she seems to have decided, well, everything in our traditional cuisine from before modern food industry, and that contrasts with today's modern food industry, must have been beneficial. For example, our ancestors seem to have consumed lots of beef and butter, but from free-grazing grass-fed cattle, which isn't how modern food industry prefers to operate today. So that must be part of what was healthy about our traditional diet, that has since been corrupted.
This represents a too-hasty conclusion to the analytical process. It willfully ignores lots of recent, rigorously performed research to the contrary. She bought into an analytical framework that had some partial validity -- modern industrial food processing has introduced some new deleterious health effects -- but then she was satisfied to stop there and not continue searching for further answers in all available avenues of skeptical and rigorous inquiry. She found a pattern that produced some obvious advantage over the status quo, but then fell into premature whole-hearted acceptance of that pattern and is content just to try to keep matching that pattern, instead of continuing to seek out the best evidence and refusing to stop trying to learn from ongoing research. Additionally, since her partial analysis has yielded a clear antagonist in the form of modern food processing industry, she has allowed her pride in rebelling against that antagonist sustain her faith in exactly her present beliefs, instead of continuing to accept ambiguity and an ongoing openness to even better evidence and better answers than the partially better ones she has already devoted herself to.
Her devotion to that insufficient pattern-matching has even become insidious enough that she refuses to consider overwhelming, rigorously obtained, scientific evidence that lots of red meat and full-fat dairy might also be deleterious to human health -- because she has devoted herself to simplistic pattern-matching based on the initial conjecture that modern food processing equals bad and anything from previous to modern food processing equals good, which includes red meat and full-fat dairy. Her devotion to her halfway-valid analysis has left her willfully defying the best knowledge that we are able to obtain.
(By the way I was even shocked to discover how badly everyone's misconceptions are about what the typical American diet was like previous to modern food processing. There wasn't nearly as much red meat and butter being consumed as most people might assume. Did you know that various beans and chili peppers were major diet staples in early 1800's America as far north as the Canadian border? The reality was actually a lot healthier than the Little House on the Prairie TV version.)
The scientific method as applied to nutrition has revealed that certain traditional cuisines were relatively quite healthy, such as traditional Mediterranean and Japanese cuisines. It doesn't by any means mean EVERY traditional cuisine was equally healthy, such as the Finnish lower boundary condition I mentioned above. The scientific method as applied to nutrition also continues to teach us new and better knowledge of healthy cuisine than any traditional cuisine from anywhere on Earth has ever had. Every traditional cuisine came about in an evolutionary process that depended partly on survivors' bias, partly on anecdote, partly on luck, etc. Like any evolutionary product, they are all imperfect, even the healthiest examples. We only even have the capability of evaluating which are the healthier ones and which the less healthy, through our modern methods of science. What does a traditional Japanese cuisine mean? Does it mean lots of white rice and udon noodles, or lots of seafood, soy products, and seaweed salad? Which are the healthiest? The Mediterranean Sea coast has a lot of surface area. What does a traditional Mediterranean diet mean? Paella? Fettucini Alfredo? Grilled fish and Greek vegetable salad with olive oil? Couscous and goat meat? Unleavened bread and hummus? Only the methods of science allow us to compare all the evidence in valid ways and distinguish among the patterns. If we ate largely traditional Japanese cuisine but with little to no white rice or simple carb noodles, or traditional Greek cuisine but without the feta cheese and substituting whole grain bread, could that be even healthier than any traditional cuisine humanity has yet known? There are no simple answers to anything. And only continuing to explore rigorously, with a sound understanding of the most foolproof methods of exploration, and an acceptance in the meantime that our knowledge remains tentative and must remain open to the best analysis of the best available evidence as we continue to search and discover, will yield the best knowledge and the best outcome. That is what I mean by relying on science.
Your claim:
Modern scientific findings, properly analyzed, are an astonishingly better guide to human health than any traditional collection of folk wisdom.
Well, for context: this is a news-aggregator site run by a venture capital / incubator company, and inhabited by a bunch of really serious techies.
Who would have a rather more diverse range of experiences on health and fitness than your initial prejudices might lead you to believe.
Enjoy your visit.
Count me envious/jealous of your financial success with your blog. :-) You have what I once wanted and never got (in terms of lifestyle -- I still hope to work out the online income thing, though my kids are grown now).
Peace.
"Juice removed from the fruit is just concentrated fructose without any of the naturally-occurring fiber, pectin, and other goodies that make eating a whole fruit good for you [...] So, my first piece of advice is to get out of the juice habit altogether. It’s expensive, and it’s not worth it."
Why would a juice machine company want people buying juice from shops?
I've mentioned on here before but the best book I read in grade school was Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders about how PR and advertising people manipulate public opinion. Sorry to say this fifty year old book is out of print, check your library and you won't be sorry.
Organic farming is not financially sustainable at scale because the costs of production are far too high. There is a very low ceiling, relatively speaking, to the amount of crops that can be produced. Therefore in order to stay profitable organic food has to be sold at very significant premium. Buyers will not pay this premium unless they're convinced that the cheaper, non-organic alternative is an inferior product regardless of whether it actually is or not.
Technically speaking, the author is right: we're better off only eating foods for which we can establish provenance. But for most folks that idea is completely unrealistic...unless you subscribe to the organic concept, where food has a pedigree of sorts, or is at least marketed as such.
Full disclosure: I live in Nebraska and grew up surrounded by agriculture. I worked farming corn/soybeans/milo from the age of thirteen through college. My wife's family is a fifth-generation farm family.
Every step of the industrial food production process involves fossil fuels, which have a limited production flow, more or less flat since 2005. Large and growing countries like China and India will demand and are receiving increasing amounts of global oil production. This forces prices to rise, and smaller, poorer players are priced out, reducing demand.
Google for Export Land Model, to read about this and other topics.
An example of this predicament is the UK who fairly transparently did a deal with Libya in return for securing gas supplies. Odious, but they had very little choice in order to secure energy.
And as the oil price rises, food costs rise too.
I don't know why you want to damn billions of people to a life of manual toil when you yourself have access to labour saving machines (you are on a computer). The problem isn't mechanization, the problem is scale.
As for sustainability, I've seen farmers in Papua New Guinea running tractors on coconut oil before biofuels were in vogue. Fuel prices are high, fuel is a significant cost to agriculture. No one in their right mind wants to use more fuel than they must.
In any sort of farming operation, soil nutrients MUST be replenished. A huge industrial farm can practice crop rotation at least as well as a small farmer, if not better, and of course can afford to have employees devoted specifically to managing and planning fertilizer application when needed.
Farming can be an expensive proposition--it is not cost-effective to apply pesticides/herbicides/fertilizer when not needed!
Believe me, farmers think about that subject far more than you can imagine. They do everything they can to reduce the number of passes they have to make through each row of crops.
Farms like my in-laws leverage technology to the maximum. For example, they have GPS units on their tractors that are integrated with meters that track how much fertilizer is being distributed and they've been tracking this for almost a decade. When they harvest, they have GPS units on the combines and sensors that are tracking yields. At the end of every season they use 2D and sometimes 3D modeling to determine the optimum distribution of fertilizer down to a few feet. The off-season is dedicated to crunching these numbers, plus a mountain of other data that is collected. The goal is to absolutely maximize the efficiency of resource use: fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, etc.
When it comes to the question of sustainability you've got to remember that many if not most farms are generational. Fathers passed the farm to the current generation, they hope to pass it to their sons or daughters. They are far more invested in the economic and environmental sustainability of their operations than the folks that have made sustainability a trendy buzzword.
And understand that I am talking about industrial farms. There is no true distinction between the "industrial farm" and the "family farm." They are one and the same, but there is a lobby out there that has it out for agriculture. You sound like a real jerkoff if you're attacking the "family" farm, but if you use the word "industrial", you conjure images of smokestacks belching pollution and fat white guys in suits lighting Cubans with the money they stole from the pocket of the janitor. It's totally cool to attack those guys.
Think about it this way. Where I live it takes about 1,500 acres to support a family. Let's say you have three families working a farm, a father and his two married sons and their kids. That's three families that need about 4,500 acres to make a living. That is a lot of land and it requires an industrial, in the dictionary sense of the word, operation to farm.
Edit: The author has posted here and claims only selling ad space, so it may not necessarily be this author, but it's still aimed at getting viewers and ad revenue. Follow the money trail is indeed good advice, of course just because money's involved doesn't mean there's a problem.