Which of my traditional diets?

I am 15 nationalities. Really, this would be difficult...

PJ

Yes and she says that. Her point is: Is there anything inherently more healthful about the Mediterranean diet (or our caricature of it)? Should we all adopt it? Her conclusion is probably not. If we are Danish, why not adopt a traditional Danish diet?; if we are Thai, why not adopt a traditional Thai diet?, etc. (assuming it served our ancestors well). For those of more mixed heritage, yes, it can be difficult. For all diets, though, she believes that an absence of sweets and vegetable seed oils will make for more positive health.

And how far do we go back? I'm willing to go far back enough to exclude wheat and sugar, at the least. But if going that far back excludes butter, I'm out.

Why not? Because we live in in a far different world than our cultural ancestors. There are seven persistent known carcinogens in our atmosphere, according to the EPA. Women are becoming shorter due to xenoestrogens in their diet, causing premature capping of the bones. And nearly all of us ate the SAD for a long time and have been permanently affected by it. We can't go home again.

So, how should we eat?

Seeming to plagiarize is a problem when one is writing about subject that others have also written about. I used to write a weekly food & recipe column for our small town newspaper. When the subject was seasonal food, my column looked very much like the food articles in the nearest city paper. Not because either that author or I were plagiarizing, but because there are just so many words that fit the subject and just so many ways of putting those words together. And I think we both depended on Widipedia! That's how I learned to cast my net more widely to get quotes from knowledgeable people - quotes from locals or well-known cooks & gardeners gave my column a different flavor - so to speak.

Denise Minger brings that up in her review of Weston Price's work in Death By Food Pyramid." Also no refined flours.

I don't think it matters so much which traditional diet one eats, just as long as it is low in processed foods. I'm partial to our local traditional Indian diet. Not because I'm Indian, but because I love salmon.

The critics could even claim she plagiarized Denise Minger's conclusion and advice. What do all the health-promoting diets omit:
-refined flour
-refined sugar
-industrially processed vegetable oils
-chemical preservatives and lab produced anythings
-nearly any creation that comes in a crinkly tinfoil package, a microwaveable tray, or a McDonald's take-out bag.
As Bonnie wrote, there are only so many ways you can write "just eat real unprocessed food". The Big Fat Surprise adds more information to the discussion, and with the WSJ article added more new readers who may not have heard this information about how fat phobia came about before, so I wish it much success. The fact that star ratings are 54 to 9 now is encouraging.

I know you are joking, but just for clarity, in no way does she advise cutting out butter. On the contrary, she is all for replacing vegetable oils with butter because it IS traditional.

I'm sure that in the 1960's, a book on the soundness of the low-fat diet would have this same ratio. That doesn't mean the majority was right. Only a preponderance of empirical evidence (or lack therof) counts.

How do we know it is xenoestrogens doing it? This author points out that we are all becoming shorter in the US. She theorizes that it is due to less meat/protein in our diets (and more carbs). Perhaps it is both.

I'm trying to figure out why you are so fundamentally opposed to this book, aj cohn…..is it the message or the messenger? And why such a strong reaction? Her advice for eating falls squarely within the Paleo/primal/ancestral health sphere. Do you have a problem with these ideas? Or it her presentation of it?

I was joking--but I either had a point in my tomfoolery, or am willing to do a little backfilling, and make like I had a point.

I sort of have a problem when it comes to "eat what your ancestors eat" as a prime directive. A lot of people follow that through to its logical conclusion... and end up macronutrient "agnostic," which I think is a mistake that insulin sensitive people can afford to make, but as for the rest of us... in my family, perogies are a tradition, but then, so is celiac.

I don't eat low carb because my ancestors ate low carb. I eat low carb because, unlike the SAD, this diet doesn't seem to be making any obvious attacks on my health and well-being.

That seems fair. However even though that is not the reasoning behind your eating LC, it turns out that you are eating closer to how your ancestors ate than how the general population currently eats.

I may be fortunate in that I don't have any obvious conditions such as celiac. I am a bit older than you and can look back at my direct ancestors and see people who ate "normally" - meat with plenty of fat attached and eaten (and for that matter, gravy), some vegetables (but might see the salad I eat for lunch to be "excessive"), sweets in moderation (after Sunday dinner perhaps, but certainly not every day and not driving around in one's car). Pie crusts were definitely made from lard well into the 80s (probably till lard could no longer be found).

These family members were both thin (on my dad's side) and heavier (on my mom's side). From what I can remember, they all ate about the same. I would hazard a guess that my mom's side was genetically destined to be heavier. They were certainly no more gluttonous or sloth-like than members of my dad's side.

Perhaps you object to Nina Teicholz's phrasing - I think she is simply trying to summon up a general way of eating that those not as obsessed with food/nutrition as people who while away their days on this board can understand. Perhaps she is paraphrasing Michael Pollan who has been showered with acclaim for his idea of eating food your grandmother would recognize (though MY grandmothers would NOT recognize the idea of eating mostly plants). In my mind, she is leading us to eat the REAL way our grandmothers/great-grandmothers ate: 3 square meals a day, each with plenty of protein and fat, and limited carbs. No soft drinks. No vegetable oils (admittedly that goes further back than MY grandmothers). Limited refined sugars. No endless snacking.

This book is not perfect. Even I, a more casual and optimistic reader of it, found some factual errors. But nothing that negates her entire message. In her acknowledgements, she mentions Gary Taubes as one of the people that read part or all of her manuscript before publication. If he can live with her "plagiarism" then so can I.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to this book; I'm fundamentally opposed to poor scholarship, fuzzy thinking and intellectual dishonesty, especially in published works. Both Dr.s Davis' and Perlmutter's books, for example, are classic examples books of citing studies that show only associations to support assertions of causality and even citing studies that show the opposite of what's asserted. Davis' book even devotes a full chapter to the debunked acid-alkaline hypothesis. Such books damage the efforts to critique the low-fat dogma and promote more traditional diets.

The one-star review I mentioned presents quite a persuasive case of plagiarism of Taubes rather than simple re-phrasing. The review and subsequent comments by the reviewer also present a persuasive case for Teicholz misrepresenting or torturing the conclusions of the studies she cites. Here's just one such example from the review:

Even a single misuse of allegedly-supporting studies makes everything in a book suspect. If you find three such examples, you can throw away the entire book and reasonably say that proponents of certain POV are like mindless zealots.