In the Sunday paper, there's an announcement of the new "World's Oldest Person"--once again Japanese. The article explains: There it is again: low in fat. How about low in sugar? How about low in processed, packaged just-barely-food substances? How about high in fresh, natural, real food?

Yeah, yeah. We know all about this.

How could you even consider that it might be the fresh, natural, real food that's the secret to longevity! You're missing the whole point! Fresh, natural, real food, doesn't benefit the corporations that produce highly processed, packaged, low fat "food"! We NEED those corporations to produce packaged edibles that have lots of sugar added to them, so we can actually tolerate eating them, once all the natural fat and other real flavor and food value has been systematically removed from them (and replaced with a chemical stew of ingredients) so that they can keep on the shelf for a year or more!

You mean like packaged ramen noodles with their chemical flavorings and "wholesome" ingredients.

In addition to eating seafood (some of which is up to 50% fat) Japan imports a lot of Canadian pork.

There is a difference between promoting a healthful diet that happens to be low in fat, and the idea that diets are healthful because they're low in fat--as if that one dietary quality were all that mattered.

I'll also say what I always say when this whole thing comes up--there are roughly 7 billion people on the planet. About 7 billion of them eat a diet that's high in carbohydrate. Low carbers are a tiny proportion of the planet's people, expecting many of us to have won the longevity lottery is silly, we just didn't buy enough tickets. Oh look, out of a sample predominated by high carb, low fat eaters, it's high carb, low fat eaters that lived the longest, shocker. If the same lot of us are grumphing about this online in forty or fifty years, I guess we'll have a sort of answer.

I'll give that the traditional Japanese diet beats the SAD, but it still needs a proper test against what we're up to.