Every day I hang out at a local Starbucks to get an extra shot in the arm of energy and to have a semi-peopled place to get some light reading or equation-solving done. Having gone there for a few months now, and staying roughly an hour each time, I can confidently state that I'm the only one who goes there to buy something without five pounds of sugar in it. A single shot of espresso, maybe a double if I'm going dancing that night, though every once in awhile I'll have them add a little whole milk.
The rest of the stream of upper-middle class people who cycle through are always ordering some damn thing or another that I rarely understand. That's signal number one that it's probably only a bit of coffee and a whole lot of something else. I decided to listen closer today and check out what it's actually made of (using the excellent online resource Nutrition Data). Let's see, a venti caramel mocha Frappuccino with whipped cream....
Holy shit -- 94 g net carbs, fully 79 g of that being straight up sugar! The whipped cream topping only adds another 2 g of sugar, although it more than doubles the fat. Ironically, the health-conscious people who go here would do better to get whipped cream than not -- compared to the massive amount of carbs they're already drinking in their "coffee," that from the whipped cream is only 2% more, and they get more healthy fats in return.
Let's try something without so many words in the title (each one probably standing for an additional source of sugar). How about a tall soy caramel macchiato? (I seriously do here "caramel" with almost every order.) That's much better, but still a sugar bomb at 32 g of net carbs, 28 g of which are pure sugar. And on it goes. My single espresso -- 1 g net, 0 of which is sugar.
Now, if a lower-class couch potato waddled out of a Wendy's with a large Frosty, everyone would gasp at how little the slob cared about his health -- "Yeah, that's just what you need there, another Frosty." All would lament the burden he'd inevitably put on our health care system -- "It's like he doesn't even care!" Well, how much sugar does it have? The largest size, at 16 oz, has 73 g net carbs, 56 g of which are sugar. That's only a bit more sugar than the equivalent size of a caramel mocha Frappuccino (which has 62 g net, with 53 g being sugar).
And yet, no one stops in their tracks to shoot disgusted looks to people power-walking out of Starbucks with a beverage that has roughly the same amount of soul-destroying sugar as a full-size Frosty. Obviously the reason is that people endow higher-status individuals with higher-status everything, including health choices. "Hey, if yuppies are eating it..."
(BTW, that tall caramel macchiato has as much sugar as a Snickers bar -- and who doesn't need more of those in their diet?)
Aside from drinks that are about 10 parts sugar and 1 part coffee, the other upper-middle class beverage that they don't catch any flak for, despite its insane sugar content, is smoothies. Jamba Juice is more for younger people, but there are still a fair amount of nearly middle-aged people there too. It's an upper-middle class joint in any case. Consider an original size Acai Supercharger smoothie -- I mean, it's got to be healthy if it has the most au courant antioxidant in it. Guess again: it has 85 g net carbs, all of which are sugar. Goddamn!
If those kids these days could only drink an acai smoothie with each meal, they'd only be two candy bars short of their daily recommended carb intake of 300 g.
Once more, imagine that pot-bellied guy wearing a wife-beater walking out of 7-11 sipping from a medium slurpee. "Gee buddy, way to ruin your health -- we're gonna have to pay for it, y'know!" Well that thing only has a bit more sugar (95 g) than the Acai Supercharger smoothie.
Updated: let's add tonic water to the list. Just checked my vegetarian housemate's Whole Foods brand "tonic water" -- 36 g of cane sugar per 12 oz can. Ironically he'd do better to just eat a Snickers bar and at least get some fat, protein, and fiber.
Everyone boomed with laughter when they tried to re-classify ketchup as a vegetable for the purposes of meeting health requirements for public school cafeteria slop. And so would they if our be-mulleted 7-11 patron were to defend himself by noting that the syrup tastes like a fruit. However, the smoothies that the well-to-do are so fond of are nothing better -- they also are just a few pounds of slushy sugar that tastes like fruit. The only difference is that 7-11 doesn't offer flavors like acai or goji berry or whatever the next fruit du jour will be, although I do believe I saw a mango-flavored slurpee when I went in there once -- but mango's fashionableness has been on the decline for some time now.
Now, don't misunderstand me -- I'm not trying to defend the dignity of the common slob who's gulping down a frosty or a slurpee. He should know better, given that everyone has told him since he was a small child that sugar is bad for you. If it's a treat he only has once a couple of months, OK. But not if it's frequent. The point is that higher-status people suck this sugary slop down their gullets too, yet no one hectors them about it, and no one laments the ominous direction our health care system is headed due to their poor impulse control and lack of regard for their own health.
Perhaps we should all engage in a bit of social shaming of sweet-toothed yuppies the way that we do for lower-class hogs. Next time you're in line at Starbucks (or wherever) and someone orders a glass full of sugar, give them a disgusted look while asking, "What are you, a 10 year-old girl? Take your coffee like a man. Our health care system will thank you."
Showing posts with label data. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data. Show all posts
Monday, July 27, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Are vegetarians smarter than omnivores?
By now we all know that vegetarians tend to have more education, and they never tire of reminding everyone else. However, this is a mere association, and so is pretty meaningless in trying to understand cause and effect. In particular, choice of diet is a marker of ethnic groups in the broad sense -- these people identify themselves in part by eating this diet, those others by eating that other stuff. All sorts of silly fads catch on among smart people, but it doesn't make them smarter. Does wearing a tie boost your brainpower?
But what about before veganism, organic food, and yoga became mainstream among the educated? Blogger Audacious Epigone looked at data from the General Social Survey, probably the largest and most representative survey of its kind, and found that while vegans were more educated, they weren't brighter than omnivores. (Vocabulary tests are highly reliable intelligence tests.) The survey question about eating meat vs. not eating meat was only asked in 1993 and 1994, so this could be a reflection of its lack of adoption by smarties at that point -- remember, this is nearly a decade or so before Whole Foods became the next Starbucks. (Both of which are great stores, of course.)
I decided to follow up and look at how IQ and diet were related across different age groups. We might expect diet to make a difference at any given age, but might diet choice cause us to cognitively age faster or slower? One weakness here is that the GSS only surveys people who are 18 or older, and it seems like the biggest effect of diet on the brain's horsepower would be at younger ages when it's still developing. With that said, here is how IQ and diet were related across age groups in 1993 - '94:
I've condensed all people who don't eat meat into one group, even though the survey measures three degrees of how frequently you abstain from meat, in order to keep sample sizes big. For the same reason, I've condensed people into 10-year age groups, with the center age ending in a 3. The two graphs show two different ways of measuring smarts -- by their average and by what percent are above the overall average (median to be exact). Each group has at least about 40 people, although the last age group is just about at this value for the vegetarians, so the 70-somethings may not have looked exactly like the data suggest.
In any case, there doesn't seem to be a strong change across the lifespan, since the gap between omnivores and vegetarians is fairly flat from the 20s through the 50s, an unclear change in the 60s, and again a not too reliable finding for the 70s. The aging pattern seems similar. However, at each age, omnivores are smarter than vegetarians by either measure. This means that either the damage was already done to vegetarians early in life, if they had mostly been vegetarian since childhood -- or that, if people face the "meat or no meat?" choice during their dopey-minded college years, brighter people were less likely to abandon animal products, while the dimmer found it more appealing. Who knows why -- it could be just as arbitrary of a choice of ethnic marker as any other, such as baggy vs. skinny jeans.
This point generalizes: if some group that does well in some respect happens to follow some diet, it may well be more of a group membership badge than a cause. You can find genetic freaks who will be ripped and athletic no matter what garbage they consume, so they can quickly move from one fashion to the next without suffering much. Hence the high turnover of nutrition and exercise advice given to people who are already pretty healthy and active, but who want to squeeze out that extra bit of energy. Only controlled studies, including long-term experiments like Darwinian natural selection, can tell us what happens to normal people, as far as cause and effect goes.
But what about before veganism, organic food, and yoga became mainstream among the educated? Blogger Audacious Epigone looked at data from the General Social Survey, probably the largest and most representative survey of its kind, and found that while vegans were more educated, they weren't brighter than omnivores. (Vocabulary tests are highly reliable intelligence tests.) The survey question about eating meat vs. not eating meat was only asked in 1993 and 1994, so this could be a reflection of its lack of adoption by smarties at that point -- remember, this is nearly a decade or so before Whole Foods became the next Starbucks. (Both of which are great stores, of course.)
I decided to follow up and look at how IQ and diet were related across different age groups. We might expect diet to make a difference at any given age, but might diet choice cause us to cognitively age faster or slower? One weakness here is that the GSS only surveys people who are 18 or older, and it seems like the biggest effect of diet on the brain's horsepower would be at younger ages when it's still developing. With that said, here is how IQ and diet were related across age groups in 1993 - '94:
I've condensed all people who don't eat meat into one group, even though the survey measures three degrees of how frequently you abstain from meat, in order to keep sample sizes big. For the same reason, I've condensed people into 10-year age groups, with the center age ending in a 3. The two graphs show two different ways of measuring smarts -- by their average and by what percent are above the overall average (median to be exact). Each group has at least about 40 people, although the last age group is just about at this value for the vegetarians, so the 70-somethings may not have looked exactly like the data suggest.
In any case, there doesn't seem to be a strong change across the lifespan, since the gap between omnivores and vegetarians is fairly flat from the 20s through the 50s, an unclear change in the 60s, and again a not too reliable finding for the 70s. The aging pattern seems similar. However, at each age, omnivores are smarter than vegetarians by either measure. This means that either the damage was already done to vegetarians early in life, if they had mostly been vegetarian since childhood -- or that, if people face the "meat or no meat?" choice during their dopey-minded college years, brighter people were less likely to abandon animal products, while the dimmer found it more appealing. Who knows why -- it could be just as arbitrary of a choice of ethnic marker as any other, such as baggy vs. skinny jeans.
This point generalizes: if some group that does well in some respect happens to follow some diet, it may well be more of a group membership badge than a cause. You can find genetic freaks who will be ripped and athletic no matter what garbage they consume, so they can quickly move from one fashion to the next without suffering much. Hence the high turnover of nutrition and exercise advice given to people who are already pretty healthy and active, but who want to squeeze out that extra bit of energy. Only controlled studies, including long-term experiments like Darwinian natural selection, can tell us what happens to normal people, as far as cause and effect goes.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
More data on changing consumption patterns
As a follow-up on a previous post about the changing availability of various foods, where I showed that we'd been following the experts' advice yet getting less healthy, here are some graphs on actual consumption -- not just using availability as a proxy. I've cobbled them together from various editions of The Statistical Abstract of the United States, which has a chapter on food, health, and nutrition.
They only go back to 1985, but the overall pattern is the same -- we've been doing what we were told to do. The higher incidence of heart disease and obesity cannot be blamed on our not eating what the experts bullied us to eat. All the data are per capita consumption, and all units are in pounds. Since the picture is basically the same as before, I don't have anything new to say. The graphs below are to show that consumption data confirm what the availability data suggested.
See Notes at the end for what separate categories are lumped into larger ones, e.g. "animal fats and oils." Click picture to enlarge.
Notes
1. Animal fats / oils includes butter, lard, and tallow. Vegetable fats / oils includes margarine, shortening, and salad dressing.
2. Lower-fat milk includes anything but whole -- 2%, 1%, fat-free, etc.
3. Lunchmeat cheeses include American and Cheddar, while Pizza cheeses include Italian and Mozzarella.
They only go back to 1985, but the overall pattern is the same -- we've been doing what we were told to do. The higher incidence of heart disease and obesity cannot be blamed on our not eating what the experts bullied us to eat. All the data are per capita consumption, and all units are in pounds. Since the picture is basically the same as before, I don't have anything new to say. The graphs below are to show that consumption data confirm what the availability data suggested.
See Notes at the end for what separate categories are lumped into larger ones, e.g. "animal fats and oils." Click picture to enlarge.
Notes
1. Animal fats / oils includes butter, lard, and tallow. Vegetable fats / oils includes margarine, shortening, and salad dressing.
2. Lower-fat milk includes anything but whole -- 2%, 1%, fat-free, etc.
3. Lunchmeat cheeses include American and Cheddar, while Pizza cheeses include Italian and Mozzarella.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Did following the experts' diet advice make us any healthier?
To kick things off at my new blog devoted only to health, food, and nutrition, I'm going to show how what we've been eating has dramatically changed in the past 100 years. Most nutrition experts tell us to cut back on red meat and dairy -- and to eat white meat or fish if we must -- while increasing our intake of grains and fruits and vegetables. Since we know that obesity, type II diabetes, and the other symptoms that make up Metabolic Syndrome have been shooting up since roughly the 1970s, we can see whether our changing diet has anything to do with it.
Did we follow the experts' advice? And if so, did it do us any good? Let's see.
The data come from the USDA (see here for the spreadsheets), and they measure the availability of various food types for each year. This isn't the same thing as consumption, but because availability (supply) reflects the demand for it (consumption), when availability goes up or down, we're safe to conclude that consumption is doing so too. The data are all per capita, so we've already accounted for America's changing population size.
We'll start with the demonized foods: red meat (saturated fat! -- actually, most of it is monounsaturated), dairy (more saturated fat! -- which explains why the cheese-eating French have such awful health), and eggs (cholesterol! -- you know, that stuff that gets turned into your pesky sex hormones and vitamin D).
We've been throwing red meat overboard since about 1970. Dairy has been way down since 1940, although there's a moderate rise starting in 1980 (my guess is that it's mostly cheese for pizza). And eggs have plummeted since 1950.
But even the fruits and nuts people will admit that we need some protein -- we should just get it from white meat (chicken breasts with 0 g of fat) or fish (which, unless you eat sardines or salmon, probably won't have any fat either). Have we been choosing these more supposedly healthy forms of protein? You bet. Here are the graphs for poultry and fish:
Poultry has been skyrocketing exponentially since 1940, and fish too has been increasing since 1960.
And what about those cure-all fruits and vegetables? Eat mostly fruits and vegetables, we're told, and you'll be as robust and affable as any PETA member. Unfortunately these data only go back to 1970 instead of 1910, but the trend is still clear -- we've been scarfing down more spinach and blueberries (hopefully not together) than ever before. I've also included graphs for specific foods like the starchy potato vs. the more nutritious dark, leafy green vegetables.
And of course, any healthy diet requires grains -- after all, they form the solid foundation of the Food Pyramid. It's just plain common sense that you can't thrive unless you crunch your way through a sack full of Grape Nuts every morning, isn't it? Here's the graph for grains:
Starting at least in 1910 (and perhaps earlier), we started putting grains to better use -- as bird feed -- but since 1970, we've been steadily reversing that practice. Now when we eat out, it's bread, breadsticks, pasta, rice, noodles, and more bread.
Finally, the one food that everyone agrees is bad for your health -- caloric sweeteners like sugar:
From the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s, we found it necessary to dump more and more sugar on our food -- probably because we'd switched to a tasteless diet of spinach and Special K. Still, for the past 15 years, we've been letting it go (likely as a result of switching to non-caloric sweeteners like Equal). So, we'd misbehaved for awhile, but we've been good -- honest! -- more recently.
To sum up, we've done everything the nutrition experts have told us to do -- and have so for decades. Aside from eating less sugar, all of these supposedly health-promoting changes began no later than 1970, with some beginning as far back as 1940. Surely that's enough time for the benefits to show up in national health statistics, right? Well, let's see what the end results of this gigantic national experiment are.
The experts began telling us what to eat in order to lower rates of heart disease, although once obesity and related metabolic problems became huge, they extended their guidelines to help us get thinner too. Here is a graph showing the incidence of heart disease during the period when all of these dietary changes had begun (from this AHA pdf):
Huh, that's odd -- our hearts seem to stubbornly resist the supposedly heart-healthy food we've been eating. These are total numbers, not per capita rates. Still, the number of people suffering from heart disease doubled from 1970 to 2000, even though the US population was only 1.4 times as big in 2000 (at 282 million) as in 1970 (at 205 million). Therefore, there was a real increase in heart disease rates that cannot be explained simply by a larger population.
Why do we need to look at "hospital discharges with CVD as first listed diagnosis" rather than deaths due to heart disease? Because we could be getting better at saving lives when a person already has heart disease -- in that case, the death statistics will make those sufferers of heart disease invisible. Checking into a hospital due to heart disease sheds better light on the group of people with CVD.
And as if you needed me to tell you what the obesity rates have been like recently, here's a graph showing the prevalence of obesity and overweight:
That's odd -- the lines are pretty flat before the mid-1970s, at least back to 1960 (and possibly before), and they only shoot up sometime in the mid-'70s. Looks like loading up on Total ceral, non-fat salad dressing, and potatoes hasn't done us much good in trimming our waistlines.
So, even though we've been scrupulously following the experts' advice about what to eat -- and those graphs above prove that -- we're more likely to suffer from heart disease, obesity, and other symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome. Does that mean that these so-called experts don't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about? Yes -- that's exactly what it means.
I doubt that eating more spinach has harmed us, obviously. The main culprits are eating more carbohydrates (potatoes, grains, and sweeteners) and eating less of the fatty animals products (red meat, dairy, and eggs). I won't go through the reasons why since, if you're reading a blog called Low Carb Art and Science, I assume you already know why.
But for those of you who, like most of us, weren't aware of how bogus the experts' advice was, here are three links that provide plenty of information in an easily understandable form:
Gary Taubes' lecture at Berkeley, where he reviews the material in his encyclopedic book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Tom Naughton's Fat Head blog, where you can buy the DVD of Fat Head, his hilarious spoof of Supersize Me, which lays out how different types of food promote or discourage obesity, depression, and so on. The movie is currently #1 in Amazon's comedy documentary section. (Imagine that -- a documentary that isn't maudlin or obnoxiously political.)
Michael Eades' blog, where the co-author of excellent Protein Power regularly explains the science behind many health and nutrition concerns that we have, especially when new studies come out.
Did we follow the experts' advice? And if so, did it do us any good? Let's see.
The data come from the USDA (see here for the spreadsheets), and they measure the availability of various food types for each year. This isn't the same thing as consumption, but because availability (supply) reflects the demand for it (consumption), when availability goes up or down, we're safe to conclude that consumption is doing so too. The data are all per capita, so we've already accounted for America's changing population size.
We'll start with the demonized foods: red meat (saturated fat! -- actually, most of it is monounsaturated), dairy (more saturated fat! -- which explains why the cheese-eating French have such awful health), and eggs (cholesterol! -- you know, that stuff that gets turned into your pesky sex hormones and vitamin D).
We've been throwing red meat overboard since about 1970. Dairy has been way down since 1940, although there's a moderate rise starting in 1980 (my guess is that it's mostly cheese for pizza). And eggs have plummeted since 1950.
But even the fruits and nuts people will admit that we need some protein -- we should just get it from white meat (chicken breasts with 0 g of fat) or fish (which, unless you eat sardines or salmon, probably won't have any fat either). Have we been choosing these more supposedly healthy forms of protein? You bet. Here are the graphs for poultry and fish:
Poultry has been skyrocketing exponentially since 1940, and fish too has been increasing since 1960.
And what about those cure-all fruits and vegetables? Eat mostly fruits and vegetables, we're told, and you'll be as robust and affable as any PETA member. Unfortunately these data only go back to 1970 instead of 1910, but the trend is still clear -- we've been scarfing down more spinach and blueberries (hopefully not together) than ever before. I've also included graphs for specific foods like the starchy potato vs. the more nutritious dark, leafy green vegetables.
And of course, any healthy diet requires grains -- after all, they form the solid foundation of the Food Pyramid. It's just plain common sense that you can't thrive unless you crunch your way through a sack full of Grape Nuts every morning, isn't it? Here's the graph for grains:
Starting at least in 1910 (and perhaps earlier), we started putting grains to better use -- as bird feed -- but since 1970, we've been steadily reversing that practice. Now when we eat out, it's bread, breadsticks, pasta, rice, noodles, and more bread.
Finally, the one food that everyone agrees is bad for your health -- caloric sweeteners like sugar:
From the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s, we found it necessary to dump more and more sugar on our food -- probably because we'd switched to a tasteless diet of spinach and Special K. Still, for the past 15 years, we've been letting it go (likely as a result of switching to non-caloric sweeteners like Equal). So, we'd misbehaved for awhile, but we've been good -- honest! -- more recently.
To sum up, we've done everything the nutrition experts have told us to do -- and have so for decades. Aside from eating less sugar, all of these supposedly health-promoting changes began no later than 1970, with some beginning as far back as 1940. Surely that's enough time for the benefits to show up in national health statistics, right? Well, let's see what the end results of this gigantic national experiment are.
The experts began telling us what to eat in order to lower rates of heart disease, although once obesity and related metabolic problems became huge, they extended their guidelines to help us get thinner too. Here is a graph showing the incidence of heart disease during the period when all of these dietary changes had begun (from this AHA pdf):
Huh, that's odd -- our hearts seem to stubbornly resist the supposedly heart-healthy food we've been eating. These are total numbers, not per capita rates. Still, the number of people suffering from heart disease doubled from 1970 to 2000, even though the US population was only 1.4 times as big in 2000 (at 282 million) as in 1970 (at 205 million). Therefore, there was a real increase in heart disease rates that cannot be explained simply by a larger population.
Why do we need to look at "hospital discharges with CVD as first listed diagnosis" rather than deaths due to heart disease? Because we could be getting better at saving lives when a person already has heart disease -- in that case, the death statistics will make those sufferers of heart disease invisible. Checking into a hospital due to heart disease sheds better light on the group of people with CVD.
And as if you needed me to tell you what the obesity rates have been like recently, here's a graph showing the prevalence of obesity and overweight:
That's odd -- the lines are pretty flat before the mid-1970s, at least back to 1960 (and possibly before), and they only shoot up sometime in the mid-'70s. Looks like loading up on Total ceral, non-fat salad dressing, and potatoes hasn't done us much good in trimming our waistlines.
So, even though we've been scrupulously following the experts' advice about what to eat -- and those graphs above prove that -- we're more likely to suffer from heart disease, obesity, and other symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome. Does that mean that these so-called experts don't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about? Yes -- that's exactly what it means.
I doubt that eating more spinach has harmed us, obviously. The main culprits are eating more carbohydrates (potatoes, grains, and sweeteners) and eating less of the fatty animals products (red meat, dairy, and eggs). I won't go through the reasons why since, if you're reading a blog called Low Carb Art and Science, I assume you already know why.
But for those of you who, like most of us, weren't aware of how bogus the experts' advice was, here are three links that provide plenty of information in an easily understandable form:
Gary Taubes' lecture at Berkeley, where he reviews the material in his encyclopedic book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Tom Naughton's Fat Head blog, where you can buy the DVD of Fat Head, his hilarious spoof of Supersize Me, which lays out how different types of food promote or discourage obesity, depression, and so on. The movie is currently #1 in Amazon's comedy documentary section. (Imagine that -- a documentary that isn't maudlin or obnoxiously political.)
Michael Eades' blog, where the co-author of excellent Protein Power regularly explains the science behind many health and nutrition concerns that we have, especially when new studies come out.
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