Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. There’s quite a lot of detail about what people should eat, and much of it lacks internal consistency - you’ll find endless instances where one paragraph contradicts another paragraph. For example, it’s not immediately apparent why a burger is “junk food” and therefore bad for you. According to the letter of the lore, it’s a balanced meal. It’s got some bread, a bit of dry, fat-free meat (less and less meat, these days), and a few soggy vegetables. So what’s the problem? It’s basically a sandwich - recommended by most guidelines as a healthy lunch. Physiology gives the correct answer: there’s actually nothing wrong with a burger per se; the problem is related to the fact that the bread is not really bread, and that it’s typically accompanied by a mountain of fries and half a litre of Coke. Americans have been eating burgers for a very long time, but they weren’t always fat.
This is another example of a lack of consistency and logic in the guidelines. The authorities advise us to eat less meat (which they identify as “protein”) and less fat. Basic math says that if you take away fat and protein, you’re left mostly with carbs. And they equivocate over this fact, suggesting that while this might be technically true, it’s not going to hurt you.
Diabetics are explicitly advised to eat even less fat than everyone else; in other words, they’re told to eat more carbs, despite the fact that diabetes is a problem of carbohydrate metabolism. The observation that diabetics get rapidly sicker on this diet is hardly a surprise.
Anyway, the fact that the guidelines have remained the same for decades is precisely my point. The health authorities can see that they don’t work, but they don’t want to back away from them. They can’t.
Carbohydrates are essential for a healthy body and should not be removed from the diet.
Carbohydrates are the body’s preferred energy source. The Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend 45–65% of energy needs to come from carbohydrates.
Choose better quality, wholegrain carbohydrates over refined carbohydrates.
A very low-carbohydrate diet combined with very high protein intake is not recommended.
Very low-carbohydrate diets tend not to lead to long-term weight loss.
I have read quite a lot about insulin resistance and low-carb diets, and find the above recommendation quite astounding, indeed, especially “Carbohydrates are the body’s preferred energy source”.
Yeah, it’s utter nonsense. Your body doesn’t have a “preferred energy source”; there is no little demon in your gut expressing frustration at a lack of carbs. But the main problem with the advice is this: if we ignore the fact that ill-health really isn’t about the fraction of dietary carbs - it’s a bit more subtle than that - the ‘45-65%’ recommendation implies the following math:
Average intake 2000kCal/day
55% from carbs (1100kCal)
Minimum viable protein 0.6g/kg/day - say 200kCal/day from protein
→ 700kCal/day from fat, or 78g.
Official statistics suggest that Americans eat - on average - around 64-81g a day; in other words they’re eating exactly what they’re being told to eat. And yet 50% of them are land whales. So, clearly, something is going wrong, and it isn’t explainable in terms of macronutrient fractions, although the authorities still insist it’s because people aren’t following the guidelines and “must be” eating too much fat.
So why are they reluctant or unable to change course?
Still believing in the advice given?
Can’t admit giving wrong advice over decades?
Pressure by the food industry?
Pressure by the pharma industry?
Desire to keep people unhealthy for other reasons?
I’m sure it’s a simple desire not to lose their jobs and funding, in most cases. There are plenty of reports of NIH staff (and other people dependent on the NIH) suggesting that anyone who didn’t bow and scrape to Dr Fauci would lose their grant money, and could be hounded from their jobs - there was at least one high-ranking official who went to an industrial tribunal about this sort of thing. I doubt that’s unique to the NIH. Would you want to be the one who goes up against (eg.) Walter Willett? You know how that kind of conversation pans out. “Who the hell do you think you are? You think you know better than Dr Willett? You’re just a low-level functionary. You only have a BSc. How many papers have you published? etc etc”.
A lot of the theory on healthy food was pushed by governments in a quest to provide the cheapest way of producing food that fulfilled the basic requirements of production.
This was before most of the population had a constant caloric surplus intake.
Carbs → Fats → Proteins, this order has always existed from cheap to expensive per caloric input.
Margarine was pushed as healthy because butter could not be produced in big enough amounts so people were told it’s cheaper and healthier (which was and is for 99% of the crap sold as margarine never true).
In general the governments tried to make a health policy that was based on how can we sufficiently keep the population in working health at least costs.
During the last 20 years especially, but actually starting way earlier the governments took in (partly) paid experts (it was cheaper and politically way safer to get re-elected) from food and pharma industry. They claimed to be having the same interests - while actually trying to maximise their own profits. As about 80% of agencies like FDA or EU medical agencies are now financed by private parties - they just keep on pushing their agenda. This was especially visible with so called vaccines for covid.
I do heavily disagree with @finley however on the point that there is any kind of supranational agenda at work. There isn’t. It’s simply what happens when conglomerates and stock listed huge companies dictate policies based on their interests. That’s actually the number 1 reason why I see the Chinese political system more and more superior to the western democracy. It will be much harder for the CCP to keep their power if they cannot show superiority in development vs the West and/or improving living standards.
In the west some corporates found out that their business model will fall together with dwindling resources and they are looking to keep their market/increase it. But they only care about themselves - that’s why you get the push for electric vehicles which are not a bridge technology or final technology but just another item that leads humanity faster into collapse.
The capitalistic world order just has the principle that when resources are scare - their prices increase. They haven’t understood what happens when all resources are scare and you cannot use technology to escape the scarcity/pollution or what the implications of diminishing living standards will do to their business models.
It’s clear that humans will simply use up everything that they can use up - and then collapse (either from pollution or from scarcity - or from wars because others want a bigger pile of what is left).
But no - there is no super world order - that is rubbish. The one thing that always prevails is chaos. What there is, are processes that aren’t known to the general public - or not understood. But they aren’t coordinated well. It’s the human strive for control and safety which makes him believe in super order/super powers coordinating the system - because it’s actually way scarier to know that no such order exists but much more a pure anarchy of the strongest (strongest nowadays being mainly based on monetary terms). There is no secret world government ruling the world - and never has been. But there are myriads of wealthy people/corporations which have hidden stakes in the game. And far too often it’s actually not the owners but the managers that push an agenda for personal profit. In the capitalistic model the biggest damage often tolerated, but often actually unknown to the stockholders of such a company. The more diverse the stockholders are - and with ETFs and so on - the only interest becomes personal gain while blindly / or simply being indifferent to how this is achieved.
We would need to have mechanisms in place that limit power and wealth much more. Right now most of them are only so big that the rich don’t have to fear revolution. And the last 100 years the power has shifted more and more away from the majority. Well you could say that actually the majority never had any power - the pushes for democracy were historically much more by growing influential classes over the old aristocracy/church than by the majority of the working people. They are just used for legitimization because the uprising class needed them in their argument and manpower.
But then China is scary - because they seem to be ruled by a rather large caste of people that doesn’t give a shit about anyone else. They try to be smarter than the Nazis have been. In one way they are the only system that could change the world for the better (and the only ones that really aren’t held back by superstitious religious crap like the rest of the world) - but on the other hand their papers have shown that they want to build a race based class caste system worldwide - where everyone is less worth than Han Chinese. But they are looking way more forward into the future compared to the western corps. Because in the west a lot of destruction is driven by short term profit for personal gains in an non coordinated way - in the west kinda nothing is foreseen now over 5 years. China still takes actual long term decisions for their own agenda.
A good example is showing now already with mobile phones. Even though the western market would pay much more - companies are selling the phones first or only in China. This is surely a deficit for them in monetary terms - so it must be pushed by the Chinese agenda. Just like while covid struck governments worldwide went local first - this will happen when the current collapse gets bigger too. The west will simply have no more access to solar panels (chips if China invades Taiwan) and so on. They can then only hope for mercy by China. The good thing is - the west is more and more waking up to this so I am pretty sure that China cannot take over Taiwan without a full blown 3rd world war. I always believed China wants to wait another 10 years or so before engaging in that war - but believe so less and less.
Oh yeah - and the people with money - more and more cannot care less about how they invest it. If a company is on decreasing path - just switch your stock to another. With ETFs and funds pushing the majority of stocks - there simply is no more personal affiliation with a single company. And sustainability is mainly used for marketing or because the believe there is more money to be made. This is especially visible now in the start up culture. it isn’t at all anymore about your company - it’s how to make quick bucks for personal profit. The times where people started had a personal affiliation to a company and the goal is simply not existing anymore for bigger scales.
The only thing the majority is able to influence this is by common interests which provide better chances for making money. Because the investors mainly don’t care. If everyone is woke then the corps will follow - so far it’s ultimately still a consumers world (which could only change if we give up the free market and introduce price caps and so on). It’s just that a tiny fraction of the consumers consume most valuable products - hence dictate what is produced too.
"By 2050, a global population of 9.8 billion will demand 70% more food than is consumed today. Feeding this expanded population nutritiously and sustainably will require substantial improvements to the global food system – one that provides livelihoods for farmers as well as nutritious products for consumers.
The mission of the World Economic Forum’s System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Food is to build inclusive, sustainable, efficient, and nutritious food systems through leadership-driven, market-based action and collaboration, informed by insights and innovation, in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals.
The System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Food aims to:
Strengthen global food systems by developing new insights; facilitating collaboration on priority action areas, including leveraging technology and innovation for food systems change; and mobilizing leadership and expertise at the global level.
Supporting regional and country platforms by achieving the New Vision for Agriculture through the Food Action Alliance - strengthening multistakeholder collaboration at the country and regional level, and by mobilizing new investments, partnerships, and best practices to achieve concrete results.
Harness the power of technological innovations to transform the food system through Innovation with a Purpose, as a large-scale partnership aggregator and project accelerator."
In my posts above I used phrases like “confluence of interest” and “emergent behaviour” to describe this phenomenon. Nevertheless, transnational groups can and do get together to discuss what they’re going to do to us and how they might profit from it - all for our own good, of course. The WEF don’t meet at Davos just to enjoy the food and the scenery - they do have certain goals, and they make no secret of them (as per @FairComment’s post). I keep an eye on this sort of thing because of my interest (which is both commercial and personal) in diet and agriculture - there absolutely are powerful agencies whose goal is to keep the system working in specific ways, despite the fact that they know better than anyone that it’s about to implode.
As for the WEF and their ilk, their problem is that they’re idiots. Not unintelligent, but uninformed. Unlike Monsanto and Cargill and Del Monte, they really don’t know how the food supply works, or the myriad interactions between peripheral systems that keep it working that way. They genuinely think they can look at a few charts and presentations and become experts on it, without ever putting their manicured hands in the dirt or getting a lungful of cow manure. I’m not entirely dismissive of the problems they identify (such as overpopulation) but what I’m not interested in are their one-size-fits-all solutions. For example, I’ve grown oca, lablab, and pandanus myself (mentioned in the unusual-foods article). The first two I wouldn’t bother with again simply because there are more interesting things that would work just as well or better. Pandanus is useful, but it’s hardly going to become an important food crop. Their underlying assumption here is that soil degradation will continue apace - which it will, if they have their way, but it need not be so.
@hannes: it’s really too little, too late. You can see grudging admissions of this type on most of the world’s health-agency websites, usually buried somewhere nobody will see it, and with a rider along the lines of “nevertheless, our dietary recommendations remain unchanged”.
I would also add that this endless wrangling over macronutrients (particularly carbs vs. fat) completely misses the point, which is that humans are pretty adaptable animals. There is no “ideal diet” for humans. There is such a thing as a really bad diet, and by some incredible feat of incompetence the health authorities have discovered exactly that diet, and promoted it as the healthiest ever. The epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease is an example of brittle failure - humans being pushed beyond their adaptive limits. @topofan may well be right that this emerged partly from a desire to feed the masses cheaply, but it’s now evolved into a religious belief, complete with a whole set of holy writings that contradict the typical textbook on physiology or cell biology.
The WEF, UNO and so on have been underestimating population growth the since existence.
This time however I believe they are wrong. By 2050 we are into the collapse already and the first billion of people at least have been decimated. Could well be that we will be down much more and less than a billion left over
We’re apparently not allowed to comment upon it in the relevant thread, but I’m watching this with increasing incredulity and despair:
In what normal human society is it acceptable to perform mass medical experiments on unconsenting toddlers? Of course there will be the usual round of “but these vaccines are the most well-monitored in human history”, and “the parents are fully informed”, and “children are at risk from COVID too”, but the reality is that nobody knows what the long-term outcome of this will be, and nor do they even care. Parents are subjected to unrelenting daily propaganda to convince them that their child needs to be enrolled in the Great Experiment. The Nuremberg Code was explicitly designed to ensure that this sort of thing never happened, ever. And yet here we are, with people clapping and cheering.
Personally, I see this sort of thing as child abuse in its most despicable form: it happens for no reason other than for the gratification of the perpetrator, and does nothing but harm to the child. The difference is that an abuser who hurts one child, or ten, can eventually expect to be arrested. People who mandate the harm of tens of thousands will never even face criticism, nevermind justice.
I can’t tell if they’re simply trying to eliminate the “control group”, so that nobody ever finds out just how bad the vaccines are, or whether this is something to do with @topofan’s cull. Either way, it’s complete madness. Now that they’ve hit rock bottom, I wonder where we go from here?
It is so strange. I don’t get it. In the UK, only 20 percent of 5 to 11 year olds took a vaccine and 85 percent odd now have antibodies so a lot caught it. They are going to give the second dose to the kids in that age group soon in Taiwan. None of the real young ones took it in the UK, did they?
Why are we always hearing about encephalitis? Are more kids getting that in Taiwan than other places? If so, why? If not, why the big push?
Yeah, it just defies rational explanation. They seem to be doing it simply because they’re obsessed with vaccines, and nobody will tell them to stop it.
As far as I’m able to tell, they are not. Encephalitis is one of those random things that sometimes hits kids for no apparent reason, so Taiwan surely gets a handful of them each month. It’s not impossible that COVID was the trigger, but then (a) why didn’t we hear about it in other countries and (b) doesn’t Taiwan know how to treat encephalitis? I was under the impression that death is nowhere near inevitable (with appropriate management) although there may be some sequelae. I can’t help wondering if they’re “treating” the COVID and ignoring the immediate problem, perhaps under instructions from the CECC.
Even if rare cases of COVID-induced encephalitis were an actual thing, it doesn’t justify the risk of vaccinating every child.
People can think they control the world. They can be thought by others to control the world. They can even have more influence over the world than they ought to have. None of those means they actually do control-control the world. If they already had the level of control that control-control involves, the game would be over, and this discussion would be pointless (if it would even be possible).
People can seem like idiots without actually being idiots. They can also be idiots in certain ways yet not quite/entirely in the ways in which they seem to be so. They say they’re going to save the world with bla bla bla, but that will actually crappify the world? Okay, so either they’re well and truly idiots, or they’re just doing their own thing and putting some idiotic window dressing on it. If they achieve their own actual purposes, whether the window dressing holds up or not is neither here nor there.
Can’t really argue with that, but people who think they run the world (or think that they should) often manage to convince others that they have something important to say, especially if they’re handing out pots of money to people who agree with them. “Control”, as you said, is mostly about influence - getting other people to think like you do, not ordering people around. In fact if you have to order people around, it’s because you’re not a very effective leader.
Even if they don’t actually control the world (by whatever means) the simple fact that they’re spending a lot of money on propaganda and projects means that they can cause a lot of problems while … uh, not controlling the world. The bizarre B&MG projects for “the poor” would be a good example of that.
Sure. Idiocy comes in all different flavours. Various academics have written entire treatises on that. What they say they’re doing often has no bearing on what they actually achieve. Taiwan’s very own CECC think that they’re controlling COVID. What they’re actually doing is causing a shitload of problems while COVID carries on COVIDing, oblivious to the ambitions and beliefs of a bunch of grey men in unfashionable suits. Do they care? Quite possibly not; they collect their pay packet at the end of the month and get their 15 minutes of fame on TV.
I was using the word ‘idiot’ here to refer to one specific flavour of idiot, viz., someone who is probably quite intelligent, educated in the traditional sense, and can make some valid observations about actual problems that exist, but lacks both the knowledge and cognitive skills to correctly identify the complexity of the problem, and to realise that it doesn’t have a simplistic solution (such as allowing rich people to own everything and allowing the plebs to rent stuff from them).
Yes, it was fat. The point was that the health authorities keep berating people for eating too much fat, when what they’re actually eating is apparently in line with their own recommendations. Of course I’m assuming here that the offical estimate of actual fat intake is accurate, which (given the general quality of nutrition research) may not be justified, but that’s all we’ve got.
I just had an interesting video pop up on YouTube about all this. The speaker brings up a really funny example of the daft logic in these health guides (the link is set to the appropriate time), where one dogmatic belief inevitably leads to a nonsensical conclusion, which then ends up as another dogmatic belief:
Big corporations have become so powerful, influential, and resourceful that legislators just can’t keep up. And when they become so big that there is no competition left they have free reign to decide what products everyone uses and what everyone thinks.
I can’t really argue with the premise of the article, but as with COVID, there’s a danger in blaming corporations for everything: while absolving you and me from responsibility, it also makes you powerless to do anything about it. If you’re not responsible, then by definition you have no control over the situation. But we are responsible - each and every one of us - and we can all do something about it.
The anecdote about Ronaldo disrupting a Coke product-placement event is instructive. Now, fair enough, he’s Ronaldo, so he has more influence than most. But any one of us is at liberty to not buy Coke, and to tell our friends or family that it’ll rot their teeth and make them fat. Shopkeepers are at liberty to not sell the stuff. Bloggers and influencers can rant about how awful it is. And so on. I post my rants here about COVID (and food-related issues) because although it’s a drop in the ocean, somebody needs to wave that flag in every public square. Luckily I’m not the only one, and I’ve had several PMs from people who are grateful that forumosa isn’t being turned into just another billboard for Big Pharma, thanks to us conspiracy theorists here.
We can all help stop the flood of bullshit engulfing Western civilisation by speaking out whenever the opportunity arises. It might seem like a losing battle, but the alternative is just to concede defeat and watch corruption and thievery destroy society.
