When my parents reminisce about the poverty of the Cultural Revolution, they often talk about the scarcity of meat. They had little to eat but rice and vegetables and they said they were never full. My mother enviously remembers a wealthy family who fed their two children a whole chicken every morning. She remembers that the children grew very robust and healthy.

From what I know of my mother’s diet while pregnant, I’m sure I was born with a ridiculous amount of insulin resistance. Moral I’m taking away from this: Eat meat!

Joyce

I AM Chinese. Now I know this is just anecdotal, but here’s my family’s medical history: My beloved maternal grandmother had heart disease her whole life and eventually died of it. My paternal grandmother has type II diabetes; her second son, my uncle, died of a blood clot in his forties. My mother’s side has heart problems, and my father’s side has blood problems. On top of all this, at only 21 years of age, I have a nasty apple shape — not the most becoming on a woman. I’ve had this shape all my life, despite being a competitive swimmer and eating a traditional Chinese diet at home.

I’ve visited China several times and it is true that the people look slimmer. However, this is in large part because their frames are much smaller. If you look at the middle age, they’re nontrivially thick around the middle. Also (again anecdotal) it seems to me that heart trouble is a big deal there in the elderly. My hypochondriac grandfather is always taking some preventative or another for his heart.

As for me, there is hope! I started Protein Power two months ago and am feeling well for the first time in a decade. Low-carb is definitely the way to go!

Joyce

P.S. My father’s family is originally from Shandong. From what I understand, it’s the “Italy” of China, consuming a lot of wheat flour — dumplings, noodles, etc. I wonder whether they have more problems there or not.

Thanks for providing us all with the interesting nutritional and disease history. Most people, it seems, appear to think that Asians have no health problems whatsoever. And are all thin. Thanks for setting the record straight, at least as it concerns those whom you’ve observed.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain just what precisely is healthy about “healthy whole grains”.

Hey Dave–

M

I can think of another possibility. Perhaps a carb heavy diet based on whole grains, fruits, and veggies isn’t as fattening as some people believe.

They seem to eat a lot of vegetables and rice so I really don’t know how they stay so slim. The only possibility I can come up with is that their portions are small. However portion size is driven by appetite which is driven by insulin. So their insulin levels must be pretty well controlled IMHO. Hence they stay thin.

http://www.who.int/cardiovascular_diseases/en/cvd_atlas_14_deathHD.pdf

Maybe Canada has less heart disease because Protein Power was a huge bestseller up there.

It’s only *within* the vegetable-rich group that the fat intake is identical.

The problem is that they don’t show the data that show that the vegetable-rich group ate more fat than the other groups. We have to take their word for it. They say the regression coefficient was 1.40 (95% CI = 0.41, 2.40). I’m not a statistician. I know that for relative risks, if the CI overlaps 1.0, it means the results aren’t significant, as they could be 1.0. I don’t know if this is also true for regression coefficients.

Hey Greta–

MRE

The table then sorts the 4 groups into 4 quartiles. For all but the vegetable-rich group, they show only energy intake (this part of the graph doesn’t show on the link given here). So there’s no way to compare fat intake in the other groups with the fat intake in the vegetable-rich group except to take their word for it (”data not shown”). Very confusing.

But they do say at the end, “The fact that we found no differences in energy percentages from fat across quartiles of this pattern [the vegetable-rich group] may suggest that the total energy intake rather than the role of fat in explaining the association is the most important factor.”

I didn’t average the energy across all quartiles of all the 4 groups. I have other things that seem more pressing.

I personally find all studies like this murky when you group foods into categories based on preconceptions, like a “prudent diet” including fish and chicken and fruits and vegetables and an “unhealthy” diet containing red meat and hot dogs and fast food and luncheon meats and then conclude that red meat is unhealthy and chicken is healthy because the latter group (who were undoubtedly eating a lot of french fries with their hot dogs and fast food) didn’t do so well.

Hi Greta–

MRE

Another part of the study should inform us how often did these people eat? Meal frequencies also makes a difference as I have experienced from intermittent fasting. I am sure that there are some modern cultures who eat 1 to 2 meals a day instead of 3 meals plus in-between-snacks. In other words did all participants in this study eat identical meal frequencies or did they vary. I strongly believe that this would also make a difference. I guarantee you that if I were to eat 2,000 calories in a day and split those calories up between 3 meals and 2 snacks, I would gain weight. Whereas dividing these calories into 2 meals or even 1 meal…I would lose weight. Of course, every one of these calories would be low carb.

I saw a documentary on TV of how Sumu wrestlers build girth. This was several years ago, before carbs were a concern for me. All I recall from that documentary was that these wrestlers consumed tons of rice. Not scientific but it is an observation.

Frankly, the more I read about fats, the more I believe that fat is the most important nutrient we can consume worlwide.

The charts aren’t laid out by thin verses obese; they are laid out in terms of vegetable consumption. Those in the quartile with the least vegetable consumption did eat more rice.