Judging by the weight loss differences, this looks more like that could be what is driving the differences in LDL, TMAO and insulin. i.e losing more weight is already known to cause differences in LDL levels and other metrics.
And this isn't really representative of what most people on those diets in the real world would be eating. i.e. most meat and cheese substitutes are considerably more processed than the foods they are replacing. i.e they contain significant amounts of salt and saturated fats like coconut oil.
I am vegetarian but that's only really doable for me over the long term because of those highly processed meat substitutes. I am virtually certain I could sustain a less processed diet if I continued to eat meat. i.e a seasoned turkey burger with little if any added salt is going to be A LOT more palatable than anything vegan or vegetarian that isn't processed significantly. And the health advantages of a healthy eating pattern only matter if that healthy eating pattern is actually followed over the long term.
I would be interested in a more long term study that tracked them over years. Just to see how many of them actually stuck with it and how good the long term adherance actually is.
Two things can be true at once. Straight from the article:
It's important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem
Anecdotally, I only know a handful of Americans, of any age, who can cook much of anything. In contrast, my wife is Philippina and all those girls can cook. When you grow up poor, you learn.
For us Americans, food's been stupid cheap for decades. Why learn to cook? I think that's caused some cultural weirdness. I remember my ex-wife and I talking cooking to my Millennial niblings. They thought cooking was more expensive! They would start with an empty fridge and pantry, buy everything for a given recipe and complain how much a single meal cost. You see where I'm going with this. 🙄
More weirdness, or ignorance, is thinking that cooking is time consuming and burdensome. Not if you can cook! First couple of times my wife asked if I wanted devilled eggs I thought, "Hell yes I do! Really don't want to wait that long..." (minutes later...) "Here you are babe." Still don't know how she does that.
Same goes for growing some food. It's easy and cheap if you learn the skills. You can hardly kill or screw up potatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, etc. Stick it in the ground, come back later, receive food.
Now that food's not cheap, we should learn to cook. Maybe that's a good thing? Given our obesity "epidemic", people having to cook healthier meals sounds like a win. Also, the market will adjust food prices down when people aren't buying fast food. I've all but completely quit eating out. And I've lost a bit of my little beer gut. Imagine that.
(LOL, sorry OP. Stuck on the phone with customer service so I dropped a novel on you.)
Not OP, but the second paragraph on the article gives you an overview of findings
In this randomized clinical trial of 22 healthy, adult, identical twin pairs, those consuming a healthy vegan diet showed significantly improved low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentration, fasting insulin level, and weight loss compared with twins consuming a healthy omnivorous diet.
Yeah, I think overall, skill is going up, but I literally don't know any millennial (or younger) couples where both people do not work. I can make a hell of a good meal out of anything, as can almost all of my peers, but the mental load and time required to effectively plan and execute a range of meals throughout the week is just too high for most people who work. Most traditional poor food is just stuff that takes time and/or labor to cook. Braises and barbecues, porridges like grits or oats, soups and stews.
I might grab some of whatever I see on sale at the grocery store, but I'm not planning anything ahead of time unless there's a special occasion meal.
To take advantage of a ham going on sale, you need to plan one meal of ham + sides, and the ham likely takes a few hours to warm up. Another meal after could be baked beans with ham (which require overnight soaking) to be planned ahead, and several hours of baking. Another meal might be pea soup with the ham bone, another meal that takes a while to prepare. Most people just don't have the time for that. When I want to make baked beans, I end up just buying a small chunk of country ham at a greater markup.
Nah, that's insane. Both my wife and I work 40 hours a week and raise a toddler.
If you are doing 60 hours weeks sure that's valid but at the risk of being called boomer that's some bullshit. It takes 2 hours tops to shop every week and a half hour to make a decent meal. You have plenty of time to do that on a 40 hour week.
A lot of cookbooks give you the steps, but not enough tell you what steps are most important, and what, specifically, you need to be paying attention to to get the best results. The food lab does stuff like telling you how the salt changes the chemistry of scrambled eggs, then doing samples of "cook immediately after scrambling", "wait 3 minutes", "wait 5 minutes", "wait 15 minutes" and showing pictures of how it changes the outcome, before telling you his conclusions.
When you understand the core bits, it allows you a lot more flexibility and variety in how you do the surrounding bits. (I like Flour Water Salt Yeast for bread for the same reason.) Too many cook books are more recipe books that don't teach the fundamentals.
All the cheap cuts of meat that we used to eat when we were growing up e.g. pork belly, lamb belly and beef shin, are now not cheap because the middle classes started eating them thanks to the proliferation of tv cooks.
The tech has improved, too. I’m not going to blame anyone but big Ag for the pricing though. I don’t think the demand created by the proliferation of sous vide, pressure cookers and air fryers caused the current problem.
Ultimately, there is not a single problem that I see around me that is not either caused directly or greatly exacerbated by Capitalism/Class War being prosecuted by the ruling class. For the purposes of casual conversation I sometimes will, as in this case, just talk about the circumstances that the ruling class have caused to come into being but it's always those greedy bastards fault and when you talk about big Ag then you're talking in most cases about the descendants of people that stole land from the commonweal. Class war every time.
Right but what if the cheapest food is idk, something like celery root? I think the idea w/the thesis of the article is that a skilled cook can adapt to whatever ingredients are cheapest at any moment.
I think I’m a decent cook but I also think I need to improve because when I’m in the produce area and have no idea how to use like 15—20% of the options there. E.g. celery root, cactus, and ½ dozen things I don’t even recognize.
Sorry, but my point was even shopping cheapest only is getting too expensive now. Poor people have always been buying cheap produce only. That strategy doesn't help when the floor for prices is rising. So if something as basic as cheap as cabbage—the canonical broke peasant food—is like $1.25/lb where it used to be $0.25/lb, the problem isn't the %15-20 of vegetables you don't know how to cook!
Indeed.. now that we can simply enter a couple ingredients into a search field and get countless recipes, and also w/Youtube, I would expect people to be better equipped in recent decades.
It's also that in the past not every member of the household worked. You can save money by baking your own bread but it takes time people don't always have.
Weren’t bread machines all the rage because you just dump in the ingredients and it’s autopilot from there? I see a lot of them at 2nd markets and in dumpsters, so I wonder if their usefulness was overestimated.
Skyrocketing prices have taken a big bite out of what Canadians are able to serve up for dinner but food economists say our ability to cope has been worsened by our collective decline in cooking skills.
"We are less able to cook than we were 30 or 40 years ago, and so it's much more difficult for us to adapt our diet," said Mike von Massow, an associate professor at the University of Guelph's Food, Agricultural & Resource Economics department.
But even for those fortunate enough to still afford their weekly grocery run, a lack of skills to improvise in the kitchen makes it harder to work around higher prices, such as by swapping ingredients for less-expensive alternates.
Both then and during today's food inflation crisis, she said her familiarity with the plant-based dishes of her family's Punjabi roots — many of them featuring inexpensive protein sources like legumes — was an advantage.
Annie Belov, a 21-year-old student studying criminology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, has taught herself a lot about cooking since food prices started shooting up.
It's important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem, said Elaine Power, a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University.
The original article contains 1,271 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I’ve sampled Hawaii-style Poké Bowl crisps in Hungary and chocolate-coated potato snacks in Finland; I have turned away from Sweet Mayo Cheese Pringles in South Korea.
Before Doritos launched in India five years ago, she took a “culinary trek” across the northern city of Lucknow, trying different pilaus, meats and breads from street food stalls.
When a flavour is made from scratch, Wood goes to chef Pat Clifford, who spent 14 years in restaurants – including some with two Michelin stars – before moving into “ambient foods” (anything in the supermarket that isn’t chilled).
Its residents earned the nickname Maneblussers in 1687 after they planned to throw buckets of water at the cathedral, believing it was alight – in actual fact, the red glow of the moon was shining through its windows.
“They had the volume, so they could request special flavours because we have a minimum order quantity,” says Gert Peremans, a salty snacks research and development director at Kellanova – formerly Kellogg’s – Pringles’ parent company.
Not all of these flavours are available in every European country – prawn cocktail only really sells in the UK and Ireland, while bacon is found in most places except Belgium, the Netherlands and strongholds of vegetarianism Austria, Denmark and Sweden.
The original article contains 4,026 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 95%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Science of Cooking
Hot