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New Zealand documentary

Well, indeed. Aotearoa/New Zealand is a diabetes hot spot country. It is estimated that about 1/3rd of the country has prediabetes or diabetes proper. I have also lived in a country that is not a diabetes hot spot country (Sweden), just your standard stats, and it makes dinner parties and social occasions with food and drink very different, as a LCHF/Keto person/diabetes plagued person, as you can probably imagine. It feels like a plague to me! And I can get very passionate about it.

Lots of folks who have a lean, or lean and muscular body type 'by nature' in a high-carb, and high bad fats, food environment. Your standard western country food situation, but with a high health breakdown situation. Amputations and kidney failure are two of the possible outcomes for uncontrolled diabetes. And what an outcome. I have actually seen this doco series twice, since diagnosis. But I have to be in a certain frame of mind to do it. (I too would be on the path to kidney failure, statistically, as a SIRD, according to the endo diabetes researchers at Lund Uni in Sweden, if my blood glucose malfunctioning system was not so tightly controlled.)

It makes me feel very strongly about putting warning labels on sugary/carbonated drinks! (I believe I would have benefited from such a warning label. I drank a lot of schweppes in the lead up to my own diabetes diagnosis, and did not, believe it or not, in my diabetes innocent state, really get that causation connection.) And having a sugar tax. I think it is really time for Governmental health and social services agencies to get seriously involved in diabetes prevention, not just picking it up at diagnosis, or making estimations. Amputations and kidney failure is a rotten path to an accelerated too-early death, if you don't mind me being blunt. But if you have seen that doco series, bluntness is called for perhaps!

But alas, how far off are we from the diabetes prevention situation? Not to mention cardiovascular disease, which is a whole other related can of health-outcomes worms, if you follow the too-high insulin connection to cardiovascular breakdown too. In my country, listening to our health minister (last time I could stand listening) say why a sugar tax is not a good idea - I believe a long way. Too sad, too, too, too bad.
 
What is sad is that after all these years. The South Pacific Islanders (Samoa, Tonga, Fiji etc) continue the bear the brunt of this devastating condition and wrongly blame fatty meat instead of the sugared water they constantly drink.

The First Nations at least had Dr Jay Wortman to guide them...
Hopefully Prof Grant Schofield could run some programs for the South Pacific Islanders...
 
Yes indeed, and I did find some of those episodes very frustrating with the mixed messages on what constitutes a healthy diet. Too much talk of fat and salt. Too many diabetics eating fruit and white bread. The world really needs to move away from the idea that dietary fat makes you fat and diabetic.

I sometimes ponder how the human race can simultaneously be so incredibly smart and so incredibly dumb. We are planning to send people to Mars and we have yet to figure out what to have for dinner on Earth.
 
I don’t even understand how it can be so confusing and complicated. How can eating what we are literally made from, kill us? If I eat myself will I get sick?

Humans are stoopid
 
Jim Lahey said:
I don’t even understand how it can be so confusing and complicated. How can eating what we are literally made from, kill us? If I eat myself will I get sick?

Humans are stoopid
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I don't know if you'd get sick but would you have apple sauce or mint?
 
Indy51 said:
With "long pig" as the PNG cannibals were wont to call it, it'd have to be apple sauce surely?
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And a little Chianti... thththth!
 
The kick in the pants is needed. Thanks for posting.

Fascinating to see Diabetes expert overweight.
 

Yes, absolutely on Maori and Pacific Islanders bearing the health-brunt of the mis-information about food.

Dr Jay Wortman is a first nations descendant person himself, and his doco was working with his own tribal group. Prof Schofield is neither Maori or Polynesian, so seeing him as a guide may not be realistic. Aotearoa is rather hot on peoples speaking and guiding their own peoples, as are the peoples themselves! Although never say never!

Also, here - diabetes vulnerable folk are Indian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Korean and Philipine immigrants and descendants of. (This is an immigrant country as post colonial countries tend to be.) A womanfriend at my table recently with prediabetic BG levels is African. Africans or descendants of eating a SAD/high carb diet are also at extreme health risk.

I for one feel very strongly about the demonising of healthy fat issue. Coconut oil is a hot topic here, and amongst Polynesians a traditional staple healthy fat. Here in Aotearoa, bird fats of course, and morsels of cooked dead birds preserved in fat was a traditional staple, and travelled well. My own body responds very well to coconut oil, and I love it. I loved that Paleo and Keto are very coconut oil friendly. I am extremely upset that such a wonderful food and source of healthy fat as coconuts have been demonised and continues to be in the absence of evidence (and I can get very passionate about the healthiness of eggs issue to boot!)

Talking of which - Weet bix yes - eggs - no? This is criminal in the face of so much blood glucose dysregulation.

Big time too then on the double whammy insulinemic/lectin-digestive havoc provocation of dairy and wheat. This being a big dairy producing country. And bread-(pastry and batter) eating from the Brits, very big time .

But I am optimistic that the healthy fats yes sugar no message will come across loud and clear in our lifetimes. Ditto as to the insulinemic/lectin-digestive issues dynamite nature of wheat and milk and or dairy for many folks. It won't be quick enough, but it will come. So many people are getting very sick, are very sick. I am sorry to say - after many folks have died too early, and too many people on kidney dialysis and not enough equipment and medical professionals to go around, and maybe me one of them. But I won't go out quietly, without making a big fuss about food, for instance. And I won't be alone. So change and improved information will happen. Not soon enough. But it will happen.
 
Indy51 said:
This thread is probably a good home for the following article (linked by Ivor Cummins on Twitter):

https://medium.com/ucsf-magazine/un...ckness-beneath-the-sweet-surface-f522c8c8b51d
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Very informative., thank you for the link.

i am certainly coming around to this way of thinking..

 
AloeSvea said:
Yes, absolutely on Maori and Pacific Islanders bearing the health-brunt of the mis-information about food.

But I am optimistic that the healthy fats yes sugar no message will come across loud and clear in our lifetimes.
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I do hope you are right. First step I'd like to see is processed cereal (ie anything not a bag of unadulterated grains) moved to the sweets, crisps & chocolate aisle in the supermarket. Stop the pretence that it's food.
 
Jim Lahey said:
I sometimes ponder how the human race can simultaneously be so incredibly smart and so incredibly dumb. We are planning to send people to Mars and we have yet to figure out what to have for dinner on Earth.
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Very true. But probably more like a lost art?
 
“It’s easy to forget that back in the ’50s and ’60s, smoking was the norm,” she explains. People smoked on airplanes, at work, in restaurants, even in hospitals. “You could buy cigarettes in our medical center vending machines,” she says. “Public health officials changed the environment. They made it unpopular to smoke.” They did so by amassing evidence of tobacco’s dangers, warning people of its harms, advocating for taxation, pushing to get cigarettes moved behind counters, and calling for smoking to be banned from bars and public buildings, among other approaches. Eventually, the death rate for lung cancer plummeted.

“We’re in the beginning stages of that kind of public health battle around sugar,” Schmidt says.”

So very true. I recall TV adverts from back in the 60s where cigarettes were being advertised by doctors.


Slight change of slant. I used to work on oil rigs an in 1980/81 I recall working with an American. I was in my mid twenties and he in his forties at the time. I remember him sitting down at one point and informing me in no uncertain terms that sugar was a killer. I was a bit taken aback and found the experience a bit odd. But it turns out he was correct but I was completely unaware of it at that time.
 
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Listlad said:
So very true. I recall TV adverts from back in the 60s where cigarettes were being advertised by doctors.
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I used to have GP's that smoked both ciggies and a pipe while I was in their surgery.

I had a medical evacuation strapped to the floor of a RFDS aircraft from Normanton to Mt Isa, the doctor and nurses all smoked.

These were all back in the 1970's, I really never noticed when it stopped though.
 

Not just Maori and Pacific Islanders but Indigenous Australians are struggling. It's now standard policy here that indigenous people are diabetic until proven otherwise. Yet we know how to change it around. Even Paul Mason on one of his youtube lectures has a research paper from the seventies showing high fat low carb reduces obesity and diabetes in indigenous people. Its so frustrating.
 
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