Quote:
Originally Posted by RCo
I am sitting here in a country (the UK) where so much enthusiasm has been put in to preventing skin cancer, that a whole new generation of young children are being affected by ricketts, a disease which had been basically wiped out since the end of WW2.
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Great example! This came about when very light-skinned Irish and Scotts entered Australia, a country with a lot of sun, and the skin cancer rates skyrocketed. In that situation it is sensible to avoid the sun. But then the UK, which rarely gets enough sun to worry about skin cancer, started on the same regime, and people got too little sun! Some scientists think that part of the increase of autism-like symptoms came about by the same sun avoidance leading to vitamin D deficiency.
I am a geneticist studying genetic and environmental effects on behavior and its the same thing - tweaking on one end can bring about another. Back to diet, lifestyle, obesity and diabetes.
Increasing certain fats may lead to depression in susceptible people. Atkins diet in some on this forum made cholesterol shoot up, in others it stayed fine or went down.
So, the bottom line is, we are all different, both from the start and how we react to diet, sun, or exercise, and there is not one lifestyle that fits all. It is futile to fight low fat dieters - they may be the way to go for some people,
and Atkins and low carb may not be good for some people. Evolution has kept a certain diversity within us humans, because if we were all perfectly adapted to the life style and environment of lets say10,000 BCE, we would have been killed as a species. Instead, because environment can change faster than genes, we have a mix of predispositions, not good or bad genes, but the Yin and Yang brings them out as positive or negatively interacting with diet and other environmental factors. Pima Indians, not unlike the cats you talk about, were slim and healthy on their native, starvation-like diet, but on a Western diet nearly all get type 2 diabetes. This i s probably because those in the population who had other genes were killed due to starvation, selection did its job too well!
Until someone can figure out not only what all the genetic makeup that affects diabetes are, but also how they react to diet, exercise, and environment, we have to experiment with our bodies ourselves and watch what happens, at least in the moderately short term (of course, we can't do that for 20 year in cancer risks). One of the leaders of the Human Genome project is just writing a book about personalized medicine - it is coming. What we need to realize is that we need to personalize our diets and experiment with what works for us - what works for 80% of people in this forum may not work for some. The same diet may be fine for one, lead to diabetes in a second and to obesity without diabetes in third person.