I have recently stumbled across Kurzweil’s The 10% Solution For a Healthy Life. According to the book (which is meticulously sourced), the ‘typical American diet gets 35 to 40 percent of its calories from fat’, in contrast to traditional east Asian diets where the figure is just 10%. This translates into excess cholesterol in the bloodstream, which is responsible for high rates of atherosclerosis in societies with meat-based diets. To quote in extenso:
If we look at societies that eat a very low fat diet-and low fat generally implies low cholesterol-we indeed find extremely low rates of heart disease…In China, the diet consists primarily of vegetables and grains. Most Chinese are not wealthy enough to afford the luxury of our high-fat foods. Cholesterol levels are typically 100 to 150, with an average level around 127. A level of 180, which we consider low, is considered very high in China. And heart disease is very rare.
The same results have been noted for many populations eating low-fat diets, including the Bantus of Africa and the indigenous peoples of Brazil and New Guinea. For New Guinea natives, cholesterol levels, which tend to run about 100, do not vary with age. Interestingly, blood pressure is also constant, and low to normal, throughout their lives. Studies of other societies eating low-fat, low cholesterol, and low-sodium diets have shown the same results.In those nonindustrialized countries where the fat level in the diet is very low, serum cholesterol tends to be low, generally under 150, and there is a virtual absence of coronary heart disease. Even in the United States, the more than 40-year-long Framingham Study (an extensive research project that has been tracing approximately 5,000 individuals since 1948 to determine the risk factors for coronary heart disease) found that people who ate a very low fat diet tended to have serum cholesterol levels below 160 mg/dl. It also found essentially no deaths from heart disease when serum cholesterol levels were below 160.
Heart disease is epidemic only in those countries where the typical diet is high in fat and cholesterol. In these same countries, serum cholesterol typically exceeds 200 mg/dl. Only a handful of countries have higher rates of heart disease than the United States. These northern European countries have diets that are even higher than ours in animal and dairy fat as well as cholesterol, and they also have correspondingly higher serum cholesterol levels.
In Russia, this problem is particularly acute – in the same year, 15.96 / 1000 Russians died, 8.95 / 100 of them, or 56%, from cardiovascular diseases. Which is not really that surprising, considering how fatty, meat-based foods make up the staples of the Russian diet. This is a particularly significant fact, because if Russia could lower its heart disease rates down to at least (still high) American levels, it could cut its mortality rate to 9.8 / 1000 (i.e. the levels of Spain or Japan) and enter the world of positive population growth (by 0.3%, if birth rates and migration remain unchanged). Nonetheless, recent falls in mortality are partially reflected in 2006 statistics, when 8.6 / 1000 (57%) Russians died from cardiovascular diseases and presumably this trend will accelerate.
According to Kurzweil, reducing caloric intake derived from fats to 10% will not only virtually eliminate heart disease, it will lower the chance of other diseases including cancer, strokes, hypertension and type 2 diabetes. He believes that eating a diet that is very low in fat reduces the risk of most major cancers by 90 percent or more.
New consumer inflation stats for the whole of 2007 have appeared on Rosstat. The biggest price increases were in milk and milk products (30%), butter (40%) and sunflower-seed oil (52%). Milk oozes with fat (“2% low-fat” milk is only 98% fat-free by weight, because most of it is water; its caloric content contains c.37% fat) – indeed, in The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs noted how the elimination of subsidies for the dairy industry in late 1980′s Poland noticeable increased life expectancy. Meanwhile, the reason why increases in butter and sunflower-seed oils are good should be obvious. The rise in the price of bread and bakery products (22%), seafood (9%) and fruit and vegetables (22%) is less desirable (compared with 8% growth in meat prices) – nonetheless, all of them remain much cheaper than meat (1kg of beef will buy 8kg of potatos, 5kg of bread, 2.6kg of apples or 2.2kg of frozen fish), and as such may be considered Giffen goods. Alcohol prices increased by a relatively low 8%, but this is not an unmitigated loss since a higher figure could have meant a reversal of the recent trend towards the decline of moonshine – which is far cheaper, but far more dangerous, than ordinary vodka.
Which goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining. What this means is that if these trends continue (many experts are predicting continuing rises in grain and meat prices for the next two to three years), hopefully low-income Russians (amongst whom mortality is concentrated) will buy less milk and butter, and more fruit, fish and bread products. Along with the recent trend in Russia towards Western healthy-food fads, these constitute two powerful vectors along which mortality can be reduced.
This is far from the whole explanation, however, of why Russia’s life expectancy was only 67.5 years in 2007 (albeit an increase from 64.9 years in 2003). It cannot be the healthcare system – for all its failings, it is much better than in countries like Egypt or China (which have longer life expectancies) and does provide a concrete barrier against the infectitious diseases and infant mortality that really drive a country’s life expectancy down. The explanation, I’ve always thought, lies in Russians’ unique combination of undesirable lifestyle traits – widespread alcohol, tobacco and narcotics consumption, stress, little exercise and a diet high in everything bad (not only fat, but also cholestorol, sodium and sugar), a pattern that is repeated in life and in statistics across the entire post-Soviet space.
We won’t go into the other areas outlined above, though generally the same things can be said about them as the recommendations one could make for diet. Most of them are not country-specific.
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Launch a wide-scale public information campaign to cut down on fat consumption. By wide-scale, I mean prime-time adverts on all the major state TV channels, newspapers and the Internet.
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Encourage people to consume poutry and fish instead of red meat, eggs and milk. Discourage any usage of salt, sugar, butter, sunflower oil. Give preference to boiling or steaming over grilling (which increases rates of stomach cancers).
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Ban all alcohol, fat and other narcotics advertising.
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Make the ‘encouragement’ real by taxing fat content in foods. It is addictive, mood-changing and deleterious to health, and as such is qualitatively no different from alcohol (or ecstasy or shrooms, for that matter). Use this money to fund healthcare or subsidize fruit production. (I am aware that this is all really not market-friendly, but in this particular case the market has failed – the lifestyle choices people make rarely serve to maximize their utility function, especially in Russia). Note: my searching on the Web revealed that a ‘fat tax‘ isn’t, unfortunately, my original idea.
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Similarly, tax salt, sugar and cholestorol content in food. I am continuously surprised and upset at the staggeringly high amounts of salt or sugar present even in apparently innocuous foods like bread or cereals.
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Russia, like the West, has an obesity epidemic. In my view the recent trend towards treating it as ‘normal’ is unwelcome. While I certainly don’t want to imply that obese people should be denigrated, society should recognize it for the debilitating disease it is and offer far more support and incentives for them to overcome it. The UK has some interesting ideas.
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Convert wine production into a strategic industry and massively fund its expansion. Try to remake Russia into a wine-drinking nation. Aim to turn vodka into an exclusively export industry (particularly to Britain and Estonia).
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Impose high taxes on McDonalds, KFC and other fast-food outlets. Impose high taxes on soft drinks and crisps like one would on any narcotic.
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I do not see the point of making cooking classes compulsory, however. ‘Ofsted said pupils were often taught “trivia” such as “arranging toppings decoratively on a pizza” or using complex engineering computer-aided design software to produce simple drawings of icing on cakes.’ No wonder Britain is such a retarded country.
Those are just the things I thought of from the top of my head. Of course, there are plenty of other things I’d do, e.g., increase subsidies to leisure centers, gradually legalize all narcotics, raise taxes on tobacco (they’re currently far too low in Russia), remove all advertising on state TV and public places to reduce stress levels, etc.
Now how do I apply for the post of Minister of Health and Social Development?
Related posts:
- Editorial: We need a Fat Tax
- Editorial: Annals of Media Madness – The Trouble with the Economist
- Editorial: Annals of Resurgent Russia – It’s the Economy (in 2007), Stupid!
- Editorial: Annals of Resurgent Russia – CIA World Factbook 2008
- Editorial: Annals of Western Hypocrisy – Georgia Presidential Elections 2008
Asians are also more carbohydrate-tolerant because agriculture, and thus carbs, have been around for so much longer than in Europe. Carbohydrate tolerance promotes better insulin sensitivity, which is associated with healthier indicators. I think the major problem has not been the existence of fat/cholestrol per se, but rather the imbalance between high amounts of omega-6s and low amounts of omega-3s.
Kurzweil is wrong. Gary Taubes is the one to read on this subject. Unfortunately it is all in his books (The Diet Delusion) not on his website. He is a professional writer – he make sure that he writes for money.