To think there's a growing amount of people who think food can fix everything?

[StructuredChaos]

Was listening to some ZOE podcasts, and love eating healthy foods myself, so it isn't a criticism of nutrition awareness. I'm a bit of a cooking nerd so love all of this stuff and finding new recipes, but I am noticing more and more people who seem to believe that eating low upf and fresh fruit and veg can add 'decades' to a human lifespan.

It certainly won't shorten it!
Surely this is an oversimplification, though?

I have always eaten in a kind of 'ZOE' way, and whilst I don't have any metabolic disease, weight problems or other issues, I am not so confident that I am going to outlive my peers due to this. It's something I can control, yes, and that's great, but I think it's deceptive to think we won't ever get cancer, heart disease, dementia or auto immune diseases if we eat in a 'clean' or ideal way.

Not to mention the 'ideal' keeps bloody changing!

I don't think life is that simple at all, even though I do champion healthy, fresh diets.
I see people who claim their spots, headaches, IBS, brain fog, joint aches and other issues immediately cease when they start eating fresh fruit and veg, or low histamine, or low inflammatory diets...... What puzzles me, as someone who has always enjoyed high fibre and fresh foods, is how nebulous those symptoms are, and not very well understood by GP's.
It allows for all manner of snake oil claims online, since the placebo effect is strong.

Just saw a vid with Tim Spector claiming that eating the ZOE way will certainly add 10 extra healthy years to your life. So if we use myself as an example of this, it doesn't take into account my familial heart disease, stroke risk, potential genetic cancers, and a world of non food related risks, of which there are countless examples.

It reminds me of those people who think they will never get ill because they don't smoke. Neither did my parents, but they died before their time (sepsis and vascular dementia).

Agree, I definitely get a sense of that on the UPF subreddit. It is difficult to locate unbiased information. I have found online science mags and articles more rewarding, but best to get a feel if there's a political bent, first.
And that's another problem isn't it? The culture/identity politics that circulates food communities. It's all so very, needlesly complicated.

But it sells books and catches attention.

I enjoy healthy, gut friendly food because my body desires it and I know how to cook it. I tend to think that someone who eats like Elvis (+medications) may walk a riskier path than I, but I could still get swept away by something quite unrelated to what I willingly put in my body. Pollution, stress, grief, genetics, etc.

I also find it exasperating how they hint that we can control how much sleep we get. Sleep is a slippery eel.

You do have a good point but on the other side of it not eating fruit and vegetables really drains you. Partly due to finances and partly due to laziness I don't have a very good diet. For dinner I'll have rice and soy sauce or buttered pasta.

Yogurts for lunch. I do try and make an effort with my breakfasts, having eggs with runny yolk, lots of spinach, and avocado. I actually crave fruit sometimes. But I do take iron and folic acid supplements, and a multivitamin. I do drink a lot of orange juice.

When I had acne it pissed me off no end when people would tell me it’s my fault because I eat badly and if I just cut out dairy/sugar/gluten/some unknown intolerance my acne would go away.

Tried all that, didn’t work. Took some tablets for a few months and fixed my face for good without worrying about eating a biscuit.

Hmm, mixed feelings about this. Of course you are right that food can't fix everything. But:

• a lot of people are going to have a significantly shorter and/or significantly worse life because of the food they eat

-food quality for a lot of people is incredibly low (over half of total calorie intake on average in the UK is UPF and for children the percentage is much higher) -we are still at a really early stage of understanding about the gut's relationship to health overall

I think it's inevitable that the sort of person who already eats pretty healthily is more likely to listen to the Zoe podcast than one who lives on poor quality food, so inevitably we end up with a small fraction of already-healthy people fretting about the relative merits of cabbage versus sprouts, while millions of people continue to eat shite.

I think the way Zoe positions itself is sometimes a bit questionable- half the time presenting sensible advice and half the time promoting a commercial product that most people don't need. But of all the companies who want to message us about food, they are very much on the side of the angels.

there IS well established research. Look at the longitudinal seventh day adventist study - this clearly shows links between meat and dairy consumption and heart disease and cancers adventisthealthstudy.org/studies .

The mere fact that you even talk about Mediterranean diets demonstrates that you do not have an understanding of this field of research as true researchers don't use it given there is no universal agreed definition on what a mediterranean diet actually is comprised of.

Dr Christopher Gardner (Stanford) and Dr Colin Campbell (Yale) have both irrefutably demonstrated the causal positive links between plant based diets and improved heart health. To a point where researching benefits of a carnivore diet would actually be unethical to do. Both are plant based off the back of their research,

Association does not equal causation.

The Adventist study follows mostly white, middle class people - the kind of people who live longer in any event. They don’t smoke, don’t drink and have strong social networks. The gap between vegetarian and non-vegetarian Adventists is narrower than the gap between similar people outside of the church, so there’s no real way to unpick the confounding factors associated with their relatively ascetic lifestyles.

Within the study, the actual effect on all cause mortality is modest - around 10%. At best you can say with certainty that a plant forward diet with limited red & processed meat shows some benefit.

Cardiovascular fitness still remains the only proven causal factor for decreased all cause mortality.

Ultimately cancer is just bad luck but there are some lifestyle choices that can increase that bad luck. As a breast cancer survivor I have actively reduced my weight but there is no guarantee that it will prevent recurrence.

I avoid telling some people that I’m a cancer survivor because they suddenly become experts in diet and healthy eating. Like a lot of women who are diagnosed with hormone dependent breast cancer it was diagnosed after using HRT. I was post menopausal and had regular mammograms that showed no evidence of cancer until the screening mammogram that did. For me, and my breast cancer surgeon I was one of the unlucky women who came a statistic.

The advice re diet from breast cancer team is to try and keep a healthy BMI which helps all areas of health but there is no magic diet that reduces your overall risk. I don’t drink alcohol, I gave up in my late 20s because I developed a reaction/allergy to sulphites.

Healthy eating may optimise life span, unhealthy eating may reduce lifespan. Genetics has a much bigger impact on longevity than diet. We know that cardiovascular disease and associated diseases are inherited so if you have a lot of family members who die early of cardiovascular disease or develop type 2 diabetes then it would be in your best interests to undergo regular early screening and follow advice.

I don’t think it’s that it can fix everything but it can help and is within my control. I’m in my early 40’s and have hypertension caused by genetics and preeclampsia. I need meds but if I didn’t also exercise and watch what I eat it could be a lot worse.

My dad has developed a neurodegenerative disease in his 70’s despite always being healthy and exercising and keeping his brain active. I don’t think anything could have prevented him getting this disease but maybe the years of doing the right thing helped delay it? Or at least helped him not develop any co-morbidities. My mother has an extremely healthy diet and at almost 80 is in great health.

I completely agree that saying a healthy weight is a powerful way of reducing the risk of all kinds life reducing and limiting disease- things like arthritis, heart attack etc.

interestingly, you don’t have to eat “healthily” to be a normal weight, and people seem to forget that.

You can do your best but it is often a lottery as to who gets cancer etc.

To be fair most people in the UK have a poor diet. Lots of UPF and sugar. A healthier diet will likely increase your longevity but also your health in later years

I think Tim Spector is talking about health-span rather than lifespan. Not necessarily living 10 years more but being healthy into old age. If you’re pretty healthy already you’re probably in a good place already. So many people eat crap though and they could definitely increase their healthspan by changing their diet.

If you listen to Zoe a lot of the scientist guests talk about genetics being less of an influence than we used to think. The twin study helped prove this.

There is a difference between adding decade or more to lifespan and adding a healthy decade - ie an extra decade of good health though

I can believe later more easily

but few people understand probability at all well so it’s hardly surprising that people get things wrong - yes you are much less likely to get something nasty but you still might and it’s worth doing your best

I know what you mean OP. I remember someone on mumsnet who was convinced they would definitely be fit and healthy in their 80s because they exercised and ate well. Surely the fact that children can get cancer demonstrates that it's not all down to lifestyle and there are no guarantees

Of course there is always going to be cancer but many cases are preventable Surely that’s empowering

I'm all for eating good non UPF food and have done this long before it became fashionable. I do think that UPF has a negative impact on our health, but it's a very personal & individual thing how that pans out.
Something for the anecdotes: my grandad died at age 92 in his sleep- healthy apart from T2 diabetes. He was overweight, chain smoker and a pickled gherkin was his idea of a vegetable. In other words his diet was shocking and really wasn't interested in anything that is considered a healthy lifestyle.... some of it is down to luck.

The thing is that it’s great to eat healthy in your 40s. I eat a really healthy diet (I don’t follow any of this Zoe stuff, it’s purely because I like whole natural foods). I don’t drink. I’ve never smoked. I’m active. I have good mental health and self-care.

I still have advanced cancer. You know why? Because nothing I did in my 30s and 40s with healthy lifestyle and good sun protection practices could undo the damage from my childhood when no one put sunscreen on me, so now I have metastatic melanoma.

It’s great to be healthy and eat nourishing foods. But you can’t outrun childhood trauma, or lifestyle factors you had no control over, or structural or environmental effects. It won’t make things worse (unless maybe you have IBD or IBS and need to limit fibre). But it isn’t medicine and it’s not going to fix everything.

With respect having T2 diabetes is not healthy. Again it’s about health span not life span.

Adding '10 extra healthy years to your life' doesn't mean living 10 more years, which I think is the way that some people are taking it. It means that the time where you're mobile / are fit enough to have a good quality of life / healthy enough to travel, is extended. So you're more likely to enjoy your retirement. And of course likely to live longer at a population level, even if not always at an individual level

Sorry that you have that diagnosis. I heard a recent podcast where a scientist said new data suggests melanoma is not caused by sun damage but by low Vit d as it often appears on parts of the body that have not been exposed to the sun. Have you heard that before?

That was exactly what I was thinking and came to post. A cup of tea and a piece of cake - how putting the kettle on is the answer to everything! Some nice cheese and a glass of wine has a similar effect, or a pint of lager and a bag of chips 🤣

I think it’s important that people realise that although a healthy diet is always going to be better than an unhealthy one, it really doesn’t resolve everything or stop you getting some of these so-called ‘preventable illnesses’. People can follow all the (changing) guidance and still get cancer or dementia.

I struggled to eat fruit. Do you actively feel better when you do manage to eat it?

About 6 in 10 cancers are not lifestyle related and are due to genetics, environment and random DNA mutations

And if you’re the unlucky one it can also feel like victim blaming. That there was something more you could have/should have done, when it was just bad luck.