Comments by "TJ Marx" (@tjmarx) on "‘This is an emergency’ - Chris van Tulleken on how our diet is killing us" video.
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@Little Bear's Party
@Timothy Gillett
This is a video which at it's core attempts to link diet as the main driving force behind obesity & heart disease. This is a false ideological narrative.
Studies, including medium scale double blind studies repeatedly demonstrate that changing diet alone has limited effect on fat percentage and BMI. Double blind studies demonstrate the opposite for changing level of daily activity alone. That is, if you keep the same diet without making any changes but increase level of daily activity you will;
(A) Decrease fat percentage
(B) Increase muscle percentage
(C) Decrease arterial plaque
(D) Decrease cholesterol
(E) Increase lung capacity
(F) Lower resting heart rate
(G) Increase overall cardiovascular and respiratory health
(H) Increase bone density
(I) Plus many more benefits
These benefits do not come from changing diet alone. We aren't talking about going to the gym or jogging for 30 minutes. Those are the minimum levels of activity you can do to not die. What we're talking about is activity across the whole of lifestyle and the kinds of choices to make in life.
That is not to say diet is irrelevant to health, on the contrary of course it impacts overall health and contributes to these two conditions specifically. However it is far from the main driving force behind them and is certainly not an emergency.
Are you aware that sitting has been demonstrated clinically to be more dangerous than smoking? Sitting for longer than 20 minutes at a time, or greater than 6 hours cumulative in a day increases your risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol and a myriad of other health impacts including risk of some types of cancer, above the risk of even smoking. Indeed there is some evidence to suggest sitting is now the leading cause of heart disease. That's without mentioning the obvious impact it has on obesity rates.
Now think about how much you sit in a day, you may even be sitting right now. You sit in the car. You sit in front of the tv. You sit while you eat. You may sit while you work. You sit with you have a conversation. How many hours in a day all up are you sitting? Do the math.
Furthermore, the opening snippet was simply popularist jag. Cereal mascots have no impact on obesity. The kinds of children whom might be tempted by cartoon monkey's, tigers and toucans don't buy cereal because they don't have any money and cannot shop independently due to their age. Children in that age bracket certainly may desire the box with the cartoon monkey but they are confined to the will and behaviour of their primary carer (parents). Little nigel has no buying power unless his parent ingratiates him with it. He can only buy the cereal his parent allows.
Cereal mascots have existed since the 1920s. Diets were interestingly higher in caloric intake in the 1950s. The obesity epidemic only took off in the late 80s and into the 90s, which is precisely when sedentary lifestyle set in and we started doing all this sitting.
There's another dark horse factor here that is rarely talked about publicly. Nano exhaust. These are the tiny particles from vehicle exhaust (particularly trucks) which can not be captured or reburned before exiting the vehicle. People living in traffic corridors have twice the risk of obesity and 3x the risk of heart disease than their neighbours just one street over.
This video is pushing an ideological agenda, and not one based in medical reality.
P.S. @Timothy Gillett I also disagree with your assessment of CH4 News. They are in fact an ideologically driven activist tabloid, close to and sometimes even identical in style to the daily mail. They constantly mistake the personal opinions, view points or interpretations of the hosts and reporters for journalism. Which of course it is not. The host in this video is one of worst culprits of this kind of behaviour. Anything approaching actual journalism regardless of quality is scarce to come by in the UK market, so I can understand how you might make this mistake. But CH4 is amongst the worst offenders of tabloidism. They don't report news, they take news and curate it until it sells whatever idea or opinion they want you to have. When you like that with a public asset, such as CH4 is, then it becomes dangerously close to propaganda.
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