More alarmist headlines

[Monty Python]

Just read an article in the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/121871...

which suggests that eating a diet with a lot of high glycemic index foods increases your risk of lung cancer by 49%. What's the point? If you don't know your risk now, how do you know what a 49% increase will be? If your current risk is 2%, then it'll go up to 3%. If it's 30% it'll go up to 45%.

Is it me or are headlines like this just designed to be alarmist?

[LordGrover]

You're right, but so long as it deters people from making poor food choices like bread and pasta it's a good thing in my book.

[KamSandhu44]

LordGrover said:

You're right, but so long as it deters people from making poor food choices like bread and pasta it's a good thing in my book.

Bread and pasta are not poor food choices.

[grumbledoak]

KamSandhu44 said:

Bread and pasta are not poor food choices.

They are in the quantities most people are eating them.

Since WWII the cheap calories of "Modern Wheat" have been Plan A for feeding the world, avoiding another French Revolution, and making some folk a fortune. For many hundreds of years prior to this, the cereal crops were the animal feed intended to fatten the animals for market. Those calories are all glucose, and as a bonus they come with almost no micro nutrients at all. It should be no surprise that a people on a diet consisting largely of cereals in various forms are suffering an obesity and diabetes epidemic.

I've no idea if they give you anything else, mind.

[LordGrover]

Forget the science, just look at the 'food'.
Flour.
Just look at it. That fine white powder that gets sticky enough to hang wallpaper when it's wet. That's what you're eating when you eat bread, pasta, pastry, etc. There is nothing of value in it, except profit for the vendors/supply chain. In some circumstance it's 'fortified' with vitamins, minerals, calcium, etc, but that doesn't make it a valid, healthy option.

[maxxy5]

Lets not get too faddish about it, it's not worth the stress. Highly processed white bread/pasta is not great for you, and most people do eat too many carbs, but there is nothing wrong with whole foods with lots of veg. Glucose is not bad per se. Even the paleolithic people that internet food faddists idealise actually ate starchy tubers, legumes, grasses, various grains, depending on where they lived. In fact glucose energy from that kind of thing is thought to have helped the evolution of the brain.