Monday, July 22, 2024
What, Exactly, Is so Great About the Mediterranean Diet?
The journal article referred to below is "Primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in women with a Mediterranean diet: systematic review and meta-analysis"
At: https://heart.bmj.com/content/109/16/1208
Meta analyses are very susceptible to finding what you want to find and the hazard ratios reported were very low, indicating very marginal effects. And it appears that the authors did not even begin to look at confounders such as ethnicity and social class.
So this study is a very poor recommendation for a Mediterranean diet indeed. The diet is essentially a fad and nothing more
Healthful eating is important at any age to lower the risk of obesity and keep the heart and everything else inside the body functioning well. This becomes especially crucial later in life, because good nutrition helps reduce the risk of chronic conditions like hypertension, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.
Being smart about what you eat also can affect your mood no matter your age—ultra-processed foods that include hydrogenated oils and high-fructose corn syrup, for instance, can increase the risk of depression—and some studies even suggest that healthy eating patterns can help delay or prevent developing dementia as we get older.
One way to improve your health while also eating some really wonderful foods, says Natalie Bruner, a registered dietitian and nutritionist with St. Clair Health, is to follow the Mediterranean style of eating.
Often referred to as the Mediterranean diet, it’s not so much a “diet” in the traditional sense, which is often defined by a bunch of hard-and-fast rules such as calorie counting and macro-tracking what you put in your mouth each day. Eating Mediterranean style is more of a lifestyle.
Patterned around the foods eaten by people who live in countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea—think Italy, Greece, Spain and Northern Africa—it puts a daily emphasis on plant-based dishes and heart-healthy, unsaturated fats such as olive oil instead the refined or hydrogenated oils that are so common in fast food meals and snack foods.
Half a Tablespoon of Olive Oil Daily May Protect Brain Health
The diet also emphasizes whole, minimally processed foods such as beans, seeds and legumes, antioxidant-rich fresh fruits and vegetables, and moderate portions of lean protein like chicken and seafood, with only the occasional serving of red meat.
Fish that is high in omega-3 fatty acids, such as salmon, is especially key since it can help reduce inflammation and pain caused by arthritis, which is common in seniors, as well as improve cholesterol levels.
“It’s not a diet that’s restrictive,” says Bruner. “You’re eating everything that’s good for you, which is great.”
Dietitians and nutritionists generally don’t like to characterize food as “good” or “bad” because that can lead to restrictive behaviors, she says. Yet multiple studies have shown that those who follow the Mediterranean diet have better cognitive function and brain health in old age, she says.
Because of its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties and its effectiveness at preventing obesity, there also are a lot of heart health benefits, along with the prevention and progression of diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, which is associated with lifestyle and diet.
For instance, according to a 2023 study in the medical journal Heart, women who follow a Mediterranean diet more closely than others had a 24 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease. They also had a 23 percent lower risk of mortality.
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A wise woman
Feminists tell women that having a career and spending your days with people you don't particulrly like is better than staying home looking after a loving family. The woman below has seen through that idiocy. But do feminists ever feel love?
Twenty-five-year-old Grace has a unique passion: cooking healthy meals for her husband. From making biscuits and gravy to baking crescent braids, she loves it all.
Grace and her husband met six years ago when she was just 19. It was love at first sight. Today, the couple reside in their Pennsylvania home with their toddler daughter. A passionate homemaker, Grace enjoys cleaning and taking care of her daughter—and doing lots of cooking.
The young wife and mother believes her husband, who has an intense job with long hours, deserves to be fed well.
She says her daily house chores are rooted in love and the desire to glorify God. (Courtesy of @thatjoyfilledhome)
The sign above her stove proudly reads, “I Love to Feed the Patriarchy.”
“Since COVID, people, especially women, started to change their views on the home,” she said. “I have seen it shift to more and more women embracing traditional values and that includes in their marriages.
“However, societally speaking, it is still not the norm to have traditional roles in marriage. There was a pendulum swing from the 50s and 60s, from ’smashing the patriarchy' to now, more women respecting the men in their lives and coming under their headship in the home.”
‘He Deserves a Good Meal While Working Hard for Us’
Grace cooks regularly, and, to stay frugal, she plans her shops according to sales. Often, she wakes up early specifically to prepare breakfast for her husband.
She adores baking. The breakfast options include crescent braids, quiche, and baked pancakes—as well as shoofly pie, the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch dessert that is one of her favorites. She also prepares lunches for her husband to eat at work.
The young mom of one lives by the age-old concept of serving her family as a caregiver. She says her husband “deserves a good meal” for working hard for the family.
“I center the meals around a protein and build from there with a carb, vegetables, etc.,” she said, using the example of roast chicken with mashed potatoes, green beans, and homemade buttered rolls. “It’s nothing fancy and probably very rusting cooking, but it’s whole-food focused and filling.”
Her husband is always grateful. “He is appreciative and after meals gives me a kiss and thanks me for cooking,” she said, adding that these exchanges have helped to strengthen their marriage.
“We both understand that neither job is harder than the other, they are hard in their own ways,“ she said. ”We don’t play a ‘tit for tat’ game, and we express appreciation for each other daily.”
Grace shares her journey to creating “That Joy-Filled Home” online, and people have responded with a wide variety of emotions.
“It usually is a mixed bag of reactions, many of which are positive, while others are angry or shocked,” she said.
While some criticized her for being “a slave” for taking care of her husband, there were also others who appreciated and recognized her traditional lifestyle.
She said: “My efforts may not be seen by the outside world, but they are seen by God, and everything I do flows out of love and the desire to glorify Him through my daily life.”
Honoring a Traditional Lifestyle
Cooking isn’t the only thing that Grace does for her family. Other chores are equally important, she says, and must be attended to daily. She keeps a list of “non-negotiables” that she gets done every day: one load of laundry, running the dishwasher, and at least three chores.
On a certain level, the young homemaker was always aware that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mother. In her sophomore year of college, however, that desire really kicked in.
She got engaged in March 2019 but put off her wedding until May 2024 because she wanted to complete her bachelor’s degree first. She was studying speech pathology and audiology but began to realize it wasn’t the path she wanted to pursue in the long run. She knew, due to the nature of the profession, that she would soon be overworked and feel burnt out.
“I knew that down the road, I didn’t want to complete a master’s degree and clinical fellowship and wait all those extra years to get married and start a family,” she said.
The young woman shared that she’s also faced pushback from others for adhering to her traditional lifestyle.
“I know it comes from a well-meaning place, but at times it was hurtful,” said Grace. “It was as if choosing homemaking was a ‘lesser’ path or that I was ’too smart‘ to dumb myself down and ’waste my potential.'”
A passionate believer in supporting all homemakers—even those who may be single or still students—Grace says she wants people to do what’s best for their family. To women who want to follow in her footsteps but are afraid of backlash, she has some candid advice.
“At some point, you have to live your life for you,“ she said, ”and not in fear of what others may say or think.”
For her, the choice to stay home has been much more appealing than a career. Serving her husband and child has produced sweet memories, and the joy of witnessing her child’s first milestones as a stay-at-home mom has made the challenges all worth it.
“I would never want to miss those moments for the world,” she said.
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We live in a new world
With a Changed Meaning of Competence
In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, there have been many questions concerning the competence of those assigned to prevent such an event. The key issue is whether and to what extent those charged with protecting his security displayed genuine competence at their jobs.
Some clearly did, those who put themselves directly in the line of fire, but what of the management and the advance team? This is a big issue and it goes to the heart of what is considered institutional competence in the 21st century. It has certainly changed from the past.
In normal times previously, competence meant taking initiative, achieving the goal, using creativity, being adaptive to circumstances of time and place, finding ways to be useful toward the institutional purpose, making excellent judgments even under stressful conditions, being brave and taking responsibility for the outcomes. In an ideal institutional environment, competence of this sort is rewarded.
Is this kind of competence still valued in the culture of corporate world today? In government? It seems to be ever less so. The larger the organization the more resources they have, the more they have all built elaborate systems of compliance that end up smothering all the features of employment that used to be valued and replacing them with checking boxes and not stepping out of line.
In most normal times, this suffices, which is precisely why bureaucracies, nonprofits, and corporate structures build such systems. They keep everyone in line. Provided there is no real change in the challenges or circumstances, turning workers into robotic rule followers more-or-less works. It doesn’t drive progress but it does keep everyone out of trouble.
When all is well, revenue is solid, systems are working, managers are ever more tempted to tighten rules and build ever more elaborate structures of rules, plans, routines, and compliance.
This has been going on for decades, as everyone knows.
The cartoon called “Dilbert” achieved fame by creating parodies of this culture as it affects corporations. When I first started seeing these, I took these depictions as slightly offensive to my capitalistic ideology: why was the cartoonist making such fun of private enterprise?
What I did not know is that the cartoon was realistic for millions of people. The author Scott Adams had come out of the corporate world and knew it better than I did. There was a reason why the cartoon was so popular: it connected closely with readers’ personal perspective.
In the “Dilbert” world, the path to success was being the best possible bureaucrat, helping to secure compliance as much as possible and otherwise staying out of harm’s way. Much of this involves inventing new vocabularies consisting of fancy words that have as little meaning as possible. Meetings supplant productivity. Doing as little as possible while seeming to be a good team member is the path to job security and promotion.
Not being a big corporate guy myself, I was unaware that this culture was growing up within the business world. I could imagine this in government of course. I could imagine that such a culture could be pervasive in the nonprofit world, simply because such institutions lack the discipline of the profit-and-loss system and therefore strong metrics of success that drive the mission. But I simply could not imagine how the for-profit world could become so dominated by such fakery.
Sadly, the meaning of competence has changed throughout every institution.
Some personal history, if I may. I was probably 17 and landed a nice job as a helper of some sort at a catering company. My first day on the job involved washing what seemed like 100 extremely dirty large pans from an event. They were piled high in the sink. Along with that there were several thousand plates and other items. Getting it all washed required many hours of work and I absolutely loved every minute of it.
Once that was done, I left and then returned the next day but with no clarity on what to do. So I stood around, as I recall. A few days later, more dishes would arrive and I would wash them. Each time, I got better at this and had more time to stand around doing nothing.
After a few weeks, I overheard a conversation between the owner and manager. They were complaining that I seemed lazy and unmotivated. Useless, I think I recall one person saying that. I was absolutely mortified and shocked.
The next day, I arrived with new determination. I realized that I was not always going to receive marching orders. I needed to find ways to make myself useful. As I looked around, I realized that the place was a dump. I threw myself into making a big difference. I started in one corner of the huge kitchen and started clearing, arranging, and putting stuff away. I went all the way to the other corner. I did the same with the hallways and reorganized everything. I stayed late to get it done and did the same the next day.
A few days later, the owner showed up and walked in. He was amazed at the difference I had made. He pointed out that I made some mistakes, putting some things in the wrong place but otherwise congratulated me for what I had achieved. Mostly he was happy that I had taken initiative. Later that week, he gave me a pay increase, and I stayed in the job for several more months or longer.
I took from that experience that I should always strive to make a difference and use my own initiative to see what needs to be done. Volition, perception, alertness, and action: these are the key to success. That is the lesson I took from this experience.
Such lessons seem to be the worst-possible ones in today’s organizational culture. Everyone today knows the acronyms: HR, DEI, and ESG. That’s only the beginning of it. Everything today seems to be governed by some document, some protocol, some rule, and some precedent. Success means fitting in and never doing anything you are not told to do by someone or something. This is the path to job security, exactly as described in the world of “Dilbert.”
What I had not entirely understood was how much the world of big business changed after the turn of the millennium.
There are many reasons but one traces to the new policies of the Federal Reserve. The interest rate kept being driven lower and lower, eventually to zero and then to negative territory, and for a long period of time. Economic theory can predict the consequences precisely. It amounts to a huge cash infusion, a government subsidy of sorts, to the largest of the big businesses, giving them a spigot of money with which to play, a seemingly infinite resource to tap for payrolls and expansions.
Such an environment seems to make everything possible, including replacing initiative with entitlement, derring-do with compliance, and efficiency and adaptability with sloth and waste.
This change in central bank policy created a new beast: the heavily cash-soaked corporation that could indulge in every sort of empire building over genuine enterprise and creativity. The managers and their employees simply went along.
This policy reinforced a new form of culture, one we had not seen before. Private corporations began to operate more like governments, and nonprofits did the same. The affliction hit every sector from media to medicine to tech. The virus of bureaucracy took over completely and utterly changed two generations of workers and their outlook on the meaning of their jobs.
All the old-fashioned views on what constitutes competence began to shift. Instead of taking initiative, obeying the handbook and complying with edicts became the very purpose of professional life. This new culture has eroded all the old standards and values.
Instead of productivity, we have the valorization of obedience and adherence to handbooks, Zoom meetings, dressing the part, flattering superiors, never exercising judgment without permission and oversight, checking all boxes, gaining all the correct credentials including continuing education, playing the part, and, finally the rarest of things, showing up.
Herein lies the problem. The very standards of what qualifies as competence have been upended. It would be much welcome to see the old standards restored. In the case of security agencies, which exist in the public and private sector, lives are on the line.
We have all been witness to this in the most vivid way, and it seems to have shifted the whole of the historical trajectory. This is no longer just about getting by and checking boxes. Life has suddenly become much more serious. It’s a good wake-up call to all individuals and institutions.
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Risk of Suicide 12 Times Greater After ‘Gender-Affirming’ Surgery: Study
A recent study has found that the risk of suicide, self-harm, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for individuals who have undergone gender-transition surgeries is significantly higher than among those who have not had the surgery.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch, found that individuals who had undergone gender-transition surgery experienced these adverse effects at more than 12 times the rate of those who did not have a history of gender-transition surgery.
The study examined data from nearly 16 million U.S. adult patients between the ages of 18 and 60 who went to an emergency room for treatment from 2003 to 2023. This data came from a larger database of over 90 million patients from 56 health care facilities. Researchers isolated data from 1,501 patients who had undergone gender-transition surgery at some point in the five years before their emergency room visit and 15,608,363 patients who had no history of gender-transition surgery, as well as two additional control groups.
The data show that 3.47 percent of the patients who had undergone gender-reassignment surgery were treated for suicide attempts, compared to 0.29 percent of patients who did not have that history, a difference of 12.12 times.
While the study does not clarify at what age the patients attempted suicide or engaged in self-harm, it does make clear that it did not include minors.
The study lacks explanations as to why these patients had higher rates of suicidality, self-harm, and PTSD, and does not cite whether the patients suffered from adverse mental health conditions before surgery.
Julie Quist, board chair of the Child Protection League, said the results of the study were “deeply disturbing.” She also said it raises “serious implications” in the health industry, mental health industry, and education system, which have almost universally adopted the “affirmation only” approach as the best treatment for gender dysphoria in children and teens.
“This is a very credible study,” said Ms. Quist, referring to the large sample size and long timespan of the study.
She said she was stunned by the 12.12 times higher rate of suicide attempt risk, recalling how parents who are reportedly coerced into allowing their children to undergo these irreversible surgeries are often asked questions such as “do you want a daughter or do you want a dead son,” implying that if they don’t allow their child to medically transition, the child will be more likely to kill themselves.
“This is standard language that they use,” she said. “It’s beyond belief.”
Ms. Quist said she was also struck by the fact that the study avoided researching the rate of attempted suicide and self-harm among minors under the age of 18.
“This study has huge implications for minors,” she said. If suicide attempts for those who have transitioned are happening at this rate among those over 18, she said it’s “counterintuitive” to assume that it’s not happening at the same, if not a higher, rate among children and teens.
“Think of all of the parents who are being told that affirming is the only answer and that the surgeries are safe and prevent suicide,” she said. “It’s a tool of manipulation that is completely false and the depth of this deception is breathtaking. They’ve weaponized the idea of suicide to coerce people into doing exactly the wrong thing.”
‘The Elephant in the Room’
Vernadette Broyles is the founder, president, and general counsel for the Child and Parental Rights Campaign. She said it’s illogical to assume that minors who undergo gender transition through surgery or medication would wait until they were 18 to attempt suicide or self-harm.
“Whatever dynamic that is present in adults stressing about their sexual transition would only be exacerbated in children because they are still in the process of development,” Ms. Broyles told The Epoch Times. “Just because the study didn’t include children under the age of 18 does not mean it has no relevance to children under the age of 18. I would expect a heightened effect among children because they’re emotionally and physically more vulnerable to negative impacts.”
While she said she was impressed that the researchers had the integrity to publish their findings, she also said she was disappointed by their attempt to explain, “without any valid evidence,” that the reason for the “alarmingly higher” rate of attempted suicide among those who had undergone these surgeries is related to minority bias, discrimination, and relational stresses.
“They pulled this out of thin air,” she argued. “There is no evidence to support that, and they’re choosing to ignore the elephant in the room—that the surgery itself is causing the suicide attempts.”
At a minimum, she said the study confirms that transitioning did not bring the happiness the patients were promised.
“That’s also how parents are coerced and cudgeled into giving consent,” Ms. Broyles said. “Yet perversely, they are correlated with an alarmingly higher rate of suicide risk. If nothing else, this is one more study that removes the legitimacy and justification for giving these surgeries is that it is going to save the person from suicide.”
False Positives in Studies
The Trevor Project is a nonprofit advocacy organization focused on suicide prevention and crisis intervention among LGBT youth. Researchers from the organization published a study in 2021 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, concluding that minors who received “gender-affirming hormone therapy” had lower rates of depression and attempted suicide than those who wished to receive them but didn’t.
But another study suggests that most minors experiencing gender confusion grow out of it by the time they reach adulthood.
Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands recently released the results of a study analyzing survey data from 2,772 adolescents over a span of 15 years, starting at age 11.
The study found that in early adolescence, 11 percent of participants reported “gender non-contentedness.” However, the prevalence had decreased to 4 percent by the time they reached the age of 26.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
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