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On June 20, 2023, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of World Health Organization (WHO), congratulated the Nordic Council of Ministers for what he called for "this impressive product and for the inclusive process of public consultations that produced it".
Link to source.
In his address to the Nordic Council of Ministers he said the following:
- This new edition of the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations makes a powerful link between healthy people and a healthy planet. We must work to promote and to protect both. Focusing only on one ... diet or large environmental impact. I congratulate the Nordic Council of Ministers for this impressive product and for the inclusive process of public consultations that produced it. The overarching recommendations align with current scientific literature is to shift to plant base diets. Animal sources such as fish should come from sustainable managed stocks with moderate amount of low fat dairy and eggs while limiting sugary and processed foods. This year, WHO will launch a new healthy diet guideline in line with the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations. And we'll introduce a concept of a healthy diet that considers sustainability and environmental impact. We're also working to make health central to climate negotiations. COP28 in the United Arab emirates this year will feature the first dedicated health day and the first health and climate ... to take place at the cop. Congratulations once again for the important contribution and thank you all for you commitment to healthy people and a healthy planet.The impressive product Dr. Ghebreyesus refers to is the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations (NNR) 2023.
Link to source.
According to the people who wrote NNR, it's the sixth edition of the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations in the report’s 40-year history, and "It is now also the most comprehensive scientific basis in the world for how we should eat well for the benefit of the planet and our health".
So many questions emerged when listening to Dr. Ghebreyesus press-release/Twitter-pitch.
Note. Dr. Ghebreyesus doesn't thank the people who compiled the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations, but the Nordic Council of Ministers!?
According to the press-release, it's not about science, but about Dr Ghebreyesus beliefs!?
Link to source
One things is certain: the dietary proposals made by the Nordic Council of Ministers and Dr. Ghebreyesus are not consistent with science-based studies.
Among friends of academic order, the following questions emerges:
1. how is this possible?
2. Dr. Ghebreyesus is a Ph.D.- guy. Why would he promote something that is not consistent with science? (I'm guessing he will argue for the opposite.)
3. Why Finland of all places? Only 5.5 million (0.06 %) out of Earth's 8 billion people live in Finland.
Due to the complexity of Dr. Ghebreyesus pitch and in order to provide an answer, information must come from a multitude of fields, including paleo-climatology, nutrition anthropology, neuro-anthropology, how our mind works, nutrition, as well as method - how studies are carried out. This approach is called disjunctive reasoning (Stanovich, 2009).
Adding to that, a Ph.D.-grade isn't general, it marks that you excelled in a certain field: anthropology, economy, history, medicine, neuroscience, nutrition, physics, psychological science, or theology, to mention a few. And method varies between these fields.
The former implies that you can be an expert in one field, yet not be fit to serve in another. For example, if your field of expertise is economy, maybe climatology isn't your thing?
Method is the way someone goes about when conducting exploration to discover. In aesthetics, and its successor philosophy, dialectics, emanation, peripatetics, rhetoric, as well as the application if syllogistic thinking was applied.
This changed with the renaissance, and later, when Isaac Newton (1642 – 1726/27) invented calculus. This new way of thinking paved the way for modern Science:
a neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.Now, researchers have tools to explore all sorts of things, how phenomena are associated, and in some cases, show causation.
The story about diet is not only the story about the human species, but also the story of planet Earth, including the climate. This means that changes throughout Earth's history not only had an impact on the climate, but also on all flora and fauna, including our species.
When the Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, a climate also emerged.
Earths history, including climate, is described in the Chronostratigraphic chart (Cohen et al. 2023), and is divided into four eons, many more eras, periods, and epochs. We know the first three eons as Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, or Precambrian. They make up 88% of Earth's existence, during which there where no visible life.
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| The International Chronostratigraphic chart (Cohen et al. 2023). |
The fourth and current eon - Phanerozoic - dates 538 million years before the present, and marks the starting point for visible life. This starting point is also known as the Cambrian explosion.
Then, levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), Oxygen (O), and temperature was different compared to the present: 5000-7000 ppm CO2, 4-10 % O, and 50 % higher temperature compare to today (see figure 1).
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| Figure 1. Variation in temperature and CO2-levels. (see numerous references in the subtext to the figure). |
Since the start of the Phanerozoic, 95 % of the oxygen has moved from the atmosphere to the bedrock, forests, and the oceans, the oxygen levels has doubled, and temperature has only decreased.
How does changes in the climate relate to humans and nutrition?
Here are some notable changes in the climate that coincide with the emergence of our lineage, and the evolution of our species.
66 million years before the present, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event occurred when an asteroid struck Earth, creating the Chicxulub crater. This event is generally known as the fifth extinction, which wiped out 75 % of Earth flora and fauna, including some, but not all, dinosaurs. However, the extinction also provided evolutionary opportunities; when the big predators where gone, mammals could thrive (Coolidge and Wynn, 2018).
9-8.5 million years before the present, two super volcanic eruptions occurred in what is now Wyoming (Knott et al. 2020). Earth went through another significant climate change.
Soon after, that is 7-6 million years before the present, our so called lineage emerged (Pickford, 2006; Pobiner, 2016).
6-5.33 million years before the present, the Messinian salinity crisis occurred, seeing the Mediterranean Sea partly or nearly completely drying out.
5.33 million years before the present marks the change from Mioscene to Pliocene. Now, Pliocene is the time when one of our most famous ancestor lived - Australopithecus afarensis - or Lucy (3.9 - 2.9 Mya).
Lucy's kind had an estimated brain volume of 365–417 cc.
Recent findings show that Lucy's made a remarkable change in their behavior around 3.6 Mya, that is, after they existed for ~ 700 000 years! They put bone marrow "onto their plates". This new additive was more nutrient dense, and contained nutrients that was hard to find in a plant based diet. The result was an acceleration of the human evolution, causing a change of the shape of their hands, a reduction of their guts, and an expansion of their brains (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995; Kimbel and Willmoare, 2016; Mann, 2018; Ponzter et al. 2016; Thompson et al. 2019).
2.8 mya, close to the ending of Pliocene, our genus emerged on the scene (Villmoare et al. 2015):
This specimen combines primitive traits seen in early Australopithecus with derived morphology observed in later Homo, confirming that dentognathic departures from the australopith pattern occurred early in the Homo lineage.2.58 Mya, another climate event occurred - Pliocene was replaced by Pleistocene. Common knowledge in nutrition anthropology is that our ancestors at that time ate meat (Pobiner, 2013, Sahnouni et al. 2018).
1.8 Mya, Homo ergaster, or Erectus, had emerged. Their brain size had doubled compared to Lucy's kind, an expansion from the occipetal lobe and forward, especially their prefrontal cortex. This gave room for new mental faculties. It's estimated that something called social cognition, which may facilitate rhythmic synchronization of behavior, emerged at this time. This was followed by symbolic thinking (Coolidge and Wynn, 2018).
320 000 years before the present, our species had emerged (Hublin et al. 2017).
200 000 years before the present marks a Fork in the road; Pagel (2019) argues, based on his premise that they had grammatical langauge and theory of mind, that some of our ancestors at this time changed their lifestyle ...
70 000 years before the present, another two super volcanic eruptions occurred, this time in Indonesia, causing yet another change in the climate. Findings show that around 100 000 - 35 000 years before present, our ancestors brains were rewired (Neubauer et al. 2018). Ambrose (2010) suggests that ~ 70 000 before present, constructive memory (Schacter and Addis, 2007) emerged. This is also referred to as creativity - the ability to combine, or meld together, non-related objects, or fragments thereof, into cognitive structures with meaning (Pringle, 2016; Österberg, 2012; Wynn, Coolidge and Bright, 2009).
They now had the ability to elaborate scenarios forward in time (Gallistel, 2017; Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Kaku, 2014; Spzunar et al 2014).
25 000 - 20 000 years ago, the Epipaleolithic emerged; the weather became warmer and therefore more stable. Archeological findings have discovered remains of settlements. That indicate that the warming again influenced some of them to change their lifestyle - to settle Hodder, 2018. During the Epipaleolithic, the first bread was baked and the first beer was brewed. Putting bread and beer on "the table" wasn't a staple diet, but rather something that was served for special occasions. One reason was the effort-to-nutrition--ratio; the energy and time used to bake bread and to brew beer gave less nutrients and energy compared to hunting for marrow and meat. Still they prioritized this diet (Arranz-Otaegui, et al. 2018; Liu et al 2018).
From a nutritional- and neuro-anthropological perspective, we can conclude that changes in the climate caused changes in the human lifestyle, including diet, which in turn caused changes the their biological set-up (Österberg, 2022).
When the climate changed again, from Pleistocene to the Holocene, the current epoch, more people changed their lifestyle from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Agriculture was a game-changer. When our ancestors, who for millions of years lived as meat-eating hunters and gatherers, settled to develop this new lifestyle, it wasn't an immediate success story. It took its toll on health, it transformed societies from egalitarian to hierarchical and divided humans into a number of societal roles still present in modern societies: guards, priests, administrators and so forth (Kohler et al. 2017; Mummert et al. 2011).
In the 1700s, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish scientist, theologian, and founder of the New Church, claimed he had experienced revelations - a deeper understanding about how people should prepare for the second coming of Jesus:
Drawing on the passage in Genesis (1:29-31) in which God Institute a vegan diet, Swedenborg said that meat-eating corresponds to the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden and was, therefore, the point of entry of sin and suffering into the world (Phelps, p. 149).In 1817 the Swedenborgian Church of North America was established,
"and 1845, when the movement toward Swedenborg was in full tide, George Bush, professor of Hebrew and Oriental Literature in the University of the City of New York and long a favorite oracle of the orthodox church, was converted and took the lead of it" (John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886), Letters: 1867).In parallel to that, the Temperance societies emerged inspired by John Edgar, professor of theology, and Presbyterian Church of Ireland minister. Sylvester Graham (Graham Crackers; 1794-1851) joined the Temperance movement in 1830 for a few months but then left to focus on promoting a plant-based 'Garden-of-Eden' diet. In 1850 Graham, together with Alcott, William Metcalfe (1788-1862), and Russell Trall, founded the American Vegetarian Society
The meeting was called by William Metcalfe who had led a migration of 40 members of the Bible Christian Church from England to Philadelphia in 1817, all abstainers from flesh foods. By 1830 Sylvester Graham (picture right) and William Alcott MD were also following the meatless diet. Metcalfe soon heard about the formation of the Vegetarian Society in Britain in 1847, and about the new word 'Vegetarian' now being used. He contacted Graham and Alcott and arranged the New York gathering (IVU).In 1830, William Millet (1782-1849) is said to have started an Adventist movement with a similar ambition, that is, also projecting the second coming of Jesus. And Millet had a date: October 22, 1844. The failure of the prophecy led to the Great Disappointment and the formation of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church (SDAC). Millet's goal-statement was reframed to a starting point.
Seventh Day Adventist Church (SDAC) was formally established in 1863, following the religious zeitgeist to promote a Garden-Eden, plant-based, diet in preparation for the second coming of Jesus.
One of the prominent members of SDAC was a young teenage girl named Ellen G. White (1827-1915). She claimed that meat, milk, and butter were responsible for 'carnal urges' - impure thoughts in men. Another early member, John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), developed breakfast cereals as a 'healthy food' (Figure 3). We know the brand because his brother William founded Kellogg's (Wikipedia).
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Figure 3. Seventh-Day Adventist church transformed into Loma Linda promoting a 'balanced diet'. The current ad dates 1969.
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During 1940s, Swedish biochemist and physician Haqvin Malmros (1895-1995) conducted epidemiological research. He gathered data from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and from one state in the north of the United States of America. He concluded that saturated fat and choleserol had a negative impact on heart health (Malmros, 1950). This was the rudiment for the diet-heart hypothesis (Noakes, 2019).
Malmros result was noticed by Ancel Keys, who later launched something called the Seven Countries study. And as the name state, SCS took data from seven countries, one of which was Finland. But since Finland consists of two language cultures, data was taken from two areas, Åbo in the south-west and Karelia in the North-east.
Link to source.
People in Åbo and North Karelia ( North Karelia Project (NKP)) ate the same diet, yet the prevalence of cardio-vascular disease was three times as high in north Karelia (Teicholz, 2014).
Probably influenced by Malmros (1950), measures was taken to mitigate the health-crisis in eastern Finland. This included Campaigns to influence people to stay on low fat, low salt diet. As late as March 2022, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare wrote this on their home page, where they emphasize the importance of reducing consumption of butter and salt:
The early 1980s saw the introduction of new dietary guidelines which were influenced by the results from The Seven countries study and the North Karelia Project. Again, they reiterate the importance of reducing the consumption of animal fat. In Finland today, low fat, or zero fat products are common.
But there's two other stories to be told. In 1972:
- professor John Yudkin published Sugar: Pure, White, and Deadly. Few nutrition people have heard about Yudkin, and the reason is simple - Ancel Keys was more successful in promoting the diet heart hypotheses (Leslie, 2016).
~25 men and ~25 women in Finland died because of Alzheimer's, and that number was steady until 1980. Then the number of cases started to increase (link).
Alzheimer's is also referred to as type-3 diabetes, that is, the insulin resistance Yudkin (1972) warned about (Österberg, 2022).
In 2006, results from Women's Health Initiative Randomized Controlled Dietary Modification Trial was published. The results in the main table revealed no association between consumption of saturated fats and cardiovascular disease. In a special table though, hidden on page 661, the result showed that women with a history of health issues, and who reduced the consumption of saturated fats by ca 10 %, had an increased risk of contracting CVD (Howard et al. 2006).
In 2014, investigative journalist, and adjunct professor, Nina Teicholz, published The big fat surpise, again rejecting the diet heart hypothesis.
The criticism against these guidelines has been thorough; Dietary recommendations were introduced by 1983, in the absence of supporting evidence from RCTs (Harcombe et al. 2015).
In 2016, forgotten findings from the Seven countries study was published, again rejecting the diet-heart hypothesis (Ramsden et al. 2016).
In 2017, White and Hall, (2017) showed that production of animal source food had little to no impact on the climate.
In 2017 and 2018, Dehghan et al published results from the PURE project, showing that carbs is bad for you, and fat is not (short version).
In 2018, I was recruited to the University of Helsingfors to lead a project - exploring the future of agriculture from a perspective of entrepreneurial thinking. When asked where to start, I replied nutrition. The rationale for that is kind of obvious; if you produce food, it make sense to produce food that promotes physical and mental health from att nutritional point of of view.
The reaction was strong; the head of department said I couldn't do that, because it's the territory of Mikael Fogelholm, professor of nutrition.
Academic territories?
~25 men and ~25 women in Finland died because of Alzheimer's, and that number was steady until 1980. Then the number of cases started to increase (link).
 |
| Diagram from Statistics Finland. |
Alzheimer's is also referred to as type-3 diabetes, that is, the insulin resistance Yudkin (1972) warned about (Österberg, 2022).
In 2006, results from Women's Health Initiative Randomized Controlled Dietary Modification Trial was published. The results in the main table revealed no association between consumption of saturated fats and cardiovascular disease. In a special table though, hidden on page 661, the result showed that women with a history of health issues, and who reduced the consumption of saturated fats by ca 10 %, had an increased risk of contracting CVD (Howard et al. 2006).
In 2014, investigative journalist, and adjunct professor, Nina Teicholz, published The big fat surpise, again rejecting the diet heart hypothesis.
The criticism against these guidelines has been thorough; Dietary recommendations were introduced by 1983, in the absence of supporting evidence from RCTs (Harcombe et al. 2015).
In 2016, forgotten findings from the Seven countries study was published, again rejecting the diet-heart hypothesis (Ramsden et al. 2016).
In 2017, White and Hall, (2017) showed that production of animal source food had little to no impact on the climate.
In 2017 and 2018, Dehghan et al published results from the PURE project, showing that carbs is bad for you, and fat is not (short version).
In 2018, I was recruited to the University of Helsingfors to lead a project - exploring the future of agriculture from a perspective of entrepreneurial thinking. When asked where to start, I replied nutrition. The rationale for that is kind of obvious; if you produce food, it make sense to produce food that promotes physical and mental health from att nutritional point of of view.
The reaction was strong; the head of department said I couldn't do that, because it's the territory of Mikael Fogelholm, professor of nutrition.
Academic territories?
As the unconfirmed story goes, Dr. Fogelholm was an assistant for the North Karelia Project.
Because (1) there are no territories in the academy, (2) the human kind is a networker, and (3) the fact that I have the habit of networking with colleagues to mine information from them, I send Dr Fogelholm a mail, suggesting we should have a coffee-machine-talk. His respons was very positive - he suggested a lunch meeting.
In 2018:
- Forestell and Nezlek show a correlation between the decision to abstain from animal source food and neuroticism and depression.
- Nezlek, Forestell, and Newman showed a correlation between the decision to abstain from animal source food and daily psychological well-being.
- Nezlek, Forestell, and Newman showed a correlation between the decision to abstain from animal source food and daily psychological well-being.
During the spring 2019, two things happened:
- Ede (2019) published a paper in Psychology Today, claiming that the brain needs animal fat. Ede is a practicing psychiatrist, at that time at Harvard university, and they had worked to partly replace, or support, medication with diet. And as it seem, the diet that gave us a large brain, is also necessary to sustain a healthy brain and mind.
- Willet et al. published a paper which has been interpret as an argument for veganism. The proposed claims made by Willet al., about health and the climate, was critizised (Blythman, 2019; Ede, 2019; Harcombe, 2019 a , b; Hauver, 2019 ; Howard et al. (2006); Kendall, 2019; Leroy and Cofnas, 2019; Leroy and Cohen, 2019; Reed, 2019; Teicholz, 2019).
Dr Fogelholm and I met on August 16, 2019, at the lunch restaurant at Vik Campus, University of Helsingfors. And it all started well. But when I asked him about his thoughts on Ramsden et al. 2016 and the PURE-project, all hell broke loose; Dr Fogelholm dismissed both Ramsden et al as well as the PURE-project (using strong language and waving his arms) and then started to lecture me, the social psychologist, about questionnaire-based studies!?
During fall of 2019, several papers was published, again rejecting claims that meat is bad for health, rather the opposite (Adesogan et al. 2019; Balehegn et al. 2019; Ylilauri et al. 2019).
Another three papers was published on the topic of meat and health, including cancer. The researcher used a new method called GRADE. The studies rejected previous claims of health risk from meat consumption (Han et al. 2019; Johnston et al. 2019; Zeeratkar et al. 2019).
Link to source.
The headline reads: Allt fler finländare vill att vi äter mindre kött – bland de unga tycker sju av tio så.
In English via Google translate: More and more Finns want us to eat less meat – among the young, seven out of ten think so.
In 2022, Dr Fogelholm together with Dr Erkkola (main author) and a number of their colleagues set out to test their hypothesis.
Dr. Erkkola et al. own main results show the following:
As their prophecy failed, again, the group of researcher didn't pay attention to scientific ethics (see my short video on the topic), by expressing the result. Instead, they expressed their own disappointment - A slow road from meat dominance to more sustainable diets: An analysis of purchase preferences among Finnish loyalty-card holders (Erkkola et al. 2022). It's like an extension of Willet et al. 2019.
But adding to former critic, a recent study which evaluated the nutrient content of Willet et al showed the diet is deficient of important nutrients (Beal, 2023):
These WHO/Nordic Council of Ministers/Nordic nutrition/ recommendations appears to be a follow-up to the heavenly criticized paper by Willet et al. (2019).
Why?
The answer, from a psychological point of view, is bias. And there are ~200 to choose from.
In his autobiography, Max Planck (1858-1947), the father of Quantum theory wrote something like: the academy evolves one funeral at the time (Planch, 1950, p. ~95). This phenomenon is formally known as Continued Influenced Bias - misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected (Cacciatore, 2021).
It is also worth noting Dr Fogelholm's outburst on Twitter, addressing me as as non-nutritionist, but not giving Dr Ghebreyesus the same treatment. Dr Ghebreyesus is a specialist on preventing malaria and doing politics. In Dr Fogelholm's mind, that's not nutrition. Me, on the other hand, was invited by Dr Fogelholm boss, to open their seminar series for expert on food and health. This calls for two biases, selection bias, but Dr. Fogelholm more likely fell victim of authority bias (Milgram, 1963):
Even worse, in 1993 psychologist Kieth Stanovich introduced Dysartionalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (Stanovich, 1993).
And when these factoids are reiterated to the public, they fall victim of availability bias (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973), they believe its consistent with science-based studies.
- Ede (2019) published a paper in Psychology Today, claiming that the brain needs animal fat. Ede is a practicing psychiatrist, at that time at Harvard university, and they had worked to partly replace, or support, medication with diet. And as it seem, the diet that gave us a large brain, is also necessary to sustain a healthy brain and mind.
- Willet et al. published a paper which has been interpret as an argument for veganism. The proposed claims made by Willet al., about health and the climate, was critizised (Blythman, 2019; Ede, 2019; Harcombe, 2019 a , b; Hauver, 2019 ; Howard et al. (2006); Kendall, 2019; Leroy and Cofnas, 2019; Leroy and Cohen, 2019; Reed, 2019; Teicholz, 2019).
Dr Fogelholm and I met on August 16, 2019, at the lunch restaurant at Vik Campus, University of Helsingfors. And it all started well. But when I asked him about his thoughts on Ramsden et al. 2016 and the PURE-project, all hell broke loose; Dr Fogelholm dismissed both Ramsden et al as well as the PURE-project (using strong language and waving his arms) and then started to lecture me, the social psychologist, about questionnaire-based studies!?
During fall of 2019, several papers was published, again rejecting claims that meat is bad for health, rather the opposite (Adesogan et al. 2019; Balehegn et al. 2019; Ylilauri et al. 2019).
Another three papers was published on the topic of meat and health, including cancer. The researcher used a new method called GRADE. The studies rejected previous claims of health risk from meat consumption (Han et al. 2019; Johnston et al. 2019; Zeeratkar et al. 2019).
This caused Dr. Fogelhom to react. Even though fluent in English and Swedish, he used one of the most remote languages on planet Earth - Uralic-Finnish to write this on Twitter:
Link to source.
The only way to understand Dr Fogelhom's message, is to used Google translate:
In late 2019, I got an invitation from the head of department where Dr Fogelholm works. She invited me to open their seminar series for experts on food and health.
On January 23, 2020 I made my case - What’s the Prospect of sustainable Food? The Case for mental health. Here' sthe abstract:
In 2020,
Link to source.
The only way to understand Dr Fogelhom's message, is to used Google translate:
Here's a really good, longer comment about that beef meat research (see Prof. Katz's article in the link below). So the result was the same as before, only the interpretation was different. It is, for example, on the evaluation of research types. The best evidence here against meat was completely ignored.The person Dr Fogelholm refers to is Michael Greger, a physician who believe that abstaining from eating animal source food, in his case, veganism, favors health. Greger in his turn refers to an article written by David Katz, another physician who also believe that abstaining from eating animal source food, also in his case, veganism, favors health. the article was published on Linkedin.
In late 2019, I got an invitation from the head of department where Dr Fogelholm works. She invited me to open their seminar series for experts on food and health.
On January 23, 2020 I made my case - What’s the Prospect of sustainable Food? The Case for mental health. Here' sthe abstract:
The human mind has unique mental abilities. Why? Some 3.6 million years ago, our ancestors change their diet to include bone marrow which contains a number of important micronutrients, e.g. heme-iron, zinc, vitamin A, and some B vitamins, and docosahexaenoic fatty acids, to mention a few. 800 000 later, when the climate changed [again], from Pliocene to Pleistocene, meat was added to ‘the plate’. The consequence of this dietary change was an expansion of the brain, from 405 cc to today's 1300 cc, which opened the door for the ability to experience the future rationally by applying functions such as explorative and disjunctive reasoning as well as metacognitive sensitivity. This includes the ability to combine/blend non-related abstractions into new concepts, like the lion-man (40 000 years ago), the first bread (14400 years ago), beer (13000 years ago), Göpekli Tepe, agriculture, and religion (11 700 years ago). The Swedish Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) suggested meat to be a sin, calling for an all plant-based Garden-of-Eden, or vegan, diet. The idea was picked up by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The 1950s saw the birth of the diet-heart hypothesis, connecting cardiovascular disease with the consumption of saturated fats, cholesterol, and red meat. Diet-heart hypothesis was never validated in experimental trials, but are still the ‘holy grail’ for some believers who continue to promote a Garden-of-Eden diet. The decision to abort animal-sourced food attracts some 1-2 % of a normal population and is explained by a combination of temperament: openness to change and neuroticism - worrying for the future. The consequence of a plant-based diet is lower self-esteem and psychological adjustment, less meaning in life and more negative moods and social experiences compared to people on an omnivore diet. In order to sustain mental health, it seems we need need to consume a plethora of micronutrients. Next time you go shopping for food, put the following on your shopping list: 13 vitamins (e.g. A, several B:s, C, some D, E, K2-Mk4 and Mk7), 15-16 minerals (Heme-Iron, Magnesium, Zinc and so forth). Choline, as well as Docosahexaenoic, Arachidonic fatty acids.Dr Fogelholm chose to be absent.
In 2020,
- Nezlek, Cypryanska, and Forestell showed a correlation between the decision to abstain from animal source food and the similarity-attraction effect - the tendency to like and be attracted to others who are similar, rather than dissimilar, to themselves.
- months before of the 2020 edition of the conference that provides advice on upcoming Nordic dietary recommendations, I wrote the following on Twitter:
Someone running the conference Twitter account responded with the following:
I responded to that:
Someone from the conference admin responded:
I persevered:
That triggered Dr Fogelholm to write a reply in his own name:
I persevered:
So did Dr Fogelholm:
Me:
Dr Fogelholm then used som ad hominem:
In 2021:
Someone running the conference Twitter account responded with the following:
I responded to that:
Someone from the conference admin responded:
I persevered:
That triggered Dr Fogelholm to write a reply in his own name:
I persevered:
So did Dr Fogelholm:
Me:
Dr Fogelholm then used som ad hominem:
In 2021:
- Dobersek et al. published a
- systemic review that "showed that those who avoided meat consumption had significantly higher rates or risk of depression, anxiety, and/or self-harm behaviors", and
- meta-analysis showing that meat consumption was associated with lower depression and lower anxiety compared to meat abstention. Compared to vegans, meat consumers experienced both lower depression and anxiety.
- Finnish state media - YLE - reiterated an interview that Dr. Fogelholm had done in another, Uralic-Finnish, tabloid. In the interview Dr Fogelholm made the following claim:
Kopplingen mellan tjocktarmscancer och rött kött är tydlig. Men då det kommer till de andra sjukdomarna kan det också handla om att man överlag har ohälsosamma levnadsvanor.In English via Google translate:
The link between colon cancer and red meat is clear. But when it comes to the other diseases, it can also be about having unhealthy lifestyle habits in general.
Link to source.
The headline reads: Allt fler finländare vill att vi äter mindre kött – bland de unga tycker sju av tio så.
In English via Google translate: More and more Finns want us to eat less meat – among the young, seven out of ten think so.
In 2022, Dr Fogelholm together with Dr Erkkola (main author) and a number of their colleagues set out to test their hypothesis.
Dr. Erkkola et al. own main results show the following:
As their prophecy failed, again, the group of researcher didn't pay attention to scientific ethics (see my short video on the topic), by expressing the result. Instead, they expressed their own disappointment - A slow road from meat dominance to more sustainable diets: An analysis of purchase preferences among Finnish loyalty-card holders (Erkkola et al. 2022). It's like an extension of Willet et al. 2019.
But adding to former critic, a recent study which evaluated the nutrient content of Willet et al showed the diet is deficient of important nutrients (Beal, 2023):
However, concerns have been raised about the extent to which the diet provides adequate essential micronutrients, particularly those generally found in higher quantities and in more bioavailable forms in animal source foods.And soon after Johnston, Leroy, Mente and Stanton (2023) followed suit, again showing that meat is part in a healthy diet.
To fill the dietary gaps that were estimated for vitamin B12, calcium, iron, and zinc, we suggest modifications to the original planetary health diet to achieve micronutrient adequacy (without fortification or supplementation) for adults, which included increasing the proportion of animal source foods and reducing foods high in phytate.
Adding to that, Mente et al. 2023 show that:
current advice to restrict dairy (especially whole fat dairy) to very low amounts in populations globally is not necessary or appropriate. Additionally, we argue that a moderate amount of red meat is permissible for diets globally (Mente)
But Dr Ghebreyesus didn't mention the importance of red meat för physical and mental health?
These WHO/Nordic Council of Ministers/Nordic nutrition/ recommendations appears to be a follow-up to the heavenly criticized paper by Willet et al. (2019).
Why?
The answer, from a psychological point of view, is bias. And there are ~200 to choose from.
In his autobiography, Max Planck (1858-1947), the father of Quantum theory wrote something like: the academy evolves one funeral at the time (Planch, 1950, p. ~95). This phenomenon is formally known as Continued Influenced Bias - misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected (Cacciatore, 2021).
It is also worth noting Dr Fogelholm's outburst on Twitter, addressing me as as non-nutritionist, but not giving Dr Ghebreyesus the same treatment. Dr Ghebreyesus is a specialist on preventing malaria and doing politics. In Dr Fogelholm's mind, that's not nutrition. Me, on the other hand, was invited by Dr Fogelholm boss, to open their seminar series for expert on food and health. This calls for two biases, selection bias, but Dr. Fogelholm more likely fell victim of authority bias (Milgram, 1963):
Authority bias is having an unreasonably high confidence in the belief that the information verified by a person with formal authority is correct, and therefore an individual is likely to be more influenced by them (Wikipedia).But shouldn't a group of people who each of them earned a doctoral degree, have the ability to stay independent? Well, studies of conformity and Grouthink point to the opposite. When forming a group, the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome (Janis, 1972; Turner and Pratkanis, 1998).
Even worse, in 1993 psychologist Kieth Stanovich introduced Dysartionalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (Stanovich, 1993).
And when these factoids are reiterated to the public, they fall victim of availability bias (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973), they believe its consistent with science-based studies.
In psychology, the availability bias is the human tendency to rely on information that comes readily to mind when evaluating situations or making decisions. Because of this bias, people believe that the readily available information is more representative of fact than is the case. The availability bias - also known as the availability heuristic -- is just one of a number of cognitive biases that hamper critical thinking and, as a result, the validity of our decisions (WhatIs.com).Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay (Finland).
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