Nutrition psychology. Former mayor of Helsingfors suffered from cardio vascular disease (CVD). Another case of mental biases interacting in a reinforcing loop

Former mayor of Helsingfors and chairman for Finland's Olympic Committee, says his political career is over because he suffered from cardiovascular disease. The likely cause of Mr Vapaavuori's 'demise' is his own advice: “Switching to a more vegetarian diet is in practice one of the most important climate measures you can take”. The advice resonates with the diet-heart hypothesis (Malmros/Seven Countries study/North Karelia Project/THL, but goes against common academic knowledge; the diet-heart hypothesis was rejected multiple times years ago. Finland is therefore at the top of the Alzheimer's ranking and has a high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, high prevalence of Finnish women's relational aggressiveness (psychological violence at home), obesity and low cognitive ability among Finnish school children. Common knowledge in nutrition science shows that animal source food is crucial for physical and mental health. Vapaavouri likely suffered from mental biases interacting in a reinforcing loop. Will he be able to apply Rational Entrepreneurial thinking? 8 pages.

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Former mayor of Helsingfors and chairman for Finland's Olympic Committee, says his political career is over. The reason: during breakfast he suddenly felt a pain in his chest which turned out to be a cardiovascular event (CVD).

Link to source.

Why did this happen?

Like any academic issue, the explanatory model for this event is very complex and includes both nutrition, paleo anthropology, and psychology.

According to paleo anthropology, which is the study of humans and how we came to be, the historical record shows that our ancestors ate bone marrow 3.6 million years ago (Mann, 2018; McPherron et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2019).

This nutrition dense diet caused their guts to reduce and theirs brains to expand, from the occipetal lobe and forward, giving room for new mental faculties like language and executive functions, including prospective thinking (Aiello och Dunbar, 1993; Aiello och Wheeler, 1995; Ardila, 2008, Ardila et al. 2018; Barkley, 2001; Coolidge and Wynn, 2018; Pontzer et al. 2016; Pringle, 2016; Suddendorf et al. 2018).

It probably opened the door for our genus – Homo (2.8 Mya; Kimbel och Villmoare, 2016; Villmoare, 2018; Villmoare et al. 2015).

~2.6 million years before the present they ate meat, which further reduced their guts and expanded their brains (Pobiner, 2013, 2016).

~320 000 years before the present, our specific kind existed (Hublin et al. 2017).

Ergo. We have adapted to a diet based on animal source food; in order to sustain physical and mental health, we need to consume a 'food matrix' including 13 vitamins, 15 – 75 minerals, tryptophan, Choline as well as DHA and EPA fats (Österberg, 2023, 2024). Abstaining from animal source food deprives the heart of K2, a vitamin that 'takes calcium' from the heart – reducing the risk of suffering from CVD.

Common academic knowledge is that welfare diseases like type 2-diabetes, high blood pressure, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which all increases the probability for cardiovascular disease (CVD), is explained by consumption of sugar and ultra-processed stuff (Hall et al. 2019; Lustig, 2017; Yudkin, 1972). Also, people who abstain from animal source also report issues with mental health, like high degree of neuroticism, anxiety, and depression (Dobersek et al. 2023; Ede, 2019).

But in February 2019, Mr Vapaavuori jumped on the climate bandwagon, claiming:

“Switching to a more vegetarian diet is in practice one of the most important climate measures you can take”.

Link to source.

Here's an interesting catch. Two years prior to Mr. Vapaavuori's op-ed, his claim had been rejected (White and Hall, 2017).

Because I was a newly appointed research-leader at the University of Helsingfors, assigned to explore the future of Finland's food production, I also delved into nutrition and health. The rationale: if farmers (food producers) want to improve their revenues, they should focus on food that has an impact on people's physical and mental health.

I'm also a former performance coach, which means that I spent decades studying nutrition. And between 2014 – 2018, I was included in a research network at Karolinska Institute discussing issues concerning physical and mental health. In 2017, I presented some news published in Scientific American (Begley, 2017). Researchers had found raw data from something called the Seven Countries study (SCS), which when being analysed rejected the diet-heart hypothesis, the claim that saturated fats cause things like atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease (Ramsden et al. 2016). But this was actually not news.

Two years prior to that, investigative journalist Nina Teicholz had reviewed nutrition science and had arrived at the same conclusion – a rejection of the diet-heart hypothesis (Teicholz, 2014).

But eight (8) years prior to that, Women's health initiative, the most expensive study on women's health, had also rejected the diet-heart hypothesis with one exception: women who had previously had health issues and reduced their intake of saturated fats by 10% had a 28% increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease (Howard et al. 2006).

In February or March 2019, I learned that Vapaavuori speaks the trade language around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic seas, which is Finland's first official language, still spoken by 47% of the population. So I wrote to him using the trade language, asking for the references he should have used as a basis for the claims he made in his op-ed. Vapaavuori's office-people answered, but they didn't use the trade language but Uralic-Finnish, a language imposed by Russia in 1863.

This kind of behavior indicates so-called defensive argumentation – a typical testimony that you know you are wrong. When we had exchanged a few polite phrases connected to Finland's two languages, the answer I was looking for came:

“there were no references, but it was probably correct”.

Vapaavuori also rejected my proposal for lunch to discuss the matter.

Why didn't Mr Vapaavuori and others take common academic knowledge into account?

The backstory of the diet-heart hypothesis has another component – Finland. And Sweden. During the 1940s, the Swedish biochemist Haqvin Malmros (1895 - 1995) conducted a study on health. He took data from the Nordic countries as well from a northern state in the US. Dr Malmros' conclusion: saturated fat and cholesterol causes Atherosclerosis. (Malmros, 1950). The diet-heart hypothesis was born.

Malmros' result was noticed by Ancel Keys (1904 – 2004), an epidemiologist (Noakes, 2019).

1954, Dr. Keys reiterate Dr. Malmros claims:

“a major factor in this difference lies in the relationship among dietary fats, serum cholesterol and atherosclerosis” (Elliott, 2014).

In 1958, Dr. Keys launched an international project to further test the diet-heart hypothesis, the Seven Countries Study (Teicholz, 2014).

1961. The newly founded American Heart Association (AHA) gave the first dietary advice, warning people that saturated fats will raise serum cholesterol, leading to cardiovascular disease, including Atherosclerosis (Teicholz, 2023).

1972. The North Karelia Project was founded in Finland. The researchers sampled data from the Swedish-Finnish population in the south-west (Åbo), and the uracil-Finnish population in the north-east Karelia. The result showed that whereas 995 out 10 000 people in Karelia died of heart related diseases, and despite eating similar food, ~300 out of 10 000 people living in the south met the same fate (Teicholz, 2014).

In the 1980s, governments around the world introduced dietary guidelines, where they warned people that meat and saturated fats are bad for health.

In parallel to that, data from statistics Finland showed a rise in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Finland is now topping the global ranking for AD. Sweden is No 10 (Österberg, 2022) with half of the incidents. Women are more than twice as likely to contract the disease.

Finland also has issues with cardiovascular disease:

“Cardiovascular diseases are endemic in Finland. Most common cardiovascular diseases include coronary artery disease, heart failure and cerebrovascular diseases” (Mehiläinen).

And this is the check-list:

The claim that high cholesterol is dangerous originates from the Seven Countries study and North Karelia Project. As recently as March 2022, the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) was proud to have succeeded in convincing Finns to reduce their consumption of butter and salt:

“From the outset, the goal was to lower cholesterol and blood pressure levels through dietary changes, including a reduction in the use of butter and salt” (THL, March, 2022).

Was that the reason why Vapaavuori made the incorrect claim in his op-ed, or is there another factor which explains why?

Members of our species are prone to mental fallacies. For example:

• Confirmation bias, the tendency to apply the same theory on all situations, or search for information which fits the conviction (Nickerson, 1998; Wason, 1960, 1966; 1968; Wason och Shapiro, 1971).
  
  
• Natural stupidity – our species propensity to rely on information which are either prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972), available (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973), or just easy to access (Kahneman and Tversky, 1977).
  
  
• Dysrationlia – the inability to think and behave [epistemic and instrumental] rationally despite adequate intelligence (Stanovich, 1993, 2011, 2016).
  
  
• Myside bias – a psychological disinclination to abandon a favored hypothesis (Stanovich, West och Toplak, 2013).
  
  
• Continued Influence Effect – Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected (Cacciatore, 2021).

These biases interact in a reinforcing loop.

Already from childhood we get fed information about what to eat and not to eat, and the information originates from authorities, like food agencies which distribute dietary guidelines.

In Finland, the Food agency is called Finnish Food Authority (Livsmedelsverket).

But these dietary guidelines was never validated but studies using Randomized Control Trials (Harcombe et al. 2015).

Nutrition science show that food items like butter and salt are crucial for physical and mental health (Dehghan et al. 2017; Ede, 2019; Mente et al. 2021). 

Between 2020 and 2024, Finnish authorities have reported on a plethora of welfare diseases that research shows are explained by nutritional deficiencies:

• Finland has a child obesity epidemic (Eva Roos, Folkhälsan, 2020).
  
  
• Finnish women's relational aggressiveness (psychological domestic violence) is the big issue (Helsingfors Police department, April, 2022).
  
  
• Too many Finnish kids fail reading comprehension and numeracy (Ministry of education and culture, May, 2022).
  
  
• 20% of the Finnish kids and young born 1997 or later have mental health issues (Elina Pekkarinen, November, 2022).
  
  
• Finland has the highest rate of Alzheimer's/dementia in the World, the rate is twice as high compared to Sweden (EU/OECD, 2023).
• Finland has the highest rate of depression with the EU (Estlander, Bensow, November, 2023).
  
  
• 40% of Finnish school kids are victims of psychological domestic violence (Estlander, Bensow, November, 2023).
  
  
• Entreprenership and innovative thinking has hit rock bottom. Why is Sweden doing so much better? (Atte Jäskelläinen, Sitra, December, 2024).

Ergo. The proposition Vapaavuori offered five five-and-a-half years ago during spring 2019, was never validated, but likely a reiteration from THL, and has been costly, not only for children, but also for himself.

How do decision makers avoid the mental pitfalls mentioned above?

I have developed a model for this – Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (Österberg, 2021, kap 3). it is based on three established theories:

• Epistemic vigilance – to minimize the risk of being accidentally or intentionally being misinformed, be suspicious of statements and the purpose of Communication the statement, especially from legacy media (Sperber et al. 2010).
  
  
• Disjunctive reasoning – take all sources into account (Stanovich, 2009).
  
  
• Numeracy – ability to understand, reason with, and apply simple numerical concepts, the foundation for instrumental and epistemic rationally (Brooks och Pui, 2010), the very mental quality which the ministry of education and culture says is missing in Finland.

I have also published some stuff about food and health (Österberg, 2024).

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