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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 added bone marrow to their diet some 3.5 million years ago (Mann, 2018; McPherron et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2019). ~800 000 years later they put meat on the plate (Pobiner, 2013, 2016). This nutrition dense diet caused their guts to reduce and theirs brains to expand, the expensive-tissue hypothesis, from the occipital lobe 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 (Kimbel och Villmoare, 2016; Villmoare, 2018; Villmoare et al. 2015). 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, DHA and EPA fats, choline, and 15-75 minerals (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.
That claim was rejected two years prior to Mr. Vapaavuori's op-ed (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 started to delve into nutrition. 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 the news published in Scientific American (Begley, 2017), that researcher had found raw data from something called the Seven Countries study, which rejected the diet-heart hypothesis, the claim that saturated fats causes 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 health, had also rejected the diet-heart hypothesis with one exception: women who previously have had health issues and cut saturated fats by 10%. They got an 28% increased risk of contracting cardiovascular disease (Howard et al. 2006).
In February or March 2019, I learned that Vapaavuori speaks Swedish, Finland's first official language which is still spoken by 47% of the population. So I wrote to him in Swedish 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, not in Swedish but in Uralic-Finnish!?, a behavior indicating so-called defense 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:
Vapaavuoir also rejected my proposal for a lunch to discuss the mather.
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.
In 1958, a large epidemiological research project was launched to further test the diet-heart hypothesis. Rumors say that the project initially included 22 countries. But when the effects failed to show (like in Howard et al. 2006), the researchers began to remove countries from the dataset. The Seven countries study (SCS) was born. Finland, but not Sweden, was part of SCS.
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.
1972. The North Karelia Project was founded in Finland. The researcher's 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:
The claim about high cholesterol-claim originates from the Seven Countries study and North Karelia Project. As late as March 2022, The Institute for Health and Welfare prided themselves on convincing Finns to reduce their consumption of butter and salt, food items that nutrition science show is crucial for physical and mental health (Ede, 2019; Howard et al. 2006; Mente et al. 2021).
Is this the reason Vapaavuori made the incorrect claim in his op-ed, or is there another factor which explains why?
Psychological science offers a plethora of studies on decision-making showing that our species sometimes suffers from “natural stupidity” - tending to believe information that is prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972), often repeated (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973) or is just easy to access (1977). This can also be called dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (this includes instrumental and epistemic rationality) (Stanovich, 1993).
Already from childhood we get fed information about what to eat and not to eat, and the information comes from authorities, in Finland the Institute for Health and Welfare and the Finnish Food Agency (Livsmedelsverket). In Finland, they reiterated claims that go back to Seven countries study and the North Karelia Project. That information has since been passed down over many generations.
In May 2022, the ministry of education and culture reported that Finnish children failed in reading compression and numeracy. Because the foundation for cognitive development happens during the first four years of living, something must be wrong in the home enviroment.
In April 2022, Helsingfors Police department said that Finnish women's relational aggressiveness (psychological violence) is a huge issue. In November 2022, during a conference about children's rights, Finland's child commissary Elina Pekkarinen said that 20% of Finnish kids and young people born 1997 or later, suffer from mental issues. The prevalence is lower in areas where Swedish is spoken. In November 2023, at that year's conference about children's rights, Pekkarinen said that psychological violence in the home environment has increased (so has lethal violence against small children). The host for the conference, Maj Estlander, interjected, saying that 40% of school children are affected. The likely explanation for Finnish women's domestic violence is malnutrition (Dobersek et al. 2023; Ede, 2019).
Ergo. The proposition Vapaavuori offered five five-and-a-half years ago during spring 2019, which likely was a reiterating from THL, 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:
Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden ) or MobilePay (Finland).
More about my expertise:
Executive coaching for CEOs/managers and workshops to facilitate Organizational Performance, Learning, and Creativity for Problem Solving | Lectures: Nutrition for physical and mental health | Course/lecture: children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development | Language training - Swedish | Academy Competency | CV | Teaching skills and experience | Summary of research project | Instagram | Linkedin | YouTube-channel | TikTok | Twitter
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 the news published in Scientific American (Begley, 2017), that researcher had found raw data from something called the Seven Countries study, which rejected the diet-heart hypothesis, the claim that saturated fats causes 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 health, had also rejected the diet-heart hypothesis with one exception: women who previously have had health issues and cut saturated fats by 10%. They got an 28% increased risk of contracting cardiovascular disease (Howard et al. 2006).
In February or March 2019, I learned that Vapaavuori speaks Swedish, Finland's first official language which is still spoken by 47% of the population. So I wrote to him in Swedish 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, not in Swedish but in Uralic-Finnish!?, a behavior indicating so-called defense 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 that it was probably correct”.In reality, it was incorrect or false.
Vapaavuoir also rejected my proposal for a lunch to discuss the mather.
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.
In 1958, a large epidemiological research project was launched to further test the diet-heart hypothesis. Rumors say that the project initially included 22 countries. But when the effects failed to show (like in Howard et al. 2006), the researchers began to remove countries from the dataset. The Seven countries study (SCS) was born. Finland, but not Sweden, was part of SCS.
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.
1972. The North Karelia Project was founded in Finland. The researcher's 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 about high cholesterol-claim originates from the Seven Countries study and North Karelia Project. As late as March 2022, The Institute for Health and Welfare prided themselves on convincing Finns to reduce their consumption of butter and salt, food items that nutrition science show is crucial for physical and mental health (Ede, 2019; Howard et al. 2006; Mente et al. 2021).
Is this the reason Vapaavuori made the incorrect claim in his op-ed, or is there another factor which explains why?
Psychological science offers a plethora of studies on decision-making showing that our species sometimes suffers from “natural stupidity” - tending to believe information that is prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972), often repeated (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973) or is just easy to access (1977). This can also be called dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (this includes instrumental and epistemic rationality) (Stanovich, 1993).
Already from childhood we get fed information about what to eat and not to eat, and the information comes from authorities, in Finland the Institute for Health and Welfare and the Finnish Food Agency (Livsmedelsverket). In Finland, they reiterated claims that go back to Seven countries study and the North Karelia Project. That information has since been passed down over many generations.
In May 2022, the ministry of education and culture reported that Finnish children failed in reading compression and numeracy. Because the foundation for cognitive development happens during the first four years of living, something must be wrong in the home enviroment.
In April 2022, Helsingfors Police department said that Finnish women's relational aggressiveness (psychological violence) is a huge issue. In November 2022, during a conference about children's rights, Finland's child commissary Elina Pekkarinen said that 20% of Finnish kids and young people born 1997 or later, suffer from mental issues. The prevalence is lower in areas where Swedish is spoken. In November 2023, at that year's conference about children's rights, Pekkarinen said that psychological violence in the home environment has increased (so has lethal violence against small children). The host for the conference, Maj Estlander, interjected, saying that 40% of school children are affected. The likely explanation for Finnish women's domestic violence is malnutrition (Dobersek et al. 2023; Ede, 2019).
Ergo. The proposition Vapaavuori offered five five-and-a-half years ago during spring 2019, which likely was a reiterating from THL, 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.
Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden ) or MobilePay (Finland).
More about my expertise:
Executive coaching for CEOs/managers and workshops to facilitate Organizational Performance, Learning, and Creativity for Problem Solving | Lectures: Nutrition for physical and mental health | Course/lecture: children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development | Language training - Swedish | Academy Competency | CV | Teaching skills and experience | Summary of research project | Instagram | Linkedin | YouTube-channel | TikTok | Twitter
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