Nutrition psychology. Mental health and entrepreneurial thinking in Finland. The tension between enlightenment - tribal culture

The Finnish Brain foundation projects that 50 % of Finnish women and 33% of men over 45 years of age will suffer from a severe brain disease during their remaining lifetime. They also project that 20% of all Finns will contract a memory oriented disease - dementia, which in most cases are manifested in Alzheimer's disease. According to Finnish media, mental health issues cost Finland 1 billion euros a year, and is equivalent to having 26 000 on sick leave. This is of course a serious issue. Why are mental health issues so prevalent in Finland, and how do the Finns go about to solve this issue? A health survey from the EU showed that life expectancy is better in Sweden compared to Finland, and that Finland has twice as many cases of Alzheimer's compared to Sweden. Finland is also topping the global Alzheimer's ranking. Despite the fact that the Brain foundation is seeking a solution through medical treatment, it's likely to assume that the solution lies in the realms of socio-culture. Sugar may be more common in that socio-culture. 7 pages.

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The Finnish Brain foundation projects that 50 % of Finnish women and 33% of men over 45 years of age will suffer from a severe brain disease during their remaining lifetime. They also project that 20% of all Finns will contract a memory oriented disease - dementia, which in most cases are manifested in Alzheimer's disease (Finnish Brain Foundation, 2024). Finland has the most cases of Alzheimer's in the world! According to Finnish media, mental health issues cost Finland 1 billion euros a year, and is equivalent to having 26 000 people on sick leave (Myntti, 2024). This is of course a serious issue. Why are mental health issues so prevalent in Finland, and how do the Finns go about to solve this issue?

One important premise is that Finland is a bi-lingual, and therefore, a bi-cultural country. That leads to other questions: how did Finland become bi-lingual/cultural, and what's the implications?

Humans have left the African continent at least five times. 70 000 - 50 000 years ago, after two super volcanic events in Indonesia causing significant changes in the climate (Ambrose, 1998), people migrated into the near East and further into Europe. By that time they had:

1. a neurological brain similar to ours (Aiello and Dunbar, 1993; Aiello and Wheeler, 1995; Ponzter et al 2016; Thompson et al. 2019).
   
   
2. psychological capabilities similar to ours (Ardila, 2008, Ardila et al. 2018; Adornetti, 2016; Barkley, 2001; Coolidge and Wynn, 2018).
   
   
3. a lifestyle - hunting and gathering.

~20 000 before the present, the peak of the last ice age occurred (Hirst, 2019). Some of the hunters and gatherers who had left Africa settled in Anatolia (southeast Turkey) to start a new life-style - agriculture (Hodder, 2018). A new language probably emerged. ~8000 years before the present, this culture reached northern Europe (Lamnidis et al. 2018).

5000 years ago, south of Sweden was inhabited by:

1. farmers who bear similarities with people from Sardinia,
   
   
2. hunters and gatherers who bear similarities with people from lake Baikal:

In 2012 whole genome data arrived, covering about 200,000 times more DNA letters. That study compared hunter-gatherers and farmers who lived in southern Sweden 5,000 years ago. The farmers were not at all like present-day people from Sweden, and instead were much more similar to present-day people from Sardinia, an island off southern Europe. The hunter-gatherers were not like present-day people from Sweden either (Reich, 2018, p. 41).

4500 years before the present, a huge wave of migrants from the Pontic Steppe reached northern Europe, bringing with them horses and language (Haak et al. 2015), and likely pale skin and blue eyes which had emerged in western Anatolia and the Pontic steppe as late as 5000 years before the present (Eiberg et al. 2008; Hanel and Carlberg, 2020). Most people in northern Europe, including Fennoscandia, originate from a mix of these migrations.

During the Vendel period (540-750 AD), named after the village Vendel just north of today's Uppsala, Sweden did not yet exist. Instead, Svitjod, divided into Tiundaland, Attundaland, Fjärdhundraland, and Roden, was the power center, stretching from lake Mälaren, across the southern quark and the sea of Åland as far as to Novgorod, the predecessor of Russia. Of particular interest for this story is Tiundaland and Roden, because it was through those folklands the people of Uppsala - Vendel started to travel eastward. On water.

Tiundaland means “land of the ten hundreds and referred to its duty of providing 1000 men and 40 ships for the Swedish king's leidang” (Wikipedia).

“The institution known as leiðangr (Old Norse), leidang (Norwegian), leding (Danish), ledung (Swedish), expeditio (Latin) or sometimes lething (English), was a form of conscription (mass levy) to organize coastal fleets for seasonal excursions and in defense of the realm typical for medieval Scandinavians and, later, a public levy of free farmers” (Wikipedia).

In Tiundaland, a socio-culture emerged based on what we nowadays call entrepreneurial thinking. One marker for that is the building of longships. By using oarsmen, they were able to explore the waterways across the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea, and even across what is now the Gulf of Finland, through Ladoga and further. They traveled in fleets and included high ranked people, which implies that the journeys were of diplomatic nature, like a crusade (Mägi, 2018;Watson, 2016; Wikipedia). ~750 AD, they started to use sails, marking the starting point for a new era - the viking period (750 - 1066 AD). People living in today's Åbo, Finland proper, applied to be part of Svitjod. Finland proper became the eastern part of the kingdom. By integrating with Svitjod, entrepreneurial thinking spread to the coastal areas of the eastern part of the kingdom. Swedish  became the trading language around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea. Until 1240, Svitjod expanded all the way to Novgorod.

~1250, Birger Jarl (1210-1266) founded a new trading place in Svitjod, the watergate between Mälaren and the Baltic sea/Ålands sea - Stockholm.

1348, king Magnus Eriksson wrote to the people of Österbotten, allowing them to trade all kinds of food. They exported food to Uppsala and Stockholm, sailing in fleets, just like the people from Uppsala - Vendel had done since the viking period.

In 1384, Svitjod became the Kingdom of Sweden.

During the 1500s, when the coastal areas of the eastern part of the Swedish kingdom thrived and developed under the leadership of king Gustav Vasa (1496-1560), tribes of Uralic pagans speaking different languages lived in the inland.

Something worth mentioning is that the population density was, and is, greatest near the coasts.

The Swedish priest Mikael Olofsson (1507-1557) aimed to convert these pagans to Christianity by producing texts from the Bible in a standardized form of their many different tribal languages. Olofsson also wrote a list of their gods, and changed his last name to Agrikola.

With a mix of Christianity, renaissance (1560 - ; McKeown, 2009), science revolution and enlightenment (1600s/1700s) (Widmalm, 2012), the Swedish kingdom went through a significant development. But in the inland, the Uralic tribes seemed unaffected by this transformation, retaining their myths and folk songs.

Some later scholars, such as Henrik Porthan (1739-1804), used these myths and folk songs to claim that these tribes constituted the indigenous people of Finland, a viewpoint that escalated with the fennoman movement after Russia's invasion of the Swedish fortress Sveaborg in 1808. In 1809, Finland became a vassal state to Russia, on paper a grand duchy. In 1863, Kreml demanded the Finns to abandon the trading language around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic Sea. Slowly, Finland's culture started to change, away from the enlightenment thinking that had emerged during the Swedish era. Still, Finland mainly remained Swedish speaking until 1910 - 1940.

During his Gifford lecture in 2019, Mark Pagel, a biological anthropologist, talked about tribalism. His first example was Papua New Guinea. The second example was Finland. In 2023, a researcher from the city of Helsingfors said that Swedish speaking Finns have better health and live longer compared to Finns who mainly speak the other, Uralic, language. In the same year, a health survey from the EU showed that life expectancy is better in Sweden compared to Finland, and that Finland has twice as many cases of Alzheimer's compared to Sweden. Finland is also topping the global Alzheimer's ranking.

(Finland; Sweden). The report shows that the prevalence of dementia, especially Alzheimer's, is twice as great in Finland compared to Sweden.

Sweden:

Finland:

Despite the fact that the Brain foundation is seeking a solution through medical treatment, it's likely to assume that the solution lies in the realms of socio-culture.

In 1950, Finland became one of several countries to test the diet-heart hypothesis - the idea that saturated fat causes cardiovascular disease by raising serum cholesterol (Teicholz, 2023). Because Finland was bilingual and had two socio-cultures, one of Finland's data points was in North Karelia. Hence, Finns know about the North Karelia Project (NKP). In the early 1970s, after implementing the result from the NKP, the prevalence of Alzheimer's started to increase.

“Subsequent clinical trials attempting to substantiate this hypothesis could never establish a causal link” (Teicholz, 2023).

Example: Howard et al. 2006, Ramsden et al. 2016.

That's because our species are adapted to consume animal source fat and protein (Mann, 2018; McPherron et al. 2010; Pobiner, 2013, 2016; Thompson et al. 2019). We also need to consume 1.5 - 2.5 teaspoons of salt per day (Mente, 2018; Mente et al. 2021).

Despite this, In 2022, The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) prided themselves on convincing Finns to reduce the consumption of butter and salt. To complement that, consumption of sugar became more common. But sugar is pure, white and deadly (Yudkin, 1972).

“A higher intake of total sugar or total calories from sugar is associated with increased dementia risk in older adults. Among simple sugars, fructose (e.g., sweetened beverages, snacks, packaged desserts) and sucrose (table sugar in juices, desserts, candies, and commercial cereals) are associated with higher dementia risk” (Agarwal et al 2023).

Remember, the prevalence of Alzheimer in neighboring Sweden is 50 % of Finland's ditto. And the prevalence of heart disease is 67% in Sweden compared to Finland.

One possible explanation is that false information can be sustained within the tribal Ural-Finnish language group to a greater extent compared to the enlightenment-oriented Swedish speaking part of Finland.

Also read: Beliefs (as opposed of factual knowledge) and self perception will influence your attitudes and life-span

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