Sweden is a relatively small country and as such they don't have that many native TV shows. They seem to fill in with some assorted American and British shows. It was there where I was exposed to British-style reality TV and I lost my Anglophilia. Instead of high tea and Jane Austen, there was "five ton mum" and "real life 40 year old virgin!" I guess one of the more interesting shows is Tribal Wives.  The premise of the show is that a British person goes and lives with a tribe. Some anthropologists have called it exploitative, but it's reality TV, not an ethnography. Some episodes do actually seem like they are exploiting hapless tribes from all over the world, but I noticed a Kitava one on Youtube yesterday(multiple parts, click the links in the sidebar). Not much about food, but it's kind of interesting. You might note that there are plenty of plump women around the village. Perhaps the diet has changed in the decade plus since the Kitavan study.

She said she didn't miss creature comforts, including electricity, as her life simplified. “The whole island revolves around yams, the islanders' staple diet,” she said. “I ate them boiled, chipped and roasted. The tribespeople spend a lot of time working out new ways to celebrate the yam.”
 

*by yam, she means true yam(Dioscorea), which the subtitles mistranslate as sweet potato

On this one, the British woman gets upset because she isn't allowed to wear pants. On the one about the Afar (a pastoral culture) the British woman gets upset because of child marriage and female circumcision. Pastoral societies are generally much harder on women than horticultural ones. In another episode the British woman is upset about a forced marriage in the pastoral Himba tribe. 

Much like the excellent book Nisa, this show puts a human face on the lives of women that professional ethnographies can't really approach. I think that between the two sources, it's clear that women in these cultures tend to be more socially constrained and threatened than some primitivists would like to think. Domestic violence, abandonment, and social persecution are real dangers. Like Price's search for vegan tribes, the search for matriarchal tribes has been in vain. But people who study these cultures often say these women are happier than most women in our society. Whether that is true remains to be seen.

 Vegans: many of them are smug self-satisfied jerks who believe they know everything about economics, nutrition, and environmental science. Even though experts in those fields realize we are just at the tip of the iceburg in our human knowledge. Yes, vegans, particularly on the internet, know their diet is sooo healthy and no one could possibly not do well on it and it saves cute puppies and you are a murderer if you eat bacon blah blah blah.

So you can tell I have no love lost for these folks. And when I saw this article title I got excited Being vegan could put heart health at risk: study. Then I realized there is a group of people who are even more insufferable: science reporters. Really, almost all of them suck and are a testament to our over-saturated journalism schools. As my brilliant science journalism professor once said "If you want to be a good science reporter, get a SCIENCE degree." 

So this isn't even a study. It's a boring review paper with lots of chemistry that obviously gave the reporter a headache.

OMG IT'S SCIENCE AHHHHHHH

It's called Chemistry behind Vegetarianism
by Duo Li from Zhejiang University and it's in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Oh yeah, it's not about vegans either. It's mostly about vegetarians, which isn't surprising since only mainly a of people are vegan in the world and there are probably less than 100 studies on these mostly-smug folks. 

And right at the beginning it says "Omnivores have a significantly higher cluster of cardiovascular risk factors compared with vegetarians." In the paper it postulates some reasons why a vegetarian might have a heart attack, mainly having to do with imbalance of omega-3 to omega-6 ratio and the ineffectiveness of vegan forms of omega-3 in foods (ALA is in vegan foods, but vegans can buy DHA supplements made from algae, who are not as cute as puppies). Only stupid vegans in fantasy raw vegan land think it's OK to be an unsupplemented vegan and this paper drives that point home. 

The homocysteine and platelet stuff may have to do with the omega imbalances in vegetarians. 

Collagen- and adenosine-50-diphosphate (ADP)-stimulated ex vivo whole blood platelet aggregation were significantly higher in both vegetarian and vegan groups than in both high- and moderate-meat-eater groups. The vegan group had a significantly higher mean platelet volume(MPV) than the high- andmoderatemeat-
eater and ovo-lacto vegetarian groups (35). Increased MPV in vegans suggests the presence of larger, activated platelets. Evidence from case control studies has indicated that an increased MPV is an independent risk factor for acute myocardial infarction (MI) (39) and for acute and/or nonacute cerebral ischemia (40).

That's an interesting study referenced and speaks to the fact that not all aspects of vegans have been studied. There are also no life-long multi-generational vegans. As science uncovers facts about how what your grandparents and parents ate affected you, this seems like a big blind spot. 

Reading the fat acceptance bloggers  on Jamie Oliver's new show, is a typical argument of theirs goes like "Food Revolution is awful because it is portraying fat people as unhealthy! Plenty of skinny people are unhealthy too, but they target the fat people for shaming!"

I totally agree with that actually. Focus on appearances distracts from real health problems. It's easy to pick on people who are overweight, but food related illness doesn't discriminate based on weight. As a skinny adolescent, I suffered from all kinds of terrible health problems related to my diet. Candy and soda didn't make me overweight, but it surely contributed to the stomach problems, headaches, and fatigue I suffered from. 

As a child growing up the South, many of my friend's fathers succumbed to heart attacks. They were slim men in their 40s. 

The old argument that being obese isn't genetic because where are all the the fat hunter-gatherers? While a few statues from the Stone Age seem to glorify curvy ladies, skeletal evidence has yet to be found. BUT there is strong evidence that gene expression can be determined by the maternal diet, gut bacteria, and environmental toxins. All three have been linked to obesity. There is no question that some people are going to have a much harder time with their weight than others. And once someone is obese for a long it's likely that the metabolism is altered enough that they are going to really have a tough time losing it and keeping it off. 

Because of an appearance-focused approach to health, plenty of skinny people I know think they are healthy despite eating terrible diets. Not to stereotype, but while Swedes I knew when I lived in Sweden ate relatively healthy, sugary alcoholic drinks and bags of gummy "godis" were a regular part of their diets. For awhile I was confused...how were people eating these awful candy gummy craps and sugar berry flavored vodka soda and looking so good? The answer is probably in the healthy full fat whole foods that are still part of the diet there (in America we both eat crap AND don't eat much nutritious food). But when I started meeting my friend's parents it became clear that there are still effects to these foods, they just show up later. Sweden isn't too far away from the United States in heart disease rates. 

For all the blather about Americans being fat, Eastern Europe leads for heart disease per capita. Type 2 diabetes is really hitting other countries hard too- India in particular, despite their "healthy vegetarian diet." So much for meatless Mondays having a huge health effect...but really, what India and Hungary have in common is love for fried processed carbs and massive amounts of sugary desserts without much actual nutrition in between. But maybe diet isn't really even that much of a factor: "In a study of Japanese migrants in the United States the cultural upbringing was the strongest predictor of coronary heart disease. Those who were brought up in a non-Japanese fashion but preferred the lean Japanese food had a heart attack almost twice as often as those who were brought up in the Japanese way but preferred fatty American food."

In the focus on food we often forget about other factors like lifestyle. 

I applaud Jamie's expose of the venality of our school lunch system, but I just don't think some homemade pasta is going to cut it. Also as a Southerner, I'm also a little annoyed that it's not a fellow Southerner leading this effort. One of the principles popular in the food justice movement is providing both healthy AND culturally appropriate food. It's too bad that the Southern culture has really been lost.

I often hear about how sending away the Native Americans to government schools caused them to lose their culture. But it wasn't just Native Americans who lost their culture because of government schools. Watch the food being served to those kids in Food Revolution. Some people think Southern food is fried pablum like that, but it's not. They aren't being served Southern food, they are being served industrial gruel. In fact, I'm sure real Southern food is illegal under the USDA guidelines. That's too bad, because my Southern ancestors were living into their late 80s even a hundred years ago on ham hocks, collard and mustard greens, turtle soup, crawfish, buttery grits, and full fat buttermilk. The awful Paula Deen flour and sugar creations are to Southern food what fry bread is to Indian food- neither authentic nor traditional. 

 An interesting exploration of the growing demand for meat in New York City

 New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni and Anthony Bourdain. As an on- and off-again meat eater, Foer has publically made his decision to step into non-meat land and now is synonymous with whining about Bourdain to New Yorkmagazine for the No Reservations host’s admittance on Larry King Live that he thinks humans are supposed to eat animals. We wonder how he’ll respond to the recent Times story about the new “Caveman lifestyle,” described as “a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.” One die-hard member purportedly indulges in “grass-fed ground beef, which he eats raw.”

I hope Bourdain will recognize us as kin rather than as "dieters." I hate that word because it implies a limitation. The limitation for me is I simply try to avoid eating foods that make me feel crappy and I always make exceptions if I feel something is awesome and uniquely delicious. Which is actually OK, because most of the body-damaging crap people shovel in their mouths isn't. 

If anything, eating like this has awakened me to the wonders of delicious silky blood, insects, liver on a stick, and reindeer hearts.  Bourdain probably doesn't think of himself as a diet guru, but his writing and shows have inspired many reluctant people to order foods like tripe. 

My father is on the paleo diet (50 lbs lost and counting, though that's another story) and Les Halles, Bourdain's restaurant, is a favorite of ours. 

Also mentioned is the Meat Hook, which is a veritable temple of meat in Brooklyn, the epicenter of the nose to tail locavore meat movement. Meat is big enough in Brooklyn that cuts previously had for pennies, like marrow bones, are inching up in price by the day. 

Surprisingly, the people who are now going back to eating meat are more than willing to delve into the nasty bits of meat production. Sold out workshops involving the snapping the necks of rabbits and gutting them? Who would have thought. This is a good thing because people who are knowledgeable about the slaughter process are more demanding about how animals lived and how they died. I don't know how much of this has to do with the locavore movement and how much has to do with the fact that many vegetarian foods make people feel crappy. 

Fun at the slaughter house

And the Humane Society's argument that even animals at nice farms have miserable lives is unconvincing to the growing number of young urbanites who work a stint on a farm in the summer. 

I do feel bad for vegetarian restaurants though. There are plenty of people that aren't comfortable with meat, and I understand that. I always was the girl who had no problem with dissecting worms, so I know I'm a little bit of an outlier. Many of my friends and family members are vegetarian and vegan, so the reality is that a visit to some of these restaurants is in my future. There are some I look forward to going to, like Souen or Pure Food & Wine, but most of them are crappy food excused by sparing cute animals. It doesn't have to be this way. I love Pure Food & Wine's fruit and nut based dishes and Souen's emphasis on seaweed and pumpkin. At each place it's possible to get a meal free of bloaty soy, fried industro-oils,  and crampy wheat. Vegans and paleo dieters can dine together, restaurants just have to be more innovative and not just serve fried soy  and gluten blobs.