In the end even the biggest most ambitious and widely reported studies of diet and health (in the united states) the nurses health study the women's health initiative and nearly all the others leave undisturbed the main features of the western diet:lots of processed foods and meat lots of added fat and sugar lost of everything except fruits vegetables and whole grains most nutrition researchers fiddle with single nutrients as best they can but the populations they recruit and study are typical american eaters doing what typical american eaters do trying to eat a little less of this nutrient a little more of that one depending on the latest thinking the overall dietary pattern is treated as a more or less unalterable given which is why it probably should not surprise us that the findings of such research should be so modest equivocal and confusing
But what about the elephant in the room this pattern of eating that we call the western diet in the midst of our deepening confusion about nutrition it might be useful to step back and gaze up on it review what we do know about the western diet and its effects on our health what we know is that people who eat the way we do in the west today suffer substantially higher rates of cancer cardiovascular diseases diabetes and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets we also know that when people come to the west and adopt our way of eating these diseases soon follow and often as in the case of the aborigines and other native populations in a particularly virulent form