Posted 9/6/2012 2:26 AM (GMT 0)
Diet with regards to disease is very much a guessing game as it is extremely difficult to tell what affect food groups have and the the potential consequences of interactions with other foods or environmental factors. Proper food studies often take 20 years or longer and even then the results are, at best, still a guessing game. For example, people who eat a lot of greasy french fries with ketchup may have high lycopene levels. Would they be as healthy as someone who eats fresh tomatoes in salads with a little olive oil and oregano?
If it is such a guessing game to say which foods help, how can the authors of the study say so definitively that such foods do not help (myths) based on such short-term data? We do know that certain populations have very low rates of prostate cancer and these rates rise when these people move to North America.
I do know that some of the populations with the lowest rates - Asian countries and Greece have a high seafood diet, more fresh vegetables, more use of spices and lower exposure to processed food.