“Sardines will therefore have a protective element because they are rich in the aforementioned nutrients, whereas nutrients taken in isolation in the form of supplements won’t work to the same extent” : to me this reads as “we found a correlation but we are clueless about the root cause”.
True. The "root cause" could be that one improves one's diet:
- if you take "sardine" supplement pills and go on eating burgers and fries, do not expect a miracle with respect to type 2 pre-diabetes,
- if you eat sardines as part of a meal, I suspect that you are likely to *replace* parts of your current diet with the (fatty) fish, rather than keep your usual diet and add fish on top of it.
For instance, a funny paragraph from section 4 (Discussion) hints that the SG (Sardine Group) must have added less olive oil to the rest of their meals:
> Another possible limitation of the study to bear in mind is the use of canned sardines in olive oil, which, despite easing distribution and consumption, present differences in MUFA content as compared to fresh sardines. Although this may have modified the pattern of lipids consumed, the SG group decreased their overall MUFA consumption. This could be due to the fact that the use of olive oil added to meals did not occur when they consumed the canned sardines and, therefore, there are no differences in its consumption with respect to CG.
NB: I don't want to dismiss any part of the article, I only want to insist that it is hard to isolate causes because of this effect of "communicating vases".
> - if you take "sardine" supplement pills and go on eating burgers and fries, do not expect a miracle with respect to type 2 pre-diabetes,
The way I generally describe the result of switching from no intentional diet to any trendy/FOTM/recent diet is mostly just that a person begins to give a shit about what they're eating, which results in an array of positive benefits not directly related to that diet. Ketogenic diets are a good example. People go from not caring about what they eat, regularly eating fast food, sugary snacks/drinks, deep fried carbohydrates, etc. to spending a bunch of money on expensive butter and grass fed beef. They then lose weight. Sure, ketosis is a big deal, but in reality the biggest factor in a person's weight loss/health improvement is just replacing high calorie, high sugar, high carb, high fat food with no sugar, low/no carb, reasonable calorie food. (This is not an attack on the ketogenic diet. There is plenty of research for and against it. As with all diets, if you find positive outcomes while trying it, keep doing it! The goal is health).
I think the real test would be, what positive benefits _do exist_ when a person changes nothing else but includes a pack (tin? can? box?) of high quality sardines weekly. If nothing, I feel like it kind of just falls into the category of "being specific and intentional about dietary choices brings health benefits", which isn't necessarily new or ground breaking.
This is true, just adding sardines your diet will probably do nothing for most people. It’s more about the elimination of other things we eat as well. It wasn’t until I was eating only salmon for my fat and protein source that I was able to raise my HDL from 35 to 54!.
I credit this to totally eliminating the omega-6 fats. But this is just me because I’m a genetic freak with hyperlipidemia.
The value of reducing Omega-6 is over-hyped. The issue here is that when you eat a can of sardines, you tend to not eat them with a big load of carbohydrates, like white bread, rice, pasta, fries...
Totally eliminating omega-6 from your diet can't be healthy, can it? There are only two essential fatty acids for humans and one of them (linoleic acid) is omega-6.
Well, I exaggerated to make a point. Even salmon has long chain omega 6. I soul have said "eliminating plant based omega 6" and this is just for me and my genetics. People without certain FADS1 genetics can do fine with short chain omega 3 and 6.
Since supplements have been brought up, what's with the American's obsession over supplements? It's like people are just chomping them down like they're some sort of food stable like bread or rice (or maybe that's just what all the youtube videos want you to think). Its like every bodybuilder on youtube has their own brand of supplements now. Don't even get me started on pre-workout. "Don't feel like working out? Chug this powder!"
With bodybuilding most bodybuilders will agree that the only (legal) effective supplement for weightlifting is creatine, with vitamin D, fish oil, and multivitamins generally recognized as also useful for general health. But the most important “supplements” are anabolics which of course can’t be legally advertised. The problem is average Joe doesn’t know that, and bodybuilders need to make money (most make very little if any money from bodybuilding) so they do endorsements and marketing for health brands which are legal even if they may not be effective.
Preworkout is a bit different because it actually is marginally useful for workouts, and I think most actual bodybuilders take some form of it. But it’s super cheap to produce so most of the expense is on marketing. You can make homemade PWO with stimulants and “pump supplements” for super cheap if you buy the raw compounds
I’ve found exactly one supplement that had a major impact on my quality of life, and that’s magnesium. Something about magnesium supplements greatly reduced my daily anxiety, to the point that I was amazed because I’d always just imagined I was an “anxious person”.
In my case taking magnesium helps with insomnia and ADHD symptoms (although it's impossible to tell if the ADHD improved directly due the magnesium, or due to better sleep)
I'm not the person you asked, but the most important part isn't the dosage, it's the form.
Basically, make sure the magnesium tablet is anything but magnesium oxide - our digestive systems cannot absorb that. Just about any other form (there's like... six of them) will work. Magnesium oxide only helps with constipation, which is also important I guess but a completely different problem.
I take Magnesium Glycinate 400mg once a day. I feel super relaxed after taking it, although I have noticed an uptick in muscle twitches, which extra calcium seems to mitigate.
Certain segments of America tend to have poor diets. Especially the young, working class which happens to overlap with the bodybuilding class which makes whey protein a logical choice. Whey protein. It is very cheap; just add mix in a multivitamin and OTC stimulants like caffeine and you have a very marketable product with a 300% markup.
The YouTube body building demographic is in the same economic class so capitalizing on a product their audience already uses makes perfect sense.
Also, America is one of the few countries with consumer pharmaceutical advertising so marketing supplements is not out of the ordinary.
The sardines are a very high-fat food item that will satiate you and potentially replace a big load of carbohydrates. Which would affect the prediabetes.
While I can follow that line of thinking, we also shouldn't immediately be dismissive of the conclusions of a professor/researcher at a faculty of health sciences. At least not without a good reason to believe that we have more expertise on the subject than them.
On the other hand, there might also be a bit of Spanish cultural bias at work there (Spain is the second-largest consumer of fish after Japan). On the other other hand, it would fit into the mystery of the mediterranean diet.
I didn’t mean to dismiss their conclusions! It might be a pretty awesome discovery actually: eat delicious sardines and avoid getting diabetes? Count me in!
I just meant that, as is often the case, great discoveries are often made before we really understand them. For example, isn’t this what happened with antibiotics?
Ah, like that! Fair enough, thank you for elaborating (please consider adding a bit of extra context next time, it will go a long way to prevent such misunderstandings)
No, it simply repeats the commonly understood fact that it is better to have a diet rich in specific nutrients than to try to use supplements to make up the difference. Everything from dosage to bio-availability of supplements shows them to mostly be not worth the price of manufacture, let alone the price people pay at the till.
There are times, however, the high-dose vitamins Are the only thing that can replace a deficiency Quickly enough. Two of them that come to mind are zinc and biotin. So like everything else in nutrition, it depends, of deficiencies and genetics.
The trouble with observational cohort studies is that causality is very hard, if not impossible, to identify. Their main result is based on multivariate logistic regression. I like logistic regression as a technique, and it is very powerful, but if, for example, there is an unmeasured cofounding or causal variable that manifests itself as a linear combination of a number of measured but perhaps more acausal variables, it _will_ confidently give you the wrong result. </s>
These are very complex bio-chem processes, so there's probably no single "root cause", but a multivariable situation where certain combinations of nutrients in certain proportion causes these beneficial effects. Also nutrients in supplements often don't have the same bioavailability as in natural products, so it's possible that you take in the same amount of nutrients per label, but your body actually ends up absorbing only a small % of it. Supplements are not that strictly regulated, so many of them are fairly poor quality products making wild claims, counting just on marketing BS to sell.
