Compared to the standard surrounding American diet of highly processed carbs, fats, pies, bacon, etc.

Diet obviously needs to be limited in throughput. I wouldn't recommend surviving on 10 pounds of nutraloaf, either.

It varies from community to community. There are some communities that don't care, and others that do definitely prohibit it.

I had the opposite impression. Lots of orders will ban tobacco outright. Those that don’t, it’s usually kept only in social settings or breaks and it’s never commercial cigarettes. Usually pipes but I guess they could roll their own cigarettes.

It’s the way humans consumed milk forever, though? Every infant consumes raw milk. Every milk-consuming culture on the planet did it until Pasteur. So… I’m not advocating raw milk consumption, but to call it poison is pure ignorance.

The issue with raw milk is that over time it’s much more likely to grow bacteria if there is any interruption in the cold chain.

Drinking it on the farm or close to when it’s very fresh isn’t super high risk. My family was in dairy and did it all of the time. Once it’s off the farm, all bets are off.

Definitely not poison. Risk of bacterial infection? Yes. I don’t know the stats on what that risk is though and for all I know perhaps it starts getting closer to zero when it’s your own farm and you are the one handling the whole process.

Please note I am not advocating for raw milk, I think it is not a wise decision but I also don’t believe it to be poison.

Citation very much needed

One of the few times I have used the downvote button in Hn for a comment.

Its not a huge effort to at least try to add some source with such a claim, besides the comment does not even bring anything of value to the discussion.

A and B are the first two letters of the Latin alphabet, though I don't see the relevance.

I wonder if the opposite is a factor: like most traditional clothing, Amish clothing blocks most sunlight.

I know a number of white males who would disagree with you, myself included.

All it takes is a single, major non-routine event to learn that lesson.

The system is really broken for everyone and the incentives are really skewed away from healthcare.

It was the first time I realized that people are existentially truly on their own and despite its claims, “the system” truly isn’t there for them.

> The Amish do not live an 1800 lifestyle. For example, if someone is sick and needs to go to the hospital, they use a phone to call an ambulance to take them there.

The Amish are very deliberate about what changes they incorporate into their communities. Each community also sets their own rules, so it's poor practice to generalize.

(For example, their attitudes towards electricity are quite complicated and I don't think I could do it justice in a quick post.)

> but a lack of care for white males is not actually one of them

racist, or just naive?

> There are a lot of things wrong with the American health care system, but a lack of care for white males is not actually one of them.

A lack of care for those who can't afford it is, though.

...also, plenty of EU countries appear to have a life expectancy, for males, less than the 76 years of Amish men for this cohort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

No screens is a good assumption for everyone at the time the study covered - TVs were just coming out towards the end, and were expensive enough that not everyone owned one yet.

They also have a cohesive family and social circles. Probably can't hurt?

When I was very young, my stepfather started a trucking company. We didn’t get along terribly well so my mom thought that driving together would solve our problems. We would hotshot recreational vehicles two to a flatbed and haul them from an Amish community east of Chicago to their dealer destination.

So, we got to know some people in the community and learned some things that would be relevant to this. One big one is the Amish view on technology. With 1965 data, especially looking at farmers, you’ll see variations in pest control tech. Amish people are not against all technology but they evaluate it differently.

For the Amish, they look at a technology and ask whether it will pull them together or push them apart. Farm chemicals would increase yields, but dramatically reduce the number of people they could have working on fields. So many colonies avoided highly toxic chemicals like DDT that were released during or after WW2. And because there was some resistance to Amish people, they tend to congregate together and so you’ll have colonies bunched up in areas - some colonies avoided water table contamination through a freak of geology and cousins who shared a belief on technology.

So nutrition does play a role - food in Amish communities is very whole and very close to natural. As an example, my stepfather was quite affable and so we’d take doughnuts to the factory where we picked up RVs. Certain companies have so much sugar in their doughnuts that it felt like giving people drugs. Physical activity is a constant. And their community plays a massive role in life and life expectancy but this data is from 1965 and looks at farmers so chemical use is definitely part of these findings as well.

The difference doesn’t come down to one single factor.

Comments that try to reduce population-scale differences to a single factor, like access to healthcare, are overly reductive. When it comes to obesity (not using being overweight, but truly past the obese threshold) you don’t need a doctor to inform you that it’s unhealthy.

The reductive claims about access to healthcare are also ignoring the fact that people in the US do actually use a lot of healthcare. The rate of GLP-1 use in America for weight loss is around 1 in 8 people, which is significantly higher than anywhere in Europe last time I checked. Obviously the higher obesity rate contributes to higher usage, but it demonstrates that many obese people in the United States are not lacking access to health care.

You quote:

> , is this a matter of the health care system

And you say:

> I see this 'medical system' stuff

To me there is a big difference between a "health care system" and a "medical system".

One is only here to try and fix issues, while the other will invest in prevention campains and help direct the overall politics around having an healthy population.

To me the recent EPA decision around PFAs is a signal of a deficient "health care system".

> Do ppl think having access to a doctor is going prevent one from being obese ? whats the logic.

Doctors can vary in whether or not (and for how long) they advocate trying a healthy diet and exercise before prescribing drugs. In the UK the system is incentivised to avoid drug prescriptions unless necessary, as it reduces the financial burden on the NHS - both for buying the drugs and for managing complications linked to obesity. In the US, pharma companies can offer money and perks to doctors who promote their products.

I realized that I ate way more chocolate than average Swiss people (Googled and it says around 24 grams per day for average people in Switzerland). I usually eat about 50 grams daily...and 72% dark

I suppose if you extend the definition of "medical system" to include education and intervention, it makes sense.

There's also medications in there - hypertension can be controlled with drugs, no?

But, yes, I agree with your main point - obesity in the US is widespread and a massive influence on both longevity and health care costs.

Nowadays maybe they could get Ozempic?

Having a socialized healthcare system incentivizes the government to ban the worst public heath offenders. High fructose corn syrup would have been long gone from most foods in a sane society, for example. Generally, making the government have a vested interest in its citizenry's good health is a good thing.

Are we talking about the same monks? Christian monks? The people developed champagne, chartreuse and many other alcoholic drinks?

Some also work outdoors.

Also disciplined breathing techniques, Om chanting strengthens the lungs and regulates O2 flows. FWIW they do get sunlight. People need some sunlight. More specifically Mitochondria need sunlight or artificial sunlight from 600nm -> 1200nm.

Do they?

From documentaries I've seen of Christian monks, there is no talk of personal benefits and emotions like a self-help book, instead it's spiritual motivations about being compelled to follow a path of devotion in service to their faith.

I get the impression that it's a hard life as such orders are dwindling and they report the deprivation of things they did since joining that we might find mundane like "going to buy music" (you can tell they joined pre '80s).

I recall reading the rules of a Buddhist monastery and it was basically a compendium of all the bad things monks have done, written down to make it ambiguous it's off-limits. It did not give the suggestion of fulfilled people. It had a lengthy chapter of all the things you can't put your penis in: people, children, animals, dead things, clay vessels, fabric dolls, trees, holes in the wall, holes in the ground etc. Feels like some desperate rules-lawyering had happened over the years.

Same family is likely not a useful comparison because lifestyle would be different. Eunuchs would be expected to serve the royal family, which implies plenty of food - not as good as the royals, but still plenty of it unlike their families back on the farm who lived closer to starvation at best and a bad year would cause a lot of deaths.

At least that is what I'd expect, but I'm trying to extrapolate what I know of European history (acoup) to Korea. Anyone have better expertise able to talk about the experience of the different groups?