ScienceDaily reports that:
In a population of initially well-functioning older adults, we found a significant correlation between strong adherence to the Mediterranean diet and a slower rate of cognitive decline among African American, but not white, older adults. Our study is the first to show a possible race-specific association between the Mediterranean diet and cognitive decline.
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Mediterranean Diet has Varied Effects on Cognitive Decline among Different Races
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(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Sunday July 20 2014, @08:20AM
Is sample size of 2326 enough to come to a conclusion ??
Why do you think this diet does NOT work with white older adults ?
Since, most of the people who follow the Mediterranean Diet are white (both young and old) from Mediterranean countries; What is difference between Mediterranean Older White Adults and American Older White Adults ?
What makes the Mediterranean Diet effective for older African-Americans ?
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 2) by lx on Sunday July 20 2014, @09:15AM
Form the article it's not clear if and how they accounted for cultural differences.
If the typical diet of older White American people is more healthy than the typical diet of older African-Americans then a switch to the Mediterrean diet may have less effect in that population.
From the abstract it appears that they only looked at adherence to the Mediterranean diet and didn't look at differences in overall diet in both groups, but without seeing the actual paper it's impossible to tell.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 20 2014, @09:51AM
Let me take a wild guess... while the Mediterranean Older White Adults are nuts ([citation] [wikipedia.org]... watch it or read it), at the same age the American Older White Adults are already salads (which is a species of vegetable)
The fact that older African-Americans jumped [wikipedia.org] or danced [imdb.com] before?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Sunday July 20 2014, @04:08PM
I'd say that is a very good sample size.
subicular junctures
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2014, @04:25AM
I'll bet you dollars to donuts they originally ran the regression without distinguishing the two groups and didn't get a significant result.
You rarely get clear answers out of large broad datasets.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @09:04AM
But, but, but, I thought everyone was the same! Everyone is equal and race is just an illusion!
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @11:30AM
Even your passive agressive character is more a result of your culture rather than of you being an inbred hick. Those extra fingers are genetic I'm afraid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @01:40PM
Lol....troll.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday July 20 2014, @07:34PM
This thread is racist and this whole discussion and submission are racist.
Race is only a social construct.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday July 20 2014, @08:10PM
Sorry, but it's not *only* a social construct, it's also a surrogate observable for a multitude of non-observable characteristics. It's not a particularly reliable surrogate, but it's one that easy to observe. Very few people could offer their geneotype to a study like this, and fewer would be willing to do so. (Even then you need to test fro epigenetic markers to complete the physical outline.) And, of course, culture is often divided along readily observable cleavage planes, and for that purpose race is used.
How about this one: Were use heavily exposed to DDT before you were 13? That's a known agent that affects epigenetic markers. How important isn't certain. It seems to lead to various physical problems. But the kicker is: Were your parents heavily exposed to DDT before or during their early teens? It's a partially inheritable change. Epigenetic changes aren't totally cleaned away between generations. They decay over generations, but there is still argument going on over how rapidly, and whether they all decay at the same rate and .... In rats some epigenetic changes seem to heal over around 5 generations. The particular change (a kink in the tail) didn't seem to confer any advantage under any circumstances. If I recall the test correctly it was imposed via a starvation diet. (See also studies about human families from the Netherlands during WWII. Also something about some place in scandanavia that I can't place at the moment.)
Now it's quite probable that families with black skin have experienced various environmental insults that families with other skin colors were spared. This could easily have caused epigenetic changes, though to my knowledge no studies have been done. (I'm *NOT* an expert in this area.)
But because of the preceeding arguments, race is not solely a social construct.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Informative) by opinionated_science on Sunday July 20 2014, @04:27PM
There is no scientific basis for race. To their credit, the authors of this study say
"Further studies in diverse populations are still needed to confirm the association between the Mediterranean diet and cognitive decline. Randomized controlled trials in particular can provide stronger evidence of the cognitive benefits of the Mediterranean diet, yet only one trial exists. If a true race effect exists, other studies in multiethnic cohorts can elucidate if such an effect is due to genetic and/or environmental factors. Regardless of any race effect, adherence to a Mediterranean diet should still be recommended for its established beneficial effects on other health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease".
There is no material given in the article for how the populations were selected other than "We followed 2,326 older adults (38.2% black, 51.3% female, aged 70–79 at baseline)", which is supposed to suggest there rest were "white". WTF?
Perhaps this field is still using outdated terms in their journals as tradition(!) , but it is on very shaky genetic as well as statistical grounds.