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The PURE Study - what diet is best?

There has been some recent news from a big international study that has been summarized across some news outlets as "Cut down on carbs and have some fat" and various takes on that.

This is referring to the recent PURE study which looked at self-reported dietary intake from 135,000 people from 18 countries over 7 years and saw who was more likely to live or die and the short answer they got was that a high carb diet is more likely to be associated with dying than a high fat diet.

There are a lot of problems with this study that the Harvard people summarized here.  I wouldn't say that the end result is wrong, but it does oversimplify things.  Not every carb is equal and sometimes higher carb diets exist because people can't afford foods higher in fats and protein.  You also can't link causality in an observational study like this.  So while most of us probably do eat too many simple carbohydrates (pretty much anything with extra sugar in it), I wouldn't swear off all carbs just because of something that comes across on the news ticker.

A better study that came out along with this in the PURE trial was one showing that eating 3-4 servings a day, combined, of fruits/vegetables/legumes reduces your chance of dying.  But going over that doesn't seem to lower your chances.  The takeaways from this are basically confirming that fruits, vegetables and legumes are a good foundation of a diet and support the idea of a plant-based diet probably being the healthiest thing out there.  It also supports the notion that you can definitely eat fruits and don't need to be a veggie only person.

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