Ramen is cheap, so there are more Ramen restaurants in poor areas, which have lower life expectancy?<p><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/01/31/low-socioeconomic-status-affects-life-expectancy-more-than-obesi_a_21704449/" rel="nofollow">https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/01/31/low-socioeconom...</a>
How do we prove that they didn't just look at mortality in all diseases and for all restaurants, and cherry-picked stroke-vs-ramen because it has the best significance?<p>I am not accusing them of anything - I have no horse in this race. What I am curious about is: how do you prove that you haven't p-hacked, if you are going to do a study like this?<p>Sure, you can pre-register your methods, but presumably you can get the data and do some data crunching on it way before you have to pre-register. How do you prove that your results are legit in the age of reproduction crisis?
People are just waking up to dangers of sugar, but too much salt is also not good, increasing blood pressure (see below link).<p>Potassium can offset much of the affects but it’s surprisingly difficult to get even the US recommended amount every day.<p>I’ve started using potassium salt instead of sodium salt in my cooking, and it feels great to kill two birds with one stone. Now I just need soy sauce and others without sodium to make my kitchen (nearly) salt free.<p><a href="https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/news/20110711/high-sodium-low-potassium-diet-linked-to-heart-risk" rel="nofollow">https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/news/...</a>
Now whenever I read articles of this type of statistical research, my mind immediately recalls Tyler Vigen's website and book... <a href="http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations" rel="nofollow">http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations</a>
So, the higher carbohydrate and salt content in restaurant style Ramen increases the chance of stroke.<p>I make Ramen at home about twice a week and double the vegetables and halve the noodles in Ramen recipes. After reading this article, I am going to try to reduce sodium also.
Weird they think ramen is the only food with regional variation. And lots of stressed salarymen in Tokyo eating ramen but Tokyo is down the bottom. It's really this north-western part of Honshu.<p>Total guess, but when I was in Hirosaki once (red area), I went to this little restaurant on advice of an innkeeper, and they gave me this plate of green leaf and other tempura. It was huge and oily and they expected me to eat it by myself. I remember thinking at the time...this can't be good for my health.
Not surprising. In the China Study they also found a positive correlation between consumption of wheat flour and heart disease. (Some places in China eat mostly rice, others more wheat.)<p>Any new guesses on the mechanism?<p>Related: <a href="https://deniseminger.com/2010/09/02/the-china-study-wheat-and-heart-disease-oh-my/" rel="nofollow">https://deniseminger.com/2010/09/02/the-china-study-wheat-an...</a>
Hokkaido seems like it is a major problem for this study: it ranks low on stroke mortality and high on ramen consumption and is well known as a land that loves ramen and other rich foods. Perhaps they eat more seafood and that somehow offsets the risk or have some other advantage but it is interesting the authors don’t even mention it given how glaring it is the largest prefecture and one of the easiest to spot on the map for a foreigner.
I’m reluctant to draw conclusions around nutrition based on this correlation, because ramen is so regional. (When I’m in the Japanese mountains, there’s no ramen - just udon and soba.)<p>I understand a huge portion of Japan’s ramen is in Tokyo. There are many human health factors with an outsize presence/lack-of-presence in Tokyo - like alcohol consumption, noise, overwork...
I’d be surprised if people are eating ramen so much it affects long term disease rates noticeably just because there are more restaurants. I also think Japanese could eat tonkotsu ramen a few times a week and still get less saturated fat than most Western diet eaters. Maybe salt could cause some acute condition though?
If you see the results, you can also find negative correlation between stroke and the density of the western restaurants (french/italian or fast foods). What conclusions can you draw out of that? I'd probably just think this is just an interesting study that can't say anything with the results alone.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal</a><p>Food fraud is potentially related to this correlation.