Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
My contention is that both of those statements are true to an extent. To clarify, I think a diet consisting entirely of cheese can raise cholesterol, but a normal high cholesterol diet won't unless you follow it to the point of obesity, and high-LDL is much less of a risk factor than it's generally portrayed as with general obesity/metabolic unhealth as the main cause(granted they're linked), and that if you combine the two things it results in the standard health narrative to limit cholesterol intake for heart health being basically misinformation- people at risk need to just lose weight by limiting calories, not worry about fat in particular.
In other words I think that prevailing medical advice is playing up a very minor contributor to heart disease to downplay the role of general obesity mostly caused by high sugar consumption, and that bribery/lobbying by food companies is the cause of that because sugar and canola oil are much, much cheaper than saturated fat but not any healthier(I don't hold to the popular on twitter idea that seed oils are particularly bad for you but do think replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat tends to lead to more sugar in everything, increasing calorie counts, because it tastes worse).
I agree that education bureaucrats don't care very much if kids learn, I just have a conspiracy that districts don't want to show overly-rapid improvement because that would raise awkward questions about "so what do you need a budget increase for?", and that there's at least some cooperation among districts.
Yeah, that's a piece of evidence I'd point to, and I think countries with worse record keeping than China are probably even worse- would anyone even notice if a few thousand Congolese or Indonesian peasants here and there happened to only exist as a form of budget padding?
There's a good amount of speculative evidence that Nigeria's population is nowhere near what it claims and may possibly be a little as 1/2 the official figure, largely driven by gov't spending being divided among its provinces by headcount.
https://markessien.com/posts/real_population_of_nigeria/
https://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/589235-nigerias-population-is-a-lot-less-than-220-million-by-tope-fasua.html
The 2nd article is written by the Nigerian President's economic advisor.
I would've thought that Nigeria's population would be under-reported: it seems that everyone I've ever met has some sort of connection to the royal family.
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Sugar intake peaked around 2000: https://twitter.com/sguyenet/status/1061362985678049281?lang=en
It's hard to believe that decreasing intake is still driving obesity. It's easy to get a bunch of fat calories in without sugar and they'll make you just as fat (although obviously sugar has other negative metabolic effects).
You're kind of assuming that people know the true number of Indonesians and then bump up the number. It seems more likely that people don't know the number and even after any bumping at least in some cases there are even more people than reported.
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