Hungarians practically eat themselves to death - Barabási

In an interview with weekly HVG, Albert-László Barabási presented an example for the impact of a high vaccination coverage. “In Boston, for example, where vaccination coverage is 83%, there’s no new wave, while in Tennessee with a vaccination coverage of 20% the pandemic is raging, and hospitals are saturated. Even those that have been vaccinated can get infected because of those that have not,” he said.

It is only fair the be wary of the COVID-19 vaccines, but there’s also a thing called social obligation, as those that do not get their shots can also harm their environment. Barabási also said that “by making a host of activities conditional to holding an immunity certificate Hungary has made great progress.”

But he stressed

I would have kept the certificates in place for a longer time, thus influencing masses that are still on the fence but willing to accept to be inoculated in exchange for their convenience.

Barabási also addressed his research into healthy food which is aimed at mapping out the chemicals present in our food. There are 26,000+ chemicals in our diet that impact our health.

Thanks to the many chemical and nutritional components it carries, diet critically affects human health. However, the currently available comprehensive databases on food composition cover only a tiny fraction of the total number of chemicals present in our food, focusing on the nutritional components essential for our health. Indeed, thousands of other molecules, many of which have well documented health implications, remain untracked, says Barabasi in an article published in Nature Magazine.
To explore the body of knowledge available on food composition, we built FoodMine, an algorithm that uses natural language processing to identify papers from PubMed that potentially report on the chemical composition of garlic and cocoa. After extracting from each paper information on the reported quantities of chemicals, we find that the scientific literature carries extensive information on the detailed chemical components of food that is currently not integrated in databases. Finally, we use unsupervised machine learning to create chemical embeddings, finding that the chemicals identified by FoodMine tend to have direct health relevance, reflecting the scientific community’s focus on health-related chemicals in our food.

In another research publication he says many documented health effects may be linked to untracked chemicals. Consider, for example, trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO). Recent studies have found that patients with stable coronary heart disease had a fourfold greater risk of dying from any cause over the subsequent five years if they had high blood levels of TMAO.

The Mediterranean diet, which regularly pairs red meat with fresh garlic, derives some of its known health benefits from allicin, which blocks TMA production in the gut, ultimately lowering the TMAO concentration in plasma.

Barabás explained why this research is vital also for Hungarians.

“Hungary is the most obese nation in Europe and the fourth most obese country in the world. The main causes of death – cardiac and coronary diseases and diabetes – stem from poor diet and are way more devastating than the damage caused by smoking.

We practically eat ourselves to death, not only in terms of quantity but also in terms of quantity

, warned Barabási.

He underlined that Hungary’s shockingly high death rate in the coronavirus pandemic is also related to this.

“The pandemic took the lives mostly of obese people with metabolic syndrome,” he said.

Barabási noted that an economic research recently published in the United States pointed out that treating the health consequences of obesity costs three times more than feeding the entire country.

According to the latest studies, 70% of our calory intake come from ultra-processed food. He claims the food industry entered a deadly price competition, and health was pushed into the background, and this is where the responsibility of governments come in. He argues that we have to take a stand against the food industry.

Just like in the case of tobacco products, governments need to deploy all means they have – via taxation and regulations – to reduce the consumption of ultra-processed food.

Cover photo: Bacon fat is poured on bread and onions in 2015. Photo by MTI / Bea Kallos