Fruits and vegetables’ dad can beat up asthma’s dad

According to an article from PonderingWillow, children in rural areas of Crete don’t get a lot of asthma or other respiratory allergies, and whenever you get some statistical outlier like that the scientists like to dive in and start slicing people open and poking at their insides. Well OK, maybe they don’t do that, but if it were rats without asthma, you could be sure they’d be at the border declaring 37,000 scalpels. In this case, all they could do without the pesky ethics board poking them was to observe the children’s diet. Guess what they found? A diet with lots of fruits and vegetables appears to reduce the risk of asthma and other respiratory allergies. Of course, the BBC is calling this the “Mediterranean diet,” so parents everywhere are probably stocking up on feta right now, which is just going to add to consumer confusion for another 30 years. I don’t know how “plant based foods” could be reduced to a simpler soundbite, but when you’re old and grey people you’ve known all your life are going to come up to you and say “hey, why didn’t you tell me about this vegan thing earlier?”