A final note about the Chinese study in the previous post: the overweight vegetable-eaters (read: wheat eaters) exercised more than their non-vegetable-eating, thin neighbors. So although their average calorie intake was a bit higher, their expenditure was as well.
Although I speculated in the last post that affluent people might be eating more wheat and fresh vegetables, the data don't support that. Participants with the highest income level actually adhered to the wheat and vegetable-rich pattern the least, while low-income participants were most likely to eat this way.
Interestingly, education showed a (weaker) trend in the opposite direction. More educated participants were more likely to eat the wheat-vegetable pattern, while the opposite was true of less educated participants. Thus, it looks like wheat makes people more educated. Just kidding, that's exactly the logic we have to avoid when interpreting this type of study!
