The nutrition establishment is finally starting to figure it out, decades too late:
It’s a confusing message. For years we’ve been fed the line that eating fat would make us fat and lead to chronic illnesses. “Dietary fat used to be public enemy No. 1,” says Dr. Edward Saltzman, associate professor of nutrition and medicine at Tufts University. “Now a growing and convincing body of science is pointing the finger at carbs, especially those containing refined flour and sugar.”
Thanks, FDA food pyramid.
How many people have been killed by this wrong-headed advice over the past forty years? My own father probably died a year younger than my present age, partly from a fataphobic diet recommended after his first heart attack in 1968. This notion that “fat makes you fat” seems like a primitive “you are what you eat” mentality. It’s not just about thermodynamics, or at least, you can’t ignore the burn rate. Not all calories are created equal, when it comes to food’s effects on your endocrine system.
Oh, and speaking of the FDA, how many are going to die in the future because they screwed up the pipeline for new antibiotics? Either abolish the agency, at least defang it and take away its regulatory authority, and have it focus on research. It murders Americans by the millions.
[Update a few minutes later]
A potato-only diet? You always have to be careful in drawing too much from this, because everyone is different. It is nice to know, though, that potatoes aren’t as bad as we’ve thought, from a glycemic standpoint.
The gov has blood on it’s hands – the result of the big ag lobby of course. It will be interesting to see the health insurance lobby take on the big ag lobby once insurers have to cover the fatties too.
The glycemic index is a red herring. Totally useless. High fructose corn syrup is lower than lactose (milk sugar), but guess which one is bad for you. Yes, white bread is very high, but crystalline fructose has a GL of zero, and the latter will give you diabetes five times faster than the former.
No correlation whatsoever.
The problem isn’t “carbs”, or “fats”, or “proteins.” The problem is eating industrially processed chemicals and franken-foods instead of real food.
Many ancient cultures were healthy and disease resistant on a high-carbohydrate diet. But did they eat Wonder Bread with grape jam? Of course not. They ate whole potatoes, or fresh ground corn or wheat, beans, and/or rice. Whole. Fresh. Unprocessed.
Many ancient cultures were healthy and disease resistant on a high-fat diet. But did they eat Crisco with canola oil? Of course not. Those were invented during the 20th century, and are entirely artificial. They ate coconut, or grass fed dairy, or seal and fish fat. Whole. Fresh. Unprocessed.
Every culture that produces tall, healthy, disease resistant individuals eats between 10 and 25% of their daily calories from proteins. But do they eat soy burgers? Obviously not. They eat meat or dairy.
The human body is marvelously adaptable. A diet of almost pure potatoes can be healthy (and this should surprise no one, particularly any Irish reading this), but so can a diet of nothing but cow blood and half-and-half (the Masai eat this). Or seal fat and dried fish. Or coconuts, yams and fish. Or rye bread, butter and cheese. Or wheat chapatis, yogurt and apricots.
As long as its fresh, whole and unprocessed it’s really hard to go wrong.
Unfortunately that means that all wheat products are basically “out” in America today, as it’s darn near impossible to get bread that is sourdough levened and not only baked but also milled both locally and recently. That’s why I stick to brown rice, beans and root vegetables for carbs.
Outright killed? Not too many. But if you mean “killed before their time” probably only Mao Zedong would have a bigger number.
The entire obesity, heart disease and diabetes epidemic sweeping our country can be laid squarely at the FDA’s feet. Dr. Broda Barnes was able to cure heart disease and diabetes decades ago with dietary change and (in hard cases) supplemental support for permanently damaged endocrine systems. Of all of his patients not a single one died of a heart attack. Not. One.
And the FDA remains utterly oblivious.
It’s amazing. No matter what the consensus is, it’s always the fault of a business lobby if people don’t follow it.
It’s the failure to produce new antibiotics that most concerns me. Back in the bad old days before antibiotics became widely available (~1945), people died of simple infections at an astonishing rate. Years ago, the TV program Nova told the story of the production of penicillin, the first widely available antibiotic. When they went to do the first clinical trials on a human subject, they had a very limited supply and didn’t know how much to give, so they divided their meager test sample into a few doses and hoped for the best. The patient was a British police officer who was dying. At first, he seemed to make a miraculous recovery. However, the amount of antibiotic wasn’t enough and he died. The source of his infection was a rose thorn. He had pricked his finger on a rose thorn and ended up dying. I think this link will show the video I’m talking about.
If things keep going the way they are, we’ll be back to those bad old days before too long. The death count from infection – already greater than from AIDS – will be horrific. We will have lost one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time and for what?
CSPI is suing McD’s again. Isn’t this the bunch that made McD change from frying potatoes in fat to using trans-fat?
“Many ancient cultures were healthy and disease resistant” – huh?
“it’s always the fault of a business lobby if people don’t follow it”
1. Gov provides huge grain price subsidy at the prompting of agribusiness lobby.
2. Gov indoctrinates population (starting in elementary school) that grain is healthy!
3. Population does cost comparison of cheap processed grain foods vs. fresh meat/veggies/fruits/nuts/fats and comes to the reasonable conclusion.
I’m not saying that people don’t have free will and choose to eat right – many of us do. But you can’t deny the government influence. Also, I have no idea why 1 and 2 are bold.
Never mind – 1 and 2 were bold in the preview.
That it correct. Also, many were not. It really depended on what sort of food they had access to, and how much.
Modern folks generally have one of two distored views of the past. Hippies seem to think it was bucolic, and ignore all the dirt, hard work, and lack of modern conveniences.
But another group, generally conservative, think the past was backwards in all ways and the present better in all ways. Also, the past is universally regressive – it was equally bad all over.
Neither of those are true. I won’t bother to debunk the first one. But the second one isn’t true either. There were cultures that routinely produced strong, tall, healthy individuals with good life expectancy. Life expectancy was lower overall due to the lack of antibiotics and modern trauma surgery, but the health of the individuals (when not injured or infected) was far greater than the modern Men of the West.
As a simple example, if a pre-modern Masai or Sikh beat the odds of being eaten by lions or tigers and lived to the ripe old age of 70, that pre-modern fellow was far stronger and more active than a 70-year-old American, and had a better chance of reaching 80. No joke.
Likewise, plague outbursts in pre-modern times did not effect all populations equally. Disease that would run rampant through populations with poor nutrition would leave well fed populations untouched. I’m blanking on the name of the doctor who did the study (sorry for the lack of references), but one doctor found populations that were even near-immune to venereal diseases, and would recover from infections they did catch with just bedrest despite a high mortality rate among other populations.
Takeaway – food matters more than most people think.
“food matters more than most people think.”
Or, one could make another equally rash assumption that the act of growing and stalking and catching one’s own food with one’s own bare hands may constitute a form of *gasp* exercise, and that regular exercise and exertion are the key to long life and healthy living, regardless of diet.
I’m not willing to go back to hunting and manual harvesting, but the whole idea that ancient cultures were healthy merely because of their diet is specious at best, and your posts read like passages from “Cradle to Cradle” or “When the Trucks Stopped Running”.
Over eating and a sedentary lifestyle were rare in ancient cultures. Infection was a leading cause of death. Today the situation is reversed, giving us a vastly different disease profile.
But another group, generally conservative, think the past was backwards in all ways and the present better in all ways.
Really?
I’m not a conservative, but many good friends are, and none of them believe such a thing, as far as I know. In fact, I’ve never seen such a bizarre description of “conservatives.”
These findings echo the argument of the book Nourishing Traditions, which is as much about nutrition as it is a cookbook. Nourishing Traditions uses the insights of American dentist Weston Price–who studied the health of primitive and traditional peoples–as a starting point for a discussion of the importance of animal fats and traditional (ancient, pre-modern) food preparation techniques for good nutrition. Although the book bills itself as “politically incorrect” largely as a marketing technique, that moniker is not completely accurate, as it is very much “politically correct” in the sense that it is anti-industrial and opposed to most innovations in food preparation, processing, and for that matter in agriculture since at least the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, it is an interesting book, and one can learn a lot about all kinds of things that the “nutrition establishment” has been keeping quiet for years.
I questioned the quality of nutrition reporting when the 4:00 news ran a special about “the dangers of killer celery.” It evidently produces a self-defense substance that is toxic to bugs. Several years later eggs were bad for you, then they were reported to have gotten a bum rap, and just the other day I heard someone recommending more dairy and eggs.
But another group, generally conservative, think the past was backwards in all ways and the present better in all ways.
Unlike Rand, I am a conservative and neither I nor any conservative I know believes that. We in fact generally believe the exact opposite.
I’ll just say that up until the early 80s the idea in other parts of the world was that Americans were too thin. My mother and I visited Europe in 1981 and that’s what they kept telling us — “You’re too skinny! Have more dessert!” I gained so much weight my special bought-for-Europe outfits no longer fit when I got home and I had to give them all away. I will say we ate a lot of carbs there, in the form of cakes and cookies and other European delights. Mmmm…
Anyway, I was skinny all through the Seventies and that was when I was on a parentally- imposed diet loosely based on the Four Food Groups (remember those? I think they were Meat and Eggs, Dairy, Vegetables and Fruits, and Grains; I think equal amounts of each group were the ideal diet) and their Depression childhood. Breakfast was supposed to be a hearty meal of eggs and bacon and toast, though I could get away with cereal during the school year. Lunch was light at home/school but there was always meat and veggies. At my grandma’s house on weekends lunch was the big meal and dinner light; at home it was the reverse because of school and my parents worked, but the rule everyone followed was “you can’t have two starches” — that meant you could have rice or noodles or potatoes but not more than one of those. (Bread didn’t count — it was “the staff of life” and we could eat as much as we wanted as long as we cleaned our plates). Meat was at every meal, except for those rare occasions when we had macaroni and cheese. Pasta dishes were mac-and-cheese, hamburger-and-macaroni casserole, or spaghetti with meat sauce and they were a special-occasion meal not practically every day. We had to clean our plates before getting seconds or before dessert. If we didn’t clean our plates we got no dessert. And snacks — candy, chips, things like that — were strictly regulated. Also we were outside and running around a lot, not stuck at home in front of the wiis and the computers no one had back then — even me, and I was a snail. Fat kids were a rarity back then, as were hugely obese adults.
All of this back-and-forth over time simply reinforces my policy of ignoring all food fads and all breaking medical advice.
I think that upon analysis the historical record would show not only that such a policy keeps one no worse off than a trend-follower in terms of health outcomes, but perhaps even ahead.
And you save all the effort of panicking over your diet, trying to change it radically, etc…