Another victory for low carb, high fat.
That Eisenhower anecdote is sad. Nina Teicholz’s new book
The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.
Gee, sort of like climate “science.”
[Sunday afternoon update]
How the war against saturated fat created carb overload, obesity and heart disease:
…there was no turning back: Too much institutional energy and research money had already been spent trying to prove Dr. Keys’s hypothesis. A bias in its favor had grown so strong that the idea just started to seem like common sense. As Harvard nutrition professor Mark Hegsted said in 1977, after successfully persuading the U.S. Senate to recommend Dr. Keys’s diet for the entire nation, the question wasn’t whether Americans should change their diets, but why not? Important benefits could be expected, he argued. And the risks? “None can be identified,” he said.
In fact, even back then, other scientists were warning about the diet’s potential unintended consequences. Today, we are dealing with the reality that these have come to pass.
One consequence is that in cutting back on fats, we are now eating a lot more carbohydrates—at least 25% more since the early 1970s. Consumption of saturated fat, meanwhile, has dropped by 11%, according to the best available government data. Translation: Instead of meat, eggs and cheese, we’re eating more pasta, grains, fruit and starchy vegetables such as potatoes. Even seemingly healthy low-fat foods, such as yogurt, are stealth carb-delivery systems, since removing the fat often requires the addition of fillers to make up for lost texture—and these are usually carbohydrate-based.
The problem is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically efficient at storing fat. Meanwhile, fructose, the main sugar in fruit, causes the liver to generate triglycerides and other lipids in the blood that are altogether bad news. Excessive carbohydrates lead not only to obesity but also, over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart disease.
First emphasis mine. In that, it has much in common with climate “science.”
And as I’ve often noted, my father was a fatal casualty of that war, back in the late seventies.
[Update a few minutes later]
One other point, that I’d never considered before. The American Heart Association is probably responsible for more heart disease and cardiac (and stroke) fatalities than any other organization.
But but but… I thought the science was settled, and the debate over?
🙂
As a kid I remember reading that despite there being a casual relationship between high fat diets with lots of salt consumption and people having heart disease there were cases that were completely out of whack with that hypothesis. e.g. Iceland had lower than normal incidence of heart disease and people there consumed a lot of salted dry fat fish. I would not be surprised if it is indeed the high carbon diet that causes these issues. Consider diabetics for example. They have a much higher than normal incidence of health and cholesterol problems precisely because they were diabetics. These people could have pre-diabetic conditions and not know about it. The only thing salt does is increase blood pressure. But IMO the blood vessels only get damaged with high blood pressure if they are brittle or clogged to begin with. Those people would get blood vessel issues if they did strenuous exercise as well.