Category Archives: Culinary

Soylent

A New Yorker reporter gives it a try.

I haven’t read the whole thing yet.

[A while later]

OK, I did read it. I was amused to learn that he was hawking it at my own local Whole Foods. One concern I have is his use of seed oils. Canola has too much omega 6 for my health. I’d use olive instead, though it costs more. If you don’t use virgin, though, it doesn’t have to cost that much.

The Big Fat Surprise

Another victory for low carb, high fat.

That Eisenhower anecdote is sad. Nina Teicholz’s new book looks interesting, too:

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.

Why Do We Eat?

It’s generally not because we’re hungry.

I can generally go all day without eating, and often do. There’s a lot of evidence that fasting has some of the benefits of caloric restriction, in terms of life extension.

I’d note, though, that the article seems to subscribe to the caloric theory of weight gain and loss. It doesn’t say what “high-density” foods are, energetically speaking, but not all are created equal. Eating fat doesn’t make you fat.

Rethinking Fat

Even NPR is starting to figure it out.

But note, that, as with climate “science,” dissenters have trouble getting published when they have actual science in opposition to the “settled” science in nutrition:

“Fat was really the villain,” says Walter Willett, who is chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. And, by default, people “had to load up on carbohydrates.”

But, by the mid-1990s, Willett says, there were already signs that the high-carb, low-fat approach might not lead to fewer heart attacks and strokes. He had a long-term study underway that was aimed at evaluating the effects of diet and lifestyle on health.

“We were finding that if people seemed to replace saturated fat — the kind of fat found in cheese, eggs, meat, butter — with carbohydrate, there was no reduction in heart disease,” Willett says.

Willett submitted his data to a top medical journal, but he says the editors would not publish his findings. His paper was turned down.

“There was a lot of resistance to anything that would question the low-fat guidelines,” Willett says, especially the guidelines on saturated fat.

Willett’s paper was eventually published by a British medical journal, the BMJ, in 1996.

And that was almost twenty years ago, and the junk-science FDA guidelines that probably killed my father in the seventies remain pretty much in place.

Terrible Nutrition Advice

The top five worst.

I agree with all of them. Eating fat doesn’t make you fat, eating cholesterol doesn’t increase your cholesterol, stick with saturated fat (not just butter, but egg yolks, and animal fats), not seed oils, and stop counting calories. Just eat what’s good for you, and avoid what’s bad.

This is even more junk science than climate science (and as I’ve noted in the past, this kind of nonsense probably killed my father in the late seventies). As I’ve also noted in the past, science that has public consequences tends to become politicized.