It is semi-interesting that The Economist is paying attention and has done a review of Ninas book. -- The case against fat would seem simple. Fat contains more calories, per gram, than do carbohydrates. Eating saturated fat raises cholesterol levels, which in turn is thought to bring on cardiovascular problems. Ms Teicholz dissects this argument slowly. Her book, which includes well over 100 pages of notes and citations, covers decades of nutrition research, including careful explorations of academics’ methodology. This is not an obvious page-turner. But it is. ... But the vilification of fat, argues Ms Teicholz, does not stand up to closer examination. She pokes holes in famous pieces of research—the Framingham heart study, the Seven Countries study, the Los Angeles Veterans Trial, to name a few—describing methodological problems or overlooked results, until the foundations of this nutritional advice look increasingly shaky. The opinions of academics and governments, as presented, led to real change. Food companies were happy to replace animal fats with less expensive vegetable oils. They have now begun abolishing trans fats from their food products and replacing them with polyunsaturated vegetable oils that, when heated, may be as harmful. Advice for keeping to a low-fat diet also played directly into food companies’ sweet spot of biscuits, cereals and confectionery; when people eat less fat, they are hungry for something else. Indeed, as recently as 1995 the AHA itself recommended snacks of “low-fat cookies, low-fat crackers…hard candy, gum drops, sugar, syrup, honey” and other carbohydrate-laden foods. Americans consumed nearly 25% more carbohydrates in 2000 than they had in 1971. ... There is increasing evidence that a bigger culprit is most likely insulin, a hormone; insulin levels rise when one eats carbohydrates. Yet even now, with more attention devoted to the dangers posed by sugar, saturated fat remains maligned. “It seems now that what sustains it,” argues Ms Teicholz, “is not so much science as generations of bias and habit.” -- It isnt just that you gain weight on a high carb diet and flirt with type II diabetes, it also seems to increase cardiovascular problems, stroke and cancer. In some sense we all already know this, its just that with the demonization of animal fats the sugary poison seemed like a lesser evil. Increasingly the reverse seems closer to truth. economist/news/books-and-arts/21602984-why-everything-you-heard-about-fat-wrong-case-eating-steak-and-cream?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/the_case_for_eating_steak_and_cream
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 17:02:56 +0000
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