Good Calories, Bad Calories: What Really Makes Us Fat?
(Page 2 of 6)
October/November 2008
By Gary Taubes
These conclusions about diet and weight loss aren’t exactly new. A carbohydrate-restricted diet is not a “fad diet” as the American Heart Association has insisted on calling it. Rather it had been the standard medical practice for treating obesity until the 1960s, when the American Heart Association began insisting that we all eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets to prevent heart disease. But then, in one decade, the fattening carbohydrate was miraculously transformed — without benefit of scientific data — into heart-healthy diet food.
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So What Happened?
Beginning in the late 1950s, a small but influential group of nutritionists and cardiologists decided that dietary fat caused heart disease. First the American Heart Association adopted this position, then Congress, the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institutes of Health. Beginning in the late 1980s with the publication of the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, an entire research industry arose to create palatable non-fat substitutes for fat, while the food industry spent billions to market the less-fat-is-good message. The USDA’s booklet on dietary guidelines and its Food Guide Pyramid recommended that fats and oils be eaten “sparingly,” while we were now to eat six to 11 servings per day of the pasta, potatoes, rice and bread once considered uniquely fattening.
Three facts were neglected during this national push for a low-fat diet. One was the upturn in obesity and diabetes rates that emerged as this new nutritional advice displaced the knowledge that carbs were fattening.
The second was that when researchers actually did clinical trials to test the hypothesis that eating less fat or less saturated fat prevented heart disease, the evidence failed to support the hypothesis. This was the conclusion of a 2001 review of “reduced or modified dietary fat for preventing cardiovascular disease.” The review was published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization dedicated to producing unbiased assessments of the science underlying medical interventions. The authors had combed the literature for all possible studies that addressed the question of dietary fat and heart disease. They identified 27 that were performed with sufficient scientific rigor to be considered meaningful. These trials encompassed some 10,000 subjects, followed for an average of three years each. The review concluded that our supposedly heart-healthy diets, whether low in all fat or just saturated fat, had no effect on longevity and no significant effect on the likelihood of actually having a heart attack.
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