Monday, March 16, 2015

A big fat surprise for dietary dogma


...Poor Dad. He gave up all his favourite foods for nothing. It turns out that for most people, the cholesterol in the food you eat has little or no connection to the cholesterol in your blood, or to heart disease either. “There’s never been a single study that showed higher egg consumption is related to higher risk of heart disease,” Walter Willett, a nutrition scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, told New York Magazine recently.

Last month, in an epic climbdown, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advice Committee, whose guidelines influence millions of people, finally dropped its recommendation to restrict cholesterol. “Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption,” it said. So go ahead – eat all the eggs you want.
Just about everything we thought we knew about the evils of cholesterol and fats has turned out to be wrong. The doctors, the nutritionists, the dietitians, the heart societies, the experts at Health Canada, the food pyramid that hung on the wall in school – the entire health and medical establishment, in fact, have been perpetuating a big fat fraud.

It gets worse. Obviously, if you cut down on one food, you have to replace it with something else. Over the past 30 years, we’ve replaced “bad” foods like red meat, milk, eggs and butter with grains, pasta, starchy vegetables and refined carbohydrates laced with sugar. These foods turn out to be even worse. They’re the reason that rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are soaring. In other words, the diet advice we’ve been force-fed all our lives has actually made us fatter and sicker.

Virtually all the increase in calories in the past 30 years has come from carbohydrate foods. Meanwhile, we’ve cut fat intake by 25 per cent. We gave up eggs and butter and switched to lean meat – and got fatter. “Americans have been the subjects of a vast, uncontrolled diet experiment with disastrous consequences,” Nina Teicholz wrote last month in the New York Times... (continued)


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