Health Authorities Continue to Fail Us

We’re told to listen to doctors and qualified professionals—but they’ve been preaching the same advice for 50 years now

By Pete Ross
http://observer.com/

February 16, 2017

For example, there is no evidence to suggest that the cholesterol in eggs relates to blood cholesterol levels, but we are still advised to only eat up to two a day.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of Gary Taubes’ seminal The New York Times article, exposing the fraudulent research and advice from Ancel Keys, that saturated fats clog arteries and cause heart attacks. Titled “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie,” Taubes documented the history of the health advice we’ve been dished since the 1950s, the fact that the low fat dogma was decided by the government, the low fat diet’s increasingly negative impact on the health of the population, and the backdoor deals that provided certain industries with huge profits at the expense of everyone else.

We have since discovered that much of the research demonizing saturated fat—and fat in general—was in fact funded by sugar and cereal companies looking to keep the conversation away from their commodity’s place in everyday diets. Research conducted over the last 30 or so years reveals there is no evidence the consumption of saturated fats causes heart attacks or strokes; cholesterol’s role in developing heart disease is actually much more complex than we’ve been led to believe. In fact, despite constant protests from nutritionists and government authorities, the research actually shows that low carb diets are significantly more effective than low fat diets. And yet, the government’s dietary recommendations have changed very little.

Now, health authorities have attempted to cover up the fact that they are ignoring current research in favor of dated advice. In 2015, science and nutrition journalist Nina Teicholtz penned an editorial in the British Medical Journal criticizing the USDA’s dietary guidelines for failing to reflect the current scientific literature. After a year of scathing criticism from academics and authorities demanding the article be retracted, independent reviewers stood in favor of Teicholtz and her editorial. One of the most damning paragraphs is as follows:

In conclusion, the recommended diets are supported by a minuscule quantity of rigorous evidence that only marginally supports claims that these diets can promote better health than alternatives. Furthermore, the NEL (Nutrition Evidence Library) reviews of the recommended diets discount or omit important data. There have been at a minimum, three National Institutes of Health funded trials on some 50 ,000 people showing that a diet low in fat and saturated fat is ineffective for fighting heart disease, obesity, diabetes, or cancer. Two of these trials are omitted from the NEL review. The third trial is included, but its results are ignored. This oversight is particularly striking because this trial, the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), was the largest nutrition trial in history. Nearly 49, 000 women followed a diet low in fat and high in fruits, vegetables, and grains for an average of seven years, at the end of which investigators found no significant advantage of this diet for weight loss, diabetes, heart disease, or cancer of any kind. Critics dismiss this trial for various reasons, including the fact that fat consumption did not differ enough significantly between the intervention and control groups, but the percentage of calories from both fat and saturated fat were more than 25% lower in the intervention group than in the control group (26.7% v 36.2% for total fat and 8.8% v 12.1% for saturated fats). The WHI findings have been confirmed by other sizable studies and are therefore hard to dismiss. When the omitted findings from these three clinical trials are factored into the review, the overwhelming preponderance of rigorous evidence does not support any of the dietary committee’s health claims for its recommended diets.

Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:

http://observer.com/2017/02/health-recommendations-wrong-saturated-fat-sodium-intake/

Expecting Scientifically Sound Nutritional Guidance from the Feds? Fat Chance.

Nina Teicholz, critic of a federal dietary guidance committee, talks about her work.

Baylen Linnekin | October 7, 2015

https://reason.com/

Congress will hold a hearing this morning that will discuss the contentious recommendations made by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC). The hearing, which will see both USDA secretary Tom Vilsack and HHS secretary Sylvia Burwell appear before the House Committee on Agriculture, is an important one, as DGAC recommendations are used to inform national dietary policies—including everything from food labels to school lunches.

As I described last year, the DGAC is a federally mandated group made up of fifteen academics, culled from fields like nutrition, public health, and medicine. The mission of the DGAC, which has met every five years for the past 25 years, is to come up with recommendations "to help people choose an overall healthy diet that works for them." Much of the DGAC's work has been intrusive and meddlesome.

For example, I previously blasted the DGAC's work for suggesting the federal government send scolding text messages to obese Americans and its call for what I termed "a steady diet of taxes and other intrusive policy recommendations."

I'm hardly the only critic of the DGAC's work. Earlier this year, for example, I interviewed a prominent DGAC critic, Dr. Edward Archer, who argues, in a Mayo Clinic Proceedings article, that the DGAC is the latest federal government construct to present "anecdotal evidence as science."

Some or all of that may sound innocuous. But today's committee hearing comes in the wake of a recent article in the British Medical Journal by journalist and author Nina Teicholz that is highly critical of the DGAC's findings. Teicholz, author of the award-winning book The Big Fat Surprise, argues that the DGAC's conclusions are based on scant evidence, and that the committee willfully ignored evidence that might contradict those conclusions. "The omissions seem to suggest a reluctance by the committee behind the report to consider any evidence that contradicts the last 35 years of nutritional advice," Teicholz writes in the BMJ.

Teicholz's article has gotten lots of press and has found equally vocal supporters and detractors. This week, I asked Teicholz about her BMJ article, and why it's proven so controversial. My questions and her responses (both sent by email) are below.

Reason: Tell me about The Big Fat Surprise. Why did you write it? What is your argument? Who loved it? Who hated it? Why?

Nina Teicholz: I did not intend to write this book. In 2003, Gourmet magazine assigned me a story on trans fats, which got a lot of attention and which eventually led to a book contract—on trans fats. Diving into the subject of dietary fat, which is the subject that our nutrition recommendations have most obsessed about—good fat, bad fat, low-fat, non-fat—made me realize that there was a much bigger story, on how our nutrition policy had seemingly gotten it wrong on all fats. That was 10 years ago. I spent nearly a decade researching the topic and wrote a book on the history, politics, and science of dietary fat. My book makes many discoveries about different diets and fats, about vegetable oils, trans fats, the Mediterranean diet (olive oil), and tropical oils, but its main argument is this: that the hypothesis that saturated fats cause heart disease has always been based on weak, inconclusive science and does not hold up. This is part of the argument that the fat overall has been unfairly demonized and has been a distraction from the real cause of nutrition-related diseases. When I began my book, I had been mostly vegetarian for more than two decades. It was quite a personal transformation.

(Note: the book has been called "pro-meat," but this is inaccurate. The book does not make an argument for meat. It makes an argument for saturated fats, and meat is just one of the foods that includes this type of fat. Dairy, eggs, coconut oil and palm oil are others, and it's important to note that all these foods contain a mixture of fats, not just saturated.)  

I was lucky in that many people loved my book. It was named a *Best Book* of 2014 by theEconomist, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Mother Jones, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews. It got strong reviews in the British Medical Journal and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It served to inform quite a few magazine cover stories worldwide, including a now-iconic one featuring a picture of a butter curl for TIME. The subject matter was ground-breaking, and I think people loved it, too, because the book explained why they didn't need to feel guilty about eating these foods that had long been a part of their cultures—a Swedish grandmother's recipe with butter, for instance. Also the foods containing these long-forbidden fats are delicious, so many people tell me that it's been a great pleasure to welcome them, guilt-free, back into their lives. I also get a lot of emails from people telling me that after a lifetime of struggling with their weight, they effortlessly lost it after reading my book and switching to a higher-fat diet.

The people who hated the book were the institutions and people who had invested themselves in the idea that saturated fats cause heart disease, which is pretty much a clean sweep of the establishment. Most notably, this includes the American Heart Association and scientists close to the Dietary Guidelines process. These researchers have launched no end of attacks against me, mainly ad hominem and personal in nature. Strikingly, there has been no serious scientific critique of my book by any serious scientist.

Read the rest of the article by clicking on the link below:

https://reason.com/archives/2015/10/07/nina-teicholz-diet-guidelines-fat

Why “Clean Eating” is a Myth

By Armi Legge

http://evidencemag.com/

Grilled Filet Mignon with Herb Butter & Texas Toast

Your favorite foods are poisoning you.

Even foods that you thought were safe are actually destroying your health, making you fat, and shortening your life.

That’s what you’ve been taught to believe.

If there’s one mistaken idea that’s become more embedded in the fitness and health industry than any other, it’s that certain foods are bad for you.

This myth is so entrenched that it’s promoted by everyone from gym rats to doctors to public health authorities.

Most diet books are based on the idea that “bad” foods will keep you from losing weight or slow your progress.

There’s no doubt that what you eat can have a massive impact on your health, performance, and body composition. However, there’s no evidence you can’t achieve all of these things while still enjoying any food you like.

Clean Eating Doesn’t Exist

“Healthy.”

“Clean.”

“Safe.”

“Wholesome.”

“Good.”

These are the words people use to describe foods they believe you should eat. On the other hand, these are the words for foods you should not eat:

“Unhealthy.”

“Unclean.”

“Unsafe.”

“Unwholesome.”

“Double-plus un-good.” (1984, 1)

The biggest problem with the idea of “clean eating” is that “clean” has no objective definition. Everyone believes different foods are “unclean.”

Vegetarians: Animal meat.

Vegans: All animal products.

Bodybuilders: Milk, fruit, and white bread.

Paleo: Grains, legumes, dairy, refined oils, added salt, sugar, alcohol, and some vegetables.

USDA/United States Government: Saturated fat, cholesterol, red meat, eggs, trans-fats.

Low-carb: Sugar and other carbs.

Hippies: Artificial sweeteners, processed foods, cooked foods, packaged foods, BPA.

It’s safe to say that for every food, there’s someone saying it’s dangerous.

There’s no way to define clean eating, which means there’s no way to measure or quantify what effect this concept might have on your health. There’s also no way to objectively compare a “clean diet” to other diets.

Throughout this article, I’ll use examples from all of these categories and let you decide which group I’m referring to.

The one thing these ideas have in common is that there are “bad” foods that should be avoided or limited, and “good” foods that you can eat. This broad definition can be further classified into two forms.

The Two Kinds of Clean Eating

1. There are good and bad foods, and you should never eat any of the bad foods.
2. There are good and bad foods, and you should only eat a small number of the bad foods to limit the damage.

In this article, you’ll learn why both of these ideas are irrational, unscientific, and unhealthy.

We’ll start by looking at the three potential ways a food could decrease your health, lifespan, or body composition. Then we’ll see if any foods actually meet these criteria for being “unhealthy.”

Why There are No Good or Bad Foods

There are three ways a food could negatively affect your health, longevity, or body composition.

1/. Contributing to a caloric excess which leads to negative health problems from being overweight.(2)

2/. Causing nutrient deficiencies by diluting the nutrient density of your diet.(3)

3/. Directly interfering with your body’s functions, causing specific diseases, increasing fat gain, or accelerating aging.

Let’s see if any foods meet these criteria.

Excess Calories Can be Bad for You — From Any Food

There is no evidence that any food will cause more fat gain than the excess calories it provides. There is also no evidence that eating a certain food will help you lose fat.

Fat loss is ultimately about calories in versus calories out.

Any food that has calories can technically be bad for you — if consumed in excess.

This includes chicken breasts, sweet potatoes, whole grains, and even vegetables. The reason many people consider these “clean foods” is because they tend to be harder to overeat than things like cookies or ice cream.

For this reason, some people refer to things like sweets, baked goods, soda, and other junk food as “fattening.”

This is an inaccurate and myopic viewpoint. It assumes that you will over-eat these foods — regardless of the rest of your diet.

If your diet has enough satiating power to keep you satisfied and happy, then there’s nothing wrong with also consuming some less-filling indulgences. This idea also assumes that people can’t moderate their food intake,which they can.

For some people, eating enough to gain or maintain their weight can be a struggle.(4-6) In these cases, higher calorie/more palatable foods can be extremely useful for meeting their calorie needs — not to mention being more enjoyable. Yet you don’t find people saying ice cream and cookies are life-saving for an anorexic, or muscle building for someone who’s trying to get bigger.

People look at these foods in isolation and assume they’re unhealthy regardless of the context.

Remember these two points:

1. The potential to over-consume a food does not mean that you will.
2. Some people need to eat more — and higher calorie, more palatable, and less filling foods can be an advantage — even a necessity.

However, you’re also concerned with your long-term health. You want to make sure you’re giving your body everything it needs to perform optimally, and you don’t want to deprive your body of essential nutrients.

Read the rest of the article by clicking on the link below:

http://evidencemag.com/clean-eating/

Book Review: 'The Big Fat Surprise' by Nina Teicholz

By Michael R. Eades, M.D.

http://www.proteinpower.com/

13 May 2014

This review of The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz is the most difficult and demanding I have ever written. It is demanding for a couple of reasons.

First, it is psychologically demanding on me because I want to write a review so good it inspires everyone to buy the book immediately and read it. Why? Because I think it is one of the most important books on nutrition ever written. Maybe the most important. And I feel a responsibility to inspire as many people as I can to get their hands on it.

Second, this book is so brimming with valuable information that I was almost paralyzed in trying to figure out which parts to excerpt. A book review always comes with excerpts, and this book presented me with such a bounty of choices, it took me forever to decide which to use.

I can categorically tell you that there are not enough superlatives – at least not in my vocabulary – to adequately describe how wonderful and important this book is. But I’m going to try because I really believe it is that good.

I met Nina Teicholz five or six years ago when I was in New York. She told me she had converted from a low-fat to a low-carb diet and that she was writing a book. We really didn’t discuss the book she was writing, so I was clueless. We kept in sporadic touch via email and exchanged a scientific paper or two, but that was about it. I hadn’t heard from her in a couple of years when last September out of the blue I got an email from her saying the first draft of her book was finished. She asked if I would mind reading it and giving her feedback.

I hate these requests because it is really time consuming to read an entire manuscript. And if it sucks, what do you say? I’ve written a number of books in my time, and I know how much effort goes into writing one. Even a bad one. So I hate to be put in the position of having to say to someone, Your book is a loser.

But, Nina’s request came when I was traveling and had some airplane time on my hands, so I said, Sure, send it on.

What she sent was a number of files, some in Word, some pdf. And she didn’t send the entire book, just the first half of it.

I started to read and was absolutely riveted. Instead of trying to carve out time to read her manuscript, I started carving out time from reading her book to do all the other things I needed to do. It was that good.

As I was approaching the end of the part she sent, I emailed asking for the rest. Which she sent, and which I voraciously devoured.

I made a few suggestions – a very few – and we emailed back and forth a bit. Then a few months later, her publisher sent me a bound review copy of basically the printout of her manuscript. It wasn’t typeset as most galleys are. I read this version and made copious notes. Here are what a typical couple of pages in my copy looks like. You can now see why it was difficult for me to decide what small parts to excerpt.

Since then, I’ve received the actual typeset galleys, which I have also read. So, I’ve gone through this book three times. All I’m asking is for you to go through it once. I guarantee you will thank me for pushing it on you.

Nina Teicholz is a married mother of two living in New York City. She is an investigative journalist and food writer by trade. When she first moved to New York, she was following a low-fat, USDA Food Pyramid style diet. Her life changed when she began writing restaurant reviews. She ate whatever the chefs she was reviewing sent out, which was often “paté, beef of every cut prepared in every imaginable way, cream sauces, cream soups, foie gras – all the foods [she] had avoided [her] entire life.”

She ate an enormous amount of fatty food, and despite her worries to the contrary, her cholesterol numbers didn’t go through the roof. But best of all, she lost the ten pounds she had been struggling to shed.

Read the rest of the review by clicking on the link below:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/big-fat-surprise/#.VAdVeyRiwU8.facebook

The science of saturated fat: A big fat surprise about nutrition?

By NINA TEICHOLZ
http://www.independent.co.uk/
26 August 2014



When Ronald M Krauss decided, in 2000, to review all the evidence purporting to show that saturated fats cause heart disease, he knew that he was putting his professional career at risk. Krauss is one of the top nutrition experts in the United States, director of atherosclerosis research at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and adjunct professor of nutritional studies at the University of San Francisco at Berkley. But challenging one of his field’s most sacrosanct beliefs – that the fats in meat, cheese and butter are bad for health – was a near-heretical act.

A few years earlier, when a colleague of Krauss’s had merely tried to speak about his positive findings regarding the high-fat Atkins diet, he was met with jeers and derision. One member of the audience yelled “I am absolutely disgusted that the [government] would waste my money on a study on the Atkins diet” – to the applause of many.

Challenging any of the conventional  wisdom on dietary fat has long been a form of professional suicide for nutrition experts. And saturated fats, especially, are the third rail. But Krauss persevered and concluded in 2010, after reviewing all the scientific literature, that saturated fats could not be said to cause heart disease. In March, another group of  scientists, including faculty from Cambridge and Harvard, came to the same conclusion after conducting a similar “meta-analysis”. These were stunning results. It seemed that saturated fat, our principal dietary culprit for decades, had been unfairly convicted.

Yet the truth is there never has been solid evidence that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be true because nutrition policy was derailed over the past half-century by personal ambition, bad science, politics, and bias.

Recipe for success: Vilijamur Stefansson (Corbis) 

Our fear of saturated fats began in the 1950s when Ancel Keys, a pathologist at the University of Minnesota, first proposed that they raised cholesterol and therefore caused heart disease. Keys was an aggressive, outsized personality with a talent for persuasion. He found a receptive audience for his “diet-heart hypothesis” among public-health experts who faced a growing emergency: heart disease, a relative rarity three decades earlier, had skyrocketed to be a leading cause of death. Keys managed to implant his idea into the American Heart Association and, in 1961, the group published the first-ever guidelines calling for Americans to cut back on saturated fats, as the best way to fight heart disease. 

The US government adopted this view in 1977 and the rest of the world followed. But the evidence backing these guidelines was weak. Mainly, it amounted to Keys’s own “Seven Countries Study”, which purported to show a link between the consumption of saturated fats and heart disease among 13,000 men surveyed in the US, Japan and Europe. Critics have pointed out that this study violated several basic scientific norms. For one, Keys did not choose his countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs – including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy – while excluding countries with low rates of heart disease despite diets with a lot of fat – such as France, Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany.

Moreover, due to difficulties in collecting accurate nutrition data, Keys ended up sampling the diets of fewer than 500 men, far from a statistically significant sample. And the study’s star subjects – men on the Greek island of Crete who tilled their fields well into old age and appeared to eat very little meat or cheese – turned out to have been partly sampled during Lent, when the study subjects were foregoing meat and cheese. This must have led Keys to undercount their saturated-fat consumption. These flaws weren’t revealed until much later. 

By then, the misimpression left by the erroneous data had become international dogma.

There were subsequent trials, of course. In the 1970s, half a dozen important experiments pitted a diet high in vegetable oil – usually corn or soybean, but not olive oil – against one with more animal fats. But these trials had serious methodological problems: some didn’t control for smoking, for instance, or allowed men to wander in and out of the research group over the course of the experiment. The results were unreliable at best.

Read the rest of the article by clicking on the link below:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-science-of-saturated-fat-a-big-fat-surprise-about-nutrition-9692121.html

Book Review: 'The Big Fat Surprise' by Nina Teicholz

What if the government's crusade against fat fed the spread of obesity by encouraging us to abstain from foods that satiate us efficiently?

By Trevor Butterworth

http://online.wsj.com/

June 4, 2014

In the great morality play of modern diet, the angels, we have been told by a host of experts, favor egg-white omelets and skimmed milk, while the devil gorges on red meat cooked in butter. For 50 years we have been warned to fight the good fight on dietary fats if we want to stay healthy. In "The Big Fat Surprise," as one might guess from the title, Nina Teicholz plays the devil's advocate—convincingly.

The road to dietary hell, she notes, was paved in the 1950s by a series of seemingly related phenomena. An epidemic of heart attacks fell upon apparently healthy middle-aged men, including President Dwight Eisenhower, who brought national attention to the problem. They all had high levels of cholesterol, thought to be the critical component of the arterial plaques that clogged arteries, restricted blood flow and triggered heart attacks. The cholesterol was coming from an abundance of meat, eggs, butter and cheese—foods that had all been rationed during the war.

The connection between a diet rich in saturated fats and cardiovascular disease was made by Ancel Keys, an American physiologist who, when visiting Italy and Spain in 1953, concluded that heart-disease rates among men there were low because they ate very little meat and dairy. It was a hypothesis that turned into a juggernaut of censure, not least because Congress was full of middle-aged men chomping down on red meat and eggs. "Eisenhower," notes Ms. Teicholz, "became obsessed with his blood cholesterol levels and religiously avoided foods with saturated fat." That his earlier four-pack-a-day cigarette habit might have had something to do with his coronary disease didn't seem to occur to anyone.

Eisenhower's personal doctor and America's most prominent cardiologist, Paul Dudley White, whom Keys had assiduously cultivated, described Keys's work as "brilliant" in a front-page New York Times  article. Keys became a media oracle, dispensing, as Ms. Teicholz puts it, "fiery language and [a] definitive-sounding solution" to America's new health problem. When the American Heart Association embraced his message, it was game over.

But, as Ms. Teicholz observes, there was a paradox in the statistical data. At the time, the Swiss ate a lot of animal fat; so too, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Danes and the Germans. But there was no correlation with rates of heart disease. Why, Keys's critics asked, was he ignoring this data? In 1956, armed with a massive U.S. government grant, Keys embarked on "the first multicountry epidemiological undertaking in human history" to prove his hypothesis—the "Seven Countries study," as it came to be called. Critically, and appallingly, he excluded the "paradox" countries.

Ms. Teicholz, who has a gift for translating complex data into an engaging forensic narrative, explains why the "proof" that the Seven Countries study seemed to deliver was far from conclusive. One morsel: Keys had included data on the Greek diet taken during a 48-day Lenten fast in Crete, when participants were required to abstain from meat, fish, eggs, cheese and butter. Forty years later, researchers estimated that 60% of the Cretan population had been fasting at the time of the study, but no attempt had been made to separate fasters from non-fasters.

Yet when skeptics, including the National Academies of Science, weighed in on Keys's impoverished data, and on related claims that multiplied over the succeeding years, the media attacked the skeptics, heedless of statistical reasoning. Meanwhile, the food industry—apart from the protesting cattle and dairy lobbies—happily ministered to the new dietary wisdom. Government agencies weighed in with dietary guidelines that emphasized carbs and vegetables and warned that red meat was something one could only risk eating a few times a month. And when this miserable diet, shorn of taste, wearied its adherents, as it so often did, the pharmaceutical industry stepped in, offering drugs to lower cholesterol.

As the 20th century closed, the Owl of Minerva finally stirred in the light of unavoidable evidence: None of this advice was preventing heart disease. What was left, as Ms. Teicholz adumbrates, was a monstrous thought: What if the crusade against cholesterol had fed the spread of obesity by encouraging a population to retreat from the very foods that would have satiated its hunger more efficiently than the hallowed grains and fruits and vegetables of the great dietary pyramid? What if the low-fat mantra had driven a population into feeling perpetually hungry? What if you were better off eating meat, eggs and dairy than a diet bloated in carbs and vegetable oils?

It is a commonplace in public-health discussions of obesity to warn that the search for "perfect" or "better" evidence is the enemy of good policy and that we can't afford to wait for all the information we might desire when there is a need to do something now. Yet Ms. Teicholz's book is a lacerating indictment of Big Public Health for repeatedly putting action and policy ahead of good evidence. It would all be comical if the result was not possibly the worst dietary advice in history. And once the advice had been reified by government recommendations and research grants, it became almost impossible to change course. As Ms. Teicholz herself notes, she is not the first to point out that saturated fats have been sinned against by bogus science; and yet, the supermarket aisles are still full of low- and no-fat foods offering empty moral victories.

"The Big Fat Surprise" is more than a book about food and health or even hubris; it is a tragedy for our information age. From the very beginning, we had the statistical means to understand why things did not add up; we had a boatload of Cassandras, a chorus of warnings; but they were ignored, castigated, suppressed. We had our big fat villain, and we still do.

Mr. Butterworth is editor-at-large for STATS.org.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-big-fat-surprise-by-nina-techolz-1401923948


Related:

Are butter, cheese and meat that bad? -

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/06/health/saturated-fat-debate/