Fat
I was wrong. Like most of the planet, I bought it hook, line, and sinker when respected institutions like the AHA told us that saturated fats are killing us and increases in dietary fat in general are causing the obesity epidemic.
They said that they had decades of research supporting their position. It turns out that what they actually had were decades of propaganda based on studies that didn't show what they claimed to show.
I cannot express how shocked I was to read about how medical researchers (these are MDs) misrepresented the evidence on heart disease to support their theories and destroyed the careers of anyone who challenged them. They thought they were right and were saving lives, but they set aside good science and probably killed a lot of people. We all know people who have dropped dead from heart disease. Almost assuredly, they were given bad advice by doctors who trusted their authority figures to tell the truth about how well supported their theories really were or weren't. My blood boiled more than a few times while reading Good Calories, Bad Calories. You (and your windows) have been warned.
They based their initial position on a study that looked at differences in dietary fat and heart disease among 7 countries and reported the results. Sounds fine as preliminary research, until you learn that they had data on TWENTY-TWO countries, but cherry-picked the ones that fit their view of the world and tossed the ones that didn't support or contradicted their hypothesis. No, really. It is THAT bad.
A study that reported LDL (I remember is as 'Lousy') cholesterol to be a 'marginally significant predictor' of heart disease was cited BY THE AUTHORS a few years later as 'strong support for the hypothesis...'
They found that statins lower cholesterol and also lower risk of heart disease, so they assumed that lowering cholesterol by eating less fat would have the same effect.
They did get around to testing some of these notions eventually. The big, expensive, relatively well-designed studies found that total cholesterol doesn't predict jack - many of us know that by now. The only significant predictor of heart disease for women was HDL (good - I think of it as 'Happy' cholesterol). LDL is important for men, but it depends on what kind of LDL you have. Big, fluffy ones are harmless; small, dense LDL (I think of them as 'the dense little f'ers') are what clog your arteries and kill you. Your doctor probably hasn't analyzed the size of your LDL, and I bet most of you don't know that number (Adam didn't know his). Triglycerides are bad and inversely related to HDL which is good.
Guess what lard does to your arteries? 47% of it is monounsaturated fat, which lowers LDL (good) and raises HDL (good). 90% of that monounsaturated fat is the same oleic acid you find in olive oil (good). Just over 40% of lard is saturated fat, but a third of that is stearic acid, which will raise HDL (good) and not change LDL (neutral). The rest of lard is polyunsaturated, which lowers LDL (good) and has no affect on HDL (neutral). So over 70% of the fat in lard improves your cholesterol (compared to eating a high-carb diet). The other 30% will raise LDL (bad), but raise HDL (good). - Tauber, p. 189 Somehow this tidbit didn't make it into the food pyramid.
Note that the government's brand-spanking-new dietary guidelines don't mention that the Atkins diet outperformed a 'balanced' diet, a low fat diet, and a very low fat diet in weight loss, as well as control of good and bad cholesterol and blood pressure (a risk factor for everything bad in the world). SBD rivaled Atkins for weight loss, but didn't see the same positive changes in cholestol - this broke my heart. It's gauche to say that an Atkins-type diet is good for you because most of us have been trained to believe in our heart of hearts that eating butter is a sin, but I'm more interested in the numbers than in the rhetoric, and the numbers say to eat the butter and ditch the bread. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo (lecture from the vegetarian Stanford researcher who did the study - his numbers broke his heart too)
Guess what increases prevalence of the dense little f'er LDLs that kill you? A high carbohydrate diet (remember 6-11 servings at the bottom of the pyramid?)
Know which hormone facilitates storage of fat? (this isn't even the tiniest bit controversial) Insulin, whose level is directly related to how many carbs you eat (also not controversial - you all know diabetics...), tells your body to store fat. If you eat too many carbs, your insulin levels are chronically high, and things get out of whack (technical term that means f'ed up), and you store too much fat and can't burn it as fuel. There is more, but this is the punchline.
Gary Taubes (a writer for Science magazine) spent a decade pulling together everything he could find on nutrition research. I would recommend his latest book (Why We Get Fat), except that it cuts directly to the topic of obesity, and I think that *I* wouldn't have believed his notions about obesity if I hadn't read about how f'ed up the 'scientific evidence' for heart disease has been for the past 50 years.
For the layperson's version (a quick read, except for a chapter or so of light science - if I know you, you can handle this much science):
http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307272702/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302124995&sr=1-1
For people who want to read the full evidence for themselves - this is quite a tome, but you can read this if you survived Psych or Bio 101:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462/ref=pd_sim_b_1
What I love about Taubes is that he is open to anyone proving him wrong. He actively tells his readers to think about whether what he is saying makes sense. I think that he would accept it graciously if someone showed him empirical evidence showing him that he is wrong, but in a decade of reading over a century's worth of research, he hasn't found that evidence.
(all of the above numbers and info from Tauber, 2010)
They said that they had decades of research supporting their position. It turns out that what they actually had were decades of propaganda based on studies that didn't show what they claimed to show.
I cannot express how shocked I was to read about how medical researchers (these are MDs) misrepresented the evidence on heart disease to support their theories and destroyed the careers of anyone who challenged them. They thought they were right and were saving lives, but they set aside good science and probably killed a lot of people. We all know people who have dropped dead from heart disease. Almost assuredly, they were given bad advice by doctors who trusted their authority figures to tell the truth about how well supported their theories really were or weren't. My blood boiled more than a few times while reading Good Calories, Bad Calories. You (and your windows) have been warned.
They based their initial position on a study that looked at differences in dietary fat and heart disease among 7 countries and reported the results. Sounds fine as preliminary research, until you learn that they had data on TWENTY-TWO countries, but cherry-picked the ones that fit their view of the world and tossed the ones that didn't support or contradicted their hypothesis. No, really. It is THAT bad.
A study that reported LDL (I remember is as 'Lousy') cholesterol to be a 'marginally significant predictor' of heart disease was cited BY THE AUTHORS a few years later as 'strong support for the hypothesis...'
They found that statins lower cholesterol and also lower risk of heart disease, so they assumed that lowering cholesterol by eating less fat would have the same effect.
They did get around to testing some of these notions eventually. The big, expensive, relatively well-designed studies found that total cholesterol doesn't predict jack - many of us know that by now. The only significant predictor of heart disease for women was HDL (good - I think of it as 'Happy' cholesterol). LDL is important for men, but it depends on what kind of LDL you have. Big, fluffy ones are harmless; small, dense LDL (I think of them as 'the dense little f'ers') are what clog your arteries and kill you. Your doctor probably hasn't analyzed the size of your LDL, and I bet most of you don't know that number (Adam didn't know his). Triglycerides are bad and inversely related to HDL which is good.
Guess what lard does to your arteries? 47% of it is monounsaturated fat, which lowers LDL (good) and raises HDL (good). 90% of that monounsaturated fat is the same oleic acid you find in olive oil (good). Just over 40% of lard is saturated fat, but a third of that is stearic acid, which will raise HDL (good) and not change LDL (neutral). The rest of lard is polyunsaturated, which lowers LDL (good) and has no affect on HDL (neutral). So over 70% of the fat in lard improves your cholesterol (compared to eating a high-carb diet). The other 30% will raise LDL (bad), but raise HDL (good). - Tauber, p. 189 Somehow this tidbit didn't make it into the food pyramid.
Note that the government's brand-spanking-new dietary guidelines don't mention that the Atkins diet outperformed a 'balanced' diet, a low fat diet, and a very low fat diet in weight loss, as well as control of good and bad cholesterol and blood pressure (a risk factor for everything bad in the world). SBD rivaled Atkins for weight loss, but didn't see the same positive changes in cholestol - this broke my heart. It's gauche to say that an Atkins-type diet is good for you because most of us have been trained to believe in our heart of hearts that eating butter is a sin, but I'm more interested in the numbers than in the rhetoric, and the numbers say to eat the butter and ditch the bread. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo (lecture from the vegetarian Stanford researcher who did the study - his numbers broke his heart too)
Guess what increases prevalence of the dense little f'er LDLs that kill you? A high carbohydrate diet (remember 6-11 servings at the bottom of the pyramid?)
Know which hormone facilitates storage of fat? (this isn't even the tiniest bit controversial) Insulin, whose level is directly related to how many carbs you eat (also not controversial - you all know diabetics...), tells your body to store fat. If you eat too many carbs, your insulin levels are chronically high, and things get out of whack (technical term that means f'ed up), and you store too much fat and can't burn it as fuel. There is more, but this is the punchline.
Gary Taubes (a writer for Science magazine) spent a decade pulling together everything he could find on nutrition research. I would recommend his latest book (Why We Get Fat), except that it cuts directly to the topic of obesity, and I think that *I* wouldn't have believed his notions about obesity if I hadn't read about how f'ed up the 'scientific evidence' for heart disease has been for the past 50 years.
For the layperson's version (a quick read, except for a chapter or so of light science - if I know you, you can handle this much science):
http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307272702/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302124995&sr=1-1
For people who want to read the full evidence for themselves - this is quite a tome, but you can read this if you survived Psych or Bio 101:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462/ref=pd_sim_b_1
What I love about Taubes is that he is open to anyone proving him wrong. He actively tells his readers to think about whether what he is saying makes sense. I think that he would accept it graciously if someone showed him empirical evidence showing him that he is wrong, but in a decade of reading over a century's worth of research, he hasn't found that evidence.
(all of the above numbers and info from Tauber, 2010)