Arthur Schopenhauer famously said that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed, and third; it is accepted as being self-evident. Back in 2009 as the above article from the New York Daily News shows, eating butter was still being ridiculed and a mix of poor research and industry lobbying was keen to keep things that way. I suspect that now, when it comes to eating butter, we have left that phase but are still somewhere in the second phase of acceptance – for butter will, over time, surely be found to have been heart and cancer healthy all along. Yet the leading luminaries of the nutrition world oppose butter and still prefer ‘marge’, as long as the trans-fats have been removed. Walter Willett, Chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health admits that as a physician back in the 1980's, he was telling people that they should replace butter with margarine because it was cholesterol free. Today he’s shifted his position a little: he imagines a spectrum ranging from super healthy foods such as blueberries to toxic ones (like a 20-oz Coke, he says) and would put butter “close to the middle, but maybe a little closer to the Coke”. Dr. David Katz, Director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center still “avoids butter, opting instead for olive oil.” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, Dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University says there is “No evidence it’s good for you, yet little evidence for major harm.” A not very subtle put-down. Dr David Ludwig also of Harvard is a little more positive with: “The next time you eat a piece of buttered toast, consider that butter is actually the more healthful component.” Butter is after all about 50% saturated fat and there the Harvard scholars feel even more sure of their findings. Frank Hu professor of nutrition and epidemiology says “In terms of heart disease risk, saturated fat and refined carbohydrates appear to be similarly unhealthful.” Pretty damning; And a fellow Harvard researcher, Yanping Li points out: “Dietary recommendations to reduce saturated fats should specify their replacement with unsaturated fats (such as vegetable oils) or with healthy carbohydrates, such as whole grains.” For now, butter sales are slowly rising so consumers are voting with their taste buds. But it may be some time before the Harvard team in particular, staunch supporters incidentally of eating whole grain carbohydrates, remind us that they always knew butter was really good for you. Yet, watch this space: in the world of nutrition, stranger things have taken place. Sources:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/butter-is-not-back-limiting-saturated-fat-still-best-for-heart-health/ http://time.com/3896448/butter-saturated-fat/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbs-against-cardio/ http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/hold-butter-eating-fat-slows-feel-dumb-article-1.41688
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It's official; the new British eating guidelines are out and they are... very similar to the way they've been for the last 20 years or so. In the words of the Chief Nutritionist at Public Health England: "The evidence shows that we should continue to base our meals on starchy carbohydrates." If you're reading this website, then you'll probably know that based on the current evidence, this 'high-carb' statement is just plain wrong. And when it comes to dairy, she says: "Try to go for lower-fat and lower-sugar products where possible, like 1% fat milk, reduced-fat cheese or plain low-fat yoghurt." The sugar reduction message is of course an important one but lower fat products usually have to resort to artificial sweeteners and emulsifiers to add taste and to thicken otherwise bland, low-fat cream cheeses and yogurts. It's a case of 'choose your poison' I suppose, unless you go for the full-fat regular (and usually less processed) original foods which satiate you and enable your body to absorb essential vitamins. For more on The new guide. This main message is wrongSource: The new guide The epidemic of obesity and type-2 diabetes (known as 'diabesity') is increasingly linked to high-carb diets, the use of vegetable seed oils and today's low-fat foods. No-one as yet can prove this but to deny its plausibility is to continue misleading millions of increasingly unhealthy people.
Today, Europe's definitive chronic disease is type-2 diabetes. In the UK alone, more than 3 1/2 million people now have the disease with 700 people per day entering the fold. Type-2 diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in people of working age and leads to more than 100 amputations a week. It is strongly associated with obesity and in some UK towns, 3 out of 4 people are obese. Children are also in the firing line. In 1957, fewer than one in ten 11-year-olds were fat; by 2012, more than a quarter of a typical class are overweight or obese.
With so many people suffering the effects of today's junk-food driven lifestyles (be they obesity, type-2 diabetes or others), solid nutritional guidance is in short supply. Websites such as www.dietdoctor.com do an excellent job but we urgently need the mainstream to catch up. Sadly, traditionally taught nutritionists are still plying their trade based on a poorly informed curriculum, steeped in largely unproven epidemiological evidence from the past. That's why the low-carb advice of Professor Noakes has kicked up such a storm with his 'baby-food trial' in South Africa. Jamie Oliver is closely followed by thousands, particularly in the UK. He has done so much to prove his credentials when it comes to talking sense about school meals and recommending that we ditch junk food, but the nutritional advice he receives is incorrect and misleading. Nowhere on his website does Jamie or his team of advisers make reference to a low-carb, high-fat approach to eating, even though it is now becoming accepted as the best anti-type-2 diabetes approach to eating. Dr Ludwig of Harvard's T.H Chan School of Public Health says: "The fastest way to stabilize blood glucose and lower insulin levels is to reduce carbohydrate." Nutritionists and chefs take note. The closest you get on the subject from Jamie's nutritional advisers is to be found in this low-carb, high-protein advice (see below) which is slanted and at best, misleading. The author takes a commonly used approach to writing such an article, using cheap rhetorical techniques to try and appeal to her audience. It goes something like this: 1/ Make things sound complicated. 2/Add confusion (but don’t try and remove it). 3/ Add a sweeping statement (straw dog) which is not relevant. 4/ Bring in the much-propagated whole grain argument. 5/ Add a sweeping (incorrect) statement that eating carbs is important and adds nutritional value. 6/ Then imply that saturated fat is bad and associate it with salt. 8/ Add further generalisations. 9/ Bring in total misinformation about the effects of eating low-carb. (We’re talking 'low-carb' not 'no-carb' and even if we were 'no-carb', the statement is almost certainly incorrect). 10/ Associate high-protein with eating red meat, sat fat and salt again. 11/ State the obvious: Lowering carbs means eating more fat or protein – well, Yes, of course. 12/ Emphasise the supposed dangers of a high protein diet. 13/ Cherry-pick your research quote, implying that low-carb has no long-term benefits. (Making no reference to type-2 diabetes) 14/ Imply that most of us want a ‘quick detox or cleanse’ – creating a doubtful strawman again. 15/ Shoot down the self-made strawman, singing the virtues of wholegrains while grouping ‘salt, sugar & saturated fat’ again together as the baddies. 16/ Sing the praises of balance and variety vs ‘overly simplistic diets’, even though the author’s hypothesis of a simplistic diet is of her own making. The lay-reader can be left with only two messages:
How about a change in curriculum? It's already crowded, I know, but if we are to truly embrace Hippocrates; “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”, then nutrition training which is pretty much non-existent currently, needs to be stepped up.
Why not take a further step forward and make the essentials of cooking fundamental to medical training? Then maybe we'd begin to move away from 'nutritionism' (what Ben Goldacre calls the 'Bollocks du jour') to putting real food back in the spotlight. Blog July 2015
“WHY IT'S HEALTHIER TO COOK WITH LARD THAN SUNFLOWER OIL" 7/29/2015 0 COMMENTS The best selling American seed oil is made from corn; in Europe, it's sunflower oil. Both of them are rich in inflammatory Omega-6 fatty acids. After misleading us last week with his message that we still need to be reducing our cholesterol levels, Michael Mosley attempts to redeem himself this week with the ‘discovery’ that sunflower oil might not be as good for us as we thought. This topic is important because today, the use of sunflower oil is pretty ubiquitous. You have only to read the label on potato crisps (or chips depending upon where you live) to see that about 30% of every mouthful is fat, and in Western Europe, that frying fat is invariably sunflower oil. In the US, it’s more likely to be corn or soy oil but it matters little, because all represent concentrated forms of Omega-6 (of which we eat too much) and being polyunsaturated fats, they all go quickly rancid as well as being inherently unstable when heated. In today's Daily Mail, Dr Mosley says that, “Most people thought frying with vegetable oils is healthier”… which is unfortunately the distorted way that these things get written up. The truth is that doctors and nutritionists have been telling us for years that sunflower oil is healthy and that lard is bad for you. So it's hardly surprising that ‘most people’, also influenced by lobby groups working in the pay of the processed vegetable seed industry, have been moved to think the same. Fat and cholesterol There is an interesting link between the two topics of fat and cholesterol because so many recent clinical trials have shown that LDL cholesterol levels, except in the most extreme cases, are actually very poor predictors of heart attack risk. And eating more saturated fats is the only sure way of increasing your 'good' HDL cholesterol'… but, of course, there’s no money for big-pharma in that message so you won’t hear it too often! As for Dr Mosley, he seems to be on a true voyage of discovery but I just wonder why he’s come to all this so late. For reference, here’s a piece from Dr. Mercola’s informative website posted 12 years ago on October 15, 2003: “When you cook with polyunsaturated vegetable oils (such as canola, corn, and soy oils), oxidized cholesterol is introduced into your system. As the oil is heated and mixed with oxygen, it goes rancid. Rancid oil is oxidized oil and should NOT be consumed—it leads directly to vascular disease.” But let’s get back to Michael Mosley. Writing just one year ago on July 16 2014 in the Daily Mail, he said: “Milk, cheese, butter, cream - in fact all saturated fats - are bad for you. Or so I believed ever since my days as a medical student nearly 30 years ago. During that time I assured friends and family that saturated fat would clog their arteries as surely as lard down a drain. So, too, would it make them pile on the pounds. Recently, however, I have been forced to do a U-turn. It is time to apologise for all that useless advice I've been dishing out about fat.” But he seems to have forgotten that when writing in today’s Daily Mail and pre-selling tonight’s show: “Trust me, I’m a doctor” on BBC2 at 8 pm. His message: “I am considering giving lard a try - and I never thought I would hear myself say that.” The article has a serious side to it though because these vegetable seed oil, when heated can be particularly bad for you. He continues: “To understand why, we must look closely at what happens to fats and oils when heated to a high temperature. They undergo what is called oxidation: they react with oxygen in the air to form substances such as aldehydes and lipid peroxides.” And then quoting a Professor Grootveld: “We found that oils which were polyunsaturated-rich - corn oil and sunflower oil - generated very high levels of aldehydes”. His angle is that this is revolutionary news but it’s not. It is simply not usually espoused by mainstream doctors and in that sense, I must admit that it’s great to see Michael Mosley bringing sensible eating advice in line with the available research findings. Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3176558/It-s-healthier-cook-LARD-sunflower-oil-Extraordinary-experiment-shows-ve-told-cooking-oils-wrong.html
The volatile compounds such as aldehydes produced when you heat these oils are hard to study because of their instability, but groups researching on animals have found that they cause inflammation. Research published in 2002 also found that aldehydes cause toxic shock in animals through damaging their gastric system. And researchers in Taiwan are studying the potential link between female cancer and stir-frying in unventilated spaces using these oils. But there is a further solid scientific basis to be found in the work of Prof. Kummerow of the University of Illinois many years ago (he’s now over 100), where his team documented that heating these oils creates oxidized LDL cholesterol showing a direct link to heart disease. The problem, he said, is not LDL, the “bad cholesterol” widely considered to be the major cause of heart disease. What matters is whether the cholesterol and fat residing in those LDL particles have been oxidized.
“Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, except if it’s oxidized,” he says. Oxidation is a chemical process that happens widely in the body, contributing to aging and the development of degenerative and chronic diseases. Fred Kummerow has contended for years that the high temperatures used in commercial frying cause inherently unstable polyunsaturated oils to oxidize, and that these oxidized fatty acids become a destructive part of LDL particles. Even when not oxidized by frying, soybean and corn oils can oxidize inside the body. This fits with the available research data showing that 50% of all heart disease patients have normal or low levels of LDL. “You can have fine levels of LDL and still be in trouble if a lot of that LDL is oxidized,” according to Dr. Kummerow. His conclusion? …that the saturated fat in butter, cheese and meats does not contribute to the clogging of arteries and is beneficial in moderate amounts in the context of a healthy diet (lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other fresh, unprocessed foods). Now where have I heard that before? And by the way, Dr.Kummerow cannot remember the last time he ate anything deep-fried. He has never used margarine, and instead scrambles eggs in butter every morning. He calls eggs one of nature’s most perfect foods, something he has been preaching since the 1970s, when the consumption of cholesterol-laden eggs was thought to send you straight to the mortuary. “Eggs have all of the nine amino acids you need to build cells, plus important vitamins and minerals,” he says. “It’s crazy to just eat egg whites. Not a good practice at all.” So getting back to Michael Mosley: My message tis that if he’s truly interested in getting to the truth of this matter? Why not set up a meeting with the highly respected Professor Kummerow, even if he is a centenarian. Or perhaps because he's a centenarian… ? More on Fred Kummerow at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/health/a-lifelong-fight-against-trans-fat.html |
Sammy Pepys"FAT IS OUR FRIEND" ADVOCATES A DIET: Sammy Pepys was the pseudonym used by James Capon when writing this book. He is not a doctor or a nutritionist but has studied nutrition and holds an MPH from Edinburgh University. Over the years, he has become increasingly suspicious of today's conventional wisdom about diet and health. When it comes to what we eat, he has helped many learn to eat more healthily.
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