This upsets me to no end. When I was growing up in the 70s, we had a food pyramid that was based on carbohydrates, created by no less than the USDA - not the surgeon general. Then, in the late 90s, the establishment totally came down on the Atkins/Zone type diets as being inappropriate and foolish.
How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?
I also find it annoying that we continue to discuss a universal "Diet", when, in fact, different people react very differently to different types of food.
I sometimes think we're still in the dark ages in terms of certain fields of endeavors.
If you're actually interested in what happened (you may just be venting, can't really tell) there's an excellent talk called "Big Fat Fiasco" on youtube that goes into the history of the lipid hypothesis (fat makes you fat) and how it got hold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exi7O1li_wA (it's about an hour long).
One of the most amazing parts for me was the video of the senate commission tasked with coming up with dietary guidelines (the commission that created the food pyramid) outright rejecting the majority consensus that it's foolish to publish guidelines at a time that so little is truly known and that, if anything, it's carbs, not fat that are the problem. (Yes, the scientific community back then was leaning towards carbs being the problem.) One of the senators has an amazing quote along the lines of: I don't have the luxury of waiting to make an informed decision like a scientist.
Anyway, long story short it was politicians blessing the lipid hypothesis and then later removing all funding from anyone with a contrary opinion. The nutrition "scientists" are almost all funded by the government and therefore started to self-censor and never publish anything contradicting the anointed hypothesis. If they did they were basically booted out and never funded again.
Finally it seems the breaking point has been reached and we might get actual scientific research done in nutrition science instead of the quack research that's been the norm for the past 40 years.
You are 100% right on. It is infinitely easier to test and isolate the variables that go into metabolism than it is to test and isolate the variables that go into global climate. Its infinitely easier because the later simply isn't possible.
"I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses" - Crichton
I am a practicing Endocrinologist and have been out in private practice for the last 5 years.I have been counseling diabetics and the overweight to keep carbohydrates in a low but still healthy range (about 120-180 grams daily) and to not follow the food pyramid.
What I generally tell people:
Carbohydrates generally follow this pathway: carbs-> glucose-> used for energy vs stored (mainly as fat).
Eat less carbs, store less fat in general. Unless one is very active either growing or running marathons it is very difficult to burn through all of the energy in 300 grams of carbs per day (which is the RDA recommendation).
Eat protein with each meal. This will not get stored as fat and whatever is not needed is generally eliminated. It also keeps one full for a longer period of time by slowing digestion. It also slows the digestion of carbohydrates.
Get lots of fiber. This is an indigestible carbohydrate which again helps to keep one full, yet does not get moved down the sugar to fat pathway.
Therefore balance the meal:
Carbs (moderate to low unless very active), protein with each meal (lean meat, fish, chicken, nuts, eggs, cheese, etc), and fiber with each meal (especially green vegetables but also fruit).
Above all: All Things in Moderation.
Also things in medicine change all the time so good judgment and common sense always trump the latest "brilliant" scientific study or fad.
> Unless one is very active either growing or running marathons it is very difficult to burn through all of the energy in 300 grams of carbs per day (which is the RDA recommendation).
This is just incorrect. 300g of carbohydrates makes only about 5000kJ (1200kcal), a figure well under baseline consumption. About 2 hours of easy to moderate jogging or cycling would take care of it, too, depending on the person.
--
Moderation is indeed good. All this talk about specific food substances is just bullshit when the real problem is people stuffing their face with 2-3 times the calories they need.
If you do a bit of reading, you would discover that the reason why there is this "talk about specific food substances" is so that people don't feel the _need_ to stuff their faces with 2-3 times the calories they need.
In fact, the best diets are the ones where people are forcing themselves to choke down food they aren't interested in, because their appetite control system has basically said "No More." Upside - zero caloric excess. Downside - food becomes much more dismal/boring.
People almost never make a conscious choice about A) the amount of food they eat and B) how quickly they metabolize it. How much you eat really is not much more than a function of a fairly complex system of your hormones, stomach, and autonomic nervous system. Changing your specific foods is effectively "gaming" or "hacking" that system so you _lose_ the desire to eat. Almost nobody effectively sustains a diet through "willpower" beyond the initial 6-9 months of a sprint where they drop 30 pounds, and put it all back on.
I have a colleague at work who runs 5 miles in the gym at lunch, every single day, and is about 20-30 pounds overweight. He is a master of discipline, never misses a day - but simply can't drop the weight he's trying to. All that exercise simply results in him being hungrier, and eating more.
> I have a colleague at work who runs 5 miles in the gym at lunch, every single day, and is about 20-30 pounds overweight. He is a master of discipline, never misses a day - but simply can't drop the weight he's trying to. All that exercise simply results in him being hungrier, and eating more.
Yes. The problem is people eating too much (although 1h of exercise is not that much, and certainly not a marathon…)
Saying that fat people eat too much is like saying alcoholics drink too much or that insomniacs don't get enough sleep. It's trivially true, but does nothing to help solve the problem. In fact, it's harmful. To imply that a problem is trivial is to suggest that the solution is easy: just don't be stupid. That's far from the case with alcoholism, insomnia, or obesity.
> How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?
Funny. You really thought the government and industry were actually looking for the scientific truth, or otherwise had your health in mind.
Now that you have been disillusioned, you should start questioning other government policies. I'll spoil the fun and tell you what you'll find: It's all about commercial interests, and you can easily see which ones in retrospect by tracing where regulators go to work after they leave their government job.
> How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?
How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?
Politics is only distantly interested in truth and widely interested in lobby parties.
Yes, they certainly can and frequently do kill. Multiple vectors, the most common of which is animal born E. Coli.
I don't know if anyone has done a toxicity study on organic vs non-organic vegetables, but, I think it would be a great area of research. Keep in mind, that if you aren't spraying on pesticides, you need to rely on "organic" methods to reduce crop loss to things like Fungi/insects/disease, etc... One of those "organic" methods is to breed (naturally) a hardier strain that is more resistant. That, in itself, can be dangerous - these new strains defend themselves with toxins. There are certainly records of amateurishly bred potatoes killing people.
There is something to be said about toxins that have a well documented and well-defined behavior versus whatever is being randomly grown in the organic farm.
Regardless - It would pay not to come to any conclusions before the traditional double-blinded statistically valid scientific studies are done, which was the point of the grandparent-post.
I know this is not a good reply, but I have to say it. Why didn't humanity die off between when we discovered agriculture and before we invented pesticides?
Humanity didn't die off, but, life spans were shorter, it was _really_ hard to get enough calories to keep yourself alive, and there was a lot of starvation and hunger in the world. Even into the 20th century, not all countries were making effective use of pesticides, and some countries had starvation, not because of civil war or unrest (the major cause of starvation today) - but because they didn't know how to grow food efficiently. Then, in middle of the last century, we had the Green Revolution, and the quartet of artificial fertilizers, mechanization, high-yield varietals, and, yes, pesticides changed the equation and pushed Malthus back a while.
From a cost-benefit perspective, I'd be willing to wager that pesticides have saved on the order of 1000x more people than they've killed.
Best case scenario, I'd wager, is no toxins in our food at all. Most people aren't willing to pay the price for that type of low yield crop.
They did not die off, but for several thousand years, they were barely able to sustain themselves, and quite a lot of them did die off. Where we have single-digit percentages growing our food today, they would have single-digit percentages not growing food.
Especially the USDA who's mission is to promote our agricultural industries. For some reason, we have the agency charged with supporting the producers of food setting the official recommendations for what and how much you should be eating.
There was a great article in the New York Times about how the USDA is simultaneously trying to get people to eat more cheese while telling them that saturated fat is bad for them.
I was trying to think of a good analogy before but just came up with this: imagine if the Minerals Management Service (theoretical regulator of the oil industry) was in charge of setting the fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.
The Minerals Management Service (now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement) is a pretty good example of that as it is. It's in charge of enforcing environmental regulations and such for oil companies, but it's also in charge of collecting oil and gas royalties for the government. This is part of why oil companies have historically been so friendly with it -- they are somewhat interested in avoiding regulation, but they are even more interested in minimizing their royalty payments.
The correct (average) recommendation might not be static. If people didn't sit still as much 40 years ago, maybe they could eat more carbs without getting fat.
The food pyramid seemed to reflect what people ate, not what people should eat. Most people eat more carbs than protein, becuase meat, fish, and dairy are more expensive than cereal and bread. Obviously sugar was at the top. Vegetables and fruits were important, but you just couldn't get as many as carbs because again, they were expensive.
It seemed to work so that was the pyramid. I'm not sure they did studies comparing different diets to arrive at that conclusion, I think it was just "common sense" nutrition.
How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding?
"Tell us what you think: Are carbs to blame? Add your own comments to the discussion"
As someone who's been on a low carb, no-grain diet (mostly) over the past year, this is gratifying to read. In that time I lost (with little effort) about 30 pounds, and while I find the diet occasionally difficult to maintain (mostly due to boredom), it's easier than a low fat diet, in which I was always starving.
Definitely. The importance of dark green and fibrous vegetables is is extremely downplayed in any official dietary guidelines, and they really should be at the base of the food pyramid, at least for most of the year.
Carbohydrates are, however, fairly useful in terms of overloading the body's metabolism. (That's why you lost the 30 lbs.) Back in college, I used to burn protein pretty badly, and my performance in the gym was severely hampered. I had a meeting with the S&C coach, where he imparted the need to carbo-load after a workout to prevent metabolism from using protein as quick energy. (At the time I was eating around 6-7k calories a day while losing weight, this helped me drop to a manageable diet.) Since carbohydrates are largely energy stores much in the same way as fat is, but without the added benefit of fat-soluble vitamins, they should be the first thing to cut down on. Well, probably fatty meat as well.
More recent low-carb advice (e.g. the Paleo Diet for Athletes) recommends eating carbs before a workout/training session, and protein + some carbs after for replenishing. I've been doing that and it works out pretty well.
I've been toying off and on with low carb diets, and my body has made it clear that if I want to continue with high carb diets it intends to make me one of the guys having heart attacks at 40 or 50, so it's now permanently "on". (I'm 31 right now.)
For a while I've been playing with spices, in all the good senses of "play", and I've been upping my culinary game. Even more recently I've started to get into sort of "gourmet" cooking; I'm scare quoting it because I'm not really in it for the attitude, but just the flavor. I have a small collection of vinegars, cooking wines, various extracts and oils (you can pry my sesame oil out of my cold dead fingers), and have been experimenting with a variety of cheeses. My wife, who isn't quite as into this yet, has also become hooked; she's discovered she really likes Balsamic Vinegar in a couple of recipes. (We buy the, ahem, "fake" stuff that doesn't take decades to create and only costs slightly more than other vinegars in the store; I'm sure it's not as good but it's good enough.)
And lo, it turns out that there are entire culinary traditions around the world that have centuries of history working with these ingredients, and it is good. My "boredom" level has plummeted in the past six months as I've opened these doors, and lately I'm getting to the point where I couldn't go back.
It isn't that hard, and it isn't actually that expensive. It does take some experimentation, though; you can follow recipes but I've found that my tastes and the tastes of those who are really "into" the culinary thing diverge quite strongly, even as we agree on ingredients. These are expensive ingredients relative to other foods in the store, yes, but typically you only use them in very small quantities; per use they are monetarily insignificant.
Example: I like hamburgers. For other reasons, I have to eat them without a bun, but I now wouldn't eat them with a bun anyhow. I do not know what it is exactly, but I find that adding one drop of sesame oil to a pound of hamburger can really change things. Don't forget to salt the meat. Toss in some dried onions for even more fun. Mix it all together, then form the patties. This is not a normal burger. I say "I don't know what it is" because something is really opening up the sesame oil, usually one drop does not have such an effect on a meal, but don't dribble much more in or you will actually ruin it. (Unless you really like sesame flavor.)
And this is just one example. It really isn't surprising (in hindsight, remember I've been there) that trying to take a typical American diet and subtract the bad stuff, which also happens to be where all the flavor is, has a boring result. But there are other traditions and ways of cooking that are as good or better; after all, the recommended American diet is a local aberration, not what we've been eating for centuries.
FYI, you may want to check out some Chinese recipes. The Chinese use sesame oil quite often. As you say, a little goes a long way, but that little amount has a great affect. Vegies like broccoli and bok choy especially seem to like it.
Maybe you'll like this interview www.lanacion.com.ar/1334798 it's in spanish, but Google does a nice job translating... and he's one of the finest chefs in Argentina right now.
I think our best bet is to let our own bodies figure out what's good for us. The problem with that is that "food" these days includes many nutritive substances which simply didn't exist in modern quantities during the evolutionary development of our appetites, most notably this abundance of fructose (HFCS, anyone?). The act of consuming food usually prompts one's body to produce insulin in order to assimilate the carbs in the food, and this insulin acts as an appetite suppressant. The problem is that fructose is so simple that no insulin needs be produced in order to assimilate it, so the appetite goes unsuppressed after the consumption of calorie-dense food, and the subject continues to feed.
This leads to a positive feedback loop, because the stored calories require maintenance (heavier people must eat more to maintain their bodies, regardless of whether that weight comes from muscle or fat). This feedback loop causes all sorts of other problems, too.
That's not even getting into the ancillary effects of the other stuff that we get from grain.
I'm not a big fan of singling out HFCS because it misses the forest for the trees. Any refined carbohydrate is going to cause a strong insulin response. White bread is pretty awful for similar reasons, for example.
Your post is full of errors. Fructose was quite common in our ancestral diets, fructose is not any simpler than glucose, it's more difficult to assimilate than glucose, and heavier people do not generally eat more. There may be other errors I'm not even noticing, because I'm no expert in the field. Look it up.
I have not asserted that fructose did not exist in the past, that it is simpler than glucose, or that it is more difficult to assimilate than glucose.
I do assert that the average modern human's diet contains much more fructose than his great-grandfather's. I do not believe this is debated anywhere, although I will accept evidence to the contrary.
I am not sure what you mean when you say that heavier people do not generally eat more. Base metabolic requirements increase with body mass; as such, if a heavier person does not eat more, he will cease to be a heavier person.
You said, "The problem is that fructose is so simple that no insulin needs be produced in order to assimilate it." But insulin needs to be produced to assimilate glucose. Your subordinate clause could only be true if fructose were simpler than glucose.
Also, your subordinate clause could only be true if fructose were less difficult to assimilate than glucose. It's not. It's more difficult. It has to be converted into glucose in order to be metabolized.
Dates and figs, staple foods throughout human history, are over 20% fructose by weight. Many fruits and vegetables derive more than half their calories from fructose and, in a few cases, fructans. Throughout the evolutionary development of our diets, fruits and vegetables supplied the majority of our calories. So saying fructose "simply didn't exist in modern quantities during the evolutionary development of our appetites" is false. Fructose could indeed be a major cause of health problems, but not because it was a small component of our ancestral diets. It might be a slightly larger component today, but I suspect it's actually considerably less because of the higher protein and fat content of modern diets.
Metabolic rate per kilogram varies widely among people, and within the same person over time. Epidemiological studies have shown that, at least in the US, heavier people have a much lower metabolic rate per kilogram, to the point that heavier people generally tend to eat less. There's lots of speculation on why this is — do they have thyroid disorders? are their bodies conditioned by widespread yo-yo dieting? do they get less exercise? — but I'm not aware of a consensus yet.
This isn't a reversal, at least not on the part of scientists. Reporting like this just reinforces the public's idea of "Why should I do what doctor's say? They just change their mind. First it was eggs..." and so on. Seriously, ask your mum.
Scientists have known about insulin sensitivity and why and how weight gain/loss happens for a long time. Bodybuilders and other sportsmen and women listen.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/print-article.aspx?id=139058 is an interesting article on what actually happened. In contrast with the "oh those silly scientists, always changing their mind" headline, that article states 'scientists have known what makes us fat for almost half a century'.
That's an article by Taubes partially explaining how the consensus that fat makes you fat came about and why that was a departure from the mainstream up to that point, but, uh, you are aware that Taubes has been just about crucified for those opinions? The article you cite is itself a non-mainstream article, you can't cite it as an example that the mainstream scientists have "always known" this. No, in fact mainstream scientists all over the place have been insisting that Taubes and Atkins and everybody else claiming it's actually carbs are not just wrong but evil for saying so. If this shift is actually made (which is still not a done deal), it will in fact be a consensus shift, one where the evidence has been available for centuries that the consensus was wrong, but a consensus was manufactured anyhow.
Agreed. I was on the Zone Diet for about four years, and I recall doing a ton of reading in 99-2003 on the topic. The whole idea of limiting your dietary intake to being no more than 40% carbohydrates was seen as being "fringe" dietary advice - and it only got play in the "alternative" arena of dietary advice. Atkins was seen as an outright kook. Basically, Fats and Cholesterol were the only components that seemed to get mainstream attention - there was almost no establishment focus on carbohydrates as being problematic at the time - to say otherwise is revisionist.
I wasn't arguing against this article being contrary to public opinion, more that it's not a change in what science has said up to this point. I'm more concerned about the damage done by provocative headlines such as these that imply that scientists have changed their minds. There's no new research or evidence here.
So how is it that Asians eat tons of white rice but don't suffer from obesity, heart disease, diabetes and hypertension at anything close to Western rates?
Low carb skeptics often raise this point, but I'd like note that it can be misleading to consider a single diet variable in isolation. The Japanese smoke more than we do, and yet have less heart disease. Hence, smoking reduces the risk of heart disease....
Of course not. Asians eat more white rice, perhaps, but they also eat more fish, seaweed (in the case of the Japanese), more vegetables, walk more, eat more soy, etc... The effect of all of these variables, combined, may result in better overall health, and yet it could also be true that white rice in and of itself isn't that good for you.
This part is huge. I moved to a new city a year and half ago and started walking everywhere. Where I used to struggle keeping the weight off, nowadays without even going out of my way to exercise, it just stays off.
And now bear in mind my city is far less walkable than your average developed Asian city...
I'm convinced that if America finally got rid of its car obsession, health levels will improve dramatically, and all this talk of the obesity epidemic will fizzle.
Exactly. We don't need to exercise now, so few people do. Exercise has become something to do in our spare time. We stay in our homes and are required to use cars. When I visited China, I had to walk everywhere because I didn't have a car. Unfortunately we really can't get rid of the car obsession without a huge effort.
First, the suburbs take up so much space and distances living areas from the store areas. If we had a New Urbanist city, it would get people to walk. Now, you can't walk. Walking is impossible. You can't walk to a Walmart and grab fresh food every day. In China, my family would get food from the market every day. Now, we get food once a week and it's in big bags. That's because buying food is inconvenient.
Second, the suburbs take up space and creates the dreaded long commute. You can't walk to work. This makes public transportation unfeasible. Everyone buys a car.
It's all a big self-propelling problem. It creates its own problems, and to fix them, you have to contribute to the problem. Long distance? Get a car. A lot of cars? Build more roads. The vicious cycle continues...
EDIT: Biking is possible. But does anyone do it to commute, with so many cars and such long distances? Nope.
I personally witnessed this myself. I had to come home from school one day and today's roads aren't good for walkers. There's no sidewalk, so I had to walk on the grass or in the ditches. In many places (in the burbs, not in the city, the city is fine for walking), there were no walk signals. If there were, you had to walk along the road to the signal which often required adding more walking to the trip. For example, I had to cross the street from the library to a restaurant for lunch. I had to cross the middle of the road, and no one wants to do that.
Let me quote you out of context: "eat more ... eat more ... more ... eat more ..."
I don't think they stay skinny by eating more. (I know, you mean "eat more of this good thing relative to the bad things".) But eating less on an absolute scale is probably a critical component.
The reason is that carbs aren't the problem. Fructose is (largely) the problem. Refined grains (and refined sugars made from grains) shock the insulin system by causing a blood sugar spike (which can be especially bad for diabetics), but they don't cause long term effects. Fructose, on the other hand, which is found in ENORMOUS amounts in both HFCS, table sugar, and "fruit sweetened" things (and in small amounts in fresh fruit) causes kidney issues, must largely be metabolized into fat before being burned, puts a load on the liver, increases appetite and more. I've lost and kept off weight with no effort simply by learning some very basic biochem and switching in glucose, dextrose and maltose for fructose and sucrose.
For more informations (and scientific peer reviewed papers that back me up), I'd recommend googling for "fructose metabolism". There is also a great lecture about fructose on youtube called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
It's not just carbohydrates so much as refined carbohydrates. The sugar and white flour that make up so much of the typical American diet have a very high glycemic index, which causes the body's blood sugar to spike pretty heavily. What makes this really fun is that the constant blood sugar spikes make you hungrier and you tend to eat more as a result.
White rice still isn't great in this regard, but it's not as bad as comparable American staples.
That makes sense but my experience of travelling in Asia is that a lot of people eat tons of white rice every day. Portions weren't significantly smaller than those I see in the U.S. either. Is white rice really that much better than white bread or is there more to the equation?
I don't know about the numbers, but as an Asian I can assure you that heart disease, hypertension, etc etc are all very common in Asia still, particularly in wealthy, developed areas.
Many health-conscious Asians have moved to brown rice, much like how many Western folk have moved off white bread.
My general impression is that refined carbs are simply not great for you.
It depends a lot of the exact type of rice and preparation. Parboiled long grain rice can have a GI as low as the 40s while instant white rice can have a GI in the 90s. White bread generally has a GI of 70 or up. Glucose sits at the top at 100.
...it is because they eat the rice with a lot of high fiber content vegetables (and not so much meat, and practically no sugar). what counts (amongh other things) is the energy/diatary fiber ratio of you meals... I presume you understand the energy part. The fiber will slow down absorption, so you stay away from eating for longer if your meals have low EFR ratio. see http://www.scribd.com/doc/23466990/Slim-Logic
I come from a country built on carbs: Italy. I think I hate at least a plate of pasta a per for 30 years and guess what, I'm not overweight. America, do you want to see you problem? Don't look further than your car. The one you drive to go grocery shopping 1 mile from home. Just walk, I'm actually thinking to not renew my car lease when it will expire in 2 months, and we'll keep only one car for the family. Do you both need to commute to work? Fine, get to car, but use them if you need to go further than 1-2 miles. Otherwise walk. You'd be amaze to find out how many things there are in a two miles radius.
I lived in Italy for a few years (Northern). Generally the portions of pasta that you ate were relatively small. You also ate a lot of fish, stews, and vegetables.
In regions of Italy that DO eat mostly carb loaded diets (like Sicily) there has been a relatively long running obesity issue. Walking is important, and it's a great thing. But even walking several miles a day does little to combat obesity when you're offsetting it with thousands of calories of carb-loaded food every day.
I grew up in Milan, and none in my family is obese. If for relatively small you mean "human" yeah, we don't server Cheesecake Factory portions (we actually do once in a while, I remember my dad and grand father eating pasta in a salad bowl few times).
The number of things within a 2-mi radius of home varies a lot depending on where you live; Italy is a far more compact country than the US is.
Also, I'm not so sure that even an Italian-sized dinner portion of pasta compares in sheer carbs per person to the typical castigated lower-class American diet. White bread and soda alone provide a mind-boggling amount.
It's all about balancing the two. If you eat lots of carbs but don't burn them off in the right way, they're going to result in disease. If you exercise regularly, some (but not all) of the negative effects of carbs are counteracted. For instance, eating carbs will still increase the acidity of your system, which leads to calcium leaking off your bones and osteoporosis.
As Taubes documented, a lot of people have known this for centuries. It's not like it's that hard of an experiment to run, even in prior centuries.
If this fully pans out, as I think it will, nutritionists of the past fifty years or so are going to have the unenviable task of being used as an example of how an entire discipline with billions of dollars in funding and the best possible science apparatus can get it horribly, horribly wrong for a very, very long time.
What will be the most interesting to watch about this is the social reprogramming that will go on.
If history is a guide, within 30 years school textbooks will read as if this was just a logical conclusion and was easily reached -- instead of the brutal infighting and confusion that it actually was.
One of the weirdest things I learned as an adult was that science does not progress linearly like they teach in school. Instead people get emotionally attached to ideas, and miracle of miracles, the evidence shows they are correct.
Until the evidence shows they are not. Then it's this long struggle for changing gears, finally ending up in a spot where nobody ever talks about what went on before.
I think the human part of science is at least as interesting as the science itself. Lots of complexity and randomness, yet parts are very predictable. Neat.
agreed. science has never offered any simple narrative, it's a sprawling, incomprehensible, fascinating mess. it's a human story just like everything else.
That's definitely what I got out of reading bill bryson's brief history of nearly everything. The people involved in most of our scientific discoveries are incredibly fascinating
It reminds of how the cure for scurvy was discovered and then "lost" years later due to bad science.
http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
(That article was previously discussed here.)
I think everyone would do well to remember that nutritionists are nuts, and do not belong to any sort of regulatory body.
You, me and my pet monkey can all start calling ourselves nutritionists tomorrow, and charge money for ridiculous dietary advice.
Dietitians, on the other hand, are certified professionals and actually say things worth listening to. Any time I read anything quoting a nutritionist, I stop reading immediately, as all credibility is lost.
The irony is that I've had a number of times where I've been discussing limiting carbohydrate intake with somebody and they repeat the claim they heard that ketosis somehow puts the body into "diabetic shock."
I'm not even hardcore about it and don't go to the extent of maintaining ketosis, but I've definitely noticed that I feel my best and control my eating easiest if I limit carbs to about 30% of my caloric intake.
When I cycled 25 miles a day, Monday to Friday, I could eat /anything/ in huge quantities without a problem. It makes sense, but not when you add up the calories; I was putting in way more than the most optimistic calculators said I was spending.
Then I moved closer to work, and had a total of maybe 20 minutes on my bike every day - but this being a cheaper bike I could leave it locked up outside (with a decent lock, natch) so it was my primary form of transport for everything - going to the shops, commuting to work or meeting friends out and about in town. I was still eating whatever I wanted albeit in slightly smaller portions without putting on a pound.
Whilst it's interesting and valuable science to discover quite what on earth goes on when we eat things, if your biggest concern is not putting on weight, why not do exercise that makes you sweat for 20 or 30 minutes 5 days a week? Seems much easier to me - and satisfying because you don't have to deny yourself anything!
You're giving exercise way too much credit. Even the most rigorous regiment (which most couldn't even do) can maybe burn a 1,000 calories an hour. But considering how it easy it is to ingest 1,000 calories, it's easier to make changes at the dietary level than to correct excess calories by burning them off.
Rather, I'm doubting that our understanding of calories and how they're burned off/turned into fat is wrong. I'm proof, as is anyone else who does 30 mins sweaty exercise a day. Otherwise, given the amount of Big Macs inbetween meals, the maths doesn't add up.
There are plenty of good points in the article. However, I find the sloppy use of the word 'carbs' unforgivable and misleading. Fruits and vegetables are mostly carbs (...as dietary fiber is a form of carbohydrate too). The majority of the latter are, of course, healthy. The casual reader may get the impression from the article that all carbs are bad, and turn to a high protein diet.
After having a bought of pancreatitis recently, I've been looking at my own food choices very closely to find the things that will keep my healthy, out of the hospital, and off long term drugs.
My anecdotal experience is that, lean meats, veggies, fruits are expensive, but are the best things for me personally. It is astounding how much sugar, carbs and fat is in the products I used to be eating. Obviously you need calories to survive, but I've been aiming to consume more calories that are slow burning (lean protein) and mix in "healthy" fats (omega 3 etc) with veggies fiber and vitamins.
I've been loosing weight, feeling better, and managed to cut my bad cholesterol by more then half, all without taking any medication to do so. I consider this a success of information and personal experimentation to find what works for me.
Prior to this health condition, I never put a high value the quality of the food I was eating. I cared about what food would keep me awake, revved, and burning the midnight oil, rather then what was good for my long term health.
After encountering all the sugar in our (US) food supply, I'm very much for removing the corn subsidies the federal government provides. It would remove the supply of cheap sugar that seems to permeates everything we eat.
Human body has a great capability for adaptation. So change in what you eat is just another form of adaptation. A couple of months with a new diet and you won't miss the "old stuff". (let's forget about obsessive patterns for the sake of the argument)
Thanks for catching up on the last 10+ years of nutritional debate, LA Times.
Perhaps the real problem is seizing on one simplistic explanation for a complicated problems ("Meats!" "Fats!" "Sugars!" "Carbs!") and beating on it endlessly, then when that doesn't solve the problem, switching to another simplistic explanation.
Carbs are fine if you're active, and even necessary if you are very active (cyclists, for example, understand this pretty well). But this is the problem, I guess. We are expected to build diets on which sedentary people can get by.
How is it that we went through at least 40 years of incorrect diet advice without controlled studies giving us accurate and science based broad understanding of what actually made sense?
I also find it annoying that we continue to discuss a universal "Diet", when, in fact, different people react very differently to different types of food.
I sometimes think we're still in the dark ages in terms of certain fields of endeavors.