Text 13450, 116 rader
Skriven 2014-05-18 22:40:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Yet another one
=======================
Yet another food and nutrition article based on recent
studies contradicting all the previous ones that is ...

Never mind those nutrition nannies by Margaret Wente, The Toronto
Globe and Mail

For years, I've been trying to eat properly. You know what that
means: lean meat; not too much fat; lots of fruit, vegetables and
healthy whole grains. Sullenly, I embraced fibre. Reluctantly, I
gave up butter and cheese. Conscientiously, I ate as much broccoli
and Brussels sprouts as I could stomach. (Cruciferous vegetables are
especially good for preventing cancer.) I even tried switching to
fake salt, which was awful.

My dad did the same after his second heart attack. He gave up booze
and fat and salt, chowed down on tasteless, skinless chicken and
lived to a relatively ripe old age, griping all the way.

Here is what the latest scientific findings have to say about all
that: Feh. The science isn't settled after all. Almost everything
the medical establishment, the health commissars and the nutrition
nannies have been telling us for the past 60 years is just flat-out
wrong.

To start with, saturated fat won't raise your cholesterol and give
you heart attacks. Neither will butter or cheese or a juicy marbled
piece of steak? Help yourself! New research published this March in
the Annals of Internal Medicine found that saturated fat doesn't
cause heart disease. This, despite decades of advice that we should
restrict saturated fat to as little as 5 per cent of our daily
caloric intake, about two tablespoons of butter a day.

Next, the salt wars. Salt vigilantes have been warning us for years
that our habit is killing us. We consume an average of 3,400
milligrams a day, mostly through processed foods. Health Canada says
we should cut back to 2,000. The American Heart Association says
1,500 - less than 3/4 of a teaspoon. Not only is this virtually
impossible, it turns out to be unnecessary and perhaps even harmful.

A study in JAMA Internal Medicine concluded: "The lack of evidence
of benefit and concerns for harm suggest that low sodium intake
(less than 2,300 mg/day) should not be recommended." According to
Dr. Gilbert Ross of the American Council on Science and Health,
anthropological studies suggest that humans are hard-wired to
consume between 3,500 and 4,000 milligrams of sodium a day - about
what we do now. "To try to cut it in half, or less, is both
fruitless and more likely to harm than benefit," he says.

As for fruits and vegetables and all the rest: If you hate Brussels
sprouts, you're in luck, because they don't do any good. As recently
as 1997, leading cancer authorities told us that eating lots of
fruits and veg might cut our cancer risk by more than 20 per cent.
They told us to stay away from saturated fat, too. But today,
decades of research into the links between nutrition and cancer have
reached a dead end. As Harvard's Walter Willett, perhaps the world's
leading cancer epidemiologist, told The New York Times, "Diet and
cancer has turned out to be more complex and challenging than any of
us expected."

What happened? How could so many people have been so wrong for so
long? How did all this flawed science become the foundation for
everything we thought we knew about nutrition and our health?

The answer, in a nutshell, is food politics, big egos, flawed
research and heavy institutional investment in the status quo. 
Science journalist Nina Teicholz is author of The Big Fat Surprise,
a new book that explores the origin of the spurious link between
saturated fat and heart disease. It's quite a tale. It all began in
the 1950s with a brilliant self-promoter named Ancel Keys, a
scientist who rose to the top of the nutrition world by arguing that
saturated fats were behind the postwar explosion in heart disease.
Although his research was full of holes, it quickly became dogma.
Leading health authorities endorsed his diet advice. Millions of
people cut back on red meat, eggs, butter and cheese, and replaced
them with vegetable oils, pasta, grains, fruits and potatoes.

The results were catastrophic. Carbohydrates break down into
glucose, and too many carbs have unleashed an epidemic of obesity,
Type 2 diabetes and possibly heart disease. As Ms. Teicholz wrote in
The Wall Street Journal, "The reality is that fat doesn't make you
fat or diabetic. Scientific investigations going back to the 1950s
suggest that actually, carbs do."

As you can imagine, these findings are not welcome news to the
experts and institutions that have invested so heavily in the status
quo. How are they supposed to break the news to the rest of us? They
also expose the awkward truth about diet and nutrition studies: that
they're very, very difficult to do well. They often have so many
confounding factors that the supposed link between cause and effect
can be extremely shaky. And many diet studies yield results that
later studies can't replicate. None of this means the vigilantes are
about to go away. Salt warrior Thomas Farley, former commissioner of
health for the city of New York, still insists that sodium is
killing us, and wants to impose sweeping laws and standards to
reduce the threat. He's the perfect picture of a modern Puritan - a
lean, ascetic type who is convinced that we are on the fast track to
hellfire and damnation.

People are already highly skeptical of nutrition advice delivered
from on high. They figure that whatever we're told not to eat today
will probably be okay again next week. But these revelations are yet
more blows to the public's faith in experts. If they can't even get
this stuff right, what else are they wrong about? So, sorry about
that, Dad. You gave up steak for nothing. As for the rest of us,
here's my best advice: Eat real food that you like, but not too
much. Avoid sugar and carbs. Stay hydrated. And if you go to Paris,
make sure to have lots of cheese.

YK Jim


... Never mind the nutrition nannies.

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