Last updated on May 24, 2015
Seeing the US population grow sicker and fatter while adhering to official dietary guidelines has put nutrition authorities in an awkward position. Recently, the response of many researchers has been to blame “Big Food” for bombarding Americans with sugar-laden products. No doubt these are bad for us, but it is also fair to say that the food industry has simply been responding to the dietary guidelines issued by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the US Department of Agriculture, which have encouraged high-carbohydrate diets and until quite recently said next to nothing about the need to limit sugar.
Indeed, up until 1999, the AHA was still advising Americans to reach for “soft drinks,” and in 2001, the group was still recommending snacks of “gum-drops” and “hard candies made primarily with sugar” to avoid fatty foods.
Our half-century effort to cut back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove Ancel Keys’s hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to move on to test other possible culprits for our nation’s health woes.
That’s the conclusion of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Nina Teicholz, a science journalist working on a book titled Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, and whose Twitter feed you can find here.
Teicholz’s book is a sign that the tide is finally turning as regards what constitutes a healthful way to eat. As far as I can tell, it has been turning for about five years: I remember reading about Art De Vany‘s New Evolution Diet — which advocates a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet — back in 2008, at about the same time the Paleo Diet and the Keto Diet started gaining in popularity.
The gist of those diets is this (I’m using the keto diet for reference): Severely limit your intake of carbohydrates — in the best-case scenario, this means no bread, no pasta, no rice, no potatoes — and increase your intake of fats, maintaining your intake of proteins and aiming for a 65-35-5% breakdown of fat, protein, and carbohydrates, respectively. This is not the same as the Atkins Diet! Carbs are actually encouraged if they are mostly fiber. In other words: One should eat green vegetables at every meal, ideally.
That type of diet has been used for years to treat epilepsy, and people who eat that way report that they feel better, their hair and skin looks healthier, and they often breathe better and have fewer allergic reactions.
Again: Those are not high-protein diets! There is evidence that eating too much protein is not good for humans.
If I may indulge in a bit of casual empiricism with n=1: I had been struggling with weight loss for all of my life when I began eating a low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet in August 2012 after reading a lot about the science behind it.* Since then, I lost 41 lbs (19 kg), and I am feeling much better overall.
The greatest difficulties with an LCHF diet are (i) people’s reactions (“Eating this much fat will kill you! lol”), (ii) going out to dinner (eating only salmon or steak when going out because everything else comes breaded gets real tired, real quick), (iii) getting rid of the taste for sweets (though this usually disappears in about two or three days after I have had them), and (iv) getting rid of the feeling of guilt/unhealthfulness that comes from eating fewer/no grains and much more fat (I imagine the same thing happens to people who decide to leave a religion after decades of abiding by its interdictions and taboos…) The upside is much easier weight loss, feeling much better, and rarely being hungry. Unlike many people, I rarely crave anything when eating an LCHF diet. Oh, and I never feel sleepy during the work day, because I don’t experience a carb slump.
(Another trick I have recently discovered is intermittent fasting: If I skip breakfast — and please refrain from claiming that it’s “the most important meal of the day,” as there is effectively zero hard science on that. and the hard science there is shows eating or skipping breakfast does nothing to weight loss — I don’t get hungry at all throughout the day. Sometimes, I can even avoid eating until dinner, which allows me to save a bunch of time. But this is a topic for a future post…)
Is an LCHF diet the solution for everyone? Probably not. Some people I know have tried and given up because the carb cravings were too strong. I am lucky to never have had that problem. In addition, vegetarians might find it difficult to get enough fat, although nuts and cheese are a great option here.
* Actually, it’s n=2, since my wife and I both eat that way, and she claims she gains weight when she eats carbs and loses or maintains her weight when she does not. My wife also says eating carbs make her more likely to get angry.
ht: Wendy Rahn.