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.
