Fast Facts Nation

For the amount of money spent on health and diet issues, we as a civilization are still appallingly ignorant on what causes us to be fat. To judge by food advertizing, you would imagine that the number one dietary culprit is fat. it isn't. Fat does not make you fat. The only macronutrient that has the capacity to put fat on your frame is carbohydrates, pure and simple. Yet we continue to indict meats, with their associated fat, and fried foods drenched in oil and shortening. Yet if you broke down the real culprits in the McDonald's diet made famous in the book and documentary film "Fast Food Nation", they would be the bun in the Big Mac, the potato in the French Fries, and the sugar in the supersized drink. The meat and the frying oil are innocent.

Now there are other health issues related to the consumption of fat. More precisely it is the kind of fat that matters; trans-fats and saturated fats, which are not natural products but manufactured, present risks for cardio-vascular disorders. But the natural fats from meats, fish and plants, especially olive oil, do not present health risks by and large, and do not contribute to weight gain.

As a personal example, I've lost over 30 pounds since April on a low carbohydrate diet, first popularized by Dr Robert Atkins - and that's without any exercise program to speak of. The beauty of the low carb approach is in the knowledge of why it works. The only way that fat comes to be stored is through the workings of the hormone insulin. Insulin is released into the bloodstream in response to elevated blood sugar levels. It converts blood sugar molecules to body fat. If blood sugar levels rarely or never rise to an excess level, then insulin will not be triggered to convert it to fat.

Dietary protein and fat have negligible impacts on blood sugar levels. No matter how much of these macronutrients you ingest, your blood sugar level will never spike to excessive levels necessitating the release of insulin. But when the body is starved of blood sugar, it reverts to a secondary metabolic pathway to meet the body's energy needs, involving the hormone glucagon which acts in an opposite manner to insulin:

Glucagon is an important hormone involved in carbohydrate metabolism. Produced by the pancreas, it is released when the glucose level in the blood is low (hypoglycemia), causing the liver to convert stored glycogen into glucose and release it into the bloodstream. The action of glucagon is thus opposite to that of insulin, which instructs the body's cells to take in glucose from the blood in times of satiation.

Yet contrary to the established science, we're still fed the low fat mantra. Food has such political and cultural significance that I doubt that the science of nutrition can ever get a fair, unbiased hearing in the public eye. The cultural and political forces arrayed against meat and fat are considerable. First and most obviously are the vegetarian and anti animal cruelty lobbies. The subversive idea that Homo Sapiens evolved as a carnivorous omnivore that isn't capable of producing all of its needed proteins from plant sources alone is just too dangerous for them to admit to.

Secondly, I think that the legacy of the Food Pyramid makes the idea that any diet that is not dominated by breads and cereals is somehow redical and dangerous. Breads and grains are embedded in our culture, but from an evolutionary timeline perspective agricultural products are a very recent innovation to our diet for which our "legacy" metabolic hardware has not properly adapted to as a primary source of nutrition. In The Paleolithic Prescription, by by S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., Marjorie Shostak, Melvin Konner, MD PHD, the authors explore the diet that our hunter-gatherer Paleolithic ancestors, which our body has evolved to emulate, and how different it is from the agricultural diet that has been our legacy for the last 12,000 years. The book presents the evidence that the Agricultural Revolution was disastrous for the health and longevity of the great mass of mankind for the majority of history leading up to the modern era, where the ready availability of animal protein has restored some of the bodily vigor that was lost in the transition to agriculture. Food "traditionalists" who worship agriculture and the settled agrarian lifestyle may be put out by this realization, but the true traditional diet for mankind is heavy on meat and wild, unrefined plant sources like nuts, seeds and fruits, and has no place for refined breads and cereals.

Update: This article by Gary Taubes goes into great detail about the development of the low fat mantra, beginning in the 1970s with Congressional hearings chaired by Senator George McGovern, and shows how the government, the AMA and leading medical institutions conspired (with good intentions, of course) to inflict an obesity epidemic on the American people through politically correct junk science. It is long, but well worth a read. If you're not a low carb believer now, you will be after reading his article. Here are a few worthy quotes:

Atkins was by no means the first to get rich pushing a high-fat diet that restricted carbohydrates, but he popularized it to an extent that the American Medical Association considered it a potential threat to our health. The A.M.A. attacked Atkins’s diet as a ‘‘bizarre regimen’’ that advocated ‘‘an unlimited intake of saturated fats and cholesterol-rich foods,’’ and Atkins even had to defend his diet in Congressional hearings.

Thirty years later, America has become weirdly polarized on the subject of weight. On the one hand, we’ve been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer. On the other, we have the ever-resilient message of Atkins and decades’ worth of best-selling diet books, including ‘‘The Zone,’’ ‘‘Sugar Busters’’ and ‘‘Protein Power’’ to name a few. All push some variation of what scientists would call the alternative hypothesis: it’s not the fat that makes us fat, but the carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live longer.

The perversity of this alternative hypothesis is that it identifies the cause of obesity as precisely those refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous Food Guide Pyramid—the pasta, rice and bread—that we are told should be the staple of our healthy low-fat diet, and then on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy. While the low-fat-is-good-health dogma represents reality as we have come to know it, and the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research trying to prove its worth, the low-carbohydrate message has been relegated to the realm of unscientific fantasy.
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It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health dogma in the 50’s with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous. The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ‘‘Dietary Goals for the United States,’’ advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of ‘‘killer diseases’’ supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat had become ‘‘this greasy killer’’ in the memorable words of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter—a dubious feast of refined carbohydrates.

In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ‘‘It’s an imperfect world,’’ Rifkind told me. ‘‘The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.’’

It isn't surprising that the deplorable Senator McGovern's fingerprints would be on this government engineered health disaster, as he and his co-conspirators in the Democrat party had earlier managed to turn an American victory in Vietnam into a full-fledged massacre of the Vietnamese and Cambodian people by withholding support from the South Vietnamese government. But there's plenty of blame to go around for the quack science underlying the low fat debacle that made Americans the fattest people on the planet.