Links - 16th February 2020 (1) (Diets/Weight loss)

No need to avoid healthy omega-6 fats - "The benefits of omega-3 fats from fatty fish and likely from plant sources like flaxseeds and walnuts are well known. They help protect the heart from lapsing into potentially deadly erratic rhythms. They ease inflammation. They inhibit the formation of dangerous clots in the bloodstream. They also lower levels of triglycerides, the most common type of fat-carrying particle in the blood. Omega-6 fats, which we get mainly from vegetable oils, are also beneficial. They lower harmful LDL cholesterol and boost protective HDL. They help keep blood sugar in check by improving the body's sensitivity to insulin. Yet these fats don't enjoy the same sunny reputation as omega-3 fats... The critics argue that we should cut back on our intake of omega-6 fats to improve the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6s. Hogwash, says the American Heart Association (AHA). In a science advisory that was two years in the making, nine independent researchers from around the country, including three from Harvard, say that data from dozens of studies support the cardiovascular benefits of eating omega-6 fats (Circulation, Feb. 17, 2009). "Omega-6 fats are not only safe but they are also beneficial for the heart and circulation," says advisory coauthor Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital."
Some of the keto people hate omega-6 fats, probably because they need more targets for their food purity laws (like soy)

Food Industry Lobbying and U.S. 2015 Dietary Guidelines - "“I was told we could never say ‘eat less meat’ because USDA would not allow it.” This is not the first time experts have raised concerns about the guidelines.“Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the USDA treated fat as the primary harm in the American diet,” says Nestle. Along with its anti-fat stance—a stance researchers say was never grounded in science—the guidelines also encouraged Americans to eat hefty amounts of carbohydrates. The 1995 edition made bread, cereal, and pasta the foundation of its “Food Guide Pyramid,” and advised people to eat between six and 11 servings of grains every day, compared to just three to five servings of vegetables and two to four servings of fruit. Fat was to be eaten “sparingly.”... In a sign of progress, the 2015 guidelines for the first time do not explicitly advise Americans to put a cap on the amount of fat in their diets. The new diet recommendations still advise limiting saturated fat to 10% of a person’s total calorie intake. Saturated fat’s place in a healthy diet remains controversial... The guidelines’ ongoing promotion of low- and no-fat dairy is also the subject of some debate. Several recent review studies have suggested whole milk has a place in a healthy diet. Some studies have also linked full-fat dairy—but not reduced-fat dairy—to lower rates of weight gain and metabolic disease. The new guidelines, which also say average dairy intakes for most people are “far below” levels that fit into a “healthy U.S.-style pattern,” doesn’t dovetail with the opinions of most nutrition experts. “There’s just not scientific evidence to support such large amounts of dairy consumption,” Harvard’s Willett says, adding that industry influence may have played a role in that as well. While some experts are critical of the guidelines, they also say the government’s health recommendations have historically influenced Americans’ diets in positive ways.When the 2005 guidelines targeted dangerous trans fatty acids, for instance, the FDA soon required food manufacturers to list a product’s trans fat content on its nutrition label. This inclusion, Willett says, pushed many manufacturers—and soon after, fast food chains—to cut trans fats from their products. A recent report from Harvard School of Public Health lists lower trans fat consumption as one of the major reasons rates of premature death and disease fell among Americans adults from 1999 to 2012. The new guidelines advise Americans to eat fewer refined grains and more whole grains—changes the latest research supports. The guidelines also advise Americans to reduce the amount of added sugar in their diets."

There's growing evidence that eating fat won't make you fat, but sugar will - "In many parts of the world, the two ingredients are rarely eaten alone. Take doughnuts as an example. When the fresh carb-laden dough is deep-fried in oil, you get a classic combination of sugar and fat with a rich flavor and powerful mouthfeel that’s tough to pass up.But an increasing body of evidence is beginning to suggest that when eaten in isolation, fat doesn’t contribute to weight gain. On the other hand, dozens of studies indicate that sugar alone is significantly tied to packing on pounds... For a large recent review of studies published in the journal The Lancet, scientists compared more than 135,000 people in 18 countries on either low-fat or low-carb diets. People on the low-fat diets were more likely to die from any cause; they were also at a greater risk of death from heart attacks and heart disease. By contrast, people on the low-carb plans had significantly lower risk of both of these outcomes...  During an eight-year trial involving almost 50,000 women, scientists put roughly half on a low-fat diet. Not only did the low-fat dieters not lose much weight, if any, they also didn’t see a decrease in the risk of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or heart disease – outcomes commonly associated with a healthier eating plan.Part of the problem lies in what happens with the rest of our diet when we suddenly try to eat only low-fat foods... on average, the more refined grains someone ate (like those from processed cereals and granola bars), the more weight they tended to gain over the study period."

I lost 13 stone – now I know the truth about obesity - "Myth 1: ‘I eat only 1,000 kcal a day, but I don’t lose weight’
People can hugely misjudge their calorie intake, and overweight people have a strong tendency to underestimate the calorie content of their food. A study carried out in 1992 investigated people described as “diet-resistant”. These people claimed not to be able to lose weight, despite restricting their calorie intake to fewer than 1,200 kcal a day. But it turned out that, in their nutrition journals, they underestimated their average calorie intake by 47% and overestimated their physical activity by 51%.
Myth 2: ‘Being overweight isn’t that bad for you’
This is the fat logic argument I encounter most often, and which I believed myself for many years. It is also the one I kick myself about the most, in retrospect. I always claimed to have made a rational decision about my weight, but I was labouring under two misapprehensions: that it is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain normal weight; and that it doesn’t have all that many advantages anyway. Now, I argue the opposite whenever I can... Obesity is a bit like smoking: the tumours don’t start growing right after the first cigarette. For someone who is naturally prone to lung problems, it might take five years. Another person’s lungs might be able to take 50 years of constant damage. But just because the damage isn’t visible, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Myth 3: ‘Being overweight doesn’t impede me’
The achievement a US leader of the fat-acceptance movement, Ragen Chastain, claims makes her an “elite athlete” – with a morbidly obese BMI. In 2013, she ran a marathon and published an article about it with the title My Big Fat Finished Marathon. She wrote about how, after five months of training, she covered just over 40km in 12 hours and 20 minutes. It is an achievement for a severely obese person to walk the entire length of a marathon in one go. But Chastain’s average speed of less than 3.5km (2.2 miles) an hour is much slower than normal walking speed. The marathon had officially ended hours before she crossed the finishing line – the stands removed, the organisers gone. The last participant to complete the race, several hours before Chastain, was a woman in her 70s.
Myth 4: ‘My family and friends don’t think I need to lose weight’
When I was sick and almost bedridden at 150kg, no one ever expressed concern or commented on my weight in any way. And then, when I lost 40kg, was able to walk again and feeling better than I had for years, people started to get worried about my health. It was as if my body had suddenly become a public forum, after years of having been a taboo subject.Why is it so socially acceptable to criticise someone for losing weight? Because most people don’t know what overweight looks like. In one British study, obese people were asked to assess themselves, and only 11% of women and 7% of men with a BMI of over 30 were aware they were obese. In a 2015 study, parents were asked about the weight of their children: 80% of parents of overweight children rated them as being of normal weight.
Myth 5: ‘Obesity is largely due to your genes’
Several studies have shown that carriers of so-called obesity genes consume on average 125-280 kcal a day more and have no differences in their metabolic rates. To say that some children have a genetic propensity towards obesity means only that they have an inherently larger appetite than naturally slim children, who feel hungry less often.But the deciding factor in whether children have a tendency towards being fat is the set of conditions created by their parents and the rest of their environment (such as school meals), which can serve either to encourage or discourage obesity."
So much for health at any size

Are metabolically healthy overweight and obesity benign conditions?: A systematic review and meta-analysis. - "Eight studies (n = 61 386; 3988 events) evaluated participants for all-cause mortality and/or cardiovascular events. Metabolically healthy obese individuals (relative risk [RR], 1.24; 95% CI, 1.02 to 1.55) had increased risk for events compared with metabolically healthy normal-weight individuals when only studies with 10 or more years of follow-up were considered"

Fat food does not cause heart disease - Uffe Ravnskov - "The crucial test is the controlled, randomised trial. Eight such trials using diet as the only treatment has been performed, but neither the number of fatal or non-fatal heart attacks were reduced significantly in any of these trials, not even if the results were added in a meta-analysis."

Counting calories is not the key to weight loss, new study finds - "people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year. The strategy worked for people whether they followed diets that were mostly low in fat or mostly low in carbohydrates.And their success did not appear to be influenced by their genetics or their insulin-response to carbohydrates, a finding that casts doubt on the increasingly popular idea that different diets should be recommended to people based on their DNA makeup or on their tolerance for carbs or fat. The research lends strong support to the notion that diet quality, not quantity, is what helps people lose and manage their weight most easily in the long run... The participants were encouraged to meet the federal guidelines for physical activity but did not generally increase their exercise levels... The new study stands apart from many previous weight-loss trials because it did not set extremely restrictive carbohydrate, fat or caloric limits on people and emphasised that they focus on eating whole or “real” foods — as much as they needed to avoid feeling hungry... the people who lost the most weight reported that the study had “changed their relationship with food.” They no longer ate in their cars or in front of their television screens, and they were cooking more at home and sitting down to eat dinner with their families, for example... "‘Don’t go out and buy a low-fat brownie just because it says low fat. And those low-carb chips — don’t buy them, because they’re still chips and that’s gaming the system.’” Mr Gardner said many of the people in the study were surprised — and relieved — that they did not have to restrict or even think about calories.“A couple weeks into the study people were asking when we were going to tell them how many calories to cut back on,” he said. “And months into the study they said, ‘Thank you! We’ve had to do that so many times in the past.’”... On average, the members of the low-carb group lost just over 13 pounds (5.9 kg), while those in the low-fat group lost about 11.7 pounds.Both groups also saw improvements in other health markers, like reductions in their waist sizes, body fat, and blood sugar and blood pressure levels.Mr Gardner said it is not that calories do not matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they were not conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger. “I think one place we go wrong is telling people to figure out how many calories they eat and then telling them to cut back on 500 calories, which makes them miserable”"
Satiety effects!

A high-carb diet may explain why Okinawans live so long - "Emerging evidence suggests a 10:1 ratio of carbohydrates to proteins may protect the body from the ravages of ageing... Even by the standards of Japan, Okinawans are remarkable, with a 40% greater chance of living to 100 than other Japanese people... The typical Okinawan centenarian appeared to be free of the typical signs of cardiovascular disease, without the build-up of the hard “calcified” plaques around the arteries that can lead to heart failure. Okinawa’s oldest residents also have far lower rates of cancer, diabetes and dementia than other ageing populations... Unlike the rest of Asia, the Okinawan staple is not rice, but the sweet potato, first introduced in the early 17th Century through trade with the Netherlands. Okinawans also eat an abundance of green and yellow vegetables – such as the bitter melon – and various soy products. Although they do eat pork, fish and other meats, these are typically a small component of their overall consumption, which is mostly plant-based foods. The traditional Okinawan diet is therefore dense in the essential vitamins and minerals - including anti-oxidants - but also low in calories. Particularly in the past, before fast food entered the islands, the average Okinawan ate around 11% fewer calories than the normal recommended consumption for a healthy adult... In one of the most compelling experiments, a group of resus macaques eating 30% fewer calories than the average monkey showed a remarkable 63% reduction in deaths from age-related diseases over a 20-year period. They also looked younger – they had fewer wrinkles and their fur retained its youthful lustre rather than turning grey... Solon-Biet has conducted a series of studies examining the influence of dietary composition (rather than sheer quantity) on ageing in animals, and her team has consistently found that a high-carb, low-protein diet extends the lifespan of various species, with her most recent study showing that it reduces some of the signs of ageing in the brain. Amazingly, they have found that the optimum ratio is 10 parts carb to one part protein – the same as the so-called Okinawan Ratio... Once again, the exact mechanisms are murky. Like calorie restriction, the low protein diets seem to promote the cell repair and maintenance. Karen Ryan, a nutritional biologist at the University of California, Davis, points out that the scarcity of amino acids can encourage cells to recycle old material (rather than synthesising new proteins)... Ryan points to some evidence that low protein intake may limit bodily damage up to the age of 65, but you may then benefit from increasing your protein intake after that point. “Optimal nutrition is expected to vary across the life history,” she says. And it’s also worth noting one study, which found that the relative merits of protein and carbohydrates may depend on the protein's source: a diet higher in plant-based protein appears to be better than a diet rich in meat or dairy, for instance. So the Okinawans may be living longer due to the fact that they are eating (mostly) fruit and vegetables, rather than its high carb, low protein content."
How to trigger keto people

Flu Shot Doesn't Work As Well For Obese And Overweight People - "This issue came to light during the 2009 flu pandemic, the first major outbreak of the 21st century. Health officials noticed that the flu was taking a particular toll on people who were significantly overweight."
So much for health at any size

Red Meat and Risk for All-Cause Mortality and Cardiometabolic Outcomes - "Of 61 articles reporting on 55 cohorts with more than 4 million participants, none addressed quality of life or satisfaction with diet... The magnitude of association between red and processed meat consumption and all-cause mortality and adverse cardiometabolic outcomes is very small, and the evidence is of low certainty."

Nutrition Science Is Broken. This New Egg Study Shows Why. - "Nutrition research tends to be unreliable because nearly all of it is based on observational studies, which are imprecise, have no controls, and don’t follow an experimental method. As nutrition-research critics Edward Archer and Carl Lavie have put it, “’Nutrition’ is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape.”... the study tracked participants’ health outcomes over periods ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and participants were queried about their diet only once, at the beginning of the study. Can we assume that the participants gave a reliable depiction of their diet at the outset, and then that they maintained that same diet for the years — in many cases, decades — that followed? Probably not. Who eats the same way for 10 years? In light of these flaws, Dr. Anthony Pearson, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Hospital in suburban St. Louis, had this advice: “Rather than drastically cutting egg consumption,” he wrote in a blog for MedPage Today, “I propose that there be a drastic cut in the production of weak observational nutrition studies and a moratorium on inflammatory media coverage of meaningless nutritional studies.” Instead of observational studies, most nutrition scientists would rather see experimental studies... you should also be wary about foods that are said to have newly revealed healthy, or unhealthy, properties. In other words, don’t buy the notion of superfoods. The evidence is just not there.In an email, Michael Blaha, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins University who has written about methodological issues with nutritional science, told me he finds “particularly distasteful studies of one particular food (e.g., broccoli) or one particular macronutrient,” because “it is impossible to disentangle the effect of one particular food or one macronutrient from the accompanying foods and macronutrients that characterize a typical dietary pattern.”"

Changes in Energy Expenditure Resulting from Altered Body Weight - "Maintenance of a reduced or elevated body weight is associated with compensatory changes in energy expenditure, which oppose the maintenance of a body weight that is different from the usual weight. These compensatory changes may account for the poor long-term efficacy of treatments for obesity."
Someone claimed that the Biggest Loser study on metabolism slowing due to weight loss was flawed and inapplicable to real life because that was for extreme weight loss. This study shows that even for more modest losses of 10-20%, we see the same effect

Why the new nutrition labels won't work - "Consumers don’t really use nutrition labels to eat healthier because it’s too complicated to try and combine all of the information into one decision. Perhaps even worse, what we know about the relationship between diet and disease is almost entirely based on data that come from people trying to remember what and how much they ate. Their memories are terrible, and subsequent study has shown that the data are flat wrong. The FDA needs to give up on this failed policy and try other ideas that help consumers make healthier choices. How am I so sure that the nutrition facts panel has been a failure? Because I made all of the upbeat predictions about how helpful it would be when, in 1993, we implemented the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990... We thought we would see about 40,000 fewer cases of cancer and heart disease over the next 20 years and prevent 13,000 deaths.Sadly, as nearly a quarter of a century of experience has revealed, pretty much none of that occurred. Today, fewer people read food labels, and most Americans think it’s easier to figure out their income taxes than to really understand how to eat healthy... Part of the problem is that different people have different dietary needs. As scientific advances move toward allowing doctors to offer customized treatment plans for patients based on very specific needs, nutrition science continues to use a one-size-fits-all solution.But even if everyone’s needs were uniform, research from the FDA’s sister agency, the Department of Agriculture, shows that the nutrition labeling law has no effect on consumption of total fat, saturated fat or cholesterol. Another study suggests that food labels may be actually misleading to consumers who are trying to make healthy choices. Nutrition science also turns out to be much more uncertain than we thought. To estimate the effects of the label changes in the ’90s, we used nutrition science to link dietary fat to cancer, but now it appears that relationship doesn’t exist. We also linked high levels of LDL cholesterol to heart disease, but the age-adjusted decreases in coronary heart disease ceased to decline even as LDL continued to decline."

People Are Still Googling One of the Most Annoying Diets of the Decade - "People who do keto talk about it as if they’re being paid to. Like most other diets, keto’s best advertisers are the people painfully dragging themselves through its rigorous limits: No carbs, no sugars, no alcohol, no joy, etc."

Carbohydrates, not animal fats, linked to heart disease across 42 European countries - "Cholesterol levels were tightly correlated to the consumption of animal fats and proteins – Countries consuming more fat and protein from animal sources had higher incidence of raised cholesterol
Raised cholesterol correlated negatively with CVD risk – Countries with higher levels of raised cholesterol had fewer cases of CVD deaths and a lower incidence of CVD risk factors
Carbohydrates correlated positively with CVD risk – the more carbohydrates consumed (and especially those with high GI such as starches) the more CVD
Fat and Protein correlated negatively with CVD risk – Countries consuming more fat and protein from animal and plant sources had less CVD. The authors speculate that this is because increasing fat and protein in the diet generally displaces carbohydrates."

Mice shed weight when they can’t smell—but not because they stop eating - "the odor-deprived rodents weighed slightly less than mice whose sense of smell was intact. In the group on the high-fat diet, however, the mice that couldn’t smell weighed 16% less than animals that could, which became obese. Losing the ability to smell also caused a different group of already-obese mice to lose weight... The obvious explanation for this effect—that mice with impaired olfaction were eating less—turned out to be wrong. There was no difference in the animals’ food consumption. Nor were the slim rodents getting more exercise. They weren’t moving around their cages more than their porky counterparts. Instead, the researchers determined, they stayed svelte because they burned more calories, especially in their brown fat... not only did the brown fat ramp up its activity in the smell-deficient animals, but some of their white fat also became more like brown fat... The researchers followed weight changes in a different group of genetically engineered rodents that are hypersensitive to odors. These super-smellers became obese, but not because they consumed more food than usual"
More evidence that calories in, calories out is a simplistic model

Why we fell for clean eating - "In the spring of 2014, Jordan Younger noticed that her hair was falling out in clumps. “Not cool” was her reaction. At the time, Younger, 23, believed herself to be eating the healthiest of all possible diets. She was a “gluten-free, sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, legume-free, plant-based raw vegan”. As The Blonde Vegan, Younger was a “wellness” blogger in New York City, one of thousands on Instagram (where she had 70,000 followers) rallying under the hashtag #eatclean. Although she had no qualifications as a nutritionist, Younger had sold more than 40,000 copies of her own $25, five-day “cleanse” programme – a formula for an all-raw, plant-based diet majoring on green juice.But the “clean” diet that Younger was selling as the route to health was making its creator sick. Far from being super-healthy, she was suffering from a serious eating disorder: orthorexia, an obsession with consuming only foods that are pure and perfect. Younger’s raw vegan diet had caused her periods to stop and given her skin an orange tinge from all the sweet potato and carrots she consumed (the only carbohydrates she permitted herself). Eventually, she sought psychological help, and began to slowly widen the repertoire of foods she would allow herself to eat, starting with fish. She recognised that the problem was not her veganism, per se, but the particularly rigid and restrictive diet regime she had imposed on herself... She lost followers “by the thousands” and received a daily raft of angry messages, including death threats. Some responded to her confession that she was suffering from an eating disorder by accusing her of being a “fat piece of lard” who didn’t have the discipline to be truly “clean”. For as long as people have eaten food, there have been diets and quack cures. But previously, these existed, like conspiracy theories, on the fringes of food culture. “Clean eating” was different, because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating, and its wild popularity over the past five years has enabled it to move far beyond the fringes... At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods (whatever is meant by these deeply ambiguous terms). Some versions of clean eating have been vegan, while others espouse various meats (preferably wild) and something mysteriously called “bone broth” (stock, to you and me)... it quickly became clear that “clean eating” was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure... as a method of healthy eating, it’s founded on bad science. In June, the American Heart Association suggested that the coconut oil beloved as a panacea by clean eaters actually had “no known offsetting favourable effects”, and that consuming it could result in higher LDL cholesterol. A few weeks later, Anthony Warner – a food consultant with a background in science who blogs as The Angry Chef – published a book-length assault on the science of clean eating, calling it a world of “quinoa bowls” and “nutribollocks” fuelled by the modern information age. When Dr Giles Yeo, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, presented an episode of the BBC’s Horizon this year that examined the scientific evidence for different schools of clean eating, he found everything from innocuous recipes to serious malpractice... Avocados now outsell oranges in the UK... Why has clean eating proved so difficult to kill off? Hadley Freeman, in this paper, identified clean eating as part of a post-truth culture, whose adherents are impervious, or even hostile, to facts and experts... Our collective anxiety around diet was exacerbated by a general impression that mainstream scientific advice on diet – inflated by newspaper headlines – could not be trusted. First these so-called experts tell us to avoid fat, then sugar, and all the while people get less and less healthy. What will these “experts” say next, and why should we believe them? Into this atmosphere of anxiety and confusion stepped a series of gurus offering messages of wonderful simplicity and reassurance: eat this way and I will make you fresh and healthy again. It is very hard to pinpoint the exact moment when “clean eating” started, because it is not so much as a single diet as a portmanteau term that has borrowed ideas from numerous pre-existing diets: a bit of Paleo here, some Atkins there, with a few remnants of 1960s macrobiotics thrown in for good measure...  There was something paradoxical about the way these books were marketed. What they were selling purported to be an alternative to a sordidly commercial food industry. “If it’s got a barcode or a ‘promise’, don’t buy it,” wrote Freer. Yet clean eating is itself a wildly profitable commercial enterprise, promoted using photogenic young bloggers on a multi-billion-dollar tech platform. Literary agent Zoe Ross tells me that around 2015 she began to notice that “the market was scouring Instagram for copycat acts – specifically very pretty, very young girls pushing curated food and lifestyle”... You can’t found a new faith system with the words “I am publishing a very good vegetarian cookbook”. For this, you need something stronger. You need the assurance of make-believe, whispered sweetly. Grind this cauliflower into tiny pieces and you can make a special kind of no-carb rice! Avoid all sugar and your skin will shimmer! Among other things, clean eating confirms how vulnerable and lost millions of us feel about diet – which really means how lost we feel about our own bodies. We are so unmoored that we will put our faith in any master who promises us that we, too, can become pure and good... When we met on stage in Cheltenham, I asked Shaw why she told people to cut out all bread, and was startled when she denied she had said any such thing (rye bread was her favourite, she added). McGregor asked Shaw what she meant when she wrote that people should try to eat only “clean proteins”; meat that was “not deep-fried” was her rather baffling reply... “But I only see the positive”, said Shaw, now wiping away tears. It was at this point that the audience, who were already restless whenever McGregor or I spoke, descended into outright hostility, shouting and hissing for us to get off stage. In a book shop after the event, as fans came up to Shaw to thank her for giving them “the glow”, I too burst into tears when one person jabbed her fingers at me and said I should be ashamed, as an “older women” (I am 43), to have criticised a younger one. On Twitter that night, some Shaw fans made derogatory comments about how McGregor and I looked, under the hashtag #youarewhatyoueat. The implication was that, if we were less photogenic than Shaw, we clearly had nothing of any value to say about food (never mind the fact that McGregor has degrees in biochemistry and nutrition). Thinking about the event on the train home, I realised that the crowd were angry with us not because they disagreed with the details (it’s pretty clear that you can’t have sugar in “sugar-free” recipes), but because they disliked the fact that we were arguing at all. To insist on the facts made us come across as cruelly negative. We had punctured the happy belief-bubble of glowiness that they had come to imbibe from Shaw. It’s striking that in many of the wellness cookbooks, mainstream scientific evidence on diet is seen as more or less irrelevant... Amelia Freer, in Eat. Nourish. Glow, admits that “we can’t prove that dairy is the cause” of ailments ranging from IBS to joint pain, but concludes that it’s “surely worth” cutting dairy out anyway, just as a precaution. In another context, Freer writes that “I’m told it takes 17 years for scientific knowledge to filter down” to become general knowledge, while advising that gluten should be avoided. Once we enter the territory where all authority and expertise are automatically suspect, you can start to claim almost anything – and many #eatclean authorities do. That night in Cheltenham, I saw that clean eating – or whatever name it now goes under – had elements of a post-truth cult. As with any cult, it could be something dark and divisive if you got on the wrong side of it. After Giles Yeo’s BBC programme was aired, he told me he was startled to find himself subjected to relentless online trolling. “They said I was funded by big pharma, and therefore obviously wouldn’t see the benefits of a healthy diet over medicine. These were outright lies.” (Yeo is employed by the University of Cambridge, and funded by the Medical Research Council.) It’s increasingly clear that clean eating, for all its good intentions, can cause real harm, both to truth and to human beings. Over the past 18 months, McGregor says, “every single client with an eating disorder who walks into my clinic doors is either following or wants to follow a ‘clean’ way of eating”... a movement whose premise is that normal food is unhealthy has now muddied the waters of “healthy eating” for everyone else, by planting the idea that a good diet is one founded on absolutes... #Eatclean made healthy eating seem like something “expensive, exclusive and difficult to achieve”, as Anthony Warner writes. Whether the term “clean” is used or not, there is a new puritanism about food that has taken root very widely... Behind the shiny covers of the clean-eating books, there is a harsh form of economic exclusion that says that someone who can’t afford wheatgrass or spirulina can never be truly “well”.As the conversation I overheard in the gym illustrates, this way of thinking is especially dangerous because it obscures the message that, in fact, small changes in diet can have a large beneficial impact. If you think you can’t be healthy unless you eat nothing but vegetables, you might miss the fact that (as a recent overview of the evidence by epidemiologists showed) there are substantial benefits from raising your fruit-and-veg intake from zero portions a day to just two."
Food: a modern secular religion

Higher Cholesterol Is Associated With Longer Life - "While total cholesterol is a poor if not utterly worthless risk marker for heart disease, doctors have focused on it to the exclusion of how it might affect other causes of death. It does you little good to save yourself from heart disease if it means that you increase your risk of death from cancer... Population studies in Japan show that people of all ages with higher cholesterol live longer... 'If limited to elderly people, this trend is universal.'... A recent review in the prominent medical journal BMJ regarding LDL cholesterol, the risk marker considered most significant, found either no association or an inverse association between LDL and death rates."

The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol - The Washington Post - "The finding follows an evolution of thinking among many nutritionists who now believe that, for healthy adults, eating foods high in cholesterol may not significantly affect the level of cholesterol in the blood or increase the risk of heart disease. The greater danger in this regard, these experts believe, lies not in products such as eggs, shrimp or lobster, which are high in cholesterol, but in too many servings of foods heavy with saturated fats, such as fatty meats, whole milk, and butter... Some nutritionists said lifting the cholesterol warning is long overdue, noting that the United States is out-of-step with other countries, where diet guidelines do not single out cholesterol... “Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome,” John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and statistics at Stanford and one of the harshest critics of nutritional science, has written. “In this literature of epidemic proportions, how many results are correct?”... the body creates cholesterol in amounts much larger than their diet provides, that the body regulates how much is in the blood and that there is both “good” and “bad” cholesterol... “These reversals in the field do make us wonder and scratch our heads,” said David Allison, a public health professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “But in science, change is normal and expected.”When our view of the cosmos shifted from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Newton and Einstein, Allison said, “the reaction was not to say, ‘Oh my gosh, something is wrong with physics!’ We say, ‘Oh my gosh, isn’t this cool?’ ”Allison said the problem in nutrition stems from the arrogance that sometimes accompanies dietary advice. A little humility could go a long way.“Where nutrition has some trouble,” he said, “is all the confidence and vitriol and moralism that goes along with our recommendations.”"
Of course, vitriol and moralism create community - especially if you're following an unusual diet

Why Dietary Cholesterol Does Not Matter (For Most People) - "When your dietary intake of cholesterol goes down, your body makes more. When you eat greater amounts of cholesterol, your body makes less. Because of this, foods high in dietary cholesterol have very little impact on blood cholesterol levels in most people... in some people, high-cholesterol foods raise blood cholesterol levels. These people make up about 40% of the population and are often referred to as "hyperresponders." This tendency is considered to be genetic. Even though dietary cholesterol modestly increases LDL in these individuals, it does not seem to increase their risk of heart disease. This is because the general increase in LDL particles typically reflects an increase in large LDL particles — not small, dense LDL. In fact, people who have mainly large LDL particles have a lower risk of heart disease. Hyperresponders also experience an increase in HDL particles, which offsets the increase in LDL by transporting excess cholesterol back to the liver for elimination from the body. As such, while hyperresponders experience raised cholesterol levels when they increase their dietary cholesterol, the ratio of LDL to HDL cholesterol in these individuals stays the same and their risk of heart disease doesn't seem to go up... High-quality studies have shown that dietary cholesterol is not associated with an increased risk of heart disease"

New Research Confirms We Got Cholesterol All Wrong - "According to the study, statins are pointless for most people... "researchers have known for decades from nutrition studies that LDL-C is not strongly correlated with cardiac risk"... "physicians continue focusing on LDL-C in part because they have drugs to lower it. Doctors are driven by incentives to prescribe pills for nutrition-related diseases rather than better nutrition—a far healthier and more natural approach."... "The reason that we don't know about these huge reversals in dietary advice is that the nutrition establishment is apparently loathe to make public their major reversals in policy," Teicholz says. "The low-fat diet is another example: neither the AHA or the dietary guidelines recommend a low-fat diet anymore. But they have yet to announce this to the American public. And some in the establishment are still fighting to retain the low-fat status quo.""

Whole Fat Dairy: It Does a Body Good* - "folks who consume higher levels of whole fat dairy products actually lowered their overall mortality and cardiovascular disease risks compared to those who consumed lower amounts or none.As the study notes, nutritionists have long recommended that people minimize their consumption of whole-fat dairy products on the ground that they are a source of saturated fats and are presumed to adversely affect blood lipids and increase cardiovascular disease and mortality. On the basis of this study, that recommendation is exactly backward: Consuming less whole fat dairy is associated with higher cardiovascular and mortality risk."
Probably because low fat = more sugar

Carbohydrates and Increases in Obesity: Does the Type of Carbohydrate Make a Difference? - "the glycemic index does not address other metabolic issues related to excess sugar consumption. Prominent among these issues is the use of low glycemic index sweeteners, particularly fructose, which is increasingly present in processed food. Fructose is associated with increased adiposity, which may result from its effects on hormones associated with satiety. Other methods of determining “good” carbohydrates have also been developed. The common theme among them is increased nonstarchy vegetables and higher‐fiber legumes."

10 Myths About Low-Carb Diets - "5. All carbs are sugar...
starches and other carbs in whole foods don’t tend to raise blood sugar levels as much as those in desserts and refined or processed foods.Therefore, it’s important to distinguish between whole foods and refined carbs. Otherwise, you might believe that there’s no nutritional difference between a potato and a candy bar.
9. Fiber is mostly irrelevant to human health...
It’s vital for your gut bacteria, which turn fiber into beneficial compounds like the fatty acid butyrate... many studies show that fiber — especially soluble fiber — leads to various benefits, such as weight loss and improved cholesterol"