I'm learning. It's fun.
It started a little over two years ago one morning while I was out walking and listening to The Current on CBC radio.
I was living in Port Angeles, WA at the time, only a few miles south of Victoria, BC, and well within range of the CBC Radio One transmitter. I had a clear signal. That was good, because I've made real changes since then, inspired by what I heard that morning.
The guest that morning was Nina Teicholz, flogging her new book The Big Fat Surprise. To summarize what I heard: Fat is OK. Fat never was a problem. Eat it.
To get a bit more specific while still over-simplifying, three points.
- Eating fat doesn't make you fat.
- Eating cholesterol-rich foods does not increase the blood level of cholesterol.
- Saturated fat does not cause heart disease.
Teicholz spent 10 years digging through more than half a century of nutritional research, reading the original papers, reviewing the original data sets, and interviewing any still-living researchers.
A big deal has been made since the 1960s of the connection between eating fat and coronary heart disease. Meanwhile, the rate of that disease has fallen dramatically and both obesity and diabetes have increased radically.
So you could say that eating less fat and more carbohydrates have been successful in a left-handed sort of way. Except that there is and never has been a connection between eating cholesterol or saturated fat, or any animal fat, and developing heart disease. It's a fraud, and has been all along.
Along with that, carbohydrates (sugar especially), are looking to be really bad. That seems to be where a lot of obesity and diabetes come from.
Ancel Keys was the primary player in promoting the "Diet-Heart Hypothesis" that inspired the no-fat craze of the last few decades. He was at best a poor researcher, and even committed scientific fraud to promote his ideas, but he was a great political in-fighter and bulldozed right over those opposed to his hunches. Because that's what they were, but he knew he was right, so a little tweaking of data here, conclusions there, sample sizes, populations studied, geographical areas, and so on were, in his eyes, justified.
But no longer.
It's known now that a fundamental element of Keyes's "research" was the island of Crete. He apparently loved it. He went there at least three times. The last visit was a key element of the invention of the Mediterranean Diet, which didn't exist until two Italian women invented it in the 1960s.
During Keyes's third visit to Crete, he studied a few men (men only), and discovered that they were eating what they ripped out of their gardens, fish, and wine. And they seemed healthy. And a lot of them were both old and healthy. That was during the Christian season of Lent, a time of penance.
That's why the were eating fish. It was punishment for their sins. They preferred red meat, which they habitually ate during normal times. Keyes chose not to notice.
He also ignored Germany and France, the two most populous European countries, where people happily ate lots of saturated fat and also did not have much heart disease. He ignored Germany and France because what was going on in Germany and France didn't fit his preconception of the origins of heart disease.
So dietary science isn't. All the answers aren't in yet, but there is to this day no proof that either red meat or the fat that goes with it is anything but supremely healthy.
As meat has been saying all along: "Bite me with abandon."
Other things I've learned:
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Calories don't exist. A calorie is a unit of energy. It is a useful concept in physics and chemistry, but doesn't apply to metabolism.
Food calories (kilo calories, or "Calories", each one the equivalent of 1000 "small" calories), are determined by burning a piece of food in an oxygen environment. This has no relationship whatsoever with what happens to that food inside any animal body. It may be passed through undigested, might be consumed by gut bacteria, could be digested and then stored in the body and not "burned", or is possibly metabolized completely.
But no matter what happens, body metabolism is not "burning" in any sense other than that electrons are transferred from one molecule to another. It is not at all the simple physical process that actual burning is.
Weighing food is just as good as counting calories. Eyeballing the volume of food is also as good. For anyone counting calories, they have to learn how many calories of which do what. In other words, you have to convert from a quantity of food to what happens to you after you've eaten a lot of that food over time. By trial and error.
There is no formula because metabolism, as noted, isn't a simple physical process, so why bother with calories when they have no relevance? Simply measuring by the teaspoon, tablespoon, or cupful is easier and just as precise.
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Salt intake is probably not an issue, except in a very few special situations. James J. DiNicolantonio has just written a book titled The Salt Fix, which contains possibly unsubstantiated or poorly-supported claims about human ancestors eating much more salt than modern humans, but the interesting point to me is that normal kidneys, according to the author, can remove from the bloodstream about one teaspoonful of salt every five minutes. Which sounds pretty effective.
I can't tell if this is true or not, but it's worth keeping track of.
- Sugar is bad, probably. No one knows for sure because dietary research so far hasn't been either scientific or reliable, but there is growing biochemical evidence.
- Carbohydrates are bad, probably. No one knows this for sure either, but Gary Taubes and others are bringing the tools of investigative journalism and basic rationality to this subject and to that of sugar.
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Eating plant fats is iffy at best. Olive oil is trendy but for most of human history it was burned in oil lamps to provide light.
Most human populations, let alone pre-humans, had no access to olive oil, ever, so it's a strange food, but since it was available in some areas, it is less strange than soybean oil, peanut oil, rapeseed oil, corn oil, sesame seed oil, or the others. These substances are the result of intense industrial processing. It is literally impossible to go up to any plant on earth, bite it, and end up with oil running down your jaw.
Vegetable fats do not occur naturally.
They have to be forced out of plants, so they are not in any way actual foods, although various amounts of vegetable fats occur in various plants, mixed in as a minor component with indigestible fiber, protein, starch, and sugar.
Humans evolved eating mammal meat, and the fat thereof, which is universally available on every continent, Antarctica excluded, but humans have never lived on Antarctica so that's a moot point. Since humans evolved eating the fat of mammal meat, we're adapted to it, and it's probably very good for us. Research has not decided this issue ether way, although it has been proven that humans can live indefinitely and healthily on meat alone.
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Anti-oxidants are most likely bogus. There has been research showing beneficial effects, but there has also been research showing that chocolate candy has beneficial effects. Sponsored by Mars, the candy company. Go figure, eh?
Chocolate: out. Red wine: Not a health food, and maybe not healthy in any way. Coffee? Meh.
I'm still learning. It's fun.