So, supposedly these guidelines looked out for your health, but given that so many of their "findings" have been overturned, then they've basically been giving advice that actually hindered peoples' health, and so one might understand that they've actually been harmful!
This might lead one to question the validity of other government suggestions. Or even policies. Maybe that's too far. Nonetheless, I think this raises serious questions as to how much faith we can put even into the government, even their "scientific" findings.
I'm sorry, but welcome to science. Theories evolve, new things are discovered, we make appropriate changes.
If the government stubbornly held onto their previous policies then they would be open to criticism, but the fact that things are changing is a good thing.
Nutritional science is hard, our bodies are complex.
I'm sorry, but welcome to politics. The dietary guidelines speak more to lobbying efforts than anything else. It's disingenuous to suggest that the US dietary guidelines are aligned to the evolving theories in nutritional science.
You get enough bad ideas hiding under the aegis of "science." Some guys claim something and pretend to be more sure about it than they've right to be. Dress it up as a scientific theory and you're personally unassailable.
I happen to think the data did and still does support restricting total fat. Highly saturated fats are mostly benign, but many fatty foods also have substantial quantities of unsaturated fats that are clearly linked to health consequences. So in practice "take easy on the fatty foods" has always been not bad for blanket general advice. They are probably making a mistake with this revision.
> Highly saturated fats are mostly benign, but many fatty foods also have substantial quantities of unsaturated fats that are clearly linked to health consequences.
I thought it was the saturated fats that are unhealthy, and the unsaturated fats that are benign and even essential up to some amount daily?
I've been reading a lot of papers on this subject recently, and it seems there is a complex interplay between intake of carbohydrate, saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat and monounsaturated fat.
Millions of years ago, creatures that you and I came from, through N levels of evolution, ingested saturated fat.
Today, some dickhead wants to tell me it's bad, so he can sell me "edible plastic" that introduces completely new molecules into my biology.
Try raising an infant without saturated fat. They will not thrive on skim milk or soy "milk". They need the fat stuff. Infant formula? Check the ingredients: chances are you will see coconut oil or its ilk.
Do you have a better alternative that we should put our faith in? At least the government has a somewhat transparent and, at least in theory, non-profit motivated process for creating these guidelines. Virtually any other source, other than doing the research yourself, is going to be about selling you something. And the fact of the matter is, the government probably has the most incentive of any organisation to keep people healthy.
I actually find that this increases my confidence in government recommendations. The fact that the old guidelines are being updated given new research over the past decades is a wonderful thing to see.
We live on a big planet with many different countries populated by the same species of human. Perhaps you could start by reading what other countries' governments recommend in terms of nutrition?
Well then why don't you enlighten us on the result of such a reading? For the impatient, I'll spill the beans - because the guidelines are quite similar across the board! They're all based on the same research and scientific majority opinion at the time! Who would've thought?
A few incorrect parts don't mean the guidelines aren't a net benefit. Just imagine what an average school cafeteria would serve if no regulations were in place at all.
Yeah, they used to serve real food. About 20 years ago, the school districts where I lived were buying real ingredients and the cooks were actually cooking meals. Now it's all packaged crap that they slap on a baking sheet and barely warm up.
As someone who's been paleo for over 6 years, this makes me very happy. I believe the paleo community had a lot to do with raising awareness of beneficial fats, promoting pasture-raised meat, and coconut oil and butter over industrial seed oils like canola.
Thanks to Paleo, I went from 340 pounds to 214 in exactly one year, and I'm now down to 190. People who've been part of Paleo already know the FDA avoids science as long as possible as not to piss off large Congressional lobbying groups.
I expect to get downvoted, and honestly, I don't care. Downvoting doesn't change the fact I lost all this weight by purposely ignoring the FDA's recommendations.
Notwithstanding the "fat-free everything" fad, the best epidermiological data we have so far suggest that fat consumption is highly correlated with coronary heart disease and all sorts of late-life complications. This could be wrong or out-dated, but FDA is only acting on the mainsteam scientific opinion that fat should be limited in a typical diet.
USDA, on the other hand, has been deeply troubled by the public's distaste of fat as they have an obligation is keep dairy farmers afloat. To this day they have been trying all sorts of things to promote fat consumption without much thought to the health consequences. South Park touched on the subject in the episode "Gluten Free Ebola", but I guess most people missed that point. New York Times have done a good article explaining the economic and politics between the FDA-USDA feud.
Finally, one must note that individual idiosyncracies play a major role in how we respond to external inputs such as diets, exercise and medication. I am glad that paleo diet worked out for you, however please bear in mind that it may and may not work for everyone when you push it.
I'd love to see a study like that as well. And you're right, not all trans fats are bad. There’s a good trans-fat called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) that is mainly found in meat and dairy from pastured ruminants. Grass-fed cattle produce 500% more CLA than grain-fed [2]. Only man-made industrial trans-fats are bad.
> Notwithstanding the "fat-free everything" fad, the best epidermiological data we have so far suggest that fat consumption is highly correlated with coronary heart disease and all sorts of late-life complications. This could be wrong or out-dated, but FDA is only acting on the mainsteam scientific opinion that fat should be limited in a typical diet
Yet if we look at other peoples and cultures around the world we can find several with high fat diets without the coronary heart disease and other problems that seem to plague high fat consuming Americans. Some examples are the natives of many South Pacific islands, the Inuits, and the Maasai.
Components of a diet do not act in isolation. It really has to be looked at as a complete system. If reducing fat in the American diet reduces coronary heart disease, that does not mean fat is bad or fat is causing coronary heart disease. It could be that if some one component instead of fat were removed the same reduction in coronary heart disease might occur (carbohydrates might be a good candidate, since the traditional high fat Inuit diet was very low in them, and they have much lower coronary heart disease than mainstream Americans do).
For nearly every rule, supposedly backed by the then current science when the rule was published, it is usually possible to find some place where the traditional diet breaks that rule yet the people there are doing fine, not suffering from the afflictions we've been told will befall is if we violate the rule.
The tendency to look at things in isolation doesn't just show up in unjustly declaring particular things bad. It also sometimes declares things good without sufficient justification. People look at, say, traditional Mediterranean diets and see that they have good outcomes, and figure it must be due to their heavy use of, say, olive oil. So then they start slathering olive oil over everything and expect they are going to get healthy no matter how crappy the stuff they are drowning in olive oil. In reality, there is probably no magic ingredient in the Mediterranean diets...it is the totality of their diet that is good.
What should be a simple task--regularly eating in a healthy way--is ridiculously complicated and requires way more research than it should in the US. And that's without getting into processed foods, and how the goals of processed food providers don't necessarily align with the goals of those trying to eat healthy.
I read somewhere (don't remember where, so can't give a good cite) that biochemists say we only understand about 10% of the chemical processes in our bodies. We know some things various nutrients are used for, but there are many we don't know. We often don't understand exactly how particular nutrients go from being part of our food to being being available at the places they are used in a form usable to our cells.
So it looks like the only reasonably effective way to eat healthy is to find some group of people whose traditional diet is known, and who have or had good outcomes in the health areas you are interested in, and had those good outcomes for a long time, and eat like you are one of them.
What I've not seen discussed is whether or not you can mix different diets this way. For instance, if you like the outcomes of traditional Mediterranean culture diets, and the outcome of traditional South Pacific Island diets, and so on for several cultures and their traditional diets, should you expect good outcomes if one day you eat like a South Pacific islander, and the next day like someone from a Mediterranean culture, and so on? Or do you need to stick with each culture's diet for some kind of extended period?
>I read somewhere (don't remember where, so can't give a good cite) that biochemists say we only understand about 10% of the chemical processes in our bodies. We know some things various nutrients are used for, but there are many we don't know. We often don't understand exactly how particular nutrients go from being part of our food to being being available at the places they are used in a form usable to our cells.
I think we know more far than 10% about our own biochemistry, but you are right in saying that there are plenty of processes we don't know enough about. Because the system is too great at adapting to changes that attempts to measure response from a single factor usually fails quite miserably. For example, Robert Lustig has been preaching for years that fructose is bad for you. His theory is scientifically sound, yet we have not observed the apocalyptic consequences he envisioned decades back. Similar debates on fat has been going on for decades and either side is backing up. Throw some economics and politics in there, and we have the mess we are dealing with today.
The main thing that set us apart from the indigenous peoples and perhaps our grandparents' generation is that we are feeding ourselves ad libitum which is very much unprecedented. After all, caloric restriction is the only proven way to enhance longevity in lab animals so it is quite likely that there is no magical diet but to eat and move as little as possible like the tortoise of Galapagos. Whether this lifestyle is conductive to a fulfiled life to open to (another) debate.
My son went from 320 to 210 in nine months while I went from 263 to 188 in the same amount of time so I can verify it certainly helps though overeating is possible on paleo, too.
However, I should note that we were working out in a gym three times a week and, after quitting that due to boredom and quitting paleo cause I love bread and ice cream, I went to 208 pretty quick.
So Paleo is not a cure all. Being a programmer who sits on his butt all day doesn't help at all.
I've looked at a bunch of paleo blogs. It surprises me that almost all of them include coconut and olive oils. As if hunter-gatherers in the paleolithic era could drop by a grocery store and buy themselves a jar of oil. Now, it seems likely that whole coconuts and other nuts are healthy, but oil??? Isn't oil basically like other foods that are not whole, such as refined sugar (consists of only sugar and no other nutrients) and refined grains (almost only starch)?
I don't know for a fact, but I'd it's possible that rendered animal fat might have used for cooking (and potentially other uses too) in paleolithic times - so no need to buy a jar of oil, they'd just make their own :)
You bring up a very good point. I guess it's important to understand that paleo isn't an attempt to copy a hunter-gatherer diet as that would be impossible today. It's an attempt to get as close to it as we can with today's domestically available food. Coconut oil and olive oil are suggested as replacements for PUFA (polyunsaturated) oils such as canola and vegetable oil that oxidize easily and cause inflammation. It's similar to how honey is suggested as a replacement for refined sugar.
> In the new DGAC report, one widely noticed revision was the elimination of dietary cholesterol as a "nutrient of concern". This surprised the public [...]
Not any public that hasn't had its head up its ass with no internet access therein for the past decade or two.
Unfortunately, unless you define "head up your ass" as "listening to any other people, including probably your doctor," this is definitely not true. Most otherwise rational and well informed people still seem to be under the impression that all fat is bad.
Never met any such rational and well informed people. How could all fat possibly be bad? Cellular and organellar membranes all over the human body (and any other organism on this planet) are built from fat [1].
These membranes conduct neural signals, release and respond to hormones, participate in immune response and facilitate all types of metabolism by enabling cell and organellum compartmentalization.
Some of the fatty acids necessary for these functions are not even produced by the human body [2] and therefore must be ingested.
I think the real question people ask is not about whether fat is bad or not, but about the benefits and risks of relative proportions of fat and other nutrients.
Current WHO guidelines state 6 teaspoons a day total sugar intake for the highest level of health benefits. Really wish food regulatory organisations like this would start actually taking note of that
That may seem low by the amounts of sugar you are used to using. But its high in terms of human homeostasis.
Consider this:
Normal human blood sugar [1]: 70-100 milligrams per deciliter of blood.
Blood volume of average human [2]: 5.5 liters
Thus, total blood sugar in non-diabetic human: 3.85 to 5.5 grams
Density of glucose: 1.54 grams per cubic centimeter
Thus, total volume of sugar in average human: 2.5 to 3.6 milliliters
In other words, your body does its best to cap the amount of sugar flowing through you at about one-half teaspoon. A 12 ounce can of coke has 39 grams of sugar, or 7-10 times what the human body considers normal. Its a tremendous shock to the system - the resulting insulin response sends your body on a roller coaster of hormone regulation.
So the WHO recommendation is actually a lot more strict than it might seem at first glance. Not only should your total sugar intake be capped at a low level, it should also be spread throughout the day.
Note that a few papers (forgot the link) found that naturally occuring sugar is fine. (I ate a banana and two oranges today and that's already above 24g of sugar, so I got worried and went to do some research..)
It's not that you can eat as much sugar as you want as long as it's not refined. For example, after your fruit consumption, you should have brushed your teeth (according to 'the guidelines'). The thing is that 50 grams of sugar is just really, really low...
I watches a few videos by Robert Lustig at UCSF. My take away is healthwise a can of Coke == one shot of booze. Partly because the fructose in HFCS and or table sugar shares the same metabolic pathway in the liver as ethanol. People that eat a lot of sugar tend to develop non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
24 grams HFCS is 14 grams fructose. A shot of 40 proof booze is 14 of grams ethanol.
Also the slug of glucose in a can of Coke spikes your blood sugar, which spikes your insulin levels. This is also not good. Take away from that eat complex carbs. Difficulty a lot of 'health food' contains processed carbs.
My gut unsupported feeling is, people living sedentary lifestyles, which is most people, don't require much in the way of carbohydrates.
I have mixed feelings about Lustig. A lot of his theories make good scientific sense but the experimental observations just don't add up. Still I agree with him in saying that the fat-free fad have probably done more harm than good since a lot of the supposedly low fat food have heaps of added sugar to maintain the taste and people end up eating way more calories than needed.
That's the WHO guideline for what they consider 'very good'. However the actual, realistic guidelines are 2-3 times as much across the world; and most people don't even manage to stay below that.
OK, it might not be a 'ban' in strict grammatical terms, but the implication is clear. Because of these guidelines many people have treated any dietary fat as taboo. I certainly counted myself among them. Decades of advice and ad campaigns from the government will do that.
I believe these guidelines and associated ad campaigns (and many like them in other countries such as the UK) have actually led to people 'learning' to find fat completely distasteful, so I think it will be some time before there is a significant change in eating habits.
Yes, you have to limit total fat, because it contains calories. You can only have so many calories. Therefore, by inescapable reasoning, there must exist a limit on total dietary fat for everyone. (Moreover, that limit cannot be 100% of your caloric intake, because 100% caloric intake from fat constitutes malnutrition.)
This might lead one to question the validity of other government suggestions. Or even policies. Maybe that's too far. Nonetheless, I think this raises serious questions as to how much faith we can put even into the government, even their "scientific" findings.