I would love for every word you have written to be true. It is much more satisfying to believe that it is the government’s fault for making us obese – unfortunately the only parties in this discussion to present any science to back this up is the CNPP. David Brown, you have cited nothing else but a 35 year-old text to back up your premise, and “Ethyl” has given neither her credentials in nutrition or any “real science” to back up her claims.

Can you give me a scientific reason to believe you, backed up with data more recent than 35 years ago? As well, if you are crying a conspiracy within the CNPP to bolster its agricultural sponsors, can you offer any proof of this? I would accept evidence of lobbying efforts and memos within the dept. for a start.

I believe that it is generally accepted among scientific nutritionists that the rising BMI in North American populations is due primarily to an increase in caloric intake and a decrease of physical exercise. Eating calorie-dense food that is easy to digest, which heavily processed foods tend to be, I will allow, is an easy way to gain weight. Foods high in sugar (refined or not, sugar is sugar, whether from raw cane or refined sugar, maple sirup or corn syrup) high in fat and low in fibre take fewer calories to digest and should be eaten in moderation.

“Retraining” your body to accept fat seems a bit of a dubious thing to say – the human body has evolved to digest a wide variety of foods, including fat, and due to our hunter-gatherer past, likes to store calories as fat in case there is a famine coming. The medical consensus is that saturated fats are bad for you and increase your likelihood of getting heart disease and stroke. Your warning to stay away from hydrogenated foods is a good one, because they mimic saturated fat, not to mention form non-naturally occurring trans versions of the fat which are also bad for you.

You cannot argue that the food period is bad and that it is supported by junk science with arguments unsupported by ANY science – where is your evidence? I would love to see it.

Here are some great references:
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/558hydrogenation.html
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=590
The Cochrane Review on low-fat and low saturated fat diets:
http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab002137.html

Michael,

You noted, “The medical consensus is that saturated fats are bad for you and increase your likelihood of getting heart disease and stroke.”

I am so painfully aware of this particular medical consensus! I clicked on your first reference and read, “It has long been recognized that saturated fats tend to increase the blood level of the “bad” LDL cholesterol.
Monounsaturated (one double bond) and polyunsaturated fats (two or more double bonds) found primarily in vegetable oils tend to lower “bad” LDL cholesterol. An elevated LDL-C increases the risk of developing coronary heart disease.”

So there you have it. Saturated fats are “bad” because they raise LDL cholesterol and polyunsaturated fats are “healthy” because they lower LDL cholesterol. Problem is, this dogma is based on two faulty assumptions. The first: high LDL cholesterol causes clogged arteries. The second: reducing saturated fat intake will lower LDL and prevent heart disease.

Interestingly, these assumptions have always been controversial. Back in 1971 Dr. Roger J. Williams wrote, “No discussion of heart disease would be complete without mention of the question of saturated fats. It has come to be almost an orthodox position that if one wishes to protect oneself against heart disease, one should avoid eating saturated (animal) fats. While this idea may not be entirely in error, it is misleading in its emphasis. The evidence shows that high fat consumption, when accompanied by plenty of the essential nutrients which all the cells need, does not cause atherosclerosis or heart disease.”
http://nutritionscienceanalyst.blogspot.com/2008/02/nutrition-against-disease.html

More recently Dr. Laura Corr commented, “Ask almost member of the general public about a diet which would reduce their chance of heart disease and the reply is the same: “a low fat diet”. On closer questioning, this means a diet with a reduction in cholesterol and saturated ‘animal’ fats, i.e. less meat, butter, milk and cheese. Most national and international recommendations for the prevention of heart disease, whether for primary prevention of or for patients who have developed the clinical manifestations of coronary heart disease, have made dietary restriction of total and saturated fats and of cholesterol the primary advice and often the sine qua non in relation to all other forms of management. To this extent they are to be congratulated that the message seems to be so universally accepted. Unfortunately, the available trials provide little support for such recommendations and it may be that far more valuable messages for the dietary and non-dietary prevention of coronary heart disease are getting lost in the immoderate support of the low fat diet.”
http://www.omen.com/corr.html

About five years ago the “American Journal of Clinical Nutrition” published an excellent article by J Bruce German and Cora J Dillard. They noted, “Most of what is known about the functions of fatty acids is fragmented and biased by the assumptions made within the experimental investigations in which the fatty acids were studied. This bias is particularly true for studies of the saturated fatty acids, most of which have been examined solely for their tendency to alter lipoprotein metabolism and to influence the concentrations of lipoproteins that carry cholesterol in blood.”
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/80/3/550

This next comment is from the Introduction to “The Modern Nutritional Diseases.” The authors, Fred and Alice Ottoboni, are both retired (for more than 20 years) PhD public health scientists.

“We learned about the heart-healthy diet when we entered the field of public health over 40 years ago. By that time the statistical association between cardiovascular diseases and saturated fats and cholesterol in the diet was accepted by the medical and nutrition communities as being more than a chance relationship. It formed the basis for official government policy and dietary recommendations. People were advised to reduce their consumption of animal fats and replace them with vegetable fats, which contain little saturated fat and no cholesterol.

People were further urged to restrict or eliminate the use of animal foods (because of their saturated fat and cholesterol content) and replace them with grains, breads, and pasta to make up for the loss of calories. At the time we had no reason to doubt that these changes were healthful ones. we reduced our intake of saturated fats by substituting vegetable oils and margarine for butter and switched from whole milk to skim milk. We reduced our consumption of red meats, ate cereal instead of eggs, and added more whole grain products to our daily fare.

By the mid-1970s, in the course of our work, we were becoming aware of some reports in the scientific literature that hinted of a conflict with the prevailing nutritional philosophy. The wisdom of the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet was beginning to be challenged more frequently and more openly. We were starting to hear about the observations and theories of scientists who found the official heart-healthy nutritional recommendations potentially dangerous. At the same time, we were also aware that the rates of cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and type-2 diabetes had increased dramatically over the past several decades and were reaching epidemic proportions. However, at the time, we did not make an association between the increasing incidence of these diseases, which normally are associated with the aging process, and the dietary changes that had occurred over the past several decades.

We followed the controversy with only academic interest until a few years later when a routine physical examination showed that one of us had slightly elevated blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides – not life threatening, but something to follow. These findings disturbed us. We were only in our mid-fifties at the time. We had been following the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet that traditional nutritional science recommended as a healthful one. The controversy now assumed a personal interest. Was there merit in the reports we had been hearing that the heart-healthy diet might not be what it was labeled? What should we do? These thoughts prompted us to do what our professional training had taught us to do – go to the library, delve into the scientific literature, and try to find the answers to our questions.

We were both scientists who had worked for many years in the field of disease investigation and prevention. This work had taught us that disease, even in older adults, does not just happen but is caused by something. And, time and again, this work taught us that the answers to most questions involving the causation and prevention of disease were already known – they were just buried in the scientific literature that resides in the libraries of all major universities.

We decided to examine the heart-healthy diet and why it had become the national panacea for cardiovascular diseases. We also decided to investigate the overall relationship between diet and the chronic diseases that were thought to occur only in older people but were now beginning to afflict young adults and even children. Why had the dietary changes that had been imposed on the public many years before not been effective? Why were the numbers of new cases of cardiovascular disease, obesity, type-2 diabetes, and perhaps even some forms of cancer increasing instead of decreasing?

With these thoughts in mind we began our long search of the literature, both scientific and popular. In general we learned that lifestyle and nutrition, not genetics and not luck, were the most powerful factors affecting health and well being. Further, it became apparent that unhealthful lifestyles and faulty nutrition were affecting the health not only of older adults but also of people in all age groups. We learned that popular notions concerning the adverse effects of dietary fats and cholesterol, which were the foundation of the heart-healthy diet, were not based on scientific facts. What we read in the popular press was not what we read in the scientific literature.”
http://nutritionscienceanalyst.blogspot.com/2008/01/resolving-nutritional-controversy-how.html

Finally, after many years of demonizing saturated fats, scientists are actually testing the effects of high saturated fat intake on serum lipids. What are they seeing? In 2005 Jeff S Volek and Cassandra E Forsythe wrote an article entitled “The case for not restricting saturated fat on a low carbohydrate diet” They said,”We believe restriction of saturated fat is not warranted on a low-carbohydrate diet because of our work showing favorable responses in clinical risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease in low-carbohydrate diets that were rich in saturated fat.”
http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/2/1/21

Now, on the other side, we see a lot of crazy things happening. For example, in 2001 Scientists at ViaLactia, a New Zealand biotech firm, screened several million milk cows looking for ones that produced low-fat milk. They found one that had less than 1% fat in her milk and called her Marge because butter made from her milk is soft enough to spread at refrigerator temperature.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1845223.ece

In the UK the Food Standards Agency released a peculiar (I almost said ridiculous) commercial in which a container of saturated fat is removed from a refrigerator and poured down a kitchen sink drain. It’s peculiar because the fat is liquid in the refrigerator and solidifies at room temperature.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_183WF_DEY

Here in the USA we have an army of dedicated health professionals who dutifully adhere to the dietary dogmas of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Apparently, very few of them are even aware that a controversy about saturated fat intake exists. Or, perhaps, most of them are aware of the controversy but are not personally motivated to look into the matter for themselves as the Ottobonis did. Whichever the case, I encourage you to investigate the matter, Michael. If you do so you’ll find that it is the size of the LDL particles, not the total weight, that determines whether or not they are atherogenic.

As for the low-fat, heart healthy diet; I think it’s downright dangerous for some people. I suspect it led to the early demise of J.I. Rodale. http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/when-that-guy-died-on-my-show/ and Paul Stitt. In an interview Paul once said, “The center of our plate is whole grain food, complemented with tasty vegetable dishes with fruit as an appetizer. Soup, salads, and breads make for very nutritionally complete meals. Meat is for flavoring.” http://www.doctoryourself.com/stitt.html Paul died from cancer earlier this year at age 68. http://www.morrisdailyherald.com/articles/2009/02/09/obituaries/295stitt.txt?__xsl=/print.xsl

MediaCurves.com conducted a study on 402 Americans regarding their health and weight class based on the U.S. Government standards. Results found that nearly one-third of Midwesterners indicated that they live an unhealthy lifestyle, and the majority (64%) are classified as overweight. The study also revealed that American women are significantly more overweight than American men.
More in depth results can be seen at:
http://www.mediacurves.com/HealthCare/J7577b-CalorieCounting/Index.cfm
Thanks,
Ben

You have produced some good studies about high saturated fat and low carbohydrate diets, and I will concede that this should be (and appears that it is) a good area of research. However, there are claims there that I think we should parse out of your statements and test.

The assumption in your previous comment was that the new food pyramid (in the 1970’s) with an emphasis on low-fat and higher complex carbs was responsible for the eventual obesity epidemic. This assumes that the American people up and changed their diet on the whole. I think this assumption is false, as people are consuming more meat and saturated fat than ever, currently, and this, along with the high sugar and low fibre diets that the average American abides by, can be indicted as one of the causes of the epidemic.

Cardiologists call the post-prandial spike in blood sugar and lipids “dysmetabolic” syndrome (http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/abstract/51/3/249 ) and has been implicated in increased atherosclerotic risk, and is precipitated by high-calorie, nutrient-weak, processed foods. As well, high fibre diets, in this study: http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/63/7/582 , were connected to better cardiovascular health. Systemic reviews by the Cochrane institute should moderate success with health advice that included low-sodium and low fat diets, on reducing the risk-factors for heart attacl: http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab002128.html . And this review: http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab002137.html , is pretty unequivocal when it comes to reductions of fat in diets and increased cardiovascular health.

LDL allows the transport of tryglycerides and other fatty acids from the liver to peripheral tissues. This means that an increase in LDL is directly associated with a rise in blood triglyceride levels. Increased triglyceride levels in the blood allows a buildup of fat and plaque on vessel walls which, over time, can cause a primary blockage of the vessel or, if a clot breaks off, a secondary thrombosis (clot) to form in the coronary arteries or the brain, the latter causing a stroke; this physiology is quite clear and not conjecture. In the Cochrane review of low-fat diets and hypercholesteremia, the connection is clear:

“Hypercholesterolemia can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease via the intermediate step of plaque creation
along artery walls, or atherosclerosis. Plaques can eventually obstruct or even block the flow of blood to the brain, heart, and
other organs, which in turn can lead for example to stroke or heart attack.”

http://mrw.interscience.wiley.com/cochrane/clsysrev/articles/CD007957/pdf_fs.html

What does concern me is the age of the studies listed by Fred and Alice Ottoboni are well over 40 years old and, I would suggest, have been supplanted by more modern studies that have shown that the low-fat diet is connected to better cardiovascular health. The studies of traditional peoples with high saturated diets, all from anthropological studies in the sixties and before, are not very compelling: they study an isolated population of people with a traditional diets and total caloric intake or the strata of their entire nutritional intake is not provided. These are hardly corollary with modern western diets and so their results should be taken with a grain of salt.

What is clear is that if you eat too much and don’t get enough exercise, you will gain weight. Period.

You also make some specious arguments in your last few paragraphs. What do cows bread to have low-fat milk have to do with the new food pyramid? And you are welcome to your suspicions, but your mention of an on-air death on the Dick Cavett show is irrelevent to the discussion, and your linking of one person’s cancer to the diet advice he was given is not only specious but a blatant red herring.

The human body is built to store fat. It evolved in an environment in which starvation was a real threat and high-protein meals were expensive metabolically. For this reason, we crave high-caloric content foods, like fat and sugar. We live in a different environment now and are much more sedate, and for this reason, we must change our eating habits, or obesity will be the norm. Any change to the food pyramid must reflect current science and the best studies, not conjecture or fear mongering from the conspiratorially minded.

When I had an annual checkup with my GP recently, I asked about my “cholesterol” level. He said it was fine, it having been tested about ten years ago. I assumed that he’d want to re-test after such a long period, but he asserted that unless my diet had changed radically in that time then it would be pretty much the same now as it was a decade ago.

Michael,

Just in case you are still following the comments here; today I was alerted to an article entitled Dietary Fat and Coronary Heart Disease: Summary of Evidence from Prospective Cohort and Randomised Controlled Trials authored by C. Murray Skeaff, Jody Miller, Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ArtikelNr=229002&Ausgabe=250361&ProduktNr=223977&filename=229002.pdf

Here’s a quote from the article:

“Meta-Analysis of Cohort Studies of SFA and CHD
Intake of SFA was not significantly associated with CHD mortality, with a RR of 1.14 (95% CI 0.82-1.60, P = 0.431) for those in the highest compared with the lowest category of SFA intake (Fig. 6). Similarly SFA intake was not significantly associated CHD events (RR 0.93, 95% CI 0.83-1.05, P = 0.269 for high vs. low categories). Moreover, there was no significant association with CHD death (P = 0.593) per 5% TE increment in SFA intake (Fig. 8). For the cohort studies included in the meta-analysis, mean or median SFA intake varied from 7 to 11% TE in the lowest category to 14 to 18% in the highest category (table 3). Overall the mean or median SFA intake in all cohort studies varied from 9 to 20% TE (online suppl. table 7).”

My take on this is that all previous studies and meta-analysis of studies failed to analyze the effects of trans-fats separately from saturated fats so saturated fats got blamed for the metabolic effects of trans fats.

In a related matter, there is a 37 minute presentation by Dr. Bill Lands available on Evelyn Tribole’s website. Here’s a partial transcript.

Early in the presentation Dr. Lands said, “Dietary omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids compete in producing tissue compositions and tissue responses…tissue composition sets the stage for favorable and unfavorable responses under crisis.”

In discussing primary prevention, as opposed to treatment he said, “If you know biochemistry, you can trace the molecular events that caused the disease or undesired consequence and prevent the underlying cause of the problem. That means you have trace back and we can do that. And the context of this connectivity of the molecular events, the context is competition between omega-3 and omega-6 for storage and for action.”

At about minute 13 he says, “We’ve had 40 years when we could have really been preventing something and we didn’t. We got off and we got on to distractions. But these are mediators of disease. People who have more than half of their Highly Unsaturated Fatty Acids (HUFA) as omega-6 HUFA have a high incidence of cardiovascular death. This is not trivial. People who have less than half of their HUFA in their membrane phospholipids predominantly, they really have low incidence of death. And some people don’t like this because gee, that’s transnational and transoceanic and all that. But if you look at the Quebec data they’re all people in the same province of the same country and there’s three sub-populations with very different eating habits and very different mortality rates. And these black circles represent quintiles of the 6,128 control subjects that are in the freezers and the data banks from the Mister Fit Trial. These are just observational data. Oh, by the way, did you know that middle aged American males have 72 to 80% of their HUFA as omega-6? But there is one quintile that has a little less omega-6. And by the way, that quintile has a much lower mortality rate. So the value of some of the information you saw yesterday brings fully into focus and realize that this population is extreme and bizarre in its eating habits. And accept the fact. Now, the way you find that fact is to do gas chromatography and gas chromatographic people are proud of all the peaks they can resolve and they usually report 35 or 40 different, individual peaks. What I want to emphasize is that most of the peaks are not used for clinical interpretations. People don’t really care how much palmitate was in that sample. What you care about is how much HUFA was in that sample. If you take serum phospholipids, that fraction from the blood serum and you look, you can see it’s around 15 to 20% of the fatty acids that are HUFA. They’re the ones you care about. The other 80, 85% of the fatty acids are not used for clinical decision. So for health risk assessment of an omega-3 deficit let’s just look at these biomarkers. And What’s really weird is that all you have to do, there’s about 7 fatty acids, 7 HUFA that you need to pay attention to and all you really need to know is what’s the percent that’s omega-3 or the percent that’s omega-6? Another fact of life is that the people who are getting grants to study supplemental omega-3 to prevent the problem like to talk about what’s the percent of omega-3 in the HUFA. I come from eicosanoid chronic inflammatory ranks. I like to talk about the problem in the tissue is the percent of omega-6 that’s there. And when you don’t have a lot of omega-6 there you don’t have a lot of problems. And when you do have a lot of omega-6 there you do have a lot of problems. The excessive irritating mobilization of omega-6 constitutes the reason we are talking about omega-3s because omega-3s displace them in the phospholipids. Indeed, the obvious thing is the omega-3 is the armor to protect you from the insurgents. And the one thing the American population is being educated about is that an insurgency of internal unrest is very different than a traditional military war. And the armor and the personnel you mobilize to fight the insurgency need to be carefully thought through. So we’re going to think this through in terms of how many billions of dollars we are going to mobilize for this kind of internal unrest…Less nutritional armor is needed when fewer insurgents are allowed in the area.”

Over the past century, thanks to modern food technology, omega-6 fatty acids have been incorporated into the food supply at levels never before possible. The harmful effects are well documented and almost totally ignored thanks to the immoderate attention showered on saturated fat.

Here is a link to the Dr. Lands presentation: http://omega-6-omega-3-balance.omegaoptimize.com/2009/11/10/why-omega6-fats-matt\
er-to-your-health.aspx

Your criticism of my so called specious arguments is unwarranted because those were not arguments but examples. They are facts relevant to my argument that the immoderate attention showered on saturated fat has caused people to consume excessive amounts of omega-6 fatty acids.

Also, to suggest that the age of studies negates their relevance is itself a specious argument. Truth is not altered by the passage of time, my point being, the truth that the Ottobonis unearthed was that 30 years ago there was no valid scientific evidence to validate the diet-heart hypothesis. There still isn’t.