OT:Fasting & detoxification
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BlueSeats
Posts: 27272 Alba Posts: 41 Joined: 11/6/2005 Member: #1024 |
8/11/2008 10:25 PM
Is anyone else still interested in this topic of benefits, or lack thereof, of the FDA and AMA recommendations of a high-carbohydrate low-fat diet? Generally I'd think not, but since this thread began with fasters, I suspect their may be a group who are willing to think outside the box for their health.
Here is the NY Times Magazine article "What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie" by Gary Taubes, the author of "Good Calorie, Bad Calorie". It's too long to post in it's entirety, but here is an excerpt. One thing taubes is good at is helping us understand that while "low fat" of course sounds great, what it's also saying is "high carbohydrate", and carbs are sugars and starches that the body readily converts to sugar. So it shouldn't be surprising that such a diet might be suspect in relationship to diabetes, obesity and heart disease. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health dogma in the 50's with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous. The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ''Dietary Goals for the United States,'' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of ''killer diseases'' supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat had become ''this greasy killer'' in the memorable words of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter -- a dubious feast of refined carbohydrates. In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ''It's an imperfect world,'' Rifkind told me. ''The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.'' Some of the best scientists disagreed with this low-fat logic, suggesting that good science was incompatible with such leaps of faith, but they were effectively ignored. Pete Ahrens, whose Rockefeller University laboratory had done the seminal research on cholesterol metabolism, testified to McGovern's committee that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets. It was not a scientific matter who might benefit and who might be harmed, he said, but ''a betting matter.'' Phil Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, testified in Congress to the same effect in 1980. ''What right,'' Handler asked, ''has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?'' Nonetheless, once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal forces took over. The food industry quickly began producing thousands of reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from foods like cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks and cookies had to compete with a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the less-fat-is-good-health message. Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls the ''huge forces'' of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful eating. Few experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it. What this means is that even saturated fats -- a k a, the bad fats -- are not nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. In other words, it's a virtual wash. As Willett explained to me, you will gain little to no health benefit by giving up milk, butter and cheese and eating bagels instead. But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease. ----- Here is a taubes video lecture. He includes photos and reveals his thought process in researching the topic. probably raises more questions than it answers, but it'll make you wonder. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149 |
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BlueSeats
Posts: 27272 Alba Posts: 41 Joined: 11/6/2005 Member: #1024 |
8/14/2008 11:14 PM
In my discussion with Code my overriding premise has been that the so called "dangers" of saturated fats is secondary to the dangers of refined carbs and polyunsaturated oils, and that as more meaningful studies are produced the data will catch up.
Here's a study that came out today regarding post menopausal women: Link downloads a PDF http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/80/5/1175.pdf "Carbohydrate intake was positively associated with atheroscle- rotic progression when replacing saturated fat and monounsaturated fat but not when replacing total fat, polyunsaturated fat, or protein. The association was perhaps stronger among women with lower physical activity, who would be more susceptible to adverse effects of carbohydrates—particularly refined carbohydrate— on HDL cholesterol, triacylglycerols, glucose metabolism, insulin sensitiv- ity, and weight gain (4 –7). Consistent with such biologic mecha- nisms, the relation between carbohydrate intake and atherosclerotic progression appeared to be stronger in women with a higher glyce- mic index. " ..... "Although CHD is the leading cause of death among both men and women, prior studies have historically focused on relations between risk factors and CHD in men. Our findings are not consistent with the hypothesis— based largely on observations in men—that saturated fat intake increases atherosclerotic progres- sion in postmenopausal women but instead suggest that saturated fat intake may reduce such progression, especially when mono- unsaturated fat intake is low or carbohydrate intake is high" ------- Isn't it amazing that our population, which is high in obesity, diabetes and heart disease, are fed the same high grain diet industry uses to make chicken, beef and pork so fat so fast for consumption? Meat producers want their animals to become obese young so as to keep upkeep low - it also keeps the flesh soft and pudgy for human consumption. The simplest way to do this is to feed them grains, even though historically, like humans, these animals had little interest in them. Similarly, the USDA tells us to eat 6-11 servings of grains a day. You'd think the goal was to get us fat fast too. And just so people know, when we speak of polyunsaturated oils, those are the general cooking oils you see in the supermarket: corn, soy, canola, vegetable, etc. They're also what's used in margarine, mayo, salad dressing, dips and virtually all packaged foods. They are highly processed and treated with carcinogens,like benzene. The best oils to use are cold pressed and extra virgin, particularly from olive, macadamia, and avocado. These are high in monounsaturated oil. [Edited by - blueseats on 08-15-2008 12:07 AM] |
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BlueSeats
Posts: 27272 Alba Posts: 41 Joined: 11/6/2005 Member: #1024 |
8/16/2008 11:57 PM
Dr Sylvan Lee Weinberg, a former President of the American College of Cardiology, a former President of the American College of Chest Physicians and the present editor of The American Heart Hospital Journal stated that the low-fat high-carb diet recommendations are no longer tenable.
VIEWPOINT AND COMMENTARY The Diet-Heart Hypothesis: A Critique Sylvan Lee Weinberg, MD, MACC Dayton Heart Hospital, Dayton, Ohio, USA Abstract The low-fat "diet heart hypothesis" has been controversial for nearly 100 years. The low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, promulgated vigorously by the National Cholesterol Education Program, National Institutes of Health, and American Heart Association since the Lipid Research Clinics-Primary Prevention Program in 1984, and earlier by the U.S. Department of Agriculture food pyramid, may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity, lipid abnormalities, type II diabetes, and metabolic syndromes. This diet can no longer be defended by appeal to the authority of prestigious medical organizations or by rejecting clinical experience and a growing medical literature suggesting that the much-maligned low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may have a salutary effect on the epidemics in question. J Am Coll Cardiol 2004;43:731-3 http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/full/43/5/731 |
OT:Fasting & detoxification