Sugar Conspiracy

[SearchingforPeace]

The sugar conspiracy | Ian Leslie | Society | The Guardian

Interesting article on low fat vs low carb diets and the political fights that caused the massive spread of diabetes.

The article is very clear on the cause and consequences. Read the whole thing.

John Yudkin, said the scientist, was a British professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in 1972, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.

“If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,” wrote Yudkin, “that material would promptly be banned.” The book did well, but Yudkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his career never recovered. He died, in 1995, a disappointed, largely forgotten man.

....

But by the time he wrote his book, the commanding heights of the field had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. Yudkin found himself fighting a rearguard action, and he was defeated.

...

In 1980, after long consultation with some of America’s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors base their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US. In 1983, the UK government issued advice that closely followed the American example.

...

Look at a graph of postwar obesity rates and it becomes clear that something changed after 1980. In the US, the line rises very gradually until, in the early 1980s, it takes off like an aeroplane. Just 12% of Americans were obese in 1950, 15% in 1980, 35% by 2000. In the UK, the line is flat for decades until the mid-1980s, at which point it also turns towards the sky. Only 6% of Britons were obese in 1980. In the next 20 years that figure more than trebled. Today, two thirds of Britons are either obese or overweight, making this the fattest country in the EU. Type 2 diabetes, closely related to obesity, has risen in tandem in both countries.

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In her painstakingly researched book, The Big Fat Surprise, the journalist Nina Teicholz traces the history of the proposition that saturated fats cause heart disease, and reveals the remarkable extent to which its progress from controversial theory to accepted truth was driven, not by new evidence, but by the influence of a few powerful personalities, one in particular.

Teicholz’s book also describes how an establishment of senior nutrition scientists, at once insecure about its medical authority and vigilant for threats to it, consistently exaggerated the case for low-fat diets, while turning its guns on those who offered evidence or argument to the contrary.

There is one section of the article I found fascinating, about how scientific consensus develops: the old guys die off.

In a 2015 paper titled Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?, a team of scholars at the National Bureau of Economic Research sought an empirical basis for a remark made by the physicist Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

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A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling.

This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice.

Back to the topic

Unsurprisingly, then, repeated attempts to prove a correlation between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol failed. For the vast majority of people, eating two or three, or 25 eggs a day, does not significantly raise cholesterol levels. One of the most nutrient-dense, versatile and delicious foods we have was needlessly stigmatised. The health authorities have spent the last few years slowly backing away from this mistake, presumably in the hope that if no sudden movements are made, nobody will notice. In a sense, they have succeeded: a survey carried out in 2014 by Credit Suisse found that 54% of US doctors believe that dietary cholesterol raises blood cholesterol.

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In 2008, researchers from Oxford University undertook a Europe-wide study of the causes of heart disease. Its data shows an inverse correlation between saturated fat and heart disease, across the continent. France, the country with the highest intake of saturated fat, has the lowest rate of heart disease; Ukraine, the country with the lowest intake of saturated fat, has the highest. When the British obesity researcher Zoë Harcombe performed an analysis of the data on cholesterol levels for 192 countries around the world, she found that lower cholesterol correlated with higher rates of death from heart disease.

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Controlled trials have repeatedly failed to show that people lose weight on low-fat or low-calorie diets, over the long-term.

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Fat takes instruction from insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar. Refined carbohydrates break down at speed into glucose in the blood, prompting the pancreas to produce insulin. When insulin levels rise, fat tissue gets a signal to suck energy out of the blood, and to stop releasing it. So when insulin stays high for unnaturally long, a person gains weight, gets hungrier, and feels fatigued. Then we blame them for it.

Read the whole thing. It is very long, but useful not only for health but also for the problem with consensus science.....

The only thing it could discuss more is the role of the food industry in all this. .....

 

[Tellenbach]

There is an excellent book that covers research into heart disease called "The Heart Revolution" by Kilmer McCully. This was a 1999 text and even back then, some doctors knew that the link between saturated fats/cholesterol and heart disease was a lie.

Some important points from the book:

1) Eskimos eat lots of cholesterol and saturated fats in their diet and they have almost no heart disease.
2) Pure cholesterol, fed to animals, does not damage their arteries.
3) Today, our diet is roughly 33% to 34% fat, but it was 40% back in the mid 1960s. Despite eating less fat, we're getting fatter.
4) The French Paradox mentioned above: The traditional French diet is high in cholesterol and fats but the French don't get much heart disease.

This book proposes that the true culprit in heart disease is high homocysteine levels due to low B vitamins, especially folic acid. There is much more evidence (strong correlation) to support this position. The Harvard School of Public Health study which followed 80,000 participants over a 14 year period found that people who consumed the least amount of folic acid and Vitamin B6 had the highest death rates from cardiovascular disease and heart attacks.

I'm waiting for the US health agencies to revise the food pyramid. We need to eat more saturated fats and cholesterol and cut down on the sugar/carbs. I think currently, the USDA recommends 6 to 11 servings of carbs and only 3 to 5 servings of vegetables. Someone at the USDA needs to start reading the scientific literature.

 

[Thalassa]

The people who have the lowest overall incidence of heart disease are vegans, who consume no cholesterol at all, and often eat high carb diets.

In the China Study a phenomenon was observed that something similar happened with disease in rural China, when mostly vegetarian country people began consuming more animal products. The China Study was conducted by a man who used to be a traditional meat and milk doctor and is not an "ethical" vegan, but an advocate of plant based diets entirely for optimization of human health.

Studies in which consumption of meat is argued to be better, I have honestly never seen anything convincing. Dr. Atkins got sick, the guy who created Paleo looks like every other middle aged American male fat ass after over a decade of his own diet plan, and life expectancy has increased abundantly since the times of more meat centric diets, so it's really hard to say when people used to die around 50-60.

The only real health risks to vegans are ignorant ethical vegans who don't understand people haven't been getting B12 from agricultural produce since the Middle Ages and therefore need to supplement. Omega 3 deficiency has also been linked to health issues in vegans - but completely unnecessarily since flax, hemp and walnuts have just as much as fish. Not difficult to add to the diet, since they also provide flavor and protein...the founder of veganism lived to be 95 and seemed 20 years younger until he was 90. Dr. T Colin Campbell who conducted The China Study looks a damn site better than Mr. Paleoface, despite being much older.

I would suggest that Eskimos are able to burn off the fat because of their more natural active lifestyle and the extra calories required to survive in freezing temperatures.

I do agree though that refined sugar, refined white bread and high fructose corn syrup aren't good for anyone in immoderate amounts.

 

[Thalassa]

There is an excellent book that covers research into heart disease called "The Heart Revolution" by Kilmer McCully. This was a 1999 text and even back then, some doctors knew that the link between saturated fats/cholesterol and heart disease was a lie.

Some important points from the book:

1) Eskimos eat lots of cholesterol and saturated fats in their diet and they have almost no heart disease.
2) Pure cholesterol, fed to animals, does not damage their arteries.
3) Today, our diet is roughly 33% to 34% fat, but it was 40% back in the mid 1960s. Despite eating less fat, we're getting fatter.
4) The French Paradox mentioned above: The traditional French diet is high in cholesterol and fats but the French don't get much heart disease.

This book proposes that the true culprit in heart disease is high homocysteine levels due to low B vitamins, especially folic acid. There is much more evidence (strong correlation) to support this position. The Harvard School of Public Health study which followed 80,000 participants over a 14 year period found that people who consumed the least amount of folic acid and Vitamin B6 had the highest death rates from cardiovascular disease and heart attacks.

I'm waiting for the US health agencies to revise the food pyramid. We need to eat more saturated fats and cholesterol and cut down on the sugar/carbs. I think currently, the USDA recommends 6 to 11 servings of carbs and only 3 to 5 servings of vegetables. Someone at the USDA needs to start reading the scientific literature.

Well here's our pyramid, we have one now as of 2015 from Cornell University and the Dietary Advisory and Guidelines Committee, for health and environmental reasons:



Enjoy waiting on your new saturated fat and cholesterol pyramid.

 

[nonsequitur]

[just dropping by in between experiments, might write up something more fully later]

Yes, there's been a big conspiracy with regards to sugar and carbs. Ancel Keys is the main person responsible for the number of obese people now outnumbering the number of underweight/starving people on earth. Keys published correlative, horrendously done science and pushed with the agriculture industry to move away from fats towards grains, sugar and just carbs in general. There's a pretty good book about the history of the food pyramid - the version that was publicised in the 1990s was actually dramatically different from its original form, and it was changed after agriculture interest groups lobbied for certain aspects to be emphasised. The food pyramid isn't factual, it is political - and the emphasis on animal meats/dairy as main protein sources also has its roots in those industry lobbies.

I don't have enough time to write up a full explanation - there's quite a bit already written/published about it - I would like to, and may if I get a couple of hours to write something well-referenced and non-technical. I'm very very passionate about nutrition and human health, and have a background in biochemistry/immunology. Before I pop off back into the lab, I'd just like to say that the problem with sugar isn't the number of calories per se, but the oxidative damage that comes with high levels of blood glucose, the body's long-term metabolic response to insulin, the disruption of hunger/satiety response, and disruption of the immune system. Heart/CV disease has been known for a long time to be due to an inappropriate activation of immune response - this goes all the way back to the 1970s. The reason why cholesterol was thought to be a cause of CVD/atherosclerosis was because it's found in atherosclerotic plaques, but we've known for a while now that it gets recruited by immune cells such as macrophages, and isn't the cause of CVD. Your liver makes cholesterol, and adjusts how much it makes based on how much you are absorbing from your diet - if you cut it out, your liver just makes more. Of course, this is something that companies that make statins don't like to advertise... That's a huge money-maker right there.

I could go on and on about nutrition studies, epidemiology studies and metabolism, but... time. I've seen many incarnations of the article above since the late 1990s, but the truth is that many have already known this since the 1970s/80s. It's very true that wrong paradigms can only be completely discarded when those who have pride/ego/power involved age out and die off.