The science is (finally) settled:
Since the 1970s almost everyone in this country has been subjected to a barrage of propaganda about saturated fat. It was bad for you; it would kill you. Never mind that much of the nonsaturated fat was in the form of trans fats, now demonstrated to be harmful. Never mind that many polyunsaturated fats are chemically extracted oils that may also, in the long run, be shown to be problematic.
Never mind, too, that the industry’s idea of “low fat” became the emblematic SnackWell’s and other highly processed “low-fat” carbs (a substitution that is probably the single most important factor in our overweight/obesity problem), as well as reduced fat and even fat-free dairy, on which it made billions of dollars. (How you could produce fat-free “sour cream” is something worth contemplating.)
But let’s not cry over the chicharrones or even nicely buttered toast we passed up. And let’s not think about the literally millions of people who are repelled by fat, not because it doesn’t taste good (any chef will tell you that “fat is flavor”) but because they have been brainwashed.
And this junk-science nutritional advice almost certainly contributed to my father’s death thirty-five years ago. I hope, at some point, that they stop putting all the “fat free” labels in the candy section.
SInce it was a New York Times article, I was waiting for some green BS and I found it:
the devotion of more than a third of our global cropland to feeding animals;
Why is this a bad thing? How much of our global cropland goes to ethanol? People aren’t starving because of lack of cropland.
They also fail to mention that a whole lot of those cattle are on marginal land that can produce little but grass. Lacking a huge digestive tract, we don’t do very well with eating grass, so in such regions we have to raise ruminants and eat those instead.
I’ve said this ever since Barry Sears published his book “The Zone Diet” in 1995. He nailed it almost 20 years ago.
To be clear, I am referring to carbohydrates, not fat, being the root of many problems. He recommends monounsaturated fats over saturated fats, but butter over margarine. At the time, he was lambasted for advocating a high-protein diet when, in fact, the Zone Diet is composed of slightly more carbohydrates than protein to prevent ketosis (a deleterious condition that results, for example, during the Atkins Diet).
Um, your comments on ketosis are flat-out wrong. You should check Dr. Peter Attia’s articles on ketosis at http://www.eatingacademy.com (Dr. Attia is both a medical doctor and an aerospace engineer, so he is well versed in all of the science and is quite analytical too).
Gary Taubes’ work only touches indirectly on ketosis, but does discuss the experiments, done in the 1920s, that definitively showed that there ain’t no such thing as a dietary essential carbohydrate. You will die if you don’t get enough protein in your diet, you will die if you don’t eat enough fat, but nothing bad will happen to you health-wise if you eat NO carbohydrate.
Without vitamin C you get scurvy. Then you die.
Is there a way to get vitamin C without eating carbs?
Organ meat.
Peppers — most berries, in fact, other than eggplant. Broccoli. You get some carbs, but they are very sparse and surrounded by fiber. Lemon and lime, even just as juice. Lots of non-carby C sources.
According to the research cited by Taubes in “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, eating lots of carbs causes the body to need much, much more vitamin C than when not eating carbs. So the Inuit (whose experiences were the basis of the experiment I cited in my previous post) don’t get scurvy because (a) they don’t need much vitamin C, and (b) meat (including but not limited to organ meat, as Rand mentions) provides all the vitamin C they need.
The summary of the study for those who haven’t read GCBC: two healthy men ate nothing but protein and fat for a year (yes, a year) under controlled conditions to ensure no cheating; they came out healthier than they went in.
A brief summary of the article: Yesterday’s food hysterics were all wrong (in a complex field with lots of confounding factors) but this time it’s different.
Gary,
vitamin C…depends on your definition of carbs…
most of the low carb diets count something they call net carbs, ie they
remove fiber from the carb count, so in that case yes you can.
For example recommended daily allowance 60mgm of vitamin c….
So red bell pepper 1.8 gm of net carbs for the RDA of vitamin c.
That should have been Gregg, not Gary…