Category Archives: Culinary

The History Of Sugar And Its Health Impacts

An interesting interview with Gary Taubes:

In the science in which I was raised—physics and chemistry, the hard sciences—the last thing you want to do is get an assumption accepted into the theory of how things work without rigorously testing it, because then people will build on it and it will grow and infect the whole thought construction. You end up with, I’m going to beat this metaphor to death, but sort of a house of cards. And there will be no way to go back on it. In a field like nutrition and obesity research, you’ve now got these enormous institutional dogmas built in that I and others are arguing are simply wrong. How do you get the institutions to change their belief systems?

The British Medical Journal is running a series on nutrition policy, and their way of dealing with it is by assigning writers from these different belief systems. So I’m a co-author on an article on dietary fat, along with the former head of the Harvard nutrition department who thinks I’m the worst journalist he’s ever met and who does a form of science that I consider a pseudoscience.

It’s just nuts.

Junk Nutrition

A mix of good and bad dietary advice.

The Lancet

It’s catching up on the nutrition science:

High carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke. Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings.

It’s a epidemiological study, but it matches most recent research.

The Fight Against Dietary Misinformation

continues:

In a recent study of 43 Latino and African American children with metabolic syndrome, for example, keeping total and calories from carbohydrate identical, a reduction from a mean of 28 per cent of calories from added sugar to 10 per cent, significantly reduced triglycerides, LDL-Cholesterol, blood pressure and fasting insulin within just ten days.

It’s been this very reliance on eminence trumping independent evidence that often stops policymakers, doctors and journalists asking the right questions while simultaneously misinforming the public.

As Albert Einstein once said, “A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”

The public must also realise that the overwhelming majority of dietitians have no qualification or understanding of the basics of medicine and although most doctors equally have little or no training in nutrition, it’s not rocket science to advise people to avoid eating processed food, more than 70 per cent of which now includes added sugar.

As with the tobacco industry, there’s a lot of money at stake.