“After 30 years of waiting, the fact that this committee is addressing sustainability issues brings me a lot of pleasure,” she began. Clancy went on to advocate that Americans should become vegetarians in order to achieve sustainability in the face of “climate change.”
“What pattern of eating best contributes to food security and the sustainability of land air and water?” Clancy asked. “The simple answer is a plant-based diet.”
“Now, this is not new, this idea of how important plant-based diets are has been around for, gosh, 30-40 years,” she said. “Before that for people who long ago were eating vegetarian.”
Clancy said plant-based diets lower the risk of cardiovascular disease and have a “smaller ecological impact” on “drought, climate change, soil erosion, pesticides and antibiotics in water supplies.”
There is zero scientific evidence of cardiovascular disease being caused by eating animals, per se (though corn-fed beef and chicken might be problematic due to omega 6).
…he scientific consensus on whether saturated fats are bad for us is changing. Now researchers are stressing that saturated fats like coconut oil actually lower bad cholesterol in our bodies.
With this:
If you consider popcorn something to douse with “butter-flavored topping” and shovel in your mouth at the multiplex, then keep it on the “bad” list. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest has concluded that movie theater popcorn—a medium tub, mind you—has 1,200 calories and 60 grams of the worst kind of saturated fat.
So what is the “worst kind of saturated fat”? I see nothing wrong with butter on popcorn (and to the degree there is, it’s the popcorn, not the butter).
She also reinforces the myth that “low calories” = “healthy.”
I hadn’t realized the degree to which George McGovern was responsible, and how much he was influenced by Pritikin. They and their junk science are responsible for millions of premature deaths, from the seventies on, likely including my father’s almost thirty-five years ago.
Mine was very cheap. I just bought a controller for less than twenty bucks, and plugged an old slow cooker into it. It even included the temperature sensor for that price. The only problem with it is that it only reads out in Celsius, but that’s not a big deal (you can fix it by spending $35 instead). For bigger pieces (like the small rib roast I made last night), add an immersion heater for eight bucks (in my case, from Bed, Bath and Beyond) and use an insulated cooler. The only issue with that is that there’s no circulation, so I had to stir it occasionally to get it evenly up to temp. But it still beats hundreds of bucks for a fancy kitchen machine. And there are DIY guides for building circulators out of an aquarium pump.
It’s particularly interesting that the “obesity epidemic” started about the time the pseudo-scientists started recommending cutting back on dietary fat.
The notion that you should drink reduced-fat milk is based on two theories that have zero scientific basis — that calories per se make you fat, and that saturated fat is bad for your heart. They’re both nonsense.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The author still gets that part wrong:
Whole-milk dairy products are relatively high in saturated fat. And eating too much saturated fat can increase the risk of heart disease. So many experts would agree that adults with high cholesterol should continue to limit dairy fat.
I repeat, there is zero empirical evidence that saturated fat increases the risk of coronary disease. It is based on the flawed theory that high cholesterol causes heart disease and that eating cholesterol increases your cholesterol. Again, neither is true.
on the history of nutrition pseudoscience.