“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”
Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”
Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.
“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”
I didn’t intend to, and I certainly never counted a single calorie, but I’ve lost about fifteen pounds over the last few months by almost completely cutting out grains and root vegetables (going mainly paleolithic), in the interest of trying to reduce my blood pressure.
Modern nutritionists (and the FDA) have primitive, unscientific beliefs (like the idiotic war on fat and saturated fat “You are what you eat”). They’re like the doctors that still prescribe leeches for ailments. And unfortunately, too many in the medical profession think they know what they’re talking about.