"We're From The Government, And We're Here To Give You Diabetes"
Wowee moment, reading a piece in JAMA -- the New England Journal of Medicine -- "The 2015 US Dietary Guidelines: Lifting the Ban on Total Dietary Fat."
It's about the "Dietary Guidelines for Americans," released every five years by the US Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.
For decades, based on distortions by Ancel Keys and others that were put forward as science, the government has been telling Americans to eat a high-carb, lowfat diet -- precisely the diet that causes the insulin secretion that puts on fat. It is also a diet absent of healthy fats and nutrients you need for proper brain and body function, and to protect you against disease.
Well, the authors of this JAMA article, Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, and David S. Ludwig, MD, Ph.D., marvel at the difference in recommendations in the 2015 report, which the secretaries of Ag and DHHS will consider in the coming months:
In the new DGAC report, one widely noticed revision was the elimination of dietary cholesterol as a "nutrient of concern." This surprised the public, but is concordant with more recent scientific evidence reporting no appreciable relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol1 or clinical cardiovascular events in general populations.2A less noticed, but more important, change was the absence of an upper limit on total fat consumption. The DGAC report neither listed total fat as a nutrient of concern nor proposed restricting its consumption. Rather, it concluded, "Reducing total fat (replacing total fat with overall carbohydrates) does not lower CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk.... Dietary advice should put the emphasis on optimizing types of dietary fat and not reducing total fat." Limiting total fat was also not recommended for obesity prevention; instead, the focus was placed on healthful food-based diet patterns that include more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, seafood, legumes, and dairy products and include less meats, sugar-sweetened foods and drinks, and refined grains.
With these quiet statements, the DGAC report reversed nearly 4 decades of nutrition policy that placed priority on reducing total fat consumption throughout the population. In 1980, the Dietary Guidelines recommended limiting dietary fat to less than 30% of calories. This recommendation was revised in 2005, to include a range from 20% to 35% of calories. The primary rationale for limiting total fat was to lower saturated fat and dietary cholesterol, which were thought to increase cardiovascular risk by raising low-density lipoprotein cholesterol blood concentrations. But the campaign against saturated fat quickly generalized to include all dietary fat. Because fat contains about twice the calories per gram as carbohydrate or protein, it was also reasoned that low-fat diets would help prevent obesity, a growing public health concern.
The complex lipid and lipoprotein effects of saturated fat are now recognized, including evidence for beneficial effects on high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides and minimal effects on apolipoprotein B when compared with carbohydrate.3 These complexities explain why substitution of saturated fat with carbohydrate does not lower cardiovascular risk.1,2 Moreover, a global limit on total fat inevitably lowers intake of unsaturated fats, among which nuts, vegetable oils, and fish are particularly healthful.1,2 Most importantly, the policy focus on fat reduction did not account for the harms of highly processed carbohydrate (eg, refined grains, potato products, and added sugar)--consumption of which is inversely related to that of dietary fat.
...The limit on total fat presents an obstacle to sensible change, promoting harmful low-fat foods, undermining attempts to limit intakes of refined starch and added sugar, and discouraging the restaurant and food industry from providing products higher in healthful fats. It is time for the US Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services to develop the proper signage, public health messages, and other educational efforts to help people understand that limiting total fat does not produce any meaningful health benefits and that increasing healthful fats, including more than 35% of calories , has documented health benefits. Based on the strengths of accumulated new scientific evidence and consistent with the new DGAC report, a restructuring of national nutritional policy is warranted to move away from total fat reduction and toward healthy food choices, including those higher in healthful fats.
I think I'll go eat a celebratory rasher of bacon!
via @DrEades
So Crisco is good for us after all... time to go fry some chicken!
Cousin Dave at June 30, 2015 7:33 AM
Crisco is not just bad fat, it's terrible fat!
Eat lard! It does a body good!
Amy Alkon at June 30, 2015 8:47 AM
Is Crisco even food? Someone once told me that you can put an open can of it out, and not even flies will eat it.
I haven't tried, though.
ahw at June 30, 2015 11:36 AM
Frisco probably isn't food, but you do need it for things like pie crust that need to be fluffy. Don't know if lard will do the trick.
Allison at June 30, 2015 2:01 PM
I just picked up 1.5 pounds of bacon at the store. Hopefully, that will last me a few days.
Dwatney at June 30, 2015 5:31 PM
Allison, you can substitute with palm oil or coconut oil in place of Crisco. Palm oil gives the most similar result in my experience.
BunnyGirl at June 30, 2015 9:30 PM
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