My last post was a fictional Q & A explaining how to bias a news story.  It was sarcasm, of course; I don’t actually believe reporters sit down and plan out how to slant the news.  The slant is the natural result of their world view, a view that is reinforced by virtue of working in an intellectual echo chamber.

As John Stossel explained in one of his books, when he was just another ABC reporter whose stories fit the cookie-cutter template — regulations are always good because the government must save us from evil industries — he got along fine with his peers.  He won 19 Emmy awards. Then he had a libertarian awakening and began to file stories questioning the wisdom and necessity of many regulations, sometimes even highlighting the negative unintended consequences … at which point he found himself becoming an outcast who had to fight to get his stories on the air.  Many never were aired.  And as he explained a few years back, “Once I started applying the same skepticism to government, I stopped winning awards.”

If it seems I’m a bit obsessed with biased, pro-regulation reporting on health issues, it’s only because I’m a bit obsessed with biased, pro-regulation reporting on health issues.  The failure to question pronouncements by the FDA, USDA and NIH as rigorously as, say, pronouncements by the Pentagon or CIA is journalistic malpractice.  The consequences are real.  After the McGovern Committee’s recommendations were released, echo-chamber reporting about the virtues of the Food Pyramid and the evils of saturated fat gave us the low-fat, high-carb diet craze.  You know how well that turned out. 

And as Gary Taubes recounted in Good Calories, Bad Calories, there were plenty of doctors and scientists around who vehemently opposed the low-fat diet advice.  But their opinions rarely made the news.  The template had already been etched.

Even when government regulations aren’t actually harmful, they run the risk of misdirecting our efforts.  If calorie-count menus aren’t the cure for obesity — which seems likely, considering that Americans 50 years ago were leaner on average despite a near-total lack of nutrition labels — then requiring those menus (which is actually part of the health-care “reform” bill) is a waste of time and money.  If not a step backwards, it’s at best a step sideways.  It doesn’t bring us any closer to putting our foot on the real cause.

Likewise, if the FDA orders the food industry to incur the expense of reformulating their recipes to reduce sodium and it turns out that the real cause of hypertension is elevated blood glucose or a lack of potassium or both, then all we’ve done is taken another step sideways … and eaten a lot of tasteless food while doing it.  Or we might end up with more high-fructose corn syrup or other additives in packaged foods to replace the palatability that salt currently provides.

Worse, as Dr. Michael Aldeman pointed out, we will be conducting yet another uncontrolled experiment on the public.  We may realize 20 years from now that restricting sodium caused more harm than good, as happened when we switched from natural animal fats to chemically-extracted seed oils in the food supply.

So I don’t really care if the health reporters I’ve criticized are hard-working and sincere.  They’re not doing their jobs.  They’re not asking the right questions.  They’re offering up government recommendations as evidence, instead of examining the evidence themselves.

McGovern was hard-working and sincere too.  But he was also biased.  His doctor assured him that low-fat, high-carb diets were indeed the way to go, and McGovern trusted his doctor … so his committee basically ignored the testimony of prominent researchers like Robert Levy, Pete Ahrens and John McMichael, who all testified that it was irresponsible to recommend drastic dietary changes without waiting for conclusive research.  If you’ve seen Fat Head, you know how McGovern replied to such criticisms:  “Senators don’t have the luxury that a research scientist does of waiting until every last shred of evidence is in.”

In other words, he’d already selected his neat, dramatic narrative:  the meat, egg and diary industries are killing us with their fatty, cholesterol-laden foods.  He tossed out any information that didn’t fit the narrative.  If he hadn’t gone into politics, he would’ve made a first-rate health reporter.

So with that long and winding preamble out of the way, here’s my version of the Los Angeles Times story about the FDA’s efforts to reduce the salt content of food.  My version is equally biased, but also equally factual.  The only fictional aspects are the quotes; I’m not going to track down researchers to get quotes for a bogus news story, so I’m paraphrasing their written statements.  The point here is to demonstrate that two articles, while both factual, can leave the reader with completely different impressions.

FDA Calls For Salt Cutbacks

By Tom Naughton
Fat Head News Network

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced a gradual but potentially expensive effort to reduce the amount of salt Americans consume in a bid to combat high blood pressure, heart disease and strokes. The FDA’s efforts began by calling for food-industry cutbacks, which the agency labeled as “voluntary” while simultaneously threatening to impose new regulations if the industry doesn’t comply.

The FDA’s decision was applauded by government officials and liberal activist groups, but criticized by scientists, who have long pointed to a lack of convincing evidence linking sodium intake to medical problems.

Sodium intake is “simply too high to be safe,” said Dr. Jane E. Henney, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and chairwoman of a government committee that produced the report calling for sodium restrictions. “Clearly, salt is essential…. We need it. But the level we’re taking in right now is far beyond the maximal levels we need.”

The “maximal level” recommended by the federal government is roughly one teaspoon of salt per day, which the average American exceeds by nearly 50%.  However, scientists question that recommendation.

“The theory that excess salt leads to heart and strokes has no long-term studies to back it up,” said Dr. Barry Groves, a science writer with a PhD in nutrition science.  “There have been 58 major studies on the matter.  They simply don’t support the current recommendation to reduce salt intake.”

Dr. Paul Rosch, a professor at the New York Medical College, agrees.  “In one of the largest studies ever to examine the link between dietary sodium and hypertension, the group with the lowest salt intake actually suffered from above-average rates of hypertension.  Meanwhile, in the group with the highest salt intake, high blood pressure was relatively rare.”

Other studies also suggest the level of sodium reduction demanded by the FDA would produce few public health benefits.  A recent article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, noted that even extreme reductions in sodium intake have failed to prevent hypertension and heart disease in clinical trials.

Michael Jacobson, director of The Center for Science in the Public Interest, praised the FDA’s action and called for an immediate clampdown on the food industry.  CSPI, a vegetarian activist group that has warned consumers about the dangers of foods ranging from cantaloupes to wine, sued the FDA in 2005 in an attempt to force the agency to re-classify salt as an additive.  The reclassification would make salt subject to federal regulation, which CSPI has demanded for years.

The head of the salt lobby blasted the FDA’s efforts as unwarranted and overly broad.  “It’s not scientifically sound,” said Lori Roman, president of the Salt Institute. “They’re talking about some very drastic reductions. They could be harming people.”

Dr. Michael Aldeman, a researcher who has conducted numerous studies on hypertension, is likewise concerned.  “This would amount to a large, uncontrolled experiment with the public as subjects,” he said.  “I’m concerned about the unintended consequences.”

…………………………………………………………………………………….

The most common defense against the charge of biased reporting is something like “How can it be biased if all we do is report the facts?”  Well, all I did is report the facts.  But my selection of facts tells a completely different story.  That’s why bias matters.  Reporters are taught to be skeptical of their sources.  Readers should also be skeptical of the reporters.

I have a fantasy in which I’m allowed to conduct a nationwide experiment lasting several years.  It would work like this:  First, I get to select a harmless food I don’t like very much and wouldn’t mind giving up.  I think I’ll go with celery.

Then, working in cahoots with several prominent health organizations, I get to convince the American public that my selected food causes premature death.  Given the current state of nutrition and health journalism, this wouldn’t be a difficult task.  We could just trumpet a few studies showing that 75% of all heart attack victims consumed celery in the previous year, for example.  Eventually the media would be full of headlines warning people to cut celery from their diets.  TIME magazine would run a major article titled Sorry, It’s True … Celery Is A Killer.   (Subtitle:  party trays will never be the same.)

Now for the really fun part … a dozen years or so later, I would conduct a large epidemiological study comparing celery consumption with death rates.  And I can already guarantee the result:  people who eat a lot of celery tend to die younger.  This would, of course, prove that celery is a health hazard, right?

Of course not.  All it would prove is that health-conscious people had heeded the warnings and were dutifully avoiding celery.  Or, to look at it another way, it would prove that people who choose to ignore the dire warnings about celery are what doctors call non-adherers … or what I call people who don’t give a @#$%.  It would prove absolutely nothing about the actual health effects of celery.

But that’s not how most of the public or (sadly) most health professionals would see it.  The health professionals would avoid the stuff and counsel their patients to do likewise, citing my study as proof.  CSPI would blitz the media with press releases warning about the high celery content of take-out Chinese food.  (A heart attack in box!)  Joy Bauer would demonstrate how to use carrots instead of celery to scoop up fat-free ranch dressing.

Finally, for the big punchline, I’d get to announce that the whole thing was a joke, preferably on national TV.  “Fooled ya, folks!  There is not and never has been anything dangerous about eating celery.  Ha-ha!”

But by then, no one would believe me.   I’d be accused of being a flack for Big Celery.  I don’t care … I don’t like celery anyway.

Okay, that’s my fantasy.  (And yes, you are allowed to make wisecracks at this point … something about the wild fantasies of a 51-year-old computer geek should do the trick.)  Now here’s why I thought of it again today:

Some of you are familiar with Jason Sandeman, the Well Done Chef, because he’s written a couple of guests posts to share his recipes.  Jason was recently diagnosed as a diabetic — first as a Type 2, but then as a Type 1.  Over the weekend, I asked how he’s adjusting.  He replied today:

I have impressed the doctors and the nurses with how fast I have gained control, mainly by ignoring their advice. I am sure it is well intentioned, but misguided … I was directed to this study by a “helpful” diabetes nurse.

The study the nurse wanted Jason to read (actually, she wanted him to read an article summarizing it) is one that came out a couple of years ago and was reported all over the media with headlines such as Seven or more eggs a week raises risk of death.  Several bloggers with functioning brains took it apart at the time (I wasn’t blogging yet), but it’s worth another look, if only because it’s a perfect example of how demonizing a food can lead to exactly the kind of associations my anti-celery campaign would produce.

The Harvard team studied 21,327 men taking part in the much larger Physicians’ Health Study, which has been watching doctors since 1981 who have agreed to report regularly on their health and lifestyle habits. Over 20 years, 1,550 of the men had heart attacks, 1,342 had strokes, and more than 5,000 died.

“Egg consumption was not associated with (heart attack) or stroke,” the researchers wrote. But the men who ate seven eggs a week or more were 23 percent more likely to have died during the 20-year period. Diabetic men who ate any eggs at all were twice as likely to die in the 20 years.

Okay, this study already has problems.  Why were we all told to avoid eggs?  Because they’ll give you heart disease, by gosh! And yet the authors noted that egg consumption was not associated with heart disease — just with premature death in general.  Hmmm … so how exactly are the eggs killing all those doctors?  Are the doctors spilling eggs on the floor, then slipping on them?

I looked up the full study and found other problems as well.  The egg-consumption figures were compiled from food questionnaires mailed at various intervals over the course of the study:  baseline, 24, 48, 72, 96, and 120 months.  Those questionnaires are notoriously inaccurate.

But let’s suppose the doctors reported their egg consumption accurately.  Doctors are, after all, more likely than most folks to think carefully about their diets … which leads to another flaw in the study:  the participants are doctors.  Most of this study took place after 1984, which is when TIME magazine scared the bejesus out everyone about cholesterol and doctors started telling their patients to cut back on cholesterol and fat.  So we’re looking at a population that’s probably a bit egg-phobic to begin with.  An editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that accompanied the study pretty much says exactly that:

The egg intake pattern in this study population was extremely low: only 8% of participants were eating >= 1 egg/d. For comparison, 36% of the men in the Framingham study and 37% of men in a Japanese study with similar outcome assessments ate >=1 egg/d.

No surprise there:  doctors are far less likely than the rest of us to eat at least one egg per day.  That’s what they’ve been taught.  In fact, in the full text of the study, the authors stated that the median consumption of eggs among the doctors was one per week.

So … what kind of doctor ignores the advice — which has been shouted from the medical rooftops since at least 1984 — to cut back on eating eggs?  I can think of two kinds:

• The very few doctors who know cholesterol-rich foods aren’t dangerous (Eades, Vernon, Sears, Ravnskov, etc.).
• Doctors who don’t give a @#$%.

And wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what the study would suggest:

Men who ate the most eggs also were older, fatter, ate more vegetables but less breakfast cereal, and were more likely to drink alcohol, smoke and less likely to exercise — all factors that can affect the risk of heart attack and death.

Although the study didn’t mention it, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts the egg-eating doctors were also more likely to eat donuts and drink sodas.  I don’t know many people who drink, smoke, and avoid exercise but then avoid sugar because it isn’t good for them.

The “helpful” nurse no doubt wanted Jason to read the article because of this finding:

Among male physicians with diabetes, any egg consumption is associated with a greater risk of all-cause mortality.

The editorial states that most of the diabetic doctors were probably Type 2 diabetics.  So, once again, what kind of doctor is more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes?  A doctor who eats a lot of sugar and starch.  And since diabetics are counseled to go on very low-fat diets, which kind of diabetic doctor is more likely to eat eggs? A diabetic doctor who doesn’t give a @#$% … which means a diabetic doctor who is more likely to smoke, drink, avoid exercise, and be overweight.

To be fair to the researchers, they cited other studies that found zero association between egg consumption and premature death, and also mentioned the limitations of their own study.  Here’s an example:

The fact that our sample consists of male physicians who may have different behaviors than the general population limits the generalizability of our findings.

Our study has additional limitations. We cannot exclude unmeasured confounding or residual confounding as possible explanation of the observed positive association among diabetic subjects. In particular, we were not able to examine the effects of saturated fat, markers of insulin resistance, lipids, and other nutrients or relevant biomarkers on the observed association. While in our study, the lack of detailed dietary questionnaire prevent us from controlling for energy and other major nutrients, this was not the case in the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study, where total energy intake was accounted for.

In other words:  We found an association — period.  We can’t actually explain it, because there were too many unmeasured or uncontrolled variables.  And by the way, several other studies found no such association. If you read the whole study, that’s the takeaway message.  But take another look at the headline and lead paragraph when the study was reported in the media:

Seven or more eggs a week raises risk of death

Men with diabetes who ate any eggs at all raised their risk of death during a 20-year period studied, according to the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Doesn’t using the transitive verb “raise” make it sound just a wee bit like cause and effect?  You know, like a Boy Scout raising the flag?  Doing it on purpose and all that?

That’s the sorry state of health and nutrition reporting.  Which means my celery experiment would be a fabulous success … well, for everyone except the Chinese restaurants and the celery-farmers.

Cover graphic by Chareva Naughton, who works cheap.

If you’re reading this post, it means I survived eating one of the new Double Down sandwiches from KFC.

After learning a few weeks ago that KFC would begin offering the Double Down nationwide on April 12, I made plans to try one. But first, given the hysterical health warnings prompted by KFC’s announcement, I put my affairs in order: I made sure my life insurance was paid up and placed a copy of the policy on my desk. I had an attorney update my will. I called my mom to tell her she was a great mother. I also tucked away a note for my wife, telling her I’d understand if she remarried after a reasonable grieving period — say, 25 years.

If you’re not familiar with the Double Down, here’s a KFC commercial introducing it:

Bacon, cheese, and fried chicken … not exactly new ingredients in fast-food restaurants. Apparently the impending rise in fatalities will be caused by — egads! — serving a sandwich with no bread. That probably explains why Michael Jacobson of CSPI isn’t already throwing a public hissy-fit about the Double Down: he can’t use his trademark “heart attack in a bun!” line. I picture him in front of a mirror somewhere, trying out alternates: “Heart attack in a breast! No, dangit, that doesn’t work! Heart attack NOT in a bun!”

Jacobson aside, I’m sure you can imagine the reaction among the usual anti-fat hysterics. Actually, you don’t have to imagine the reaction, because I found plenty of headlines and quotes:

On April 12, KFC’s Double-Down Sandwich Will Bear Down Upon Us Like a Train Without Brakes

KFC’s Bacon Sandwich On Fried Chicken “Bread” Starts Killing People Nationwide April 12

The Double Down Proves Once Again That KFC Wants Us All Dead

The KFC Double Down: One Sandwich To Kill You All

KFC’s newest “sandwich” is a heart-stopping creation that seems literally to die for.

Well KFC has heard your demands, and has started facilitating quite possibly the food equivalent to a WMD.

Corporate America has officially lost its buns. Fresh off the signing of the historical Health Care Legislation, Corporate America decides it’s time to ‘Double Down.’

Excuse me? What does forcing other people to pay for your health insurance have to do with improving health? If you can name one provision in the “historical” health-care legislation that will actually make people healthier, please share.

Why pay one angel’s hair of attention to what Michelle Obama, Jamie Oliver, and those killjoys at the American Heart Association are telling you when KFC keeps giving us moist, crunchy ways to kill ourselves, one bite at a time?

I can come up with plenty of reasons not to take health advice from Michelle Obama or the American Heart Association, but I’ll just mention one here: they have no flippin’ idea what they’re talking about.

KFC has helpfully posted both a countdown clock and nutritional content on its website, which is a little like being given the chance to see exactly when and how you’ll die. With any luck, the primary ingredient in the Colonel’s sauce is Lipitor.

Ah, yes … replacing white bread with extra meat will give you heart disease, but Lipitor will save you. As far as the grain lobby and the pharmaceutical companies are concerned, that last reporter would fall into the category of journalists that Josef Stalin referred to as “useful idiots.” (He used the term to describe western journalists who actually believed what he told them.)

As the useful idiot noted, KFC has added the Double Down to its online nutrition menu, so I looked it up. Here are the calories and macronutrient values for the fried-chicken version, which is the one I tried:

Calories: 540
Fat: 32
Saturated Fat: 10
Protein: 53
Carbohydrate: 11

Hmmm … seems to me we’re looking at a high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate meal without too many calories. Compared to a lot of other fast-food offerings out there, it’s actually a pretty good choice. Here’s the nutrition info for a Quarter Pounder With Cheese, for example:

Calories: 510
Fat: 26
Saturated Fat: 12
Protein: 29
Carbohydrate: 40

The Double Down provides a bit more fat, a lot more protein, and barely one-quarter of the carbohydrates. So this is the sandwich that proves KFC wants us all dead? You’ve got to be kidding me. I think it just proves KFC wants us feeling satisfied. In fact, according to one of their executives, that was the whole point:

Javier Benito, executive vice president of marketing and food innovation at KFC stated that in consumer studies young men said they were still hungry after eating chicken sandwiches served on conventional buns. “They told us they were looking for something meatier,” he says.

Yup … a thin piece of low-fat meat on a bun can definitely leave a guy feeling hungry. This sandwich won’t. I slept late and skipped breakfast, then had a Double Down for lunch. I wasn’t hungry for hours. I had a small goat steak for dinner, and that’s it.

Is it a tasty sandwich? You bet. Is it health food? Of course not. But the biggest downside is that KFC fries their chicken in vegetable oils — which is exactly what the anti-fat hysterics demanded years ago. The polyunsaturated oils aren’t good, but at least a Double Down isn’t going to add insult to injury by jacking up my blood sugar. I know because I checked.

When I woke up this morning, my fasting blood sugar was 89 mg/dl. An hour after the Double Down, I measured the effect of those 11 grams of carbohydrate: 94 mg/dl. I checked again at the two-hour mark: 92 mg/dl.

Back in my young and foolish days, a typical breakfast for me was a cup of Grape-Nuts with a cup of skim milk — in other words, exactly the kind of “hearty-healthy” choice the experts recommend. Here’s what that meal provided:

Calories: 507
Fat: 2
Saturated Fat: 0
Protein: 21
Carbohydrate: 107

Low protein, very low fat, screamingly high in carbohydrates … a prescription for a blood-sugar joyride to Diabetes Land. I couldn’t find any testimonials about what Grape-Nuts do to a person’s blood sugar, but a couple of years ago, Dr. William Davis posted a reader’s experience with Cheerios — another low-fat, “heart healthy” cereal:

My BG started to rise very fast within 15 minutes after eating the cereal, peaked at about 250 mg/dL at 45 minutes, then slowly dropped. By about 60-75 minutes, I experienced strong hunger and carb cravings as the BG began to slowly drop, and by about 2.5 hours after eating, my BG had suddenly dropped quite low (in the low 70s) and I had developed a nasty hypoglycemic feeling (shaky, irritable, craving sugary foods, headache, etc.)

So let’s review: a sandwich consisting of bacon, cheese and fried chicken produces a blood-sugar reading of 94 mg/dl.  A bowl of Cheerios produces blood sugar of 250 mg/dl, at least for some people … but in a nation of type 2 diabetics, Cheerios are promoted as health food, while the sandwich denounced as the equivalent of a WMD.

If only the useful idiots in the media could comprehend that most of the major health problems we see these days are the result of runaway blood sugar. Now that would be “historical.” And perhaps we’d finally see some headlines like this:

Cheerios prove the American Heart Association Wants Us All Dead

I keep thinking the tide is turning.  I read several blogs written by MDs or biochemists who explain why it’s refined carbohydrates that are killing us, not saturated fat or cholesterol.  I listen to top-notch doctors and researchers cover the same topics in Jimmy Moore’s podcasts.  I watch the number of visitors to this blog tick up steadily every month (and bless you all for that).  We’re winning, I say to myself.  The word is finally getting around.

And then I do something stupid like check out the health articles on MSN.  (That hissing sound you hear is my optimism deflating.)  I don’t know what MSN’s audience size is, but I’m pretty sure if you added up the combined audiences for every blog in my blogroll plus every blog in their blogrolls, we’d be barely be the Hong Kong to MSN’s China.  No wonder when I tell people saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease, they look at me like I just said, “I actually have three heads, but two of them are only visible when the moon is full.”

This evening after dinner (meatloaf from farm-raised goat and beef, plus cauliflower whipped with butter, feta cheese, sour cream and garlic) I read an MSN health article, followed a link, followed another link, followed another link, then decided I should quit while my blood pressure was still at its usual below-average level.  The MSN article, provided by Health.com, was on how to alter your diet to reduce your cholesterol.  Here are some quotes with my comments:

Want to cut cholesterol without cutting taste? Most people are afraid that “good for my cholesterol” means meals that are joyless (and tasteless).

That’s because most people have functional tastebuds.  The rest are survivors of chemical warfare or vegetarians.

Here are some simple substitutions that you can make to the food you already eat to help fight cholesterol painlessly.

Sprinkle walnuts, skip croutons

Carbohydrates can cause high levels of a type of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), also known as bad cholesterol. For a healthier salad, replace your carbo-laden croutons with walnuts, which are high in polyunsaturated fat-a good fat that can lower LDL while boosting HDL (aka good cholesterol).

Uh, wait a second … you’re admitting that carbohydrates raise a “type” of LDL?  I’m stunned.  The type that carbohydrates raise, by the way, is type B … otherwise known as the small, dense LDL that can actually perforate the walls of your arteries.  Hey, maybe I was pessimistic for no reason!  This health writer might actually get it right.

Sip red wine, not cocktails

Research suggests that moderate alcohol intake can produce a slight rise in HDL cholesterol (a so-called good cholesterol). But that won’t do you much good if you’re tossing back margaritas or mixed drinks with fruit juice, which contain carbohydrates. Switch to red wine; it has about a 10th of the carbohydrates of a margarita, and you’ll also get antioxidants such as flavonoids that are believed to lower LDL and boost HDL.

I’ll be dipped; she is going after the carbohydrates!  Man, I feel like such a dolt … as soon as I saw the Health.com logo, I was preparing myself to yell AAAAAARGGHHH a lot.  I can relax now.

Yes to edamame and nuts, no to cheese and crackers

For a pre-dinner snack, skip the crackers and cheese, which are sky-high in saturated fat - one of the prime culprits behind high cholesterol.

AAAAAARGGHHH!!!  Do these goofy reporters ever check the latest research?  When Christopher Gardner of Stanford conducted a controlled study of three different diets, he reported (reluctantly, by his own admission) that people on the Atkins diet showed the greatest improvement in lipid profiles.  Pretty impressive, considering that another diet in the study was the Ornish low-fat plan. 

Of course, I wasn’t surprised by Gardner’s results because while I was researching Fat Head, Dr. Mike Eades challenged me to eat all the natural saturated fat I could stand for a month while cutting out sugar and starch.  If you’ve seen the film, you know what happened — my total cholesterol and LDL plummeted, while my HDL shot up.

Edamame is low in saturated fat and one cup contains about 25 grams of soy protein, which is thought to actively lower LDL (although the evidence is conflicting). Buy them frozen, dump them into boiling water, and drain after 5 minutes-that’s all there is to it.

The dust-bunnies under my bed are also low in saturated fat, but I wouldn’t eat them, boiled or otherwise.  If you think soy is good for you, do yourself a favor and read Lierre Keith’s amazing, beautifully-written book, The Vegetarian Myth.  If that’s too much of an undertaking, check out this page or this page from the Weston A. Price website.

Vinegar and lemon juice beats salad dressing

As everyone knows by now, drenching a salad in high-fat salad dressing is like smoking cigarettes while jogging: It totally defeats the purpose. A low-fat alternative is a step in the right direction, but the best option for lower cholesterol is drizzling your salad with balsamic vinegar or lemon juice.

I can hear my favorite journalism professor from college yelling across 30 years of time:  “Never, ever, use phrases like ‘everyone knows’ to make a point, because there’s nothing that ‘everyone’ knows!”

If you’d prefer to avoid absorbing most of the nutrients when eating a salad or vegetables, then yes, using a high-fat salad dressing will totally defeat that.  Most important nutrients are fat-soluble, so without fat in a meal, they’ll just pass through your body and eventually fortify the health of whatever critters live in your local sewage system.

If the purpose of eating a salad is to amuse your friends with your wacky pucker-face, definitely go for the lemon juice and vinegar. 

Ditch the butter for margarine spread

One tablespoon of butter contains more than 7 grams of saturated fat-that’s more than a third of the recommended daily value. It also contains 10 percent of your daily value for dietary cholesterol, which, though it isn’t as harmful as was once thought, is one of the main sources of high cholesterol (and atherosclerosis).

Hmmm, that would explain the sky-high rate of heart disease in 1900, when Americans consumed four times much butter per capita as we do today.  The French still consume four times as much butter as we do, but have a far lower rate of heart disease — even though they have a higher rate of smoking.  If only we could import that paradox thing …

Switch the butter with a vegetable-oil-based spread such as Smart Balance or Olivio (which also contains olive oil); you’ll be replacing a bad fat with a good fat.

Yes, because Mother Nature has no idea how to produce good nutrition for humans; all the best health-enhancing foods were created in a lab.  Here’s a little gem from the Smart Balance web site:

Smart Balance uses natural saturates (palm fruit oil) and balances it with polyunsaturates from soy and canola oils. This comprises the patented, heart-healthy Smart Balance blend that we believe to be superior to other methods of avoiding trans fatty acids.

That little balancing-and-blending act would involve extracting the oils with hexane, mixing them with sodium hydroxide and passing them through a centrifuge, mixing them again with hydrated aluminum silicate to bind to and remove the unwanted speckles, passing them through a steam distillation chamber to deodorize them, then adding artificial color and flavor.  My advice:  never eat food that has a patent number attached to it.

And instead of using butter to grease the pan while cooking, try olive oil or white wine vinegar.

“Honey, I can’t get the low-fat cookies unstuck from the pan!”
“Who cares?  They taste like vinegar anyway.”

Use ground turkey, not ground beef

Red meat is a source of both saturated fat and dietary cholesterol-two of the main sources of blood cholesterol. Ground turkey contains half the saturated fat of 85 percent lean ground beef, and it can be substituted easily for beef in most recipes.

Ground beef:  40% of the fat is monosaturated (like olive oil), and most of what’s left raises HDL.  It also raises LDL, but only the harmless, fluffy kind — i.e., not the same type raised by carbohydrates.  And even “Dr. Lipid Hypothesis” Ancel Keys eventually concluded that dietary cholesterol has no effect on the amount of cholesterol in your blood, as have several clinical studies.  Yes, I can certainly see why we’d want to avoid ground beef.

Skip the fatty sour cream, choose fat-free Greek yogurt

Whether it’s used as a garnish or in a sauce, sour cream adds a shot of saturated fat to otherwise heart-healthy meals. To cut out that excess fat without sacrificing taste or texture, swap the sour cream with no-fat Greek yogurt-one of the world’s healthiest foods.

Since you’re a professional health writer and all, did you happen to notice either of the studies published this year that concluded there’s no association whatsoever between saturated fat intake and heart disease?  Have you seen the many other studies published over the years that reached exactly the same conclusion … like this one, from the European Heart Journal:

The commonly-held belief that the best diet for the prevention of coronary heart disease is a low saturated fat, low cholesterol diet is not supported by the available evidence from clinical trials.

And if you believe swapping sour cream for fat-free yogurt doesn’t sacrifice taste … well, then I’m sorry about the chemical-warfare attack and I sincerely hope my government wasn’t involved in any way. 

Now I’d better go listen to one of Jimmy Moore’s podcasts to preserve my sanity.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, nutrition labels were pretty much non-existent. People who wanted to lose weight usually just put a little less food on their plates and cut out the obvious offenders, like desserts and potatoes. If you actually wanted to know exactly how many calories were in your food, you had to go buy a book.  Almost nobody did … but amazingly, there were fewer fat people.

Now nutrition labels are everywhere, but there are more fat people. I’m surprised the proponents of the Lipid Hypothesis didn’t leap to the obvious conclusion: nutrition labels must make people gain weight … I mean, just look at the correlation.

You’d think this little bit of history would convince the high priests of the Holy Church of Accepted Advice For Living A Long And Healthy Life that accurate calorie-counts aren’t the key to losing weight. And of course, you’d be wrong. They’re still convinced it’s all about counting calories. Take a look at this video:

Ohmigosh, the calorie counts on restaurant meals and pre-packaged meals are off by an average of 18 percent! Horrors! No wonder we’re all waddling around these days. This study naturally received a lot of media attention; evil restaurants making us fat and all that. Here’s my favorite headline, from this online article about the study:

Study: Restaurants Lie About Calorie Count

Ah, I see:  they’re lying to us!  That’s quite an interesting slant, especially since the article itself included this paragraph:

The researchers and other experts aren’t accusing restaurants and food companies of trying to deceive customers. They said most of the discrepancies can be explained by variations in ingredients, portion sizes and testing methods. For example, the teenager behind the counter might have put too much mayonnaise on one sandwich.

I guess journalism school ain’t what it used to be. But if I get started on media bias, I’ll be writing for days, so back to the “experts” in the video …

They’re convinced the inaccurate calorie counts are making us fat. The co-author of Eat This, Not That — one of the many worthless diet books out there — even warns us that being off by 18% could result in gaining 30 to 40 pounds per year.

Wow! Imagine diligently counting your calories for a full year and ending up 40 pounds heavier. You’d be so shocked by the inexplicable weight gain, it would never even occur to you (after, say, gaining the first 20 pounds) to cancel out that extra 18% by thinking to yourself, “Hmmm, my calorie limit might be a little too high. Maybe I’ll reduce it a bit.”

But even if people were actually that stupid, Mr. Eat This Not That’s calculation is based on these assumptions — not a one of which is true:

• People religiously count calories, and continue counting calories even if they gain 40 pounds in a year.
• People eat nothing but pre-packaged food and restaurant meals and therefore depend on precise calorie counts.
• Our metabolisms never adjust to what we eat, so our daily caloric needs always stay the same.
• Every time we exceed those daily caloric needs by 100 calories, we gain exactly 0.02857 pounds.

In other words, they still believe gaining or losing weight works like a bank account: you have a fixed number of expenses to be paid daily from the account (your basal metabolism), and everything else depends on deposits (eating) and withdrawals (activity). The bank counts every calorie.

So by gosh, if you want to lose 10 pounds this year, just cut 100 calories from your daily intake, and you can start shopping for that smaller dress by Christmas. But if you accidentally deposit an extra 100 calories per day — darn those teenage counter clerks with their extra mayo! — you’ll gain 10 pounds.

The bank-account analogy only works if you add a crazy banker to the equation — so crazy, not even the Federal Reserve would hire him. If he’s decided your account should stay at the same level, he doesn’t really care if you deposit a little more or a little less … he’ll just adjust the expenditures and the interest rates until your account is back to where he likes it.

On the other hand, if you eat foods that jack up your insulin, you send a coded message to the banker telling him to build up your account — like it or not. You may think you’re consuming just enough calories to cover your daily expenses, only to discover that he cut your heating bill and deposited them anyway.

In Good Calories, Bad Calories, Gary Taubes recounted a study in which naturally-lean prisoners were fed an extra 1,000 calories per day for six months. If it’s true that every calorie counts, they should’ve all gained 50 pounds. Not one did. Most only gained a few pounds. Their bodies simply adjusted to the higher intake. As soon as the experiment was over, they returned to their previous weights — and none of them counted calories to do it.

My son’s weight is also remarkably stable.  He’s always the same size, always has the same six-pack abs, year in and year out. He consumes well over a million calories in a year, but doesn’t count any of them. Do these experts really believe he just happens to eat exactly the right number of calories every year — with better than 99% accuracy? That’s ridiculous. His hormones tells him how much to weigh, then adjust his appetite and metabolism to keep him there.

Very few people gain 40 pounds in a year, and trust me, the ones who do aren’t counting calories or anything else.  And since most of us eat a mix of packaged foods, restaurant foods and home-cooked meals, counting our daily calories precisely is nearly impossible. It’s also unnecessary, if we eat the rights foods.

Yesterday morning I had an omelet with sautéed onions, spices, raw-milk cheese and sour cream on top. My wife made it, she didn’t measure anything, and we split it. (In our case, that means I ate about 2/3 of it.) I have no idea what the calorie count was.

It rained all afternoon, so we took the girls to the mall to get them out of the house. We stopped for lunch in the food court, but I didn’t eat. I wasn’t trying to restrict my calories; I just wasn’t hungry, so nothing appealed to me. Later in the evening I had another one of my wife’s concoctions: a mix of spaghetti squash, grass-fed hamburger, onions, alfredo sauce, and a bit of tomato sauce. Delicious.

Once again, I have no idea how many calories I consumed. Nor do I care, because I don’t calories. I eat the foods I know are good for me. I keep my insulin down. When I do that, I don’t have to control my appetite. My appetite takes care of itself.

One of the more controversial claims I made in Fat Head is that the obesity epidemic has been overblown — mostly by people with a vested interest, such as the CDC and the weight-loss industry.  (Unfortunately, between the government-industry revolving door and the consulting contracts offered to officials still in government, those are often the same people.)

A recent Gallup poll supports my claim.  I’m not suggesting (and didn’t suggest in Fat Head, despite what some reviewers think) that we don’t see more huge people walking around in public than we did 30 years ago.  Anyone with eyes knows a minority of the population has gotten very fat. 

But that’s a minority.  The statistics say the average American is only about 8 to 12 pounds heavier than a generation ago.  Let’s split the difference and call it 10 pounds — and remember, we’re also about 10 years older on average than we were in 1970.  As Dr. Eric Oliver pointed out in the film, when the Body Mass Index classifications of overweight and obese were adopted, they put millions of people right on the edge of being overweight.  It only took a few extra pounds to push those people into the “overweight” category … and then we gained those pounds.

The main thrust of the article about the Gallup poll is that while most Americans are overweight (using the BMI scale, anyway), fewer than half are currently trying to lose weight.  Well, duh … millions of people have tried the “eat less and move more” method promoted by doctors and nutritionists and failed.  It’s no wonder they’ve given up.

But what I found most interesting was the data on who’s “overweight” and by how much.  Here are the numbers:

More than 50 pounds overweight: 6%
21-50 pounds overweight: 17%
11-20 pounds overweight: 15%
1-10 pounds overweight: 24%
At ideal weight: 18%
1-10 pounds underweight: 7%
11-20 pounds underweight: 3%
More than 20 pounds underweight: 1%
Undesignated: 9%

We’re looking at BMI figures here, not a measurement of who’s actually fat and who isn’t.  As I’ve said many times, the BMI scale is ridiculous.  It labels almost anyone with decent muscles as overweight or obese.  Tim Tebow, the star quarterback of the Florida Gators, is a lean, mean, running machine.  He’s also 6′3″ and weighs 245, which puts his BMI at 30.6 — in other words, obese.  To be considered normal weight, he’d have to lose 45 pounds.  Short of amputating a leg, that’s not going to happen.

But of course, not many people are as muscular as Tim Tebow, so let’s take an example closer to home — me.  When I graduated from high school, I was 5′8″ and weighed 155 pounds, giving me a BMI of 23.6 … normal weight.  But I only had a 36-inch chest, not much in the way of muscles, a big belly and “boy boobs.”  When we played shirts vs. skins in gym-class competitions, I prayed to end up on the shirts team. 

Today I’m 5′11″ and weigh 195 pounds, giving me a BMI of 27.2 … overweight.  I also have a 44-inch chest, with much thicker arms and legs.  My belly is smaller and the boy boobs are gone.  But to be considered just barely at “normal” weight, I’d have to lose 20 pounds.  To reach my high-school BMI of 23.6, I’d have to lose 26 pounds.  That’s how screwy the BMI measurement is.

Not surprisingly, then, the Gallup poll found a “gap” between the number of people who are technically overweight and the number who consider themselves overweight.  No kidding.  If you tried to tell Tim Tebow he needs to lose 45 pounds, he’d probably hit you.  If you tried to tell me I should lose another 26 pounds, I’d probably ask Tim Tebow to hit you.

Let’s have a little fun with the Gallup numbers.  We’ve heard over and over that obesity is reaching epidemic proportions and 60% of all Americans are overweight.  Yup … if we accept that the BMI scale actually means something and we include people who are 10 pounds or less overweight, I guess that’s true.

But since the average weight gain since 1970 is about 10 pounds, let’s take everyone who’s considered overweight, put them on a low-carb diet, and knock off those pounds — after all, 10 pounds isn’t much.  Better yet, let’s decide the BMI categories are arbitrary (which they are) and simply spot people another 10 pounds before they’re considered overweight.

All of a sudden, POOF! … our epidemic isn’t quite so scary.  Instead of 62% of all American adults being overweight, we’re down to 38% — and we could even say that only 23% of all adults are more than 10 pounds overweight. 

According to the poll, the average American adult is 14 pounds over his or her ideal weight.  But keep in mind, that’s an average.  Six percent of American adults are 50 pounds or more overweight.  They’re not being offset in the numbers by people who are 50 pounds underweight. 

Take one guy who’s 50 pounds above the “normal” BMI and average him together with one man who’s 15 pounds overweight, three who are 10 pounds overweight, one who’s five pounds overweight, and one at the ideal weight, and you get an average of 14 pounds overweight.  But only two of the seven are above that average, and five of the seven are within 10 pounds of their supposedly ideal weight. 

There are probably a lot of numbers like these involved in that “gap” that had the Gallup people so surprised.  People who are within 10 pounds of their supposedly ideal weight (a quarter of the population) can be forgiven for answering that their weight is “about right.”

That’s what you’re actually seeing when hysterical members of the media show you those state-by-state charts, with the overweight and obesity numbers growing like a runaway cancer:  the statistical outcome of 10 extra pounds on average since 1970 … which for many people were the result of gym memberships and weight machines.  Not many people lifted weights in 1970.  Now even my naturally-thin wife does.

A different Gallup poll underscores another point I made in the film:  there is a genuine epidemic out there, and it’s called diabetes.  More than 11% percent of Americans adults have diabetes now, and more than 90% of those have type 2 diabetes, which is mostly preventable.  The rate has more than doubled in the last decade alone.  Among senior citizens, the numbers are even more harrowing: nearly one-quarter have diabetes.  Just think of all the physical damage that’s causing.  And even those numbers don’t count the pre-diabetics.

Since high blood sugar can lead to both weight gain and diabetes, we’re actually seeing two sides of the same coin.  But the real problem is the diabetes, not the extra 10 pounds, or even the extra 20 or 30 pounds many people have gained.  In my family, there are two type 2 diabetics who are lean and look great in their clothes.  No one told warned them about the dangers of high blood sugar, and since they were lean, they assumed their diets were just fine — after all, they ate lots of those energy-giving carbohydrates and not too much of that icky fat.

The constant drumbeat about the obesity epidemic and the emphasis on losing weight is sending the wrong message.  We need to tell people to get their blood sugar checked and keep it under control with the proper diet.  If we do that, the 10 pounds will take care of itself.  And if it doesn’t, well … so what?  A bit of belly won’t kill you if it’s not the result of high blood sugar.

p.s. - We’re leaving for grandma’s house on Wednesday.  It’s not likely I’ll post on Thursday, but I’ll check comments when I can.  Enjoy your Thanksgiving.