Over the past several weeks, I’ve received quite a few emails and comments about Kansas State nutrition professor Mark Haub and his “Twinkie Diet.” I became aware of professor Haub’s experiment awhile back because he emailed me about it. He’s seen Fat Head, and if I remember correctly, he said he shows it to his students in class.
In case you haven’t heard about his experiment, here’s a typical headline, this one from a CNN article:
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds
For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.
His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.
The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.
As you might imagine, a lot of the emails and comments I received included a question along the lines of “How can this guy be losing weight when he’s living on all those refined carbohydrates?” I replied that I’d need to see a breakdown of what he actually ate. Fortunately, Professor Haub (unlike Morgan Spurlock) has nothing to hide and has made his food log and health assessments public. I finally spent some time going over them and crunching some numbers.
So, the answer to the question How can this guy be losing weight when he’s living on all all those refined carbohydrates? is … (wait for it): By not actually consuming a high number of carbohydrates.
Despite the headlines, Professor Haub wasn’t living on a “Twinkie Diet” or a “Little Debbie Snack Cake Diet.” He was on a diet that includes Twinkies and Little Debbie Snack Cakes.
First, let’s look at a couple of daily menus:
November 12
Pumpkin Spice Donut
Coffee
Protein shake
Onion Rings
Steak
Broccoli
Macaroni and Cheese
Baked potato casserole
Dynasty Lychees
Baby carrots
Peanut butter cookies
2% milk
October 29
Hostess cupcake
Coffee
Sesame chicken
Teriyaki chicken
Egg roll
Chicken nachos
Broccoli
Lemon zingers
Kit Kat
Like my Fat Head fast-food diet, nobody would mistake this for any kind of health-food diet. The guy is definitely consuming sugar. And yet he lost weight, lost body fat, raised his HDL, and lowered both his triglycerides and LDL. How can that be? Well, let’s look at the numbers.
I copied the daily nutrition totals into Excel and calculated Professor Haub’s average daily intake of calories and macronutrients over the 10 weeks he’s been on the diet:
Now, 173 grams of carbohydrate per day certainly isn’t low, but it’s not high either. Depending on whose figures you use, that’s about half as many carbohydrates as an average American male consumes per day. It’s also at least 1,000 fewer daily calories than an average male consumes. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Professor Haub lost weight on a “Twinkie Diet” that is actually moderate in carbohydrates and very low in calories. I’d lose weight on that diet, too. (I’d hate it, but I’d lose weight.)
I would also lose muscle on such a low protein intake, and according to his health assessments posted on Facebook, Professor Haub did in fact lose 6 pounds of lean body mass over the 10 weeks. So we’re looking at a fat loss of 20 pounds in 10 weeks, or two pounds per week.
As with dieters everywhere, his weight loss appears to be slowing down as he goes along. During the first four weeks of the diet, according to his online data, he lost an average of 3.75 pounds per week, but slowed to 1.8 pounds per week over the next six weeks. That’s not surprising. There’s usually some initial water loss in the early phase of a diet, and of course once you begin to lose weight, your basal metabolism tends to drop. What would be interesting to see is how quickly he’d regain the weight if he went back up to 2500 calories per day and consumed more carbohydrates — not that I’d encourage him to try it.
Overall, it looks like an interesting experiment, and it’s certainly generated a lot of media buzz. It’s just too bad the buzzing media reporters aren’t taking a little closer look at the professor’s online food log. There’s certainly junk food in this diet, but it is not (as one headline described it) a Junk Food Binge. When you consume fewer than 1500 calories and 175 carbohydrates on an average day, it’s not any kind of binge.
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.”
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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:
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:
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:
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.
"This movie is funny and entertaining and amazingly informative."
"Contradicts everything you've ever been told about diet and heart disease with true science to back it up."
"Funny and smart, you'll be hard pressed to spend a more enlightening 100 minutes, and you'll come away with more practical knowledge than a whole college course in 'convential' nutrition."
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.
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