Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic: Time to Change Course

[Note:  This item comes from friend Shannon McElyea.  Shannon’s comment:’A lot about the deadly effects of sugar these days… well to be heeded.’.  DLH]

Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic: Time to Change Course
By Jeff Ritterman, M.D., Truthout
Jun 5 2015
<http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31193-four-decades-of-the-wrong-dietary-advice-has-paved-the-way-for-the-diabetes-epidemic-time-to-change-course>

In 1977, the McGovern Commission, chaired by then-Senator George McGovern, issued dietary guidelines that we follow to this day. The commission recommended that Americans receive no more than 30 percent of their energy requirements from fat and that we consume no more that 10 percent of our calories as saturated fat.

Dr. Robert Olson, professor of medicine and chairman of the Biochemistry Department at St. Louis University and an expert on nutrition science argued that the recommendations were not supported by the available science. In Dr. Olson’s words:

“I pleaded in my report and will plead again orally here for more research on the problem before we make announcements to the American public.”

Senator McGovern, speaking for the commission stated that:

“Senators don’t have the luxury the research scientist does of waiting until every last shred of evidence is in.”

Senator McGovern’s comment concerning “every last shred of evidence” was widely off the mark. It was never a question of having supportive, but incomplete, evidence. There simply was no convincing scientific evidence at all in support of the commission’s recommendations. There still isn’t.

At the time that the commission issued its dietary guidelines, only 2,500 men had been studied in randomized control trials, the gold standard in clinical research. No study included women. No study showed that a low-fat diet was superior to a diet higher in fat content in any measure of health outcome. In fact, in the one study that compared a 10 percent saturated fat intake to a diet with unrestricted saturated fat, the low-fat subjects had a higher death ratefrom all causes, including heart disease.

Yet, without any study recommending the dietary guidelines, and without any science to back up the guidelines, and with some evidence that the contrary was in fact true, 220 million Americans were advised to lower their saturated fat intake.

Unfortunately, these recommendations were not only wrong, they were dangerously wrong. They have helped lead the way to the present epidemics in type-two diabetes, obesity, coronary heart disease, and hypertension: the modern day “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

When the food manufacturers started removing the fat from our food, the taste went with the fat. The answer: Add sugar and lots of it. This worked well economically as the introduction of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) made cheap sugar plentiful.

It didn’t work so well metabolically. The huge increases in our sugar intake have exceeded our physiologic limits. The result is the pathophysiology that we see all around us.

Let me explain.

[snip]