An article in the NYTs yesterday about
October 10, 2007
Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus
Basically, the article asserts that the idea that a low fat diet is most healthy for the heart and wards off other diseases is a myth. The myth was started by Dr. Koop, Surgeon General, and was based on what is called the “cascade effect” – Dr. Keyes asserted it to be true, he was well respected, but it was never backed up with hard clinical evidence.
Interesting, no? Read the article – it’s worth checking out.
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Light A Candle
Episcopalifem 
O/T, but note this bit of Sexist writing: delicately put, but hard at its core.
If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does.
The size of the task sometimes amazes me, but it’s important to be on the right side.
Yeah..I noticed that too.
Only a “she” would need two other people to believe something before she would believe it too.
This is NEWS? Geez. My buddy, Ann Louise Gittleman, was Director of Nutrition at the Pritikin Center when she jumped ship and wrote “Beyond Pritkin” in 1988 challenging the low-fat craze. Her promo bio says:
“Always ahead of her time, Ann Louise was the first to proclaim that obesity was caused by the lack of dietary fats and the wrong kind of carbohydrates in her book Beyond Pritikin, published in 1988. In Beyond Pritikin, she predicted that the fat free, carb-rich diet was creating weight gain, sugar cravings, fatigue and diabetes.”
A recent article gives further info (at http://www.thatscrispy.com/index/news-app/story.766
/title.ann-louise-gittleman-staying-young-and-healthy).
This isn’t just a matter of a “cascade” of opinions. The diet , food, and health industry together with pharmaceutical companies work REALLY hard at suppressing information contrary to their economic interests. Ann Louise couldn’t get the time of day from anyone for a long time — and she’s still a bit outside the mainstream, despite her best efforts at self-marketing. She worked for those idiots, but she did not / does not have a medical degree — could just read the research and see how they were misinterpreting it. Also, she pointed out back then that all the studies were based on men, who, in case you noticed, gain and lose weight differently.
Yet, despite widespread publicity in recent years (thanks to Dr. Atkins and South Beach — with their own industries), the FRACKING food pyramid hasn’t changed in the schools. I called a teacher on it once here and sent her a copy of a Harvard study showing that the old pyramid was wrong and she wouldn’t even share it with the kids as alternative information.
And the NY Times just figured out the problem?
LOL
I don’t feel so bad now – if the NYTs doesn’t know it yet.