Here’s a nice post about dietary puzzles in which a group of people who should have a high or low rate of heart disease don’t. For example,

Spanish paradox. Those naughty Spaniards are eating more fat and less carbs and getting LESS heart disease, now there’s a surprise. Good thing their medical system is so marvelous.

Sri Lanka paradox. In Sri Lanka they eat <25% calories from fat and still get lots of heart disease. Tut tut.

I have blogged about the Israeli Paradox. These paradoxes go away, the author notes, “when you realize saturated fat is not the cause of heart disease.”

Elsewhere on his blog he discusses studies that found that eating less fruits and vegetables improved health. Thanks to Dave Lull.

Not unrelated to all this, Ken Carpenter, a co-author of mine and an excellent speaker, is giving a talk next week in the Nutrition Department at UC Berkeley titled “When Nutritionists Go Wrong”. It is on Wednesday, December 19, 2007, at 4:10 pm Room 114 Morgan Hall. Ken has written wonderful books and articles about the history of nutrition and I am eagerly awaiting this talk.

Gary Taubes spoke at Berkeley a few weeks ago; the title of his talk was “The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why No One Seems to Care” (webcast). Did you know that the last edition of Dr. Spock’s baby book advocated a vegan diet? One of many fascinating details. Also this:

There’s a group at the University of Cincinnati that did an Atkins vs. low-fat study and they found that the Atkins people lost twice as much weight and they liked the diet much better. I was interviewing the dietitian who did the study. She had agreed to talk to me but she was very hesitant — she didn’t offer up any information. Finally, at the end of the interview, the one thing she offered freely: I asked her who funded it and she said the American Heart Association.

I said, “Well, I have to give them credit for funding it.”

She said, “Don’t. They funded it because we proposed it as a study that would refute the benefit. And when we found that the Atkins diet really worked and worked better than the low-calorie diet, now we’re trying to get money to look further into it and they won’t give it to us.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

In the latest New Yorker, an article by Bill Buford begins:

Meat-eaters . . . have more recently had to accept that their diet is probably the source of much of the world’s . . . obesity.

Gary Taubes’ new book Good Calories, Bad Calories argues the opposite. Even if the fact checkers hadn’t read Taubes, surely they knew of the Atkins diet?

Addendum: Buford also blames heart disease on meat. In this talk Malcolm Kendrick notes an inverse correlation between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. Thanks to Dave Lull.

Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating and an innovative methodologist, has been appointed executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion for 14 months. A surprising and most encouraging choice. Brian’s research is amazingly free of dogma. He does what you should do, rather than what people tell you to do.

About cool data.

This Men’s Health article is a nice summing-up of the lack of evidence that saturated fat is bad.

In 2000, a respected international group of scientists called the Cochrane Collaboration conducted a “meta-analysis” of the scientific literature on cholesterol-lowering diets. After applying rigorous selection criteria (219 trials were excluded), the group examined 27 studies involving more than 18,000 participants. Although the authors concluded that cutting back on dietary fat may help reduce heart disease, their published data actually shows that diets low in saturated fats have no significant effect on mortality, or even on deaths due to heart attacks. “I was disappointed that we didn’t find something more definitive,” says Lee Hooper, Ph.D., who led the Cochrane review. If this exhaustive analysis didn’t provide evidence of the dangers of saturated fat, says Hooper, it was probably because the studies reviewed didn’t last long enough, or perhaps because the participants didn’t lower their saturated-fat intake enough. Of course, there is a third possibility, which Hooper doesn’t mention: The diet-heart hypothesis is incorrect.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Here’s a nice essay about the Women’s Health Initiative, a nine-year mega-million-dollar experiment to measure the effect of “healthy eating” especially a low-fat diet.

48,835 postmenopausal women . . . were randomly assigned . . . to either their regular unrestricted diet or to a “healthy” diet that was low-fat (20% fat) and high fiber, with at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables, and 6 servings of grains a day. The “healthy” eaters endured an “intense behavioral modification program by specially trained and certified professionals” to keep them on their diets. While they backslide a little, they did surprisingly well in sticking to the diet — as good as dietary prescripts will ever get and money can buy — at a cost of $8,498 spent per person!

Oops, no effect. “The results of this huge study, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on it, were quietly buried.”

I conclude two things: 1. People in charge of spending vast sums on nutrition research don’t know very much about what constitutes a healthy diet. 2. The same people know very little about how to do experiments. The most basic lesson is to do the smallest experiment possible.

Sandy Szwarc, the author of this essay, concludes:

When we enjoy a variety of foods from all of the food groups — as most everyone naturally does when they’re not trying to control their eating — and trust our bodies, we’ll get the nutrients we need to prevent deficiencies. And that is the only thing that nutritional science can credibly support.

There is some truth to this, both (a) we instinctively eat to avoid certain deficiencies and (b) nutrition science has found conclusive evidence that we need certain chemicals. But she is quite wrong in the sense that most Americans appear to suffer from huge omega-3 deficiencies (my posts about this). Many of them, probably most of them “enjoy a variety of foods from all of the food groups.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.