Fear of a Fat Planet

I have spent a lot of time reading about the relationship between diet and health, and one of the most exhaustive surveys of the subject can be found in Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. For those not familiar with him, he’s a science journalist who made a big splash with a New York Times Magazine article in 2002 called What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?. His book is chock full of studies on diet and health going back 150 years. If you need statistics and studies to convince you that you simply have not been told the truth about dietary fat (especially saturated fat), his book is a great read.

While Taubes does a good job making all of the data both interesting and readable, it’s very…science-y. If you are interested in the topic and you want something more entertaining, a lot of the same material is covered in the movie Fat Head, a comedic documentary about an eating contest that is now out on DVD. Tom Naughton (the documentarian) also has a blog that covers material related to the movie.

The primary idea being pushed on us is to eat less fat. The stores are full of low-fat products, and the popularity of skinless, boneless chicken breasts is strong and unchanging, and yet Americans seem to be fatter than ever before. Based on everything I’ve read and what I see around me, I have come to the conclusion that the U.S. Dietary Guidelines are making us fat and sick. There’s no actual evidence that dietary fat causes heart attacks. Half the people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol. Eating cholesterol (or abstaining from it) does not effect your serum cholesterol level. Actual studies cost money to view on the web, so these are mostly derivative articles, so if you don’t like my links, try one of these books. These books all cite and excerpt the actual studies (esp. the Framingham Study and the Seven Countries Study):

Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic

Good Calories, Bad Calories (already mentioned above)

The Great Cholesterol Con

There’s another well researched study, an oldie but a goodie, but it doesn’t cover heart disease in a direct way. It covers overall health based on the health of bones and teeth: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price. Anthropological studies use bones to determine the diet quality of our human ancestors, so certainly using the teeth of living humans can tell us something too.

Or, alternately, you can just watch the aforementioned DVD, Fat Head. It covers things in a more cursory manner, but it’s one heck of a lot funnier.

If you like real foods but feel guilty about eating them, do yourself a favor and have a look at the data yourself. Don’t believe what you see on television, and especially don’t believe headline studies. If you look at the actual study, you’ll often find that the data don’t support the headline.

The real reason I’ve written all this to support something else I’m getting around to saying. It’s also a bit of a prelude to a post on Home Economics that I have in the works.

Slashfood, a site I really enjoy reading, has hired a new writer. It makes me sad that there’s no way to exclude one of their writers from the RSS feed because I’d rather not even be tempted to read her stuff. This writer is Jennifer Iserloh, The Skinny Chef, and everything about her articles and recipes seem to tick me off. This post makes me want to bang my head on the wall, repeatedly. The main issue I have is that she’s really big on low-fat, and I think low-fat is a false economy both for dieters and for frugal shoppers.

Cutting fat from your diet might cut calories, but it will not help your glucose metabolism any. If you substitute carbs for the fat, it *really* won’t help because you might wind up eating the same number of calories. Another great thing about fat is that it’s *filling*. Carbs make many people want more carbs, especially if one’s weight is being impacted by metabolic syndrome.

The chalky texture of fat-free cheese is certainly not attractive. Fat-free sour cream and yogurt tend to be very tart with no creaminess to offset that effect. Fat-free cheeses contain artificial flavors and colors, and some even contain yeast. Fat-free sour creams and yogurts often contain gelling agents to keep them cohesive and non-liquid. Check the labels if you don’t eat meat — they often contain gelatin, which is made from animal bones.

I know a lot of people are used to skim milk, but when I switched to skim milk about 15 years ago, I figured out that I wasn’t actually consuming the stuff any more and cut way back on purchases. I’ve since switched back to whole milk because I find tastes better in every application I have for milk. I’m heading towards buying a cow share to get raw, whole milk just like it comes out of the cow. We tried a 1/2 gallon sample in the last week, and we enjoyed it. We made butter out of some of the cream, and made paneer with the last of it yesterday. Anyway…when most people envision how skim milk is created, they see cream being removed after floating to the top. Oh, if only it were that simple.

Inside that machinery, milk shipped from the farm is completely remade. First it is separated in centrifuges into fat, protein and various other solids and liquids. Once segregated, these are reconstituted to set levels for whole, low-fat and no-fat milks; in other words, the milk is reconstituted to be completely uniform. Of the reconstituted milks, whole milk will most closely approximate original cow’s milk. The butterfat left over will go into butter, cream, cheese, toppings and ice cream. The dairy industry loves to sell low fat milk and skim milk because they can make a lot more money from the butterfat when consumers buy it as ice cream. When they remove the fat to make reduced fat milks, they replace the fat with powdered milk concentrate, which is formed by high temperature spray drying. All reduced-fat milks have dried skim milk added to give them body, although this ingredient is not usually on the labels.

If you’re shopping on a budget, buy the best whole foods you can afford. Defatted foods are processed, and you usually pay for the processing in the price. If you’re trying to cut calories, don’t sacrifice fats to the caloric gods – it won’t help, and it might make things worse.

The problem with telling people to eat and drink what they like, but to do it in moderation is that there’s no money in it. People want a pill or a magic trick, but there’s no substitute for a healthy lifestyle. People readily accept that industrialized agriculture is not good for us, but many of the same people accept the rest of the diet orthodoxy that is used to support farm subsidies, and yes, industrialized agriculture. Here’s a bit from Michael Pollan (warning, PDF!):

Sooner or later, everything solid we’ve been told about the links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away in the gust of the most recent study. Consider the latest findings. In 2006 came news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against cancer, may do no such thing—this from the massive, federally funded Women’s Health Initiative, which has also failed to find a link between a low-fat diet and the risk of coronary heart disease. Indeed, the whole nutritional orthodoxy around dietary fat appears to be crumbling, as we will see.

I’m closing this up and moving on to something about frugal eating.