In 1977 America changed its health advice. In a nutshell (or, more likely, an ADA approved Mars bar): Eat more starchy foods, eat more carbohydrates, saturated fats are bad. If that sounds [...]]]> I cannot believe I’m about to link to the Huffington Post, but this article really gets to the meat of the so-called obesity epidemic.

In 1977 America changed its health advice. In a nutshell (or, more likely, an ADA approved Mars bar): Eat more starchy foods, eat more carbohydrates, saturated fats are bad. If that sounds like pretty good advice to you, then you don’t know enough about what you are putting into your mouth.

Your grandparents were raised in a generation aware that God’s supermarket was better than man’s. Saturated fat was a vital part of their diet. For them, obesity was not a common health problem. They were not suffering malnutrition in the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K). Remarkably, you, dear Western reader, probably are.

The 2010 Dietary recommendations are very much simply “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” It is total insanity.

I think the biggest danger out there is the foods with a health halo – too many people, even supposedly smart Whole Foods shoppers – fall for the idea that processed foods, if it fits their particular orthorexia, are healthy. Evaporated cane juice and agave nectar are *still* sugar. You might as well feed your kids HFCS for all the difference it makes. Most fat-reduced dairy products are full of additives that, let’s face it, you don’t even KNOW WHAT THEY ARE! But if Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods is selling it, you trust them that is must be OK.

Don’t even get me started on the gluten-free junk food revolution. It’s going to be the next giant money maker for the processed food industry.

I think I need one of those “bang head here” signs on the wall today.

The thing is that there’s no connection between blood pressure and salt. It’s never been proven. [...]]]> Salt, like many other foods, has been demonized by what we believe to be current science. It’s one of those things that “everybody knows”, so they accept that something they like is something they should eat less of.

The thing is that there’s no connection between blood pressure and salt. It’s never been proven. Gary Taubes has an article about it that you can read on line called “The (Political) Science of Salt.”

You really should read it, so I’m not going to reprint, summarize and quote too much of it here. It’s so much worse than I thought. It’s worse than the cholesterol “studies.”¹ The so-called science behind the blood pressure/salt relationship is even more lacking.

Through the early 1980s, the scientific discord over salt reduction was buried beneath the public attention given to the benefits of avoiding salt. The NHBPEP had decreed since its inception in 1972 that salt was an unnecessary evil, a conclusion reached as well by a host of medical organizations, not to mention the National Academy of Sciences and the Surgeon General. By 1978, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, was describing salt as “the deadly white powder you already snort” and lobbying Congress to require food labeling on high-salt foods. In 1981, the FDA launched a series of “sodium initiatives” aimed at reducing the nation’s salt intake.

Not until after these campaigns were well under way, however, did researchers set out to do studies that might be powerful enough to resolve the underlying controversy. The first was the Scottish Heart Health Study, launched in 1984 by epidemiologist Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe and colleagues at the Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee, Scotland. The researchers used questionnaires, physical exams, and 24-hour urine samples to establish the risk factors for cardiovascular disease in 7300 Scottish men. This was an order of magnitude larger than any intrapopulation study ever done with 24-hour urine samples. The BMJ published the results in 1988: Potassium, which is in fruits and vegetables, seemed to have a beneficial effect on blood pressure. Sodium had no effect.

With this result, the Scottish study vanished from the debate.

Like the saturated fat demonization and the pushing of low-fat, high-carb, low-calorie diets, the established elements desperately want it to be true. They just *know* that salt is bad for you, but they can’t prove it. Like the other two, they keep running studies to try, yet again, to prove it.

Settled science does not need more studies to prove it’s hypotheses.

The demonization of salt is something I’ve mostly been ignoring because I don’t eat that much processed food. Most of the processed stuff I eat is in restaurants, and even then, I’m always trying to get that as close to simply prepared meat, green veg and fruit, since that’s what I actually eat at home. I don’t even eat salad dressing in restaurants any more, so pulling salt out of things doesn’t affect me that much.

Unfortunately, the FDA, having solved all other problems, wants to meddle with food even more.

But proponents of mandatory salt reduction say lowering salt to more reasonable levels could reduce high blood pressure, improve health in other ways, and save 100,000 lives a year in the U.S.

If you read Taubes paper above, you know that claim has no basis in reality. None whatsoever. Worse than that:

• your tax money is being spent over and over to try to prove this
• pulling salt out of foods, like pulling out fat, will cause manufacturers to add something else to make the item palatable
• what they choose to add might be something we have NOT been eating for thousands of years
• what they choose to add might cause other deficiencies or imbalances and would constitute a vast, uncontrolled science experiment performed on the American public
• what business is it of theirs anyway?
• I don’t have high blood pressure, and you probably don’t either!

It’s only a matter of time before these jokers try to ban something Paleo/Primal types actually eat. Even if you eat little salt, you want to stay on top of this particular stupid idea.

¹You’d expect that cholesterol levels of people who have just had a heart would indicate excess cholesterol is the cause. They don’t. To sum it up: That study shows that the mean LDL on heart attack hospital admissions was 104.9, mean HDL was 39.7. You were expecting those two to add up to something over 200? Wrong. Triglyceride is another story, but you never hear about that, partially because excess sugar definitely causes it to go up. Whoops! No more Snackwells for you, fattie! You can find many books that explain how statins are worthless (because the cholesterol numbers predict nothing). My favorite is Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s The Great Cholesterol Con.

WellPoint Inc., a for-profit insurer whose business is composed largely of Blue plans that it has acquired, oppose the exemption for nonprofits from the new tax. The company says the exemption would unfairly tax some states, such as [...]]]> I’m so delighted to see that our new Democrat Senators are looking out for the folks back home:

WellPoint Inc., a for-profit insurer whose business is composed largely of Blue plans that it has acquired, oppose the exemption for nonprofits from the new tax. The company says the exemption would unfairly tax some states, such as Virginia, where primarily for-profit plans operate.

“We’ve talked to the states where there are a high proportion of for-profit plans to let them know this is a tax on those states,” said Brad Fluegel, WellPoint’s chief of strategy. “Just because they are not-for-profit doesn’t mean they don’t make money,” he said of the nonprofits, citing income that goes toward administrative expenses and overhead.

So, I guess I now get to pay YET MORE for health insurance? AWESOME! I love when the government tries to solve problems!