Saturday, August 18, 2007

Messed up food pyramid is ruining our health!

I've linked to the article in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons under Credible Evidence but here's a quote from the abstract and the conclusion of the article with bold highlighting added by myself.

ABSTRACT
The USDA-sponsored Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) and its Food Guide Pyramid are nutritionally and biochemically unsound. The DGA was nevertheless accepted wholeheartedly by nutrition authorities, who took Ancel Keys as their guiding spirit and his lipid hypothesis their mantra. They radically changed the food habits of tens of millions of Americans in a massive human experiment that has gone awry. Much evidence suggests that the current epidemics of cardiovascular diseases,

Conclusion
It is no secret that the lipid hypothesis, now dogma, is facing a serious challenge. America's long dietary experiment with the lowfat, high-carbohydrate diet has failed. Today, there is little doubt that there is a clear temporal association between the "hearthealthy" diet and the current, growing epidemics of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type-2 diabetes. Many scientific papers and books support this association and explain exactly how and why the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet causes these diseases.

Long-held beliefs that animal fat is the cause of cardiovascular disease and that grain products are the staff of life will not be relinquished without a struggle. The articles and comments widely circulated in the public press, exemplified by the denigration of the "low carb" diet and its author, the late Dr. Atkins, are evidence of this struggle.

Hope for a solution may well lie with physicians and nutritionists schooled in the biochemistry of nutrientmetabolism and open to revisiting past dogmas. As Dr. Sylvan LeeWeinberg, past president of the American College of Cardiology, states in his insightful and courageous critique of the validity of the dietheart hypothesis:

"Defense of the LF-Hcarb[low-fat, high-carbohydrate] diet, because it conforms to current traditional dietary recommendations by appealing to the authority of its prestigious medical and institutional sponsors, or by ignoring an increasingly critical medical literature, is no longer tenable."

I hope you will consider reading the whole article at: http://www.jpands.org/vol9no4/ottoboni.pdf

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