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Save The World; Eat Your Vegetables
I spent most of the day reading the newly-released Final Scientific Report of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC). This report will form the basis for the next 5-year revision of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, due out later this year. The report is 571 pages long, and I won’t pretend to have read all of it, but I did read major portions. I did not do it for fun; it’s part of my job to know about this stuff.
I was particularly interested to see how the DGAC would handle the fact that, over the past five years, a critical mass of the public has become aware that public health experts have been, uh, “misrepresenting” the evidence for decades regarding dietary fat. There never was much, if any, real evidence that low-fat diets are good for you, or that saturated fat causes cardiac disease (despite the fact that both of these dogmas have been “settled science” since the 1970s.) But in recent years, several studies have been published that make it impossible to push low-fat diets any longer with a straight face, or low-saturated fat diets with much confidence. And much of the public is now aware of this new evidence.
So, I wondered, how would the DGAC handle this problem in a way that saves face?
The committee handled the low-fat diet part of the question simply — by ignoring it altogether. The only direct mention of low-fat diets I could find in their report was all the way back on page 453: “… dietary advice should put the emphasis on optimizing types of dietary fat and not reducing total fat.” Low-fat diets? Who said anything about low-fat diets?
The committee’s handling of the saturated fat question was far more interesting. They dutifully described four major meta-analyses published since 2009 that failed to show any association (let alone a causal effect) between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease. But they attribute this failure to the likely substitution of carbohydrates for saturated fats in the diets of the research subjects in these studies. (Despite decades of telling us otherwise, the committee now assumes we all know that refined carbs are deadly.)
But instead of concluding that maybe saturated fats aren’t so bad after all, the DGAC immediately elided to a different question. They cited a number of studies indicating that cardiac disease can be reduced by substituting polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) for saturated fats. Apparently, even if saturated fats aren’t really bad, PUFAs are even better. And to get all the PUFAs you need, the committee asserts (not quite correctly), you need to consume lots of vegetables, specifically vegetable oil.
There are several major potential problems with this formulation (which I won’t bore you with), and I suspect the DGAC is aware that their vegetable oil imperative might blow up on them (like trans fats) even before the next five-year update of their report is due. If that were to happen, it would be particularly tough to explain, seeing as how they’ve just had to abandon (without much comment) their beloved low-fat, high-carb dogma and are even now trying painfully to finesse their discredited saturated fat dogma.
What they need is some embarrassment insurance. And they found that insurance in the form of yet another branch of settled science: global warming.
You see, fellow Ricochet members, there is a much higher reason to abandon our animal fat diets than merely our personal health and well-being. By giving up saturated fats (and apparently, all those good omega-3 PUFAs we get from meat), we are not only saving ourselves from the ravages of cardiovascular disease, but we are also saving our planet. An entire chapter of the DGAC’s report is dedicated to this proposition. In the committee’s own words:
Moderate to strong evidence demonstrates that healthy dietary patterns that are higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods are associated with more favorable environmental outcomes (lower greenhouse gas emissions and more favorable land, water, and energy use) than are current U.S. dietary patterns.
By eating the kind of diet the committee (and later this year, the US Government) is recommending (and regulating) for us, the DGAC asserts, the greenhouse gasses emitted by agricultural pursuits will be reduced by as much as 4%.
Even if it turns out that the omega-6 PUFAs we get from most vegetable oils are actually accelerating our atherosclerosis and cancers (as some studies suggest, especially if we cook with them), we would still be advancing our war on global warming by abandoning saturated fats. Since global warming is officially the greatest existing threat to mankind, this is a good trade and it will justify whatever minor mistakes in dogma the public health experts are still inadvertently (or otherwise) making.
Image Credit: wikicommons media, via Creative Commons License.
Published in General
Barfly,
I am impressed that your BS detector was so well-developed in elementary school.
I was in elementary school quite some time ago, but I seem to recall that my BS detector was very embryonic back then. I say this because during the duck-and-cover drills, I really thought crouching under my flimsy desk would offer some protection against the hydrogen bomb.
If they had had a food pyramid in those days, I would have dutifully learned it for the test.
DrRich, I do understand that food choices only modify probabilities and not in any precise way. But if there are official recommendations and I don’t follow them (say, by going to a high saturated fat diet) and it doesn’t work out, I would feel responsible. Doctors must run into that constantly.
Jojo—DrRich et al have great answers to the food question… I just want to weigh in with something more basic. It’s very obvious from your post that every meal and morsel put before your husband is chosen and seasoned with great love. You are giving your beloved what everyone hungers for. No matter what happens (and things do happen) he hit the jackpot when he married you.
Sounds like primary education backslid between your time and mine. You got away without the elite-serving nutrition propaganda, and that desk might actually have saved you if you’d been outside the burn radius but inside the collapse zone.
The ultimate goal sounds like a diet that shortens human life, but saves the planet.
A much better indicator is waist-to-height ratio or just waist size.
“Waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio are better predictors of cardiovascular disease risk factors in children than body mass index. ”
If you have a pot belly, then you have a problem, in short.
But if you’re not actually a body builder and you have a high BMI, then you’re probably over-fat.
This is probably true. But it shows how quickly I became cynical when, by the time I was in junior high, I figured out that the teachers and administrators wanted all the kiddies under their desks so they could more easily make their way to the bomb shelter in the basement.
You are on to something. But, based on the various writings of some of our overseers, I fear that the real ultimate goal is a “diet” that terminates life precisely at age 75.
How selfish of you to attempt to live longer.
The real question is: Will Zeke E euthanize himself on his 75th?
Kate, you don’t have private messaging so I have to thank you for such nice words in a comment. Thank you, but if you knew us you would know who hit the jackpot. And also- I have been wanting to say I am sorry for the harsh-sounding way I put something on another thread, I should have found a better way to make my point.
While I don’t want to get into an argument, I want to report that after going through Chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, I stopped eating meat in March 2014 for health reasons.
My point is that it is possible to be a loyal member of Ricochet, and be a Vegetarian. (I tried being a Vegan, but couldn’t pull that off.) After awhile, I stopped craving meat, and at this point the fake meat provided by Morningstar is quite tasty.
Once I stopped eating meat, I became more troubled about the notion of “factory farming,” and would continue to not eat meat, because I am troubled about the welfare of animals who no longer live a natural life. (I appreciate the argument that those animals wouldn’t be born if they weren’t raised to later be killed for food.) I would never look at this issue while I was still eating meat. For more information, see the book “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call for Mercy” by Matthew Scully, a former speech writer for George W. Bush.
While I acknowledge that some Vegans (and Vegetarians) can be extremely self-righteous, I am happy to be living meat-free.
Gary Robbins
Without doubt. I was a vegetarian for nineteen years. (Of course, that exacerbated my health problems of today, but that’s a long story and probably will not apply to you.)
Gary,
No argument here. I respect your choice, and I understand it.
Regarding the nutrition argument, I cheerfully acknowledge that once we really understand all this stuff it may indeed turn out that vegetarians have had it right all along. At this moment I don’t think that will happen, but I could certainly be wrong.
My point is merely that for decades our public health experts have been making pronouncements from on high, and setting public policy, and being very arrogant and self-righteous about it, all based on half-baked ideas they represent as settled science. And now that it looks like their house of cards is collapsing, they’re trying to prop it up by switching to the global warming argument.
Doing the clinical research that would really be necessary to sort out the remaining questions regarding saturated fat, the cholesterol hypothesis (which is looking weaker and weaker), the effects of the various subspecies of PUFAs, and other important issues of nutrition, would take a lot of careful planning, time, money, and some open minds. We can’t even begin the necessary research as long as our public health officials insist they already have the information they need to direct the diets of the entire population, and are quite comfortable calling on the Feds (as the DGAC does in their report) to use its regulatory authority to make sure all of us in the herd begin to obey.
So more power to you, Gary. Eat what you want, while you’re still allowed.
Rich
Whoa. I might have been precocious, but you passed me there. I never got that one. Jeez, I feel like an idiot.