More on Diets.

An NYT editorial today makes a wry point about that low-fat diet study. Similar to the hokum cooked up by the alternative medicine crowd. By the time science has caught up with the latest fad and shown it to be exactly that hokum, the promoters are on to the next piece of rubbish:

Meanwhile, experts in nutrition and chronic diseases have moved on to a
new consensus: it is not the total fat but the kind of fat you eat that
is important. Many groups recommend that people cut their intake of
"bad" fats, like saturated fats and trans fats, and increase their
intake of "good" fats, like those found in vegetable and fish oils. Of
course, such diets have not been subjected to the sort of large-scale
study just completed. If they were, by the time the results came in,
nutrition experts might have moved on to yet another approach.

5 responses

  1. embutler Avatar
    embutler

    at least these quack diets get a lot of people doing things the gov would never look into for scientific tests…and who knows it might work in some future diet plan..folk medicine at its best

  2. yellerKat Avatar
    yellerKat

    Good fats / Bad fats theory has been knocking around for decades. I simply can’t believe they didn’t control for extra virgin olive oil, avos, oily fish etc.
    Cue another 8yr study on the public dime?

  3. I am convinced a totally fat-free diet (which I undertook to lose weight) is what triggered the expression of my hereditary hypercholesterolaemia.
    Good fats all round, I say.

  4. Hang on. A couple of weeks ago, any dietitian claiming that cutting your fat intake has no effect on your health — as some were — would have been dismissed as a quack with another silly unscientific fad diet to sell. Now they’ve been proven right by a scientific study, and you see this as evidence that, er, anyone who disagrees with the current scientific concensus is a quack. Eh?
    > By the time science has caught up with the latest fad and shown it to be exactly that hokum …
    What has in fact happened here is that science has caught up with one of the latest fads and shown it be 100% true, while also showing that the received wisdom of mainstream doctors and scientists was hokum.
    Medical science is very good at all sorts of things, but has a terrible blind spot when it comes to diet. You think the results of this study will be reflected in doctors’ advice? I doubt it. We were told to avoid eating cholesterol in order to keep our blood cholesterol low for three or four decades, despite there not being a crap of evidence that colesterol in diet was ever converted into cholesterol in blood — and that lack of evidence despite a large number of studies being done with the express purpose of proving it. Expect your GP to tell you to stick to a low-fat diet for another few decades yet. For some reason, the usual basic rule of science — avoid believing things for which you have no evidence — flies out of the window when it comes to mainstream medicine and diet. And that’s why there’s such a huge market for alternatives: because people notice that the mainstream advice is bollocks.

  5. Er, “a scrap of evidence”, that should be. One of my finer typos.

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