I Am Overjoyed

Today is a wonderful day for me. Today is the day that the Journal of the American Medical Association joined me in advocating that people eat natural fats instead of carbohydrates. They have called for the food pyramid to be based on real food, instead of adulterated artificial foods. Here is a link…

This article is found behind the paywall, it costs thirty dollars to read it–so I will wait for it to show up at the local library before I read the whole thing. To me it is significant that they say

As with other scientific fields from physics to clinical medicine, nutritional science has advanced substantially in recent decades. Randomized trials confirm that diets higher in healthful fats, replacing carbohydrate or protein and exceeding the current 35% fat limit, reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Science has finally caught up with reality, replacing the pseudoscience that went before it, as always eventually happens. I can amplify this, modify the paragraph changing one word to make it one hundred percent spot on, change “Healthful” to “natural” and you have a perfect thought. There is nothing wrong with naturally occurring fats, saturated or otherwise. We can live on them for decades without issue. We should eat plenty of the natural fats in nuts, olives, and meat animals. We should shun fats from factories.

To add to my joy this morning, Mark Bittman weighs in on this same news at this article in the New York Times. Long time readers will remember that Bittman is one of my favorite food authors. He wrote a book saying that a person should be a vegetarian before 6 PM in order to eat a healthy diet. Of course, I don’t obviously agree with everything he has said, but now I almost do. Bittman says eat real fats. It is a bit of a breakthrough for him. I hear from Nina Teicholz that Bittman recently asked for a copy of her book, and was interested in the later chapters on industrial food oils. I think that this is when the shingles fell from his eyes. Here is a link to her book on Amazon.com. Bittman says:

But partially hydrogenated oils have benefited no one except their manufacturers and the producers of the junk that includes them. And the three-year phaseout means more deaths from people consuming a substance that should have been taken off the market at least a decade ago. (Studies finding that trans fats were worse than animal fats were published in the early 1990s.)

Where have I read this same sentiment recently…Oh yes! I wrote those same thoughts just this month. I love that the bandwagon is filling up, and with people sporting much larger megaphones than my own. More Bittman goodness:

Once again it’s clear that too often the primary concern of government watchdog agencies is to protect corporate profits rather than public health. Otherwise we’d know how much sugar was in processed food, we’d have long since banned the routine use of antibiotics in animal production, we’d have salmonella-free chicken and we’d have forbidden the marketing and sale of soda and other liquid candy to minors.

Yes, Mr Bittman, it is obvious that the FDA does not hold it’s responsibility to the public in as high a place as it’s effects on the profits of the industries it regulates. This is similar to the government regulating and restricting the tobacco industry while giving farm subsidies to tobacco farmers at the same time. Every constituency gets its needs met. Our health and safety are not the primary, secondary or even top ten needs. This could lead into a whole political rant, but I won’t go down that hole this morning.

I will say that the solution does not lie in legislation, or even government recommendations. The solution is at the grocery store, where you quit buying foods in boxes, bags, bottles or cans. If you would start just buying fresh foods, located on the outside walls of the store, because all of the processed food is unhealthy, whether we know it yet or not, then the makers would quit putting artificial ingredients in. Someday it may be safe to eat artificial foods again, but I can’t say it will happen in my lifetime.