The Surprising Facts About Diet and Nutrition

Written by Ron Unz on December 16, 2024. Posted in Current News

Donald Trump has selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services in his new administration, and the latter has declared that his mission will be to “Make America Healthy Again”

But even if Kennedy is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he faces a very stiff challenge in fulfilling that pledge.

Most Americans are probably not fully aware just how dramatically our national health has declined over the last few decades, and until very recently I was certainly included among the uninformed.

Yet much of this decline has been easily visible to our eyes. According to research studies, about 74% of all American adults are now overweight, while almost 42% suffer from clinical obesity, along with nearly 15 million adolescents and children.

These rates have skyrocketed during the last half-century.

Our national obesity figures are not only far higher than those of any other developed nation, but they are nearly double those for Germany and almost four times the rates for France.

Obesity is closely associated with diabetes, and nearly 40 million Americans now suffer from that serious medical condition, while another 115 million have prediabetes. Tens of millions have high blood pressure and other related illnesses.

Once again, these rates have risen dramatically over the last generation or two.

These are huge numbers, with massive health consequences. Diabetes alone ranks as the eighth leading cause of death, annually killing more than 100,000 Americans, while being a contributing factor in 300,000 additional deaths.

By contrast, the combined total of all our drug-overdose fatalities is a little over 100,000.

A study last year indicated that obesity substantially boosted the risk of death, potentially by as much as 91 percent, and with so many tens of millions of Americans suffering from that condition, the mortality impact has obviously been enormous.

Partly as a consequence of these very negative trends, we spend much more on health care than any other developed nation, yet our life expectancy has generally been much lower, and stagnant rather than rising.

Everyone who has looked into these very serious problems agrees that dietary issues are the main culprit. But the complexities of that factor may be seen if we consider two meals, each totaling around 1,000 calories but otherwise quite different, one of them reasonably healthy and the other extremely unhealthy.

Suppose that an employee at a local health-food shop returned from a long day of knocking on doors for Jill Stein. He sat down at the kitchen dinette of his studio apartment for three servings of fruit yogurt, a pair of small Oats & Honey granola bars from Nature’s Valley, and two tall glasses of delicious all-natural orange juice.

Around the same time, a trucker stopped by a McDonalds on his way home from a Donald Trump rally, and proudly wearing his red MAGA cap ordered a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder with Cheese along with some fries.

Ignoring the soda fountain, he walked to the corner liquor store and bought a Budweiser beer to wash down his greasy fast-food meal, so heavy with animal fat and salt.

The contrast between those two hypothetical meals, one that maintains human health and another that seriously undermines it, played in my mind a few weeks ago after I published an article on nutritional issues, the very first time I’d ever investigated that topic.

Although dietary factors are mostly responsible for our health problems, there are some important aspects to this crisis that are not regularly presented in our media. These greatly surprised me when I discovered them, and I think they would probably surprise many others as well.

Thus, in our hypothetical example it was actually the McDonalds and Budweiser meal of the MAGA trucker that was reasonably healthy, while the dangerous dietary choices made by the Jill Stein supporter placed him at high risk of eventually developing diabetes and considerably shortening his life-span.

But I’d suspect that more than 95 percent of educated Americans might automatically assume the opposite. Such a mistake would be the direct consequence of the last half-century of promotion for extremely damaging nutritional policies, whose total failure has been revealed by our devastating public health trends.

I’d originally studied nutrition for a few weeks during my 10th grade Health class in the 1970s, but I hadn’t found the subject interesting and never paid any attention to it in the decades that followed.

I would occasionally read high-profile articles on that subject in my daily newspapers, but I wasn’t too sure how seriously to take their often complex and conflicting claims, so all of those usually faded from my memory soon afterward.

However, earlier this year a prominent medical school professor happened to mention to me that our understanding of that subject had undergone a major upheaval over the last twenty years, and that sufficiently piqued my curiosity that I decided to read some of the relevant books and articles.

A few weeks ago I’d published a provocatively-titled essay that summarized the very surprising but persuasive analysis that I’d absorbed.

Since I’d never had any interest in dietary or nutritional issues, I’d casually assumed that was equally true of most of the regular visitors to our website and I doubted that my piece would attract much readership.

But as has so often been the case, I was entirely mistaken, and it instead drew a good deal of traffic and more than 600 comments, many of them quite long and detailed and far better informed than I had ever been on that topic.

Most of my newly acquired knowledge had come from the books and long articles of Gary Taubes, a very distinguished science journalist with academic roots in physics who had eventually developed an interest in nutrition.

Beginning more than two decades ago, his major cover stories in the New York Times Sunday Magazine had heavily challenged our long-established official dogma on that topic, bringing the work of dissenting researchers and medical doctors to much wider attention.

This played a crucial role in launching a major scientific debate on those important public health matters, all of which took place while I remained blissfully ignorant and unaware.

Among his most surprising claims were that contrary to everything I’d always been told, fatty foods were neither harmful to our health nor caused obesity, but instead the true culprits were the carbohydrates that our medical experts had always encouraged us to eat in their place, with ordinary sugar being especially harmful.

So if Taubes and his many scientific allies were correct, for roughly the last half-century our official nutritional policies had been entirely upside-down and backwards.

During all those decades, our government and our media had been urging us to replace relatively harmless high fat foods such as sausage, bacon, and eggs with far more damaging fare, including such supposed health foods as yogurt, granola, and fruit juice.

Although these striking claims almost seemed like something out of a satirical Monty Python sketch, Taubes’ credibility and that of his scientific sources appeared very solid, and the 67 page bibliography of his thick 2007 national bestseller Good Calories, Bad Calories contained some 1,500 entries.

As an ignorant layman encountering those surprising ideas for the first time, I hardly put great faith in my own judgment, but as far as I could tell, the case he made seemed a very solid and persuasive one, especially his arguments about the dangers of sugar.

Taubes’ book had been reviewed in the Times by Gina Kolata, the newspaper’s longtime medical reporter, and while not entirely negative, her verdict was very mixed.

The journalist was so casually skeptical of some of his sweeping conclusions that she even closed her piece with the dismissive sentence “I’m sorry, but I’m not convinced.” The byline mentioned that she herself had published Rethinking Thin earlier that same year, so I decided to read it in order to get her side of the story.

I wasn’t terribly impressed. Whereas Taubes had provided an exhaustive, massively-documented discussion of the history and science of nutrition issues, Kolata’s rather thin volume—perhaps one-quarter as long—was mostly just casual reportorial journalism.

She told the personal stories of a group of volunteers trying to lose weight as participants in a scientific test comparing the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet with the standard low-calorie approach favored by the medical establishment, a test that ultimately yielded inconclusive results.

I did find some interest in her scanty coverage of the broader issues, especially her mention that Taubes’ original 2002 Times Magazine cover-story had provoked enormous secondary media coverage, producing a huge if temporary wave of renewed popularity for that Atkins diet.

But I doubted that her book had attracted more than a small fraction of the publishing advance, sales, or attention of Taubes’ own, released that same year, so her criticism of the latter might have partly been driven by the professional jealousy that some had suggested.

I also happened to notice that one of her very recent Times articles reported new findings that vindicated Taubes’ sugar analysis, so perhaps after a dozen years she had now substantially shifted over to his once-controversial position.

Taubes’ article had heavily discussed the eponymous diet of Dr. Robert C. Atkins, whose enormously popular regimen based upon a low-carb, high-fat approach had directly challenged the low-fat orthodoxy of our nutritional establishment during the 1970s and 1980s.

So I decided to read the original Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, which had sold a mammoth 6 million copies after its 1972 release, and found it much better than I expected given how heavily it had always been ridiculed and condemned by the medical establishment at the time it appeared.

Roughly one-third of Atkins’ pages were taken up with suggested meal-plans and I skipped those, leaving just a couple of hundred paperback pages of main text. These hardly provided the detail of Taubes’ thick volume, and the book lacked a bibliography or almost any source-notes.

But it did provide much of the same scientific and historical narrative, explaining where and when our academic establishment had supposedly gone so terribly wrong, and Taubes’ exhaustive later research seemed to confirm nearly all of the trailblazing claims that Atkins had made 35 years earlier.

This is taken from a long document, read the rest here unz.com

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