The government's dietary guidelines: ignore them

Every five years, the government puts forth the “US Dietary Guidelines,” which have a big influence on nutrition education and food labeling. The problem, as explained by Nina Teicholz in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), is that the guidelines are misleading and not based on sound scientific evidence.

The guidelines are put together by a committee of 11-15 experts who seem reluctant to consider any evidence that contradicts the last 35 years of nutritional advice. What’s more, many committee members have financial interests in various food and drug companies, such as Unilever. The chairman is the president of a company that offers health advice. Rather than using rigorous methods for reviewing scientific data, the committee relies on professional associations, especially the American Heart association and the American College of Cardiology (this outfit received 38% of its funding from industry in 2012).

Unsurprisingly, the most glaring topics for which the committee ignored scientific evidence had to do with saturated fats and low carbohydrate diets. It strikes me that the committee members just can’t bring themselves to say that it’s OK to eat saturated fats and that eating all those grains may not be that great after all. It would be admitting that they’ve been wrong all these years—and they have been. Huge studies have proven that there is no link between eating saturated fat and heart disease. For example, the largest nutritional trial in history, the Women’s Health Initiative that studied 49,000 women showed that a diet low in fat and saturated fat is ineffective for fighting heart disease, obesity, diabetes or cancer. This study has been confirmed by many more. As to the efficacy of a low carbohydrate diet, a meta-analysis of 113 studies have concluded that low carbohydrate diets are better than other nutritional approaches for controlling type 2 diabetes.

I have long believed, based on my own research, that eating saturated fat won’t give you a heart attack and a diet low in carbohydrates can help prevent diabetes. Those are my own biases. I know I am right.

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