The Food Nannies, led by Willett and Ascherio of Harvard with their nonsense on fats, have caused the FDA to act.
Food Nazis reign, and propose to make sure the stomach and intestines are never insulted by the foods that have been eaten for so many centuries.
Imagine, these advocates of natural are banning natural and not so natural food–they can’t stop and won’t until we eat some form of ground up gruel.
Here come the high steppers with their imperatives on what’s healthy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/07/fda-ban-trans-fats_n_4232871.html
And then here comes a devastating and still pertinent commentary from the great Milloy.
http://junkscience.com/1999/11/29/fear-of-margarine-the-trans-fat-myth/
There was never a bit of reliable evidence that butter was bad, saturated fats were bad, and the meddlers moved on to unsaturated and such, but now they are convinced that trans fats are bad.
And the evidence is so convincing–the problems with any food study is the lag time, and the recall info but more importantly the silly exercise of making “correlations” into a disease, when we all know it would be faithful to the principles of Bradford Hill to try to do the associations, make sure the magnitude of the associations was robust, and eliminate the alternatives, but also attempt to FIND A PLAUSIBLE MECHANISM TO EXPLAIN THE ASSOCIATION.
In the new world of food fights, plausible mechanisms are not a factor, just associations, because associations is all that people like Ascherio and Willett can do–think they get down in the blood vessel adn find out how some ingested substance, fat, protein, carb, makes a beeline to a blood vessel and causes a plaque?
The Human intestine and liver don’t really give a rat’s behind what the source or original molecular structure of a fat, protein or complex carb like a polysaccharide. The process is not intelligent and so the body just digests what’s edible and burns it or builds with it. . When the breakdown of food is complete, the bod doesn’t know what the original stuff was and the basics, sugars, amino acids, simple fatty acids, don’t have little flags on them that say–“came from bad food.”
The only people who care about bad food/good food are the politically motivated and agenda driven researchers. The intestines are very accepting and thoughtless and just digest and transport.
Isn’t it a contradiction that people who come from an elite group that promotes tolerance and non judgmentalism have so many silly opinions about food??? Unowadimeen?
I had a wonderful friend who always talked about eating right. Eating right is overrated and in the realm of cultist talk–vegetarians only risk nutritional gaps, and any other eater who is obsessed needs to take a pill and a deep breath–stop listening to the charlatans. Nutritionists and health food stores are full of ideas about what’s good and what’s bad. Nonsense, cookies are good to everyone but a nut case. So is good red meat that has all kinds of important elements of a balanced diet.
The Good Eater nut cases are proof of what Schumpeter said–the first casualty of idealism is the truth.
This really in depth effort by Milloy on margarine is worth a review. Margarine isn’t bad, butter isn’t bad, carbs aren’t bad, so assume that food is good, and variety is good. Milloy takes on the panic and shows that there aren’t any magical or evil and diabolical foods. His essay is good today as it was in 2009. Trust me, the food nannies don’t have anything new, just a lot of anxiety and a high opinion of themselves.
http://junkscience.com/1999/11/29/fear-of-margarine-the-trans-fat-myth/
Yes Jerry, and EVERYONE knows that trans fats are natural products of nature. Yep. Man can not hurt himself, ever. Right?
Everyone seems to know why I have type 2 diabetes. My Doctor says it’s because I allowed my parents to get it. I tend to believe him.
You know – l am getting less on the side of these studies every day. It seems lime they change every other year anyway. And then find diet research is worse than climate change research in regards to falsified studies and studies with bad data and poor stats.
Take my comments above with a grain of salt – definitely – but personally as my own protest against the government I am putting more vegis in my body and putting more meat in again and leaving out some starch ( yeah you caught me -I had spaghetti tonight – its a goal not a religion for me)
I have to say i really like some of these posts.
And i would like to think the points made represent very intelligent and cogent discussion on what has become the open field for a bunch of idiots.
Thanks for confirming my firm belief there are people who think, not many, but still. . .
OMG – how did we miss 7.000 deaths as year? That’s a lot of bodies to overlook. In the 22 years I was working at FDA in the Division of Food and Color Additives (which included GRAS Substances), we never had a single verifiable report of a trans-fat death. I wonder if the Ivy League food nannies can produce a single case study showing a death by trans-fat?
FDA is turning into jellyfish (no spine) by letting junk science take over.
T.C. Brown
Howdy marque2 and BofH
People began eating more starch, I think, when we began to cultivate grains. Grain is easier to store than leafy vegetables or even potatoes are. Grain can also be transported more readily in terms of calories per pound because they’re drier than vegetables, fruits or potatoes. Stored grain and stored sugar can be available year round and other plant foods couldn’t, for a very long time.
It’s possible that the amount of grain, and therefore starch, in our diets conflicts a bit with our metabolism. It clearly isn’t killing us because a grain-and-meat-based diet has been the norm for around 10k years now.
Certainly some fiber in the diet appears to be a good thing and certainly some variety is useful. Scurvy, beriberi, all that kind of thing.
I read a report from a nutritionist who lived for six weeks on potatoes and milk only; his health came through all right but it was awfully dull.
The life expectancy has increased substantially over the same time frame that all of these “now to be banned” substances have been available.
based on all of their claims, the exact opposite should have happened.
Not really, societies have existed almost exclusively on starches. In fact, before very recently (and even in most of the world now), vegetarian diets based on grains were the norm and varied, carnivorous diets were the markings of the rich.
Diabetes has far more to do with the relatively sedentary society that has developed since the industrial revolution.
You need to eat a variety though. Our government push to make us eat only starch and sugar is causing sugar shock in us. Bodies have only a limited ability to deal with lots of sugar over a lifetime. And we wonder why folks are getting fatter and getting diabetes due to the normal function of insulin.
As environmental benefit is the agenda of only a few environmentally-sounding people, so health is the agenda of only a few of the food-nanny people. The real goal of nanny-bullies is to run our lives.
There are no magically good foods and, except for actual toxins or infectious material, no magically bad foods. Our bodies are so robust that they will manage a wide range of distributions of fats, proteins, carbs and trace elements. Every sure-fire diet program has some successes and some failures.
We have an administration devoted to the nanny-bully mentality right now. We’ve got to vote differently if we want common sense and liberty to be the primary drivers of government — and I should have put those in the other order.
If you look up stearic acid you will find even the NIH says it strongly lowers cholesterol (not that lowering cholesterol is neccearily good) stearic acid is the main component of unhydrogenated lard.