Do you trust the dietary recommendations from the FDA and USDA
Warning: Eating according to the food pyramid below may be hazardous to your health!
I’ve explained before how Primal/ Paleo eating, and living have improved my life. It was only at the age of 40 that I came to understand that natural fats are quite healthy, whereas excess carbohydrates, especially sugar, are very harmful to the human body. This flies in the face of the nutritional advice that I was given growing up, and that many are still given today. I only wish I’d grown up eating better.
The influence of corporations on researchers and government resembles the even greater influence exerted by big-time bankers on the field of economics and on government. I discussed the latter at the end of my recent post about the Parallels between the Contrasting Approaches within Ecology and Economics, respectively.
Why you may not want to blindly follow the government’s advice
Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents, a newly published paper in JAMA Internal Medicine, reveals some inconvenient truths. This helps to answer the question of why the government agencies, together with large corporations, so actively promoted a low-fat diet for so many years.
How the Evidence is Stacking Up
There was evidence that sugar (sucrose) increases risk for Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) as early as the 1950s!
In 1965 the ‘Sugar Research Foundation’ (SRF) funded a study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that singled out fat and cholesterol, as risk factors for CHD, and downplayed any risk from sugar consumption
SRF the review’s objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts, but its funding and role was not disclosed.
Quoting from the abstract of the new JAMA paper:
Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD.
More In-Depth Information About Fats and Carbs
For more details about why fats are good for and excessive carbs are bad for us, see also Gary Taubes' excellent books Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.
S. Lan Smith
Kamakura, Japan
September 14, 2016
Thanks to those who provided the images and made them freely available for reuse.