Interesting
NY Times article on the history of the belief that consuming fatty foods was the primary causes of heart disease and other ailments (cancer is named) in America. The establishment of this belief caused the creation of the "Food Pyramid" which pushed more consumption of carbohydrates, and in turn may have been the cause of the rise in heart disease in recent years.
As a person who's tried the
Atkins diet (consuming copious amounts of protein and low amounts of carbohydrates) and the
Body for Life diet (consuming multiple meals but limiting fat intake to near microscopic amounts), the thing that has really stuck out for me is that it's not about cutting off one thing or another. It's all about calories, and controlling the amount you consume. If you can perfect that, exercise a bit and try to keep your caloric consumption as well rounded as possible then you might be able to fend off some of the diseases that are plaguing folks. (Just a quick note you should probably skip foods containing the following:
High-fructose corn syrup,
Trans fat. Nutritionally they're crap.)
From the article:
In the case of fatty foods, that confident voice belonged to Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago (the K-rations in World War II were said to be named after him). He became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors.
There were two glaring problems with this theory, as Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine, explains in his book. First, it wasn’t clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet.
Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus [NY Times]
Picture from
Craig Hatfield
