Re: ABC News Nightline: Carbohydrates Make You Fat, and Perhaps Sick

Nicky <ukc802466929@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:59:28 -0700, jeissner777@xxxxxxx wrote:

"Carbs are not killers," said New York nutritionist Carol Forman
Helerstein. "Mother Nature would not have put carbs on the face of the
earth if they were killers.

For heaven's sake - how thick is this woman!

Quite. No doubt the poisonous plants were put on the face of the earth
by nasty old Father Nature :-)

I also noted this remark of hers:

If you're eating the low-sugared, natural carbohydrates, they do
not contribute to any degenerative diseases.

Bears out the claim I've frequently made here that nutritionists aren't
educated, they're trained.

I do like the kind of things Taubes says in the quotes I've seen. But
I'd like to get his book and check out the case he makes for the
scientists getting it wrong. My impression is that many serious
nutritional scientists didn't, and that the position Taubes espouses
was generally held, but with the details less developed, forty or
fifty years ago. What later happened was that cardiologists and other
medical but not nutritionally well educated researchers started
blaming fat consumption for atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular
problems. A scare got whipped up about fat, which was given extra
wings by the growing problem of obesity and the shift of female
fashion towards the skinny look, which created a huge consumer market
for fat-reducing diets. And if you haven't clue, then it's obvious
that eating fat must be what makes you fat :-)

So a huge highly profitable Evil Fat bandwagon started rolling. It did
seduce most medical experts who weren't actually scientists
specialising in nutrition. (I don't of course mean "nutritionists" :-)
Which meant that there was soon no lack of authoritative doctors
telling us to stop eating butter and shift to healthy margarine
instead. But these people weren't scientific specialists in
nutrition. Unfortunately they were scientists, so they did lots of
really half-baked epidemiological studies which "confirmed" their
dietary assumptions, usually by begging the question.

However, I always had the impression that among those scientists who
actually specialised in nutrition there was never a consensus in
favour of fat makes you fat, etc.. It became a majority view, but never
a secure majority. It was always being heckled by sceptics who had
good scientific arguments to back their criticisms.

That's the impression I got over those decades of casual mildly
interested reading and conversation. That's why, even though I was fit
and healthy at the time, never seeing doctors about anything except
occasional injuries, I was never persuaded to stop eating butter. The
case against butter was based on research which begged the questions
it ought to have been answering, and there wasn't a case *for*
margarine, just an absence of a case against it. And that wasn't
because anyone had looked hard and failed find evidence, it was
because nobody had looked!

Actually, I disagree with Taubes' exercise position. I accept that
exercise to lose calories in the immediate future is pretty pointless
- I generally use up around 400 calories in a karate session, I could
make that up with a snack as soon as I got home - but then that
benefit, in terms of general fitness, metabolic rate, flexibility, and
general joie de vivre lasts much, much longer.

Exactly. The problem is that most people are convinced that you must
exercise in order to work off calories if you want to lose
weight. They never do the arithmetic to discover just how much
exercise they'd have to do to work off a bar of chocolate or a
doughnut. There's also the very but mot common view that you can't
lose weight just by eating less. My doctor uncle used to keep a
photograph of the skeletal inmates of Auschwitz looking out through
the barbed wire at their rescuers to show to those of his patients who
claimed they didn't lose weight no matter how little they ate.

Diabetics are a special case, because if we're capable of moderate
exercise we can pull down a post-prandial BG spike quite quickly with
it. For me, like you, however, the major benefits of exercise are not
in direct BG control, but in the general benefits to health and the
indirect longer term benefit of making BG control easier by the
metabolic changes of being fitter.

--
Chris Malcolm cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

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