DailyDirt: Eat This, Don't Eat That...

Say That Again

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Feb 13th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Fad diets and diet recommendations seem to change every few years. Whole eggs were bad for you, but now they should be considered as part of a balanced diet. What makes a diet balanced? More carbs? Less Fat? Maybe you should just walk every day to your nearest Subway and only eat sandwiches. Or maybe you can just track your calories and eat whatever you want. Or not.

The American Heart Association and the US govt have been recommending low cholesterol, low saturated-fat diets for over 50 years. However, mounting evidence is removing foods high in cholesterol from the "bad" food lists -- and maybe someday foods with saturated fat won't be perceived as unhealthy either. [url]
Saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. The unintended consequences of vilifying fat in our diet has shifted people to consume more carbohydrates -- which actually do have proven negative health effects. [url]
Dietary guidelines from Brazil are a bit non-specific, but they also sound pretty reasonable. Brazil's dietary advice includes this point: "Be wary of food advertising and marketing." [url]

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Filed Under: calories, cholesterol, diet, food, health, jared fogle, recommendations, saturated fat

13 Comments

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madasahatter (profile), 13 Feb 2015 @ 5:24pm

"Be wary of food advertising and marketing." I would add also bewaring of those with agendas show as government agencies and politicians.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Feb 2015 @ 7:34pm

For many years the manufacturers of margarine and shortening relentlessly touted their laboratory-created products as healthier alternatives to the saturated-fat rich natural products they simulated, butter and lard. But the transfat they contained (previously categorized as "unsaturated") turned out to be far unhealthier than saturated fat. So, ironically, the people who made extra efforts to "eat healthy" were actually killing themselves, while the so-called "conspiracy kooks" who didn't trust Big Science had some major "I told you so" moments.
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- art guerrilla (profile), 14 Feb 2015 @ 3:51am
  
  Re:
  as a k-k-k-konspiracy kook, thank you...
  besides, butter just tastes better...
  
  had some seaweed flakes the other day, took some bbq chicken and 3-4 ribs to get that horrid taste out of my mouth... i didn't claw my way out of the ocean and evolve limbs so that i could still eat seaweed...
  
  not looking forward to our soylent green future...
  
  ('soylent green is long pig ! ! !')
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Feb 2015 @ 8:23pm

I thought Brazil's dietary guidelines would include more 'HUEHUEHUEHUEHUE'
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 13 Feb 2015 @ 9:51pm

It Was Never About The Cholesterol In Food, But About The Fat
I can remember back in the 1970s a brief time when it was thought eggs were bad for you because of their high cholesterol content. However, this was soon debunked, when it was realized that your body broke down all ingested fats into their components before building them up into different kinds of fats, including cholesterol. So the amount of cholesterol building up in your arteries bore little or no correlation to the amount of cholesterol per se you were eating—it was more to do with the total amount of fat.

That’s why I’m surprised to see this chestnut keep popping up so often.
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- observer, 14 Feb 2015 @ 1:01pm
  
  Re: It Was Never About The Cholesterol In Food, But About The Fat
  You'd be amazed how many people STILL talk about cholesterol as though it was something taken in through our food, not manufactured by the body itself.
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Julian (profile), 14 Feb 2015 @ 2:05am

"Be wary of click bait articles about diet and nutrition." There's an entire industry devoted to taking advantage of worried, and sometimes desperate people.

It's not just the Daily Mail. That includes tech blogs as well.
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- Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 14 Feb 2015 @ 4:38pm
  
  Re: It's not just the Daily Mail. That includes tech blogs as well.
  Do you know of any? It would be fun to go and laugh at them. And their readers.
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Shawn H Corey, 14 Feb 2015 @ 5:51am

Saturated Fats
Saturated fats are good for you: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2010/01/13/ajcn.2009.27725.abstract
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Dave Barnes, 14 Feb 2015 @ 11:13am

Just stick with the basic 4
The best advice is to stick with the 4 basic food groups: pizza, beer, chocolate, marijuana (I live in Colorado).
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ScottRankine (profile), 15 Feb 2015 @ 7:53am

Elon / Spacex
Elon is a cool guy so you should expect a fair use commons statement shortly
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SirWired (profile), 16 Feb 2015 @ 5:41am

On thing gets lost in the War Against Carbs
Except for a few scattered societies with little access to plant-based foods, and relatively recent times with access to cheap meat and dairy, THE staple food for EVERY society since the Dawn of Agriculture thousands of years ago has been a cultivated starch. Corn, potatoes, wheat, rice, yams, yuca, most legumes, barley, millet, oats, plantains, teff, soybeans, etc. While each has different properties and nutritional profiles, every single one is primarily a carb.

Yet, for some bizarre reason, they are only making us fat and killing us NOW, even though we, as a species, have been rather successfully eating them as a primary source of caloric intake for thousands of years. Even the idea that an agricultural society could possibly shift caloric intake to primarily fats and proteins is quite new, as it's quite expensive to do so. (Not to mention eating primarily protein is environmentally unsustainable.)

The answer, of course, is that there is a lot more to the story of carbs besides their very existence in our diet. Dispensing blanket advice of "carbs have proven negative health effects" is irresponsible, at best. Yes, there are ways you can consume carbs and have them help hasten your demise, just like the same could be said for protein, fat, or just about any macro or micro nutrient consumed to excess.
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- Tony (profile), 17 Feb 2015 @ 7:42am
  
  Re: On thing gets lost in the War Against Carbs
  From what I have seen, the link is REFINED carbohydrates. Think ramen and white sugar.
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