Tag Archive for: saturated fat

The Bottom Line on the Saturated Fat Debate

Finishing up this look at saturated fat and the Dietary Guidelines, those who oppose the limit on saturated fat argue that saturated fat is not related to cardiovascular disease. They go on to argue that if fat is limited, carbohydrates will take their place—and high carbohydrate intake is the real cause of obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.

Before I go any further, if you’re reading this at home, write down three of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines that you remember. How about two? One? Exactly. Unless you’ve just taken a course in healthier eating, you don . . .

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Handpicking the Data

I’m continuing my look at a recent paper that called into question the process for limiting saturated fat intake to less than 10% in the new Dietary Guidelines (1). What else should we know about how the conclusions were derived and who wrote the op-ed? Let’s start with the author.

Nina Teicholz is an investigative journalist and accomplished writer and has more of a scientific background than most health and nutrition writers today. That’s great, but it’s just not good enough. After reading the article, I watched a TEDx talk she gave. She has a . . .

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Saturated Fat Debate

The new Dietary Guidelines for 2015 have stirred a lot of controversy this year and they aren’t even published yet. The latest headline related to the new Dietary Guidelines has been an op-ed piece written by a journalist and published in the British Medical Journal (1). It has everything a good mystery has: potential conspiracy, implied payoffs, big business, ignoring facts. I’m going to take a look at it this week.

The paper The Scientific Report Guiding the U.S. Dietary Guidelines: Is It Scientific? was written by Nina Teicholz, an investigative journalist who has . . .

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The Link Between Fat Intake and Heart Disease

The second batch of headlines I referred to Tuesday related to an article published in the journal Open Heart (1). The study was a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials done before the dietary guidelines on fat were put in place in 1977. The studies analyzed showed no reduction of heart disease when subjects were placed on a low-fat diet; therefore the current study’s authors concluded that the original low-fat recommendations in the 1970s had no scientific basis.

Sorry, but we didn’t need randomized controlled trials in this case—and here’s why.

In the late . . .

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Eggs Are Okay!

Actually they were always okay, but I’m ahead of myself. As American Heart Month continues, we’ve seen more headlines regarding dietary fat and cholesterol in the past couple of weeks, and I’ll cover them in the next two messages. Let’s start with eggs.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are issued every five years. The Advisory Committee of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said we no longer have to be concerned about limiting dietary cholesterol to the amount in about one egg per day, a recommendation that’s been . . .

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