As it turns out, it's all about insulin.
The "Big Fat Lie" article in the NYT magazine challenged my views on nutrition. The article brought up several things that I did not know. One is that the NIH could never prove that fatty diets caused heart disease but they could prove that drugs to reduce cholesterol had the effect of reducing heart disease, so without real proof they started telling americans to eat less fat and more carbohydrates.
The second thing I was not aware of is the growing body of evidence that repeated surges of insulin caused by simple carbohydrate consumption may be causing a raft of health problems from Type II Diabetes to heart disease to obesity.
The author, Gary Taubes, implied that only people in Berkeley eat whole foods like brown rice and black beans and that it was unreasonable to expect the rest of the country to eat what they eat in Berkeley. I don't agree with this. There is information missing and the government is at fault for supplying false information, still, because we have a counter culture that believes in whole foods, the information is out there and lots of people eat those things and it IS a valid alternative. I eat brown rice all the time as well as beans, legumes and greens. Now, armed with information from this excellent article, I can see more clearly than ever the harm done by processed sugar and carbos which are found in heavily processed foods. The idea of eating hamburger without the bun seems pretty good. Avoid starches, processed carbohydrates and sugars. This is not radically new information, but the article brought it to life for me and threw in the seduction of secrets and bad government to grab my attention.
On the downside, the article also comes very close to endorsing the Aitkins diet and makes Aitkins out to be some kind of hero for facing down the medical establishment. The Aitkins diet is not proven to be safe. There is a higher incidence of cardiac disease in people on the Aitkins diet. The goal of the Aitkins diet and other low carb diets is to induce ketosis. Ketosis is controversial. Experts quoted in the article claimed that Ketosis wasn't dangerous. Other information from some of our research instititions argue that our brains perform poorly in ketosis conditions, so poorly that we become too stupid to realize we are stupid. I don't like the sound of that! Ketosis means that your cells and tissues have switched from using glucose as an energy source to using ketones, a breakdown product of fat because no glucose is available.
To summarize:
1. People who are on the Aitkins diet have a higher rate of cardiac disease and ketosis may or may not be dangerous.
2. The NIH, American Heart Association, and other groups have their hearts in the right place but have simplified the message about carbohydrates to the point that it is worthless and probably dangerous.
3. The food industry is safe from cigarette company style lawsuits because they can easily say they were following the government's regulations and they can say there is no proof that their foods cause obesity or heart disease and they would be right.
5:24:18 PM 
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