What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?

I’m overweight, and I’ve been having trouble dealing with that. I know people who are doing quite well on the Atkins diet, but several people I trust had convinced me it was a bad idea.

What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?
(Update: the article is archived at a diabetes site now)

The research community has been recommending low-fat diets for 25 years, based on (it turns out) very little justification. And it’s hard to argue the fact that humans cannot have evolved in a carb rich environment, because we’ve been farming for less than 10,000 years.

An example from the article:

the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. […] they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same.

Time to go do some more research, I think.

posted at 10:49 am on Wednesday, July 17, 2002 in General | Comments Off on What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?

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