No one has said everyone should avoid gluten at all costs. Some people are sensitive to it and others aren’t. Just like everything else.
These types of conversations remind me of the fued between Dr. Oz and Gary Taubes. Dr. Taubes pretty much rejects the cholesterol/fat argument. I find it hard to eliminate nearly all breads, pastas, rice and beans as he suggests, but I did go on his program for 3 months and my cholesterol numbers went down and my good cholesterol went up. I lean towards Michael Pollen in “Defense of Food”. He refers to much of the information concerning diet today as “nutritionalism”. Never in my life have I said “what I really crave is some good protein” or “vitamin K”. On the other hand pan seared salmon and a salad sounds pretty good.
@lvvcsf, is Dr. Oz still listened to? I have a lot of time for Gary Taubes and Michael Pollen.
Even back in the 90’s, when I began working in cardiac critical care, I began noticing something interesting. It seemed that the people who were having heart attacks were coming in with levels of low cholesterol, normal cholesterol, and high cholesterol. I asked a cardiologist “it seems like 2/3 of these people with MIs have either low or normal cholesterol levels. What gives?” He whispered, “psst. High serum cholesterol doesn’t cause heart attacks. Inflammation does.” I said “what causes inflammation?” He replied, “high triglycerides, for one thing.” Even in the mid 90’s this cardiologist had his patients go on the lower carb diet, particularly low in refined sugars and other refined carbohydrate products.
Some of the inflammation markers that we test for now weren’t around back then, but it certainly is not new that research has been pointing towards the fact that high cholesterol foods are not what is causing heart disease.
“How is the fact the the govt and their scientists are about to change the truth not news???”
Science doesn’t deal in “revealed truth”, it never has, unlike the religious fundamentalist who have sadly been given power in this country, who tell you that the earth is 6000 years old, the earth was created in 6 days and evolution is a lie, because it was revealed in a book of scripture written in the late bronze age sigh.
And the whole anti fat thing was not necessarily science, either. Part of the idea of dietary cholesterol is because if you look at fats, they are gloppy and sticky, and like early man who associated how something looked with how it worked, they decided ipso facto that that must be the cause, and went on a crusade against fat. Note, it wasn’t just cholesterol, we had the whole ‘low fat=healthy heart’, and they were telling people to eat low fat, so we had things like snackwell cookies, ‘non fat’ muffins, and telling people to stay away from oils entirely, not to eat nuts, you name it…and you had doctors telling people to buy low fat foods like that, that often were loaded with salt and sugar to make them palatable, the last time I had a cardio exam the doctor was telling me there are a lot of good, low fat meals out there and such if convenience was an issue (!). Then a researcher discovered that plaque can’t hit the artery walls if the walls are healthy, which led to the discovery of homocysteine (which is present when you eat meat), and that folic acid blocks homocysteine from scarring the walls. The doctor/researcher who said that faced a ton of crap from the profession,they were calling him a charlatan, but he was right.
More importantly, there was a study done a long time ago, called the Framingham study, it was a long term study of dietary cholesterol and heart disease, and the study basically came to the conclusion there was no link…but yet the medical profession kept selling it.
Then, too, there is the politics of nutrition and diet. With the whole anti fat thing, they started promoting grains, big time, as the savior, and gee, could it be because this benefitted the agri businesses, who produce wheat and soy and corn? Not to mention that many of the ‘low fat’ foods being sold used high fructose corn syrup, once again making the agri industry happy.
Then we had the infamous LDL/HDL ratio, and with that came the statin drugs, to boost the “good” hdl and lower the ‘bad’ ldl, and in fact they do/did. Only problem was, they discovered that when studied, they found that the HDL/LDL ratio didn’t correlate directly to heart disease. It was the same thing with Niacin, doctors prescribed niacin, which affected the HDL/LDL ratio the same way, lowered the ldl, raised the HDL…and a major study came out and said it didn’t affect heart disease rates.
Turns out the HDL/LDL ratio is meaningless, these days they do LDL particles, and that is accurate, unlike the ration. Not only that, but they measure the size of the particles as well, and apparently, the killers are ‘big, fluffy particulates’ , and that dietary cholesterol had little to do with the particulate count and type. What it did discover was that simple carbs like sugars and grains (even whole grains cause problems, but not as much as refined grains) had major impact, creating the ‘fluffy particles’ that cause the problems.
And yep, inflammation is a problem as well.
A lot of this has been known a long time, but the resistance was not just science, the science community has been questioning these ‘facts’ for a long time…on the other side, you have big pharma, that makes a ton of money out of statin drugs, you have the agricultural industry that makes a lot of money if people are seriously eating grains (and inadvertently, products using HFC, for example). The AHA is still refusing to change their dietary guidelines, as is the FDA with the idiotic “food plate” they promote, and not a surprise. The FDA these days is primarily a marketing booster for the farmers and the agribusinesses, and the Heart Association gets huge donations from the pharm industry, plus there is the tie between doctors and the pharm companies, and that has been a major source of resistance.
As far as gluten goes, that is an example of health fads, not science. Glutens are a problem for some people, some people have celiac, others have a kind of sensitivity to it, but most people don’t. However, there is significant evidence that grains should be moderated, even whole grains, that they cause problems out of balance, and that the bulk of the diet should be vegetables, with lean protein, grains and healthy fats and oils a bit more limited.
The biggest thing people can do is stay away from processed foods and the sugars and other crap that is in them. A lot of bread products, for example, have HFC in them to make them “yummy”, and most processed foods are a disaster area. Nutritionists will tell you that in a store, most of your shopping should be done on the outside aisles, not the middle an that is true. a large percentage of people’s diets come from processed foods, and it is a disaster area.
With meat products, try to eat range fed products, they are more expensive, but stores are carrying grass fed beef now and it is getting to be more common. The meat that is produced commercially is basically force fed corn to make it grow fast, and as a result has lowered levels of omega 3’s and also is a lot more loaded with fat then grass fed beef and range fed meat has, and there are indications that corn fed meat products also increase the levels of inflammation compared to range fed ones.
Keep in mind that no one is saying go out and gorge on fatty foods, among other things, fat is relatively calorie dense, and has some other things that are not good if eaten in quantity.We need fat in our diet (last thing I read was that alzheimers might be tied to a lack of fat being available for the brain to use, among other possible causes), and in a balanced ratio is healthy, whether it be meat or fish or poultry.
And for all the anti science types, whom I am sure are smugly saying “and we are supposed to believe science is right, like with global warming”, science has a long track record that over time has become more and more accurate, and for example the whole ‘fat is bad’ thing built up over the last 40 years, but in the last year a number of studies have shown it to be a false hypothesis. The AHA is still fighting it, arguing that a ‘low fat diet’ is the best way to go, but like I said, the AHA has reasons outside science to recommend what they do.
@musicprnt good info, thanks. I too believe that a lot of the “science” is dollar driven - follow the money.
@musicprnt, I think this is the second time I’ve seen you mention the large fluffy particles as being the more atherogenic of the LDL particles. This simply isn’t true. It’s the small, dense particles which are the culprit.
http://www.centerforpreventivemedicine.com/04114med_messenger.pdf
http://labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/lipoprotein-subfractions/tab/test/
I do think it is news when scientists discover that they were wrong about advice they claimed was beneficial to humans. Why wouldn’t it be news?
Nobody is saying this came about overnight. But the total official revamping of what was for a long time nutritional/health gospel–that is news to me. I did Atkins years ago and talked about here. It was widely though to be total BS. While it has many limitations it does do things for weight loss and improving cholesterol numbers.
I learned to stop trusting nutrition science when I was little and my parents told me I should only eat the white part of the egg, a few years before they told me that I should only eat the yellow part of the egg. Or when they told me I shouldn’t drink cows milk, I should only drink soy milk, then a few years later told me that I shouldn’t drink soy milk, I should drink rice or almond milk.
Because it happens ALL THE TIME.
That’s the point. When the worst thing we could eat was fat, food companies jumped on the band wagon and labeled everything “fat free” even when it never had any. Or packages that said “low fat” when it was full of calories due to sugar. Now there are packages of foods labeled “gluten free” that never contained it in the original version just to get people to buy it.
How many shoppers out there think for themselves? Apparently they need the companies to tell us that a banana has no gluten or fat before we’ll buy it.
Agree!! ^^^^^ Whatever nutritional message might be out there in an official capacity is overshadowed by the marketing machine of food companies. Eggs are such a wonderful, simple food by themselves but once you can create and market pourable egg whites in a carton they are liquid gold. Now we are in the gluten free phase.
Next breaking news science story:
catastrophic global warming one big con job
^^^ once again…follow the money
In the documentary Fat Head, Tom Naughton examines the history of the “fat is bad and causes heart disease” movement. Very fascinating documentary imo. It does parody the documentary Supersize Me quite a bit. If you haven’t seen that one, some of the jokes may not make sense, but in any event it is still a very interesting look at how business and politics can influence public health policy in spite of research which clearly contradicts the wisdom of same.
Yes, follow the money…
Follow the money… it always seems to lead to corn and soy.
Science always says “This is the best we know right now”. We also invite you to bring your own theories.
As long as you can support them. That’s where most people start getting confused.
Hey, you’re spoiling my get-rich strategy for marketing gluten-free bottled water!
The problem is that it is not science that decides what lands on the supermarket shelves. It is just my wild guess that many “nutrition scientists” and scientist-wannabes failed their org. chem, pharmacology, physics, biochem. etc. courses miserably. Yet they pretend that what they say has rational, proven basis. Take Dr. Oz - what a quack. To consume less alcohol at parties in order to stay sober party goers should dilute their red wine with 2 parts of club soda?! What kind of advice is that?! First, the resulting swill will taste awfully. Second, it is basic knowledge that adding carbonation to alcoholic drinks will make you drunk faster. What a crock. OTOH, if this turns wine into swill, people might not even want to drink it to begin with… 