The first Dietary Goals for the United States (DGUS) were released in 1977 to not a lot of fanfare.  At that time, the great unwashed masses hadn’t really heard much about the word cholesterol, a substance the DGUS recommended that we should limit to 300 mg per day.  Doctors didn’t routinely screen for it, and if they did, they didn’t pay much attention to it.  In fact, at that time – as I recall, anyway – the upper limit of normal for total cholesterol was 240 mg/dl.  I was in medical school back then, and I don’t really remember any emphasis on cholesterol or blood lipids.  I think we had one lecture on it in biochemistry, given by a nebbish little professor we called Mighty Manford (his first name was Manford), who labored away in the obscurity of the biochemistry department. It’s hard to believe in today’s world of lipophobia that as little as 30 years ago, no one much cared about cholesterol.

One of the major players in bringing cholesterol to the public’s awareness was Time magazine. Its piece on cholesterol in the March 26, 1984 issue was a devastating hit piece on both dietary cholesterol and dietary fat.  Both – the article explained – were a main driving force behind the development of heart disease.

Reading this article today, it’s amazing how it drips with misinformation.  At the time, however, most people – physicians included – accepted it as gospel.  Sadly, even today, many physicians who should know better believe in and act in accordance to the bountiful misinformation contained in this piece.

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Synchronicity strikes again.  The seeds of this post were sown when Gary Taubes emailed me about a study published in early 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that I had seen at the time, briefly skimmed and tossed aside as worthless.  Gary agreed that the study was of little value, but notice that it contained a peculiar statement by the authors, an interesting admission about HDL, the lipophobe’s favorite lipoprotein.  And not only had the authors made this strange admission, but so had another prominent lipophobe who wrote the accompanying editorial.

I pulled the study, read it more thoroughly and still found it mediocre at best.  But I did come across the strange HDL statements that Gary had mentioned. (More about which later.)

As I was shaking my head over the amount of money spent on what was a truly abominable study, the synchronicity occurred.  I got a ding that I had a new email.  It was a notice from the American Heart Association telling me that this august body had deemed the very study I was holding in my hands as one of the ten most important papers published in 2009.  The sheer stupidity of it nearly took my breath away.

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A paper appeared recently in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that seems to have a whole lot of people on edge.  If you read the press accounts of this study, you might think anyone stupid enough to follow a low-carb diet would be doomed to certain death from heart attack.  But is that the case?  Or is it simply another instance of the media either failing to understand how science works or, worse, misreporting to get a better story?

I suspect the latter, but before we get into it, I need to go over a few blog housekeeping issues.

As I’m sure everyone has noticed, the look of this blog has changed – as has the look of the entire website.  Our designer and tech guys have been struggling to get everything working right, but, finally, my incessant whining got to them, and they went ahead and put the thing up in its not-completed state.  Please bear with us – it will ultimately work as it’s supposed to.  If you are having a problem, send me a description in the comments section.  Make sure you tell me what kind of computer you’re using (Mac (Intel or pre-Intel)  or PC) and which browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) so that the gurus will know what to do to fix it.

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Applebee's Quesadilla Burger

One of my readers sent me a link to a segment on ABC News with Charlie Gibson showing just how disgustingly slanted and inaccurate mainstream media reports can be.

Gibson leads into the segment about two reporters who underwent self experimentation on the adverse effects of unhealthy eating.  The reporters, ABC’s Yuji de Nies and Jon Garcia, set out to see what would happen if they consumed a giant meal containing over 6,000 calories.  Here is the result as they reported it.

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English breakfast at our hotel. A good low-carb diet.

It was bound to happen.  Forever the low-fat diet promoters, whenever asked about low-carb diets, would always say: Show me the studies.  Well, we showed them the studies, the vast majority of which demonstrated the superiority of low-carb diet, but they didn’t like what they saw.  So they demanded more.  The rallying cry became: Show me the long-term studies.  Now that those are in, the anti-meat folks are running out of options.  But one of their own great lipophobes (Lipid  = fat; phobic = fear of.  Lipophobe = fearer of fat.), David Jenkins, has come to the rescue.

Since the low-carb diet has proven so effective, opines he, why not make it even more so by making a vegetarian version?  Then dieters can have all the advantages of a low-carb diet along with all the advantages of a plant-based diet.  That is, assuming there are advantages to a plant-based diet, more about which later.

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