If you went through the copy-paste-enlarge gyrations to be able to read the yellowed clipping taped on to the back of my Framingham study booklet you know that Dr. Kannel, the head of the Framingham study at the time, didn’t mince words about the association of serum cholesterol with heart disease. His strong statements came, strangely enough, as a ‘clarification’ to the report published under his name showing no such association.

See Dr. Kannel’s remarks in an enlarged section of the yellow clipping below.

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The latest saturated fat study to come down the pike has been picked up by all the newspapers it seems, reinforcing one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes:

If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

This latest piece of whatever has followed the typical trajectory of such things. Study done, pre-publication press release, dissemination by gullible press that doesn’t have sense enough to ask the right questions, publication in scientific journal. In this case it goes to show that the gullible press is really gullible where saturated fat is concerned. No study is too moronic as long as it implicates saturated fat as a bad nutritional actor.

Let’s look at a sampling of what a number of “health and science’ outlets have to say. Medical News Today warns that meals high In saturated fat Impair “good” cholesterol’s ability to protect against clogged arteries and cautions us that
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I feel about Dean Ornish the same way as one of my favorite philosophers, David Stove (1927-1994), must have felt about his own philosophy department at the University of Sydney when he wrote about it thusly:

[It] is a disaster area, and not one of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.

And like some kind of a toxic spill, Dr. Dean Ornish is there emitting effusions of imbecilities into the airwaves year after year, polluting the minds of those gullible enough to listen.

His latest screed is a ‘fact’ sheet written in response to a presentation that was made November 9, 2003 at one of the scientific sessions of the meeting of the American Heart Association. The presentation was ultimately written up as a paper and published in JAMA in January 2005. Why Ornish is just now getting around to attacking this paper I haven’t a clue.

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Today’s JAMA contains three papers showing that the low-fat diet does not reduce the risk for colon cancer, heart disease or breast cancer.

Data from the giant Women’s Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial show that after 8 ½ years post menopausal women consuming a diet meant to contain about 20 percent of calories as fat, but in fact containing about 28 percent of calories as fat, showed no decrease risk for breast cancer, heart disease or colon cancer compared to a control group of women consuming their regular diet.

To read the full text of the paper on breast cancer click here.

To see the abstracts of the other two papers click here and here.

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As I was flying back from France a few days ago I had one of those experiences touchy, feely types call synchronicity. I was reading the International Herald Tribune and came upon an article entitled “The ethical calculus of foie gras” about the ongoing battle between animal rights activists and foie gras producers, and how they were both, strangely enough, working together. Legislators with the help of foie gras producers are drafting a bill that would basically put these same producers out of business in 2016. The activists are signing on, figuring that 2016 will ultimately arrive and the producers will be finis. The producers are signing on because such a bill will give them breathing room to move their business somewhere more simpatico without a lot of hassle in the intervening years.

I have never seen ducks force fed, and had always imagined it to be pretty brutal, so I was interested to read the following:

To animal welfare groups, the obscenity of force-feeding, known by the French word “gavage,” is self-evident. But Ginor and his partner Izzy Yanay, who runs the farm, accuse their critics of anthropomorphism and ignorance of duck anatomy and behavior. They say the practice is as benign as it is ancient, since waterfowl lack a gag reflex and have sturdy throats that easily tolerate grains, grit, stones and inflexible gavage tubes. To understand gavage, they say, is to accept it – as they insist poultry researchers have, after examining birds for signs of undue suffering during gavage and finding none.

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