Subtitled: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet
Teicholz's book pretty much turns upside down everything that has been gospel about healthy diet for over 40 years. Turns out butter, meat, etc don't raise cholesterol, or rather, they do, but it is the good HDL cholesterol they raise. Turns out LDL cholesterol levels show no relation to heart disease risk. Turns out vegetable oils, especially when hydrogenated or heated, show a much stronger relation.
Looks like heart disease, diabetes and obesity are also related to consumption of carbohydrates, especially processed ones. The food pyramid with grains at the bottom is a recipe for the kind of health epidemics we have been seeing for decades.
This is all very interesting and mind-boggling, but the real underlying issue is how the scientific community's consensus could be so wrong. The seminal studies behind our modern diet guidelines are highly flawed and show poor scientific rigour. The results have been reported in a highly biased manner, focusing only on the data bits that have supported the dominant hypothesis. Challengers to the current field consensus have been humiliated, hounded, shunned and denied funds to pursue their work. The role of outsized egos, career status and research dollars in creating this "scientific" consensus is shocking. A prime example of how dangerous and unreliable field experts and accepted norms can be.
Scientific studies must be treated with extreme caution - probably best ignored unless you are personally willing to read it over and verify both its method and true results.
No comments:
Post a Comment