Discussion > The Big Fat Surprise
You can't believe any health story except that smoking increases cancer risk by a lot. Most if not all other claims are based on shifty stats and wishful thinking to fuel the banning industry and the nanny state. Salt, sugar, fat, red meat, suspect all the stories which allow some wannabe authority to lecture you on what you are doing wrong.
There is no obesity epidemic in the UK, rates are flattish. Diabetes is increasing because of more pervasive testing. Heart disease is going down. Any one of them MIGHT have a medical/bacterial/virus cause but blaming consumption (and thus human frailty/ evil corporations) means we don't take a proper look at causation.
rhoda
Rhonda
I agree 100%.
Whenever I say to people tell a low fat diet is good, that Ancil Keys Seven Countries study is seven countries because data from all the others disproved his theory, they haven't heard of Ancil Keys far less the seven countries study.
sandyS
Thanks Keith Macdonald for that.
It confirms a disturbing thought a lot of us have been having; that climate science is not an aberration, a pimple on the otherwise spotless face of science.
It's not difficult to see why science took this wrong turning. The advent of unlimited computing power made the old anti-scientific adage: “You can prove anything with statistics” come true. From your description of the affair, it sounds as if what distinguishes Keys from other scientists is not his scientific talents, but his persuasive powers and his use of the media. There's a danger here that the post-normal view of science as a creative activity like any other is coming true.
geoffchambers
Geoff
Yes, a pattern does seem to be emerging, and climate science is just the top of the iceberg (sic).
The recent stories of Clinical Trials and abused statistics also comes to mind.
e.g. Tamiflu
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/apr/10/tamiflu-saga-drug-trials-big-pharma
Keith Macdonald
From what I've read, Nina Teicholz is an investigative journalist whose focus has be in the food industry. Where did you hear she was a biologist?
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Nina-Teicholz/78779127
Tom M
It's just what I read on the book's website
http://www.thebigfatsurprise.com/
About the author
Nina Teicholz wrote on food and nutrition science for Gourmet and Men’s Health magazines. She was a reporter for National Public Radio for years, covering Washington, D.C. and Latin America. She has also contributed, on a variety of topics, to the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Times, and Salon, among other publications. In addition, she served as the associate director for the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Teicholz studied biology at Yale and Stanford Universities and earned a master’s degree from Oxford University. She lives in New York with her husband and their sons.
I don't know what her Master's degree was on/in.
Keith Macdonald
I first heard this story about Keys a couple of years ago and like Keith immediately spotted a .... shall we say, 'certain relevance'!.
Have a look at this site for a user-friendly guide to the problem. There will no doubt by other more "official" sites available; this just happens to be the first one I came across.
There does at least seem to be a prima facie case that carbohydrates, especially refined sugars, are the killer and the whole debate around cardiac disease could become the "gastric ulcer" of the early 21st century.
What is terrifying about this (assuming it is proved correct) is the extent to which one man's obsession can almost literally destroy millions of lives. My understanding is that the science underpinnng the hype was never very solid in the first place but, as with climate change, if your doctor tells you that eating fat is bad for you you're likely to believe him and you don't even have the evidence of your own lyin' eyes to start to challenge him.
It's not until the anecdotal evidence about statins (for example) starts piling up that anyone — patient, medic, surgeon, politician — starts to query the, by then, received wisdom.
Mike Jackson
I first read solid research debunking the cholesterol myth in the 1980s ( a proper study with a control group, in Scandinavia) where men who were placed on the standard, low fat, low salt diet that was supposed to protect against heart disease had a higher death rate than those who continued with their usual diet, irrespective of what it comprised. Interestingly, one of the significant factors in the higher death rate of those being forced to radically change their eating patterns to reduce cholesterol was suicide. Whether it was the trauma of having to give up eating all the things they liked, or whether artificially lowering cholesterol levels actually affects mental health, is not known.
But it does seem as though, just like in another field we might mention, the Establishment has invested so heavily in this dodgy and potentially dangerous myth that it will take something very radical (like the irrefutable camphylobacter experiment) or the passing of the participants to change things.
johanna
Most of us passively accept the idea that a low-fat diet is good for us. Because everyone knows it's true, don't they? And look at all the adverts and newspaper articles on low-fat diets. But still people get fatter and fatter. Hmmm.
Imagine my surprise when I read a book called "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz (a biologist)
It turns out the low-fat diet idea was invented by one Ancel Benjamen Keys, who cherry-picked from suspect data, and then used the media to attack anyone who voiced a sceptical opinion.
The Big Oily-Food Industry was happy to go along with this, as it matched their use of polyunsaturated trans fats. Government policy advisors/activists (but not scientists) advised that it should be government policy.
Since when the public has paid the cost in terms of worse health, not better, despite all the claims about the benefits.
Does that sound familiar? It should do.
Here's one review: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/big-fat-surprise/
Keys’ formidable powers of persuasion along with his academic credentials led over time to his diet-heart hypothesis being accepted by just about everyone. Anyone who dared to disagree was attacked with great vitriol in the pages of any journal in which the opposing argument appeared.
Thanks to his non-stop promotional abilities, Keys ran roughshod over his detractors, and in his annus mirabilis, 1961, scored three major triumphs. First, he graced the cover of Time, he wrangled the American Heart Association (AHA) into his low-fat corral, and he got the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to buy into his theory.
Which references the original critical counter-research
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qrjo32vwlm6ev3l/Yerushalmy%20and%20Hilleboe_NY%20State%20J%20Med_1957.pdf
Publishers blurb:
In The Big Fat Surprise, investigative journalist Nina Teicholz reveals the unthinkable: that everything we thought we knew about dietary fat is wrong. She documents how the low-fat nutrition advice of the past sixty years has amounted to a vast uncontrolled experiment on the entire population, with disastrous consequences for our health. For decades, we have been told that the best possible diet involves cutting back on fat, especially saturated fat, and that if we are not getting healthier or thinner it must be because we are not trying hard enough. But what if the low fat diet itself is the problem? What if the very foods we've been denying ourselves - the creamy cheeses, the sizzling steaks - are themselves the key to reversing epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease? In this captivating, vibrant and convincing narrative, based on a nine-year investigation, Teicholz shows how the misinformation about saturated fats took hold of the scientific community and how recent findings have overturned these beliefs.