The Evils of Trans Fats, or, How What We Been Told About Nutrition Is Really Wrong (Pollan)

I realize this is a really long quote, but I felt only in its entirety does it have the effect it had on me while reading the book. I’ve tried to cull the point down to the important sentences, but still there’s a lot to chew on here.

The most important ... nutrition campaign has been the thirty-year effort to reform the food supply and our eating habits in light of the lipid hypothesis—the idea that dietary fat is responsible for chronic disease. ... Thirty years later, we have good reason to believe that putting the nutritionists in charge of the menu and the kitchen has not only ruined an untold number of meals, but also has done little for our health, except very possible to make it worse.

These are strong words, I know. Here are a couple more: What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure. You can argue, as most diehards will do, that the problem was one of faulty execution or you can accept that the underlying tenets of the ideology contained the seeds of the eventual disaster.

At this point you’re probably saying to yourself, Hold on just a minute. Are you really saying the whole low-fat deal was bogus? But my supermarket is still packed with low-fat this and no-cholesterol that! My doctor is still on me about my cholesterol and telling me to switch to low-fat everything. I was flabbergasted at the news too, because no one in charge—not in the government, not in the public health community—has dared to come out and announce: Um, you know everything we’ve been telling you for the last thirty years about the links between dietary fat and heart disease? And fat and cancer? And fat and fat? Well, this just in: It now appears that none of it was true. We sincerely regret the error.

No, the admissions have been muffled, and the mea culpas impossible to find. But read around in the recent scientific literature and you will find a great many scientists beating a quiet retreat from the ... lipid hypothesis. Let me just offer example, an article from a group of prominent nutrition scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health. In a recent review of the relevant research called “Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review,” the authors proceed to calmly remove, one by one, just about every strut supporting the theory that dietary fat causes heart disease.

[The critical review] in its second paragraph drops this bombshell:

It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have cause unintended health consequences.

Say what?

… “Surprisingly,” the authors wrote, “there is little direct evidence linking higher egg consumption and increased risk of [coronary heart disease (CHD)]"—surprising, because eggs are particularly high in cholesterol.

By the end of the review, there is one strong association between a type of dietary fat and heart disease left standing, and it happens to be precisely the type of fat that the low-fat campaigners have spent most of the last thirty years encouraging us to consume more of: trans fats. It turns out that “a higher intake of trans fat can contribute to increased risk of CHD through multiple mechanisms”; to wit, it raises bad cholesterol and lowers good cholesterol (something that not even the evil saturated fats can do); it increases triglycerides, a risk factor for CHD; it promotes inflammation and possibly thrombogensis (clotting), and it may promote insulin resistance. Trans fat is really bad stuff, apparently, fully twice as bad as saturated fat in its impact on cholesterol ratios.

— Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (pgs. 41-44, 2008)

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