It Really Has Been A BIG, FAT Lie – The Real Science Behind Dietary Fat, Cholesterol and Your Health
I originally did this interview to help my clients maintain their fat-loss. On the nutrition side of things I use low-carb diets to help people drop a lot of body fat without being hungry. However, there is one huge problem with low-carb diets – other people’s ill-informed opinions.
Conventional wisdom says that this is a heart attack on a plate, BUT is there actually ANY evidence to support this idea?
Here’s a typical conversation:
Coworker: “WOW! You look fantastic – like you’ve dropped 40 pounds. You never even had a neck before. How did you do it?”
My client: “I’ve been eating low-carb and lifting weights and doing intervals.”
Coworker: “WTF!? Are you trying to kill yourself!? Low-carb diets are the most dangerous things ever – all that fat and cholesterol is going to make your heart explode!”
My client usually says nothing, and inside a very negative conversation begins. “Hmmm… What if they’re right? What if I am trading my health for a great body? What if all this steak and eggs really is going to kill me?”
The problem is that their coworker is sincere, BUT the information is sincerely wrong.
So will this stuff make your heart explode?
They literally have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT whatsoever. They’ve probably never read and comprehended primary research on nutrition in their entire lives. (By the way, almost none of the students in my 400 level nutrition classes had ever read a single study on their own. They were just parroting what the food pyramid said.)
Very few people understand statistics, research design, biochemistry, or anything else that makes reviewing research worthwhile. As a nerd, I keep two different biochemistry textbooks in my office to read for fun.
Most people get their opinions from other people who get their opinions from other people who got their opinions from the media, and the people who report on health and exercise are not usually scientifically literate. They will write up whatever the spokesperson for the study has to say and will almost never critically evaluate the study. (For an example read this on red meat and this on a sham diet study.)
So what I did for my clients was arrange an interview with Gary Taubes. He’s one of the few people on planet Earth who has reviewed the entire field of literature on public health, nutrition and obesity.
He spent multiple full-time years with multiple assistants in multiple libraries – whose salaries he paid – and hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to do this. If there is a study out there that was ever published ANYWHERE on diet and health he has read it and is great at helping people understand it.
So Gary, will the saturated fat and cholesterol in a low carb diet kill you?
This was actually my fear when I first started a low-carb diet 10 years ago as an experiment. I’d sit there eating scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast waiting for my heart to blow up, then I did some research.
I wanted to see how we came to believe this idea that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you, and whether or not our beliefs were justified. Believe it or not, I have actually read all of the field going back to the 1800’s. One of the things that I was looking for was the point when the idea that saturated fat and cholesterol were killers was still controversial. That was in the 1970’s.
The first thing I saw was… the rest of this interview is published at Primer Magazine.
OH, and please don’t forget to vote for me right here. It only takes 2 clicks to vote and I would really appreciate your help.
Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.
This is an excellent interview that you need to read.
Gary Taubes is apparently the only researcher who has read ALL of the science papers on diet and health for he past 150 years. His conclusion? The standard doctrine of Ancel Keyes, the AHA, and AMA that low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets are good for you is 100% wrong. Taubes found that there is not a single study that shows that the low-fat diets really work. But, he found lots and lots of studies which show that high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets are GOOD for you. In other words, Atkins, South Beach and Cave-Man type diets are NOT going to kill you, regardless of what your friends may say. It’s the low-fat soy latte with high-fructose corn syrup OR sugar, and the bagel with low-fat cream cheese, that will make you fat and give you a heart attack, high blood pressure, diabetes, and a whole syndrome of other, connected, deadly symptoms.
In other words, the standard dietary advice that we have all heard and that most of us have been trying to follow (more or less) for nearly 50 years, has just been one big fat lie.
Josef Brandenburg, who conducted this interview, is the only personal trainer I know of who actually knows enough biochemistry to understand and “digest” these studies and pass his findings along to his clients. I suspect that most (not all) other trainers and advice ‘gurus’ really don’t know what they are talking about at all.
I also recommend reading Josef’;s latest book (title escapes me) and Gary Taubes’ book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories.” But Josef’s book is a lot easier to read.