Many people today are obsessed with food, what to eat and how much. Government wants to get in on the game and to tell you what to eat, but the experts have no answers. So governments just make it up.
From Malanga's excellent The Washington Diet - Following the government’s nutritional advice can make you fat and sick:
...several top medical scientists have concluded that the government’s carb-heavy guidelines may actually have harmed public health. In 2008, three researchers from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine—including the associate dean of clinical research, Paul Marantz, and a former president of the International Hypertension Society, Michael Alderman—observed in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine that since 1977, Americans have largely followed the government’s advice, doubtless as conveyed by the doctors they consulted. Men, for instance, cut their fat intake from 37 percent of their daily calories to 32 percent and increased their carbohydrate intake from 42 percent to 49 percent. Yet over the same three decades, the fraction of American men who were overweight or obese increased from 53 percent of the population to about 69 percent. The doctors wondered whether this correlation was an unintended consequence of telling the entire population to change its eating patterns. “In general,” the doctors wrote, “weak evidentiary support has been accepted as adequate justification for [the U.S. dietary] guidelines.
Read the whole thing. My sense is that you can eat whatever you want unless you have some special illness like diabetes, and it won't make a darn bit of difference. Food is not medicine. All we really know is that no food is bad, plenty of food - but not too much - is good.
Toon h/t Theo
