The Bulletin - Philadelphia's Family Newspaper - Council Considers Nutrition Labels On Restaurant Menus
The Bulletin - Philadelphia's Family Newspaper - Council Considers Nutrition Labels On Restaurant Menus
A Different View
In a new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, author Gary Taubes challenges the medical orthodoxy that fatty foods cause heart disease and other life threatening ailments. He also challenges the idea that calories alone account for weight gain.
He claims medical studies do not support the conclusion.
Mr. Taubes, who writes for Science magazine, notes the diets of previous centuries were as high or higher in fat content than the ration in today's modern American intake.
His research also concludes there is no new epidemic of heart disease. More heart disease is being reported, he agrees, but people are living longer, seeing doctors more often, and physicians are getting more adept at diagnosing symptoms.
In an interview Mr. Taubes did on the PBS program, "Frontline," he asserted, "There were several studies done in the late '80s, where they actually calculated how much longer you would live if you cut back on saturated fat. If everyone in the country cut back on saturated fat to that level recommended by the government, and cut back their total fat consumption, you could then calculate from these studies how much longer you would live. And the answer was a [few] days to a few months."
Taubes' research is compelling. He's an advocate of the Atkins diet and claims carbohydrates do more to cause obesity than fats or sugars.
Approximately 25-30 years ago, obesity rates in the United States climbed from 12 to 14 percent up to 22 to 25 percent. He blames it on the "monolithic dogma" that a high fat diet is bad.
"Diet became a religion," Mr. Taubes told "Frontline." "The whole low-fat idea, as much as anything came out of the counterculture and Berkeley and San Francisco in the '60s, this idea that eating fatty meat, in effect, is the dietary equivalent of conspicuous consumption. There were famines going on around the world, people were starving, and here in America we were eating eggs and bacon for breakfast and huge steaks for dinner. This was just unacceptable politically, sociologically, ideologically. It merged with this idea that fat might cause heart disease, and then blossomed in the '70's."
A Different View
In a new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, author Gary Taubes challenges the medical orthodoxy that fatty foods cause heart disease and other life threatening ailments. He also challenges the idea that calories alone account for weight gain.
He claims medical studies do not support the conclusion.
Mr. Taubes, who writes for Science magazine, notes the diets of previous centuries were as high or higher in fat content than the ration in today's modern American intake.
His research also concludes there is no new epidemic of heart disease. More heart disease is being reported, he agrees, but people are living longer, seeing doctors more often, and physicians are getting more adept at diagnosing symptoms.
In an interview Mr. Taubes did on the PBS program, "Frontline," he asserted, "There were several studies done in the late '80s, where they actually calculated how much longer you would live if you cut back on saturated fat. If everyone in the country cut back on saturated fat to that level recommended by the government, and cut back their total fat consumption, you could then calculate from these studies how much longer you would live. And the answer was a [few] days to a few months."
Taubes' research is compelling. He's an advocate of the Atkins diet and claims carbohydrates do more to cause obesity than fats or sugars.
Approximately 25-30 years ago, obesity rates in the United States climbed from 12 to 14 percent up to 22 to 25 percent. He blames it on the "monolithic dogma" that a high fat diet is bad.
"Diet became a religion," Mr. Taubes told "Frontline." "The whole low-fat idea, as much as anything came out of the counterculture and Berkeley and San Francisco in the '60s, this idea that eating fatty meat, in effect, is the dietary equivalent of conspicuous consumption. There were famines going on around the world, people were starving, and here in America we were eating eggs and bacon for breakfast and huge steaks for dinner. This was just unacceptable politically, sociologically, ideologically. It merged with this idea that fat might cause heart disease, and then blossomed in the '70's."
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