https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/01/20/...
“Dr. Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at Harvard University and one of the three nutritionists who helped write the report, said: "There will undoubtedly be many people who will say we have not proven our point; we have not demonstrated that the dietary modifications we recommend will yield the dividends expected.
"The question to be asked therefore, is not why should we change our diet, but why not. "What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat - and cereal products - especially whole-grain cereals? There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected."”
I find the history of that fascinating since the Nixon administration felt pressure to do something about the then-dramatic obesity crisis on a time-scale which was too short for the scientific process. They had some of it right (eat your vegetables!) but the big mistakes with fat and salt made the problem so much worse.
But to make a good trade, you need to know the relative benefits of two parts of the advice. Giving up fats might be good and/or neutral; but if it exhausts your willpower to avoid sugar, and you indulge, then you are worse off.
There's also an angle about how this pushed a lot of people to heavily processed foods because leaving out everything on that bad list left a much narrower list of things you could make at home which were also tasty.
I can't imagine a scenario where that cereal/grain recommendation in GP quote isn't sponsored or populistic at the time though.
And while their method/reasoning wasn't flawed if they indeed had no research opposing their recommendation, that's kind of a straw man from the main issue of avoiding fat being legitimately bad.
You need energy, and you get some from protein which you desperately need, but you can't get all your energy from protein, and that leaves you fats or carbs. Of those it's so much worse to avoid fat than carbs.
Olive oil is one of the four basic ingredients. (In addition to tomatoes, garlic, and salt.)
In terms of taking the edge off of tomato sauce, shredded carrots works pretty well. I don't use sugar in any of my cooking, and no one has noticed.
If you think that's not true, simply take a sugar-low bread (check the food label, don't just go for organic/whole-grain, those usually have more sugar) and taste it for a while in your mouth. You'll notice it starts to become sweeter in your mouth.
As long as you stick to proper bread without the crazy added sugar, and preferably whole grain (actual whole grain, not just marketing "whole grain"), it's not an issue. Unless you try to subsist on literally only bread, of course.
Sugar content in pasta sauces is almost random. Varies from 3 to 10 grams per serving at least. It seems to vary more than almost any other premade item I buy.
And yet, even though I still eat junk too often, and like some treacle, I would not sort sauces based on sugar content.
I can't tell if there's no correlation or if it is literally reversed for my taste buds, but often the high sugar ones are the worst to me.
Just a theory, but maybe the sugar enhances some flavors, like garlic, but masks others, like basil, rather than drawing them all out equally?
I'm not sure how well sugar's complex affect on taste is understood by food scientists, let alone smaller or newer food brands. (What do the generic brands have, a couple chefs and a couple rounds of taste tests? No idea.)
Maybe there are too many possible combinations of ingredients and market segments for producers to all agree on the proper role of sugar, and maybe they're mostly guessing.
If that's true, then we could all probably stand much less added sugar than we/they realize.
The end result is that most people find the taste of non-pumped chicken unappealing, because they're simply used to the faked-up salt/sugar chicken.
There was some lab-rat study super long ago where they got mice/rats addicted to sugar and cocaine, then let them pick between the two - and they chose the sugar every single time.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/wheat-belly-arguments-are-based-on-sh...
The only diet* I've had any luck with is the No S Diet: No Snacks, No Sweets, No Seconds, Except (sometimes) on days that start with "S".
So while I agree that cutting out added sugars is a damn good idea, I very much disagree with the unfounded "all carbs and grains are BAD!" alarmism.
It's not perfect, it doesn't make huge promises and it's not going to make the weight magically disappear instantly or even over a period of weeks, it's a long-term thing. But it is straight-forward and (most importantly) relatively easy to adhere to, and it doesn't require massive amount of effort, like diets where you have to count every calorie and in-depth micromanage your nutrients. Of course there is plenty of room for cheating (you could eat a whole plate of chocolate and call it a "meal"), but that's a fault of all diets where you're not actively forced by someone else to adhere to the rules.
Short-term diets are stupid and counterproductive. We don't need diets or temporary crash weight loss, which just leads to yo-yoing. We need actual, lasting lifestyle changes to make sure the weight stays off and we stay healthy.
That said, I think it's obvious that most people need to challenge the status quo of their diet. For Grain Brain to remind them "you are what you eat" is a step in the right direction. For both to suggest that you can be sensitive to gluten so give it up for 30 days...well, that's not going to hurt anyone either.
Moi? I read them as guidelines and suggestions. Sure, perhaps not 100% pure science, but there was a time when science said the world was flat, smoking was ok, etc.
To say "this things are worth looking at as you revist your health" might not be ideal. But neither is a bag of chips and a stack of cookies.
Ultimately it's about:
- Changing your relationship with food. Food is for health, not to experience an aural orgasm.
- Lifestyle. Diet is just one way to mind your health. Junk is junk, whether that's food, friends, or information. Trying to fix your health only via diet is, as you note, a fool's errand.
I'll have to check out those books, they sound really interesting. You might want to check out the book "The Case Against Sugar", it tells the story of sugar and is really interesting.
I imagine people were also eating much more whole foods as well, so saturation could have been lower regardless of what was in the junk food on the shelves at the time.
A study linked on HN recently also showed that sugars relationship to obesity snd diabetes may be that it changes your metabolism over time, and that change to your metabolism is what has you put on fat.
The guy claims he gained about 15kg over a one month period by substituting sugary foods into his diet while keeping his caloric intake the same. That's a massive claim which you'd expect to be backed up by pretty rigorous testing, yeah? Not even close. He doesn't even count his calories.
The whole time I was watching I was waiting to see the numbers. Spoiler alert: there aren't any. Halfway through the 'experiment' he states that he's never counted calories before, proceeds to do it just once, and then claims that his intake appears to be the same as it was before. To embark on a project like this and only measure your caloric intake once throughout the entire thing is incredibly disingenuous behaviour.
For instance, the evidence against trans fats is seriously overwhelming and convincing. The evidence against carbohydrates? Eh, not so much.
Avoid added sugar, don't worry so much about bread (as long as you avoid the stuff with added sugar, obviously) or rice or paste or potatoes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Health
It's pro-veganism and the narrator is a goofy manchild, but has credible (to me anyway) medical experts.
So food producers started making fat-free versions of everything. Only problem is it tasted like shit. So what did they do? They added sugar. So now you have sugar added to everything from salad dressing to pasta sauce to bread and muffins. The latter probably had some all along but the fat free varieties had a lot more.
Edit: I'll add that saturated fat was considered especially evil, which begat trans-fats substituted everywhere. Turned out they were even worse.
Bottom line, eat minimally processed meats and plants and you can stop worrying about it.