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Tuesday 29 July 2014

A Guest Post on Prof. Grant Schofield's Blog


This is just a short post to direct readers to my guest post here: http://profgrant.com/2014/07/30/all-that-fat-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/

Which contains all my thoughts about dietary fat recommendations and the lipid hypothesis, without too many distracting details.

I also want to supply a link to a most enjoyable book, Bertha M. Wood's "Foods of the Foreign-born in Relation to Health" from 1922.
https://archive.org/details/cu31924003579756
I think this is the first record of "dietary transitions", adverse changes to the traditional diets of migrants in a new land. It was written at the height of U.S. xenophobia (in the immediate aftermath of the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution) and can also be seen as a response to prejudice. Though the Hungarian child's diet below might not have helped much.


In 1922, diabetics were treated by restricting starch, especially from grains and legumes; this was replaced with non-starchy vegetables. Fat was not generally restricted (though this is said to be necessary in some cases, perhaps because sugar doesn't seem to have been reduced).

I learnt about Bertha M. Wood's book from The Old Foodie blog.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Clear, concise and very well written, George.

I've not been "hedging my bets", so I should probably do another round of bloods to see what's going in inside.

I've also been wondering a bit about the processed meat correlation lately, as I eat a fair bit of salami and bacon - I see Dr Malhotra suggests it may be the nitrates or sodium but I haven't had a chance to look at the meta analysis he uses as a reference.

Cheers, and keep up the excellent work.

Puddleg said...

My thinking is that processed meat = empty protein calories, and protein calories are where most micronutrition is naturally.
e.g., you need B6 to exploit amino acids, including (perhaps critically) to make NO. (and metabolise nitrates, and make taurine and cysteine); protein foods are natural sources of B6, but processed meats are stripped of most B6.
To give just one example (because I don't think supplementing B6 will necessarily help that much).
Also, look at what happens to wheat protein when flour is bleached - something like that must go on when meat undergoes similar processing.
Salami; I eat the raw fermented stuff sometimes. Bacon, it's not a lot of the day's protein, and it can be traditionally processed (like the bacon in Hungarian diet), there's no reason to think dry cured meat is harmful, at least bacon isn't ground to powder before processing.

Anonymous said...

Interesting. Thanks.

Puddleg said...

Don't forget this study (using commercially processed bacon, nothing fancy):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2527479/
"The results suggest that, in rats, beef does not promote the growth of ACF and chicken does not protect against colon carcinogenesis. A bacon-based diet appears to protect against carcinogenesis, perhaps because bacon contains 5% NaCl and increased the rats’ water intake."

So salty food protects against cancer? seems like a dubious interpretation. It's just the goodness of bacon, that's all.

Puddleg said...

Another one: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2638100/

LeonRover said...

Nice one, George.

Good compares & contrasts.

As a child growing up in an Ireland with recent experience of rationing, & on the brink of TeeVee confectionery & soft drink advertising I never became habituated to added sugar or pints of ice-cold Florida OJ.

My cooking was an elitist version of hearty peasant dishes - and still is.

When MrFit and other Dietary studies were published in 1983/4 I made your observation regarding the special pleading which used Coronary Death Rates rather than Total Death rates for a LoFat HiCarb diet & Cholesterol reduction, concluding that such completely ignored the evidence, & paid no attention to the resulting marketing.

I am a firm advocate of the "The Dose maketh the Poison" principle & apply it to the constituents of the foods I buy, prepare and eat.

I also ignored the tentative advice of Statinating Doctors, as I do not Familial Cholesteraemia.

It is with amusement that I observe Pfizer about to be sued by T2Ds who took Lipitor before being diagnosed with their disease.

Sláinte