andrearavenet

[andrearavenet]

Dietary Pharmakon: How our government engineered a diabesity epidemic.

Here’s how it began.

In 1980, the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services released their first-ever dietary recommendation guidelines.

The government recommended that we eat less fat in order to lose fat. The government told us that saturated fat would clog our arteries, putting us at risk for high blood pressure, stroke and heart attack. The government told us that if we ate foods containing cholesterol, we’d develop dangerously high cholesterol levels.

Even though these guidelines have since been revised every five years, the basic messages have stayed the same: eat more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, while avoiding fats and meats.

But despite this public health campaign, obesity rates continued to rise steadily in the United States. According to the Harvard University School of Health, the population of obese Americans more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, and now, more than two out of three American adults —and more than one out of three American children— are overweight or obese. So, although obesity is almost always preventable, Americans are less healthy now than ever before.

So are we just not getting the message about healthy food choices? Are we simply ignoring the available nutritional advice? Well, no, to both questions. Studies show that between 1971 and 2006, Americans did follow the USDA’s dietary recommendations: We reduced our fat and protein intake, often by choosing from the wide range of reduced-fat and low-fat products that became available in grocery stores in the 1980s. We chose skim milk over whole, switched from olive oil and butter to cooking sprays and margarine, and ate low-fat omelets made from egg substitutes. All while maintaining our normal activity levels.

We trusted the government.

We followed our government’s recommendations, but only became sicker and fatter. Insidious ailments including chronic inflammation and metabolic syndrome are becoming more and more common every day. Our obesity problem has reached epidemic proportions and it’s causing a huge range of medical problems including heart disease, stroke, cancers, blood pressure problems and, of course, diabetes.

The CDC reports that rates of diabetes, which is itself a major cause of blindness, high blood pressure and stroke, rose 176% between 1980 and 2011. Diabetes is also implicated in the rise of ailments including nerve damage, impotence, palsy and Alzheimer’s Disease, which is now being called another form of diabetes.

The fact that we are gaining weight faster than ever before despite our dietary changes is what some researchers refer to as the “American Paradox,” but it turns out that this might not be so paradoxical after all. In fact, the American Paradox and declining overall health should come as no surprise considering what we now know about nutrition.

So what exactly were we eating?

Food is fuel. That fuel comes in three forms: carbohydrates, fats and proteins.

Most people get the majority of their energy from carbohydrates, just as the USDA has been recommending for quite some time now. Sugars, starches and/or fiber make up the carbohydrates we eat. They’re chains of sugar molecules, of varying lengths, which our bodies break down and use as a fast fuel. But with each and every rise — and subsequent dip— in your blood sugar, your pancreas is forced to perform its crucial balancing act, alternatively secreting the hormones insulin and glucagon in order to bring your blood sugar back to normal levels.

And there’s no fooling your body: Every carbohydrate consumed is a sugar, however, the more refined and processed they are, the more they can damage your heart, promote belly fat, cause leptin resistance, fuel cancer cells, age the brain, and make us fat. But here’s a surprise: Despite the popularity of carbs, it’s the one fuel source we can actually survive without.

We cannot, however, live without fat. That is, natural, healthy fats, including animal and fish fats, as well as the fat found in butter, nuts, olives, seeds and avocados. Since the early 70’s, Americans have followed the USDA guidelines to decrease their fat intake by any means. The result? We cut out all these healthy fats but our consumption of carbohydrates skyrocketed due to the fillers, sweeteners (including high fructose corn syrup) and flavor enhancers added to fill the flavor void left by the absence of fat in all those new low-fat food options. Essentially, we traded fat for sugar.

While consumers attempted to reduce overall fat consumption, major food manufacturers flooded the market with low- and lower-fat products containing “frankenfats,” hydrogenated oils or transfats, which cause vascular damage, among other things. So although we were proud to be eating less fat overall, we substituted butter for margarine, lard for laboratory fats. The scary part? The fats we were consuming were not just unnatural, they were damaging. So just to be clear: When we talk about healthy fats, we are categorically excluding these laboratory creations.

Proteins, which are a necessary fuel for our bodies and a building block for cellular growth, have come in and out of fashion in the American diet, often thanks to special interest groups and effective marketing campaigns. A few decades ago, the USDA recommended that we replace eggs and bacon with chicken breasts and that other white meat. We traded our proteins rich in saturated fats for low-fat options, effectively robbing our diets of cholesterol, which we now know keeps our brains vibrant, and our bodies well-wired and healthy.

Sugar has been killing us.

Basically, what the USDA inadvertently ended up engineering was a nutritional nightmare. We traded the crucial fats most needed by our bodies and brains for what’s been called the White Death: tons and tons of sugar, in every form imaginable — simple or complex, natural or artificial. But even as we got sicker and fatter, we congratulated ourselves that we were doing the right thing by avoiding the villified fats.

We should have felt good, right? The thing is, we didn’t. As our diets strayed farther and farther away from what our bodies naturally crave, we developed severe deficiencies. Like poor absorption of vitamins A, D, E & K, all critical for cellular growth, immunity, cell repair and blood clotting. Like insufficient omega-3s, which are critical for learning, preventing depression and staving off mental health issues. Luckily, Big Pharma was there with plenty of insulin, statins, and anti-depressants.

Many of us remain on this nutritional and pharmacological roller coaster, still suffering the aftereffects, the least of which include extreme highs and lows, general malaise, even confusion. We’re whiplashed, trying to figure out who’s to blame and how to best heal. The not-so-surprising realization is that we’ll feel better when we get off this ride and understand that the science behind our bodies’ metabolisms hasn’t changed in millions of years: Fat is the primary fuel for our brains and hearts, and always has been. Which is why our increased carbohydrate consumption —and displacement of fats— is now a matter of life and death.

Why does the increase in carbohydrate consumption matter?

Carbohydrates are a potent metabolic regulator.

Our continuous consumption of carbohydrates has confused our bodies. They’ve stopped burning fat and, instead, now run almost continuously on carbohydrates, which historically were a purely seasonal fuel, and which signaled our bodies to start storing fat for the long winter. Today, by getting the majority of our calories from carbohydrates, we’re signaling our bodies to store fat every day, all year long. What was once adaptive behavior has clearly become maladaptive.

So, the American Paradox actually makes perfect sense after all. We have followed the USDA dietary recommendations for reducing dietary fat and increasing carbohydrates, while at the same time, corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup flooded the American diet through processed, convenience foods and drinks. The result? Carbohydrates comprise the majority of our caloric intake, are in most Americans’ foods, and are easy to burn, so our bodies are turning them into fat faster than ever before. By following the USDA’s recommendations, we have made ourselves fatter and sicker than ever before.

We need fat to be well.

Fat, one of your body’s main energy sources, is comparatively difficult to turn into energy. True, an ounce of fat has more energy in it than an ounce of sugar, which is ostensibly the rationale behind the 1980 push toward a diet high in carbohydrates instead of fats but, in fact, it is much more difficult for your body to use the energy stored in protein or fat than in carbohydrates. And it turns out that eating fat actually burns fat: We should be eating fat while eliminating carbs if we want to reverse the obesity trend.

Ketogenic diets are low-carbohydrate, moderate-protein, high-fat diets. There are many varieties of ketogenic diets, and what they have in common is the restriction of carbohydrates and the increase of fat consumption, forcing people’s bodies into a state called “ketosis,” when you preferentially burn fat instead of carbohydrates for your energy.

Ketogenic diets are not new. In fact, man has been eating this way for millions of years. As a curative, ketogenic diets have been around since at least the early 20th century, when they were used to treat childhood epilepsy. The diet was 95% successful at reducing seizures and 60% of patients experienced total recovery (zero seizures). It was the primary medical treatment for childhood epilepsy until the 1930s, when chemists discovered new anticonvulsant drugs. Ketogenic diets, as championed by Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Charlie Foundation, among others, is still changing —and saving— lives of people with epilepsy every day.

Then the diets reappeared in the 1950’s and 60’s as weight loss remedies. Today, ketogenic diets aren’t just for losing weight, though they have been proven more effective for weight loss than low-fat diets. The evidence is in, and it supports the fact that eating ketogenically actually makes you healthier whether or not you have weight to lose. Studies have shown that eating a high-fat, low-carb diet sets cholesterol at healthy levels, improves your blood pressure, increases your insulin sensitivity, improves neuron firing and repair in the brain, and might even starve cancers or help diabetics get off of their medications.

In 2013, the Sweden Council on Health Technology Assessment (Sweden’s version of the Food and Drug Administration) officially recognized just how harmful the low-fat, high-sugar diet is. They issued a government report confirming that low-fat diets are a recipe for obesity, diabetes, and a myriad of other preventable diseases. The report concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt that people who eat high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets are healthier than their peers, and urged their country’s equivalent of the USDA to adopt new dietary guidelines that reflect this fact. Simply put, a high-carbohydrate lifestyle can no longer be regarded as healthy.

Pharmakon: The dietary cure that actually poisoned us.

Following the USDA’s dietary recommendations, including its current “My Plate” guide, has made us sick. The low-fat craze it inspired was a pharmakon—an intended cure, but also a poison.

We should take a cue from the research data: Adopting a high-fat, ketogenic lifestyle appears to be the best way to prevent disease and maintain optimal health. It’s how we evolved and how we were intended to eat.

As a species, it’s time to resume eating fat, instead of avoiding it.

Sources

Diet comparisons

http://authoritynutrition.com/23-studies-on-low-carb-and-low-fat-diets/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826507/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24717684

http://www.myplate.gov

Obesity rates:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/an-epidemic-of-obesity/

Trends in carbohydrate, fat, and protein intakes and association with energy intake in normal-weight, overweight, and obese individuals: 1971-2006.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310830

Diabetes Statistics:

http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/

Diabetes Prevelence:

http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/prev/national/figage.htm

1980 USDA Dietary Guidelines

http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/DGAs1980Guidelines.htm

Sweden’s FDA

http://www.sbu.se/en/Published/Yellow/Diet-and-Obesity/

Fats:

Fat 101. The American Heart Association. Fat. The American Heart Association (accessed September 15, 2009).

Maes, Michael, et al. 26 April 1996. Fatty acid composition in major depression: decreased ω3 fractions in cholesteryl esters and increased C20:4ω6/C20:5ω3 ratio in cholesteryl esters and phospholipids . Journal of Affective Disorders. 38 (1): 35-46.

Perlmutter, MD, David. Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar— Your Brain’s Silent Killers. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013. Print.