Sounds good to me

Pass the butter: The experts were all wrong

 

MARGARET WENTE

 

The Globe and Mail

 

Published Tuesday, Apr. 19, 2016 8:00AM EDT

 

When I was a kid, the milkman came right to our back door. He brought us bright glass bottles of rich whole milk and thick sweet cream. We drank a lot of milk. Nobody had heard of skim. On weekends my dad cooked up breakfasts of eggs fried in butter, piles of bacon, delicious German sausages. For dinner, we had big chunks of fatty meat every night.

That was in the 1950s. Nobody was fat, except for one lone girl at school who everybody picked on. Most kids ate like horses and were skinny as rakes.

Then the experts came along and declared that all that fat was killing us. Whole milk was banished from children’s diets so that they would not develop clogged arteries and heart disease in later life. To keep our cholesterol in check, we began to ration eggs and treat butter like a toxic substance. We gave up our juicy, marbled steaks and switched to pasta. Ever since the 1960s, the authorities have told us that a healthy diet is a low-fat diet.

The results were not what they had hoped. Obesity rates soared, but heart disease did not subside. And now, a mountain of new evidence says the experts were all wrong. One Harvard study found that people who had consumed the most dairy fat were far less likely to develop heart disease. Researchers at Oxford University discovered that the biggest consumers of saturated fat in Europe – the French – also have the healthiest hearts. Last year, a major review in The BMJ, a leading medical journal, found that “saturated fats are not associated” with mortality, heart disease, strokes or Type 2 diabetes. As Ian Leslie, writing in The Guardian, puts it, “The promotion of low-fat diets was a 40-year fad, with disastrous outcomes, conceived of, authorized, and policed by nutritionists.”

The modern history of nutrition science is fraught with controversy, flawed theory, faulty research, vested interests, suppression of evidence, and vicious battles between the old guard and the insurgents. They’re still fighting. But it’s clear that a lot of what your Food Guide says is flat-out wrong.

Thanks Randy