I mentioned a few days ago the special edition of the journal "Science" and
its story by Gary Taubes entitled "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat."  Below
are three paragraphs from this piece.  Read and enjoy.  The first is a
glimpse at the creation of the USDA food pyramid (your tax dollars hard at
work!), the second, documentation of just some of the protests from the
medical establishment, and the third some interesting fact and great quotes
on just how stupid this 'low fat=good health' hypothesis was and, in fact,
IS.  Just look around you.

And yes, my head is still reeling at how freakishly similar this story is to
a campaign we launched two months ago.  If imitation is the sincerest form
of flattery, I'm about as flattered as it gets.

Dori Zook
Denver, CO



And while the data on fat and health remained ambiguous and the scientific
community polarized, the deadlock was broken not by any new science, but by
politicians. It was Senator George McGovern's bipartisan, nonlegislative
Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs--and, to be precise, a handful
of McGovern's staff members--that almost single-handedly changed nutritional
policy in this country and initiated the process of turning the dietary fat
hypothesis into dogma.

McGovern responded with three follow-up hearings, which aptly foreshadowed
the next 7 years of controversy. Among those testifying, for instance, was
NHLBI director Robert Levy, who explained that no one knew if eating less
fat or lowering blood cholesterol levels would prevent heart attacks, which
was why NHLBI was spending $300 million to study the question. Levy's
position was awkward, he recalls, because "the good senators came out with
the guidelines and then called us in to get advice." He was joined by
prominent scientists, including Ahrens, who testified that advising
Americans to eat less fat on the strength of such marginal evidence was
equivalent to conducting a nutritional experiment with the American public
as subjects. Even the American Medical Association protested, suggesting
that the diet proposed by the guidelines raised the "potential for harmful
effects."

Carbohydrates are what Harvard's Willett calls the flip side of the calorie
trade-off problem. Because it is exceedingly difficult to add pure protein
to a diet in any quantity, a low-fat diet is, by definition, a
high-carbohydrate diet--just as a low-fat cookie or low-fat yogurt are, by
definition, high in carbohydrates. Numerous studies now suggest that
high-carbohydrate diets can raise triglyceride levels, create small, dense
LDL particles, and reduce HDL--a combination, along with a condition known
as "insulin resistance," that Stanford endocrinologist Gerald Reaven has
labeled "syndrome X." Thirty percent of adult males and 10%  to 15% of
postmenopausal women have this particular syndrome X profile, which is
associated with a several-fold increase in heart disease risk, says Reaven,
even among those patients whose LDL levels appear otherwise normal. Reaven
and Ron Krauss, who studies fats and lipids at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in California, have shown that when men eat high-carbohydrate
diets their cholesterol profiles may shift from normal to syndrome X. In
other words, the more carbohydrates replace saturated  fats, the more likely
the end result will be syndrome X and an increased heart disease risk. "The
problem is so clear right now it's almost a joke," says Reaven. How this
balances out is the unknown. "It's a bitch of a question," says Marc
Hellerstein, a nutritional biochemist at the University of California,
Berkeley, "maybe the great public health nutrition question of our era."

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