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Mediterranean, Low-fat, paleo - if modern diet advice sounds to you like a jumble of special interests competing to advance sales of their diet book rather than inform public health, you are not alone. No one takes diet advice any more seriously than they take any food advice - in a modern culture where an organization calls sausage the same level of carcinogen as cigarettes and asbestos, it is easy to be dismissive of the whole field.
If you are only now back to eating butter, it is because you did not read us decades ago - we said all along that saturated fats were being unfairly criticized using junk science and that the replacement might be worse, which got diet fad types yelling we were shills for Big Dairy. When the replacement, trans fats, was then blamed for everything, we had to note they were non-nutritive but they were not causing diabetes and obesity any more than butter did. For that, we were called shills for Big Trans Fat.
Yet we were simply shills for public health, just like always. And still are. One of our co-founders, Professor Fred Stare, was the Founder of the Harvard Department of Nutrition, and separating health scares from health threats is part of our cultural DNA.
Nutrition advice remains as muddy as ever. A food outreach non-profit named Oldways tried to gather a group to sort it all out at the the Oldways Finding Common Ground Conference. According to Megan Scudellari of Stat, a new health site owned by the parent of the Boston Globe, it got a little bumpy. Ninety minutes into the meeting, we were still trying to agree what the hell a vegetable was, she quoted Dr. David Katz, director of Yale s Prevention Research Center.
What did they expect? They had Dr. Dean Ornish and he thinks adopting his diet will "undo" heart disease. Then the Paleo Diet guy said his diet is to nutrition what germ theory is to medicine.
So it ended up not accomplishing much; they managed to cobble together a consensus statement on healthy eating, which is the nutritional equivalent of coming out in favor of clean water.
Oh, and they said food should be sustainable, whatever that means.
There are good nutritionists, of course, you just don't see them on national diet shows or at conferences on panels with Yogic flying instructors. If you are one of the good nutritionists, please tell that group in Boston what a vegetable is.
And you are always welcome to write here any time.
