Moving on, the hook of Ms. Teicholz's essay is that a top scientist advising the US government on nutrition policy had said that low-fat diets are "probably not a good idea". In her opinion, this constitutes a shocking admission because for decades now the US government has blamed fats for heart disease and other ills and continues to promote low-fat diets.
To this day and every year, a large number of Americans strive year to eat low-fat foods. This despite a retreat on the anti-fat message in some quarters, such as Harvard's school of public health.
Why the retreat? Because low-fat foods are the problem people!
"By the turn of the millennium, however, clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were showing that a low-fat regime neither improved our health nor slimmed our waistlines," she writes.
As I have written about in this blog before, a lot of scientific evidence generated in the last 1-1/2 decades, evidence published in respected journals, consistently show that low-fat diets do not reduce one's risk for deadly heart-related events or one's tendency to gain weight.
Truth is most scientific trials on diets that compare low-fat to low-carb diets show that low-carb diets outperform low-fat diets when it comes to improving people's health. Writes Ms. Teicholz:
"[A] low-carbohydrate regime consistently outperforms any other diet in improving health. Diabetics, for instance, can most effectively stabilize their blood glucose on a low-carb diet; heart-disease victims are able to raise their 'good' HDL cholesterol while lowering their triglycerides. And at least two-dozen well-controlled diet trials, involving thousands of subjects, have shown that limiting carbohydrates leads to greater weight loss than does cutting fat."
This is something worthwhile to keep in mind when come this January 1st when you decide to change your diet. Cheers and have a wonderful new year!