I once read a great quotation, which unfortunately I can no longer find (so I understand if you vote this comment down for spreading rumours), from a person involved in the anti-fat movement (AHA, USDA, or something like that). The quoted person said that they knew perfectly well that which fats one eats is far more important than how much fat one eats, but that saying ‘Make saturated fat [and trans fats, but this was before people talked about that] a low proportion of your total fat intake.’ was too complicated a message for the public to understand, so it was better to use the less accurate but more easily grasped rule ‘Make fat a low proportion of your total calorie intake.’. (The article did not explain why the second rule would be easier to follow. It is easier using current nutrition labels, at least in the U.S., but that’s the anti-fat movement’s own fault!)
Also, the anti-fat argument was originally against heart disease, not obesity. Saturated fats (and trans fats) seem to contribute to heart disease, not to obesity. (Of course, obesity also contributes to heart disease.) The main diet-related contribution to obesity is simply total calories, for obvious reasons. Fixing the number of calories, a high-fat diet can actually be helpful (when the issue is obesity), since fats do a better job than carbohydrates of making one feel satiated. The idea that ‘Eating fats makes you fat.’ appeals to people, but it’s a fallacy that I’ve never heard from any authority more sophisticated than a fast-food commercial.
I eat a mostly vegetarian diet, for mostly ethical reasons (which are as much about the environmental impact than animal rights). But I don’t try to avoid fats. On the contrary, oils and nuts are a big part of my diet, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Otherwise, I’d be hungry all the time!
The one that’s right out in public is the way people keep saying that there’s evidence [1] that one glass of wine per day is healthier than not drinking, but that doesn’t mean anyone should start drinking.
[1] The evidence might not be as sound as it looks. People who have one drink per day presumably aren’t alcoholics and are extremely unlikely to be ex-alcoholics, so that’s a healthier cohort than the whole population even if one drink per day doesn’t do anything to improve health.
Alcohol is probably the worst example of a health issue where all sorts of people—including numerous official “experts” with lofty titles and credentials—obsessively insist on one or another set of recommendations that are supposed to be valid for everyone, while completely ignoring the enormous relevant variation between individuals. Consequently, the claims commonly heard in public about this topic are almost pure nonsense.
In reality, depending on your genotype, a glass of wine a day can have very different effects. If you’re exceptionally alcohol-intolerant, it may cause acute poisoning, and if you’re exceptionally prone to alcoholism, it’s a good idea to stay off booze completely. On the other hand, for some people it’s perfectly safe to drink several liters of beer or wine (or a whole bottle of hard liquor) every day—they can do it for decades without ever appearing visibly drunk, and live to ripe old age until something entirely unrelated kills them. Most people are somewhere in-between, of course, but there is definitely no such thing as a universally valid limit for safe drinking. (Not to even get into the complex and non-obvious lifestyle factors that further complicate individual reactions to various levels of drinking.)
Considering all this enormous individual variation, it’s absurdly silly to give any universal recommendations about whether a certain level of drinking is on the net positive or negative. It’s as stupid as if someone tried to come up with a recommended shoe size for everyone without taking into account individual differences in foot size. (And to make things exceptionally un-PC and thus difficult to discuss meaningfully in public, alcohol tolerance appears to have been a subject of very recent evolution, and therefore correlates significantly with ethnicity. In this regard, it’s similar to lactose tolerance.)
Interesting distinction—I suppose I was expecting that if it weren’t for prejudice against alcohol, the experts would be taking those studies and saying that everyone should have one drink per day, even if what I said was more reasonable.
In a sane world, the experts would be saying something more like “Try out one drink per day if it seems to make sense for you.”
But it isn’t even remotely evident that saturated fats contribute to heart disease. There isn’t much room to rhetorically redeem a statement positing that it is.
I once read a great quotation, which unfortunately I can no longer find (so I understand if you vote this comment down for spreading rumours), from a person involved in the anti-fat movement (AHA, USDA, or something like that). The quoted person said that they knew perfectly well that which fats one eats is far more important than how much fat one eats, but that saying ‘Make saturated fat [and trans fats, but this was before people talked about that] a low proportion of your total fat intake.’ was too complicated a message for the public to understand, so it was better to use the less accurate but more easily grasped rule ‘Make fat a low proportion of your total calorie intake.’. (The article did not explain why the second rule would be easier to follow. It is easier using current nutrition labels, at least in the U.S., but that’s the anti-fat movement’s own fault!)
Also, the anti-fat argument was originally against heart disease, not obesity. Saturated fats (and trans fats) seem to contribute to heart disease, not to obesity. (Of course, obesity also contributes to heart disease.) The main diet-related contribution to obesity is simply total calories, for obvious reasons. Fixing the number of calories, a high-fat diet can actually be helpful (when the issue is obesity), since fats do a better job than carbohydrates of making one feel satiated. The idea that ‘Eating fats makes you fat.’ appeals to people, but it’s a fallacy that I’ve never heard from any authority more sophisticated than a fast-food commercial.
I eat a mostly vegetarian diet, for mostly ethical reasons (which are as much about the environmental impact than animal rights). But I don’t try to avoid fats. On the contrary, oils and nuts are a big part of my diet, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Otherwise, I’d be hungry all the time!
The one that’s right out in public is the way people keep saying that there’s evidence [1] that one glass of wine per day is healthier than not drinking, but that doesn’t mean anyone should start drinking.
[1] The evidence might not be as sound as it looks. People who have one drink per day presumably aren’t alcoholics and are extremely unlikely to be ex-alcoholics, so that’s a healthier cohort than the whole population even if one drink per day doesn’t do anything to improve health.
Alcohol is probably the worst example of a health issue where all sorts of people—including numerous official “experts” with lofty titles and credentials—obsessively insist on one or another set of recommendations that are supposed to be valid for everyone, while completely ignoring the enormous relevant variation between individuals. Consequently, the claims commonly heard in public about this topic are almost pure nonsense.
In reality, depending on your genotype, a glass of wine a day can have very different effects. If you’re exceptionally alcohol-intolerant, it may cause acute poisoning, and if you’re exceptionally prone to alcoholism, it’s a good idea to stay off booze completely. On the other hand, for some people it’s perfectly safe to drink several liters of beer or wine (or a whole bottle of hard liquor) every day—they can do it for decades without ever appearing visibly drunk, and live to ripe old age until something entirely unrelated kills them. Most people are somewhere in-between, of course, but there is definitely no such thing as a universally valid limit for safe drinking. (Not to even get into the complex and non-obvious lifestyle factors that further complicate individual reactions to various levels of drinking.)
Considering all this enormous individual variation, it’s absurdly silly to give any universal recommendations about whether a certain level of drinking is on the net positive or negative. It’s as stupid as if someone tried to come up with a recommended shoe size for everyone without taking into account individual differences in foot size. (And to make things exceptionally un-PC and thus difficult to discuss meaningfully in public, alcohol tolerance appears to have been a subject of very recent evolution, and therefore correlates significantly with ethnicity. In this regard, it’s similar to lactose tolerance.)
Interesting distinction—I suppose I was expecting that if it weren’t for prejudice against alcohol, the experts would be taking those studies and saying that everyone should have one drink per day, even if what I said was more reasonable.
In a sane world, the experts would be saying something more like “Try out one drink per day if it seems to make sense for you.”
Or “Whatever, one drink is going to make barely any difference spend your attention on things that may actually matter.”
But it isn’t even remotely evident that saturated fats contribute to heart disease. There isn’t much room to rhetorically redeem a statement positing that it is.