Nutrition: Flawed mainstream dietary advice

It will soon become part of turn-of-the-century nostalgia. In 2055, elderly people will ask, Remember that old US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Guide Pyramid?

Of course, one way to ensure that youll live a long life is to ignore most of the dietary advice thats been graphically depicted for the past 13 years in the Food Guide Pyramid.

Soon, however, well have a new graphic to ignore. A revised Pyramid will be unveiled this coming spring, and theres speculation that an entirely different graphic image will be employed to illustrate the new food guidelines that were recently announced.

Whatever the new image may be, this much is certain: The USDA is still mired in several key dietary misconceptions that it just cant seem to shake.

 
Brain food

The new USDA guidelines dont have it ALL wrong. Theyre mostly accurate on the obvious topics. For instance, the guidelines recommend that everyone get exercise every day. For most of us that certainly couldnt hurt. But most experts weve spoken to agree daily exercise isnt required, as long as we get moving regularly. So the 60 minutes per day suggested by the guidelines is excessive.

The recommendation to simply eat as much as you need rather than all you can is good advice, as we tend to gorge on food. If that gorging was done on mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, we might not be in bad shape. But our collective shape tends to be obese because the gorging is done on mostly processed foods that contain plenty of simple carbohydrates.

And speaking of fruits and vegetables, the new guidelines rightly encourage more consumption. The importance of whole grains is also emphasised.

However, when it comes to more complex dietary issues the new guidelines have something in common with previous guideline revisions: they just dont get it.

 
Staff of life

The new guidelines recommend consuming three or more ounces of whole-grain products per day. Okay, Im all for that. But its followed with this: ...with the rest of the recommended grains coming from enriched or whole-grain products. Of course, the key word here is enriched. An example of an enriched product is white bread that has nutrients added. Enrich it all you want; white bread is not good nutrition. End of story.

And then theres milk. The guidelines not only suggest consuming three cups of milk or milk products each day, but they also say you should avoid raw, unpasteurised milk. Just one problem: theyve got it backwards. As weve seen in previous e-alerts, if you MUST drink milk, the most nutritious form is raw milk. In the words of HSI Panellist Dr Allan Spreen, Pasteurised, homogenised milk does not qualify as food in my opinion.

The guidelines also recommend that milk intake should be restricted to fat-free (skimmed milk) or low-fat milk. But is this good nutrition? According to Dr. Spreen the skimming process actually makes the nutrients in milk (such as calcium) more difficult to absorb.

 
Fear of fat

And finally, the guidelines are sticking to the completely overblown fear of saturated fat intake. Heres the recommendation: Consume less than 10 percent of calories from saturated fatty acids. Gosh... are saturated fats really all that scary? In a word: No.
Last September, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition carried a remarkable overview of studies that have examined saturated fat intake. Here are some of the results found by US researchers with the Department of Food Science and Technology, University of California, Davis (UC):

 One analysis of 50 years of research on the link between saturated fat intake and heart health found no evidence that a low-fat diet prolongs life

 Results of studies on the association of saturated fat intake with atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease were found to be inconclusive or even contradictory

 To state flatly that saturated fat causes heart disease is to ignore the many common factors that have been shown CONCLUSIVELY to contribute to heart disease, such as an intake of carbohydrates with high glycemic index, smoking, obesity, diabetes, a family history of heart disease, high homocysteine, high C-reactive protein, lack of exercise, oxidative stress and high blood pressure

 Abstaining from saturated fats has not been shown to lower the incidence of coronary disease or total mortality

 Beyond the fact that fatty acids are essential to all the tissues of the body, there is no conclusive evidence that a low-fat diet prevents obesity or cardiovascular disease

In short, the new guidelines are guaranteed to perpetuate some of the most stubborn myths about fat intake and general nutrition. In five years these guidelines will get another overhaul, and a lot can happen in five years. Who knows? Maybe theyll get it right in 2010.

. . and another thing

In past e-alerts Ive brought you numerous updates on the dangers of hormone replacement therapy.

Now new research shows that hormone replacement therapy pills dramatically increase the risk of gallstones in post-menopausal women.
The new research is the latest to come out of the Womens Health Initiative study in the US. The scientists, led by Dominic Cirillo of the University of Iowa, presented their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

They found that women using the combined HRT pill were 68 per cent more likely to have gallstones than non-users. A previous study, called Hers, discovered a 38 per cent increase over a four-year period in hospitalisations for gall bladder disease among women with heart disease taking HRT. HRT has been linked with an increased risk of breast cancer, and the Womens Health Initiative study was halted in 2002 after the discovery that HRT was linked to higher rates of heart attack and stroke.