Past president of American College of Cardiology says 'healthy diet' is no longer defensible
Recent studies have demonstrated that high-fat, low-carb diets are healthier and that the recommendations to base meals of starchy foods and "eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day" have increased the numbers of people becoming overweight or obese and contracting serious diseases such as type-2 diabetes and heart disease, the very disease against which the recommendations were aimed.
Now I feel vindicated as Dr Sylvan Lee Weinberg, a former President of the American College of Cardiology, a former President of the American College of Chest Physicians and the present editor of The American Heart Hospital Journal, in a paper published in the 4 March edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, stated that these recommendations are no longer tenable (this has been my position for over thirty years!). Here is the abstract of that paper:
The Diet-Heart Hypothesis: A Critique
Sylvan Lee Weinberg, MD, MACC
Abstract
The low-fat "diet heart hypothesis" has been controversial for nearly 100 years. The low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, promulgated vigorously by the National Cholesterol Education Program, National Institutes of Health, and American Heart Association since the Lipid Research Clinics-Primary Prevention Program in 1984, and earlier by the U.S. Department of Agriculture food pyramid, may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity, lipid abnormalities, type II diabetes, and metabolic syndromes. This diet can no longer be defended by appeal to the authority of prestigious medical organizations or by rejecting clinical experience and a growing medical literature suggesting that the much-maligned low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may have a salutary effect on the epidemics in question.
J Am Coll Cardiol 2004;43:731-3
Because Dr Weinberg's critique did not criticize so-called "unhealthy" low-carb, high-fat diets, you won't be surprised to learn that it was not reported in the press, TV or radio over here in Britain. And probably not in the USA either.
There are certainly vested interests at work to cover up the huge body of evidence supporting a low-carb, high-fat diet. I imagine that, in such a litigious society as the USA, and increasingly here in UK, the nutritionists and dieticians, who really should have a better knowledge of their professed subject, dare not admit that they have been wrong and done so much harm. But the cracks are beginning to show and it only needs a trigger for the s*** to really start hitting the fan. Weinberg's paper should have been that trigger; I thought it would be; however, the lack of wider publicity meant that it has died without trace — except on websites such as this one.
Last updated 3 November 2007
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