Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation 4

Pat Hartman August 23, 2022 No Comments

Here are more details about Dr. Pretlow’s World Obesity Federation Conference presentation.

In talking about why overeating is often irresistible, he says,

It’s like something pushes a person to overeat or get drunk — It’s like a switch gets pulled in their brain. Like a tape plays, and the individual must go along with the tape until it stops running… The behavior doesn’t make sense to the person involved.

And even if one does understand certain aspects of one’s own behavior, there is no guarantee that it can be gotten rid of. To comprehend is fine, but as some believe, “That and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.” As Werner Erhard put it, “Understanding is the booby prize.”

No, what a person needs is a way to change. And often, it helps to do things in (what you have always believed is ) the reverse order. If somebody you respect says, “This works,” why not at least give it an honest try? And sometimes, not always but sometimes, what works is this: Do the things suggested by a trusted person, and you might get results; and then after a while, you may receive understanding.

But that part doesn’t really matter. To have positive results, without necessarily wrapping your head around it, is a better deal than an understanding that brings intellectual satisfaction, but does nothing to mend the damage.

Again, with the multifactorial

Plenty of people figure out how to disconnect that troublemaking switch, and there is more than one way to do it. There are nutrition programs, for instance, that seem able to affect the chemical factors that flip those treacherous brain switches (or let them be). Some people become Zen monks. Others walk 10,000 steps per day. Some answers work for some people, while others are effective for other demographics.

(Actually, Dr. Pretlow just happens to know of a way that is very promising for young people… more soon…)

But, back to the presentation. Like drunkenness and other addictive excesses, the symptomology of obesity-causing behavior includes actions and attitudes that do not suit the situation, and out-of-control behavior that brings down negative consequences. For these and other reasons, it seems to have been decided that obesity fits the definition of addiction.

Then, what naturally follows is the question: What causes addiction? Especially the kinds that do not involve chemicals.

Digression: But doesn’t every addiction necessarily include chemicals produced by one’s own body? Whether the chemicals are endogenous or exogenous, they are certainly present in, for instance, porn addiction, even if no substances are consumed. For the sake of discussion, it is sometimes necessary to separate other addictions from literal substance abuse.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: Source: Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation,” Weigh2Rock, undated
Image by Owen Parrish/CC BY-SA 2.0

Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation 3

Pat Hartman August 22, 2022 No Comments

This is a continuation of comments related to the presentation Dr. Pretlow gave at the World Obesity Federation Conference in 2019, which can be found on his Weigh2Rock website.

An encouraging feature of the whole problem is that some kids realize how urgently they need help, and will ask for it. This is an audio-visual presentation in which one quotation from a young person talks about how the immediate presence of food, in front of you and within reach, just banishes any shred of motivation to develop more useful habits. The issue might be encapsulated in three words: “Can’t say no.”

In other words, the instant gratification of eating right now erases any thought of waiting for delayed gratification, which would be the weight loss they so desperately crave.

A youth is heard saying, “I just really like the way food tastes.” That might be a clue about one of the overall structural, institutionalized causes of obesity for everyone, everywhere. Processed foods can be interfered with in probably a dozen ways, and the one that has an enormous impact is the creation of hyperpalatable groceries.

The easy availability of unnaturally tasty foods is a con game and a terrible cheat. Even more sadly, almost no one realizes it. The film business will make a movie about the terrible price of messing around with atomic energy, but where is the cinematic drama about weird chemicals in the cupcakes?

Can’t say no

Kids are not oblivious to the inner contradiction, and that just makes things even worse, because then, along come a bunch of bad feelings. A teenage boy says, “After I eat, I feel horrible.” Dr. Pretlow quotes a statistic where “95% of binge eaters report regret, guilt, or anger with themselves.” This does not improve with age. Adult binge eaters regularly (and psychologically) beat themselves up for their wayward behavior.

A girl speaks, who does not even offer the excuse of being captivated by an irresistible, delicious flavor, but just eats anything that happens to be around, because it is there. “I would overeat just to eat whatever was available.”

Anyone who has ever experienced the dangerous lure of binge eating will attest that this is a bad bargain and a cold, malicious twist of fate. You get all the unattractive results, the extra pounds, and everything that comes along with them — and it wasn’t even fun. You ate two-week-old leftover lasagna without even warming it up! You might as well have long COVID, with its concomitant anosmia and ageusia — loss of the senses of smell and taste.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation,” Weigh2Rock, undated
Images by Wrapped Up (modified) and Internet Archive/Public Domain

Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation 2

Pat Hartman August 19, 2022 No Comments

This continues a look at Dr. Pretlow’s presentation about addiction and displacement theory, which is also available in viewable form, with illustrations and the actual recording of the presentation.

There is a thing called the motor component, which is separate from the most obvious attractions of food, such as aroma, taste, texture, “mouth feel,” and so on. Take a bag of chips as an example. In many cases, just tearing open the bag is the gateway to a sensory experience, as the delicious smell pours out. So, even that could become an element of what in this talk is termed motor addiction. But there is much, much more to come. Biting is enjoyable in and of itself, and so are crunching, and chewing.

Moving on from chips to, for instance, cooked meat, the activity of gnawing is extremely pleasurable to people with good teeth, and perhaps explains the widespread popularity of the snack called buffalo wings. Subconsciously, gnawing takes us back to ancient times, when members of a human settlement brought home dead game animals so the group could eat.

The hunter had spent so much time in pursuit of this moment — watching, tracking, enduring heat or cold or rain, running, spearing, carrying the carcass back to camp, and perhaps being wounded himself in any one of several possible ways. Then, the meat would need preparation, it would need to be skinned and cooked before, finally, being eaten.

All the patience and the physical exertion and long-practiced skills of the hunt, all the privation experienced to catch that animal, now paid off in the opportunity to use the teeth to scrape every bit of nutrition from the animal’s body. It was not only an individual reward but an altruistic one, that temporarily ended the hunger of the entire group.

To gnaw on a creature’s fire-singed bones must have been incredibly satisfying, engendering feelings of competence, triumph, and worthiness. One can imagine the hunter thinking, “Take that, animal! After all the hard work you put me through, here I am, home and safe, gnawing on your bones!”

Some of the other mouth motions named are licking and sucking. Sucking, obviously, harkens back to the most primal activity of all, pulling nourishment from the mother’s breast. The swallowing of chewed, solid food is a definitive sensation. First it was up here, up in the oral cavity. Now it is traveling to its new destination, the stomach, and often can be decisively felt making that journey.

In our studies, up to 85% of the participants report that when they overeat, they overeat on whatever is available, not some specific, hyperpalatable food. So this motor addiction component is similar to what are called Body Focused Repetitive Behaviors.

One of the many polls submitted for consideration to the young readers of Dr. Pretlow’s website, Weigh2Rock, asked the question, “Do you think overeating is like nail biting?” 53% of the respondents replied affirmatively to, “Yes, I do both when stressed.” Now, obviously, the answer to this dilemma is not, “Well then, just bite your nails more, and it will help you eat less.” Many kids realize that they have been virtually held in chains by the cycle of overeating and regret, and understand that they need help.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation,” Weigh2Rock.com, undated
Images by Jason Lander: 1, 2, 3/CC BY 2.0

Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation

Pat Hartman August 18, 2022 No Comments

Today we take a look at the information provided by one of Dr. Pretlow’s addresses to professional colleagues. Specifically, this one was presented at the 2019 World Obesity Federation Conference in Oman. Obviously, this does not mean anything is out-of-date, because the concepts are the same now as they were then. The talk concerns the concepts of food addiction and eating addiction, as they relate to displacement theory.

Dr. Pretlow begins by describing the features of his long-established interactive website, Weigh2Rock. Young people can submit questions whose responses are not personally aimed, but phrased to include any youngsters who suffer from the same problems. There is a Teens Bulletin Board, where they can express their feelings on many aspects of their overweight situation. The large majority of their difficulties can be condensed into one generic statement: “I can’t stop eating.”

Many young people in various kinds of trouble have full awareness that they need help, and one of the things we are doing here is to aid in creating a society where young people can find the help they desperately need. Often, a teen will elaborate by adding that they know what to do, so a lack of information is not the problem. The problem is finding something — a method, a program, a plan of action — that will enable them to actually do what is necessary to get their consumption under control.

Measuring the pain

Why is this such a significant problem? Well, for one thing, there are metrics in the soft sciences as well as in the hard sciences. One of the metrics employed here is a comparison of the quality of life among obese kids, to the QOL experienced by young people receiving chemotherapy treatment for cancer. To our dismay, their subjective experiences of unhappiness are about the same. So this can definitively be deemed a serious problem.

Why, asks Dr. Pretlow, is it so nearly impossible for these unhappy young people to do such a seemingly simple thing as stop eating so much? If a simple change, like substituting healthful foods for high-calorie, low-nutrition junk food, is available as a life choice, why isn’t everybody doing it? As Dr. Pretlow phrases it, “Something else is going on.”

What is that something? Could it be addiction? Dr. Pretlow wrote,

The definition of addiction is continuing a behavior even though the behavior will cause substantial negative consequences to the person’s life. And obesity seems to qualify under that definition.

The brains of obese people, when exposed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology, show similarities to the brains of known confirmed and diagnosed addicts. This has led to the creation of two terms, one of them being food addiction. This is a substance dependence on the ingredients — mainly sugar — found in far too many types of food. When fMRI technology is employed to visualize it, it shows up looking very much like drug or alcohol dependence. The other term is eating addiction, or behavioral addiction to the act of eating.

It has been shown by some researchers that food ingredients have a direct effect on the brain’s reward system. Maybe; maybe not. It seems more likely that the dopamine rush, the “high,” is produced by such factors as the taste, texture and temperature of food. It appears to be a sensory addiction similar to that found in, for instance, sex addiction. Dr. Pretlow wrote,

We also believe that there is a motor addiction component, involving the actions of eating, like biting, chewing, gnawing, crunching, licking, swallowing, and hand-to-mouth motion.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Food/Eating Addiction and Displacement Theory,” Weigh2Rock.com, 2019
Image by Pat Hartman

Coronavirus Chronicles — Milder Does Not Mean Mild

Pat Hartman August 15, 2022 No Comments

At the beginning of this year, American hospitals were in dire straits. Journalist Ed Yong looked into it for The Atlantic and interviewed, among others, Megan Ranney, a Rhode Island emergency physician, who revealed that because of staff shortages, “whole sections of beds” were closed. Yong traced how the COVID crisis crushed every part of the healthcare system:

A lack of pharmacists and outpatient clinicians makes it harder for people to get tests, vaccines, and even medications… There aren’t enough paramedics, making it more difficult for people to get to the hospital at all. Lab technicians are falling ill, which means that COVID-test results (and medical-test results in general) are taking longer to come back. Respiratory therapists are in short supply, making it harder to ventilate patients who need oxygen.

The scarce beds had to receive virus victims, meaning that people with other kinds of emergency health events or recurring chronic problems were out of luck. Even hospital patients who no longer needed acute care were affected, because they could not be released due to a shortage of beds in facilities for post-acute long-term care. And that made the shortage in general hospitals even worse. For people who depended on dialysis, mental health counseling, and many other outpatient services, support was hard to find.

A new demon

Thanks to the ambitions omicron coronavirus variant, there was a brief resurgence of public interest and even concern. “Do we need to wipe down packages that arrive, or simply stop ordering consumer goods from overseas? Should we wear gloves in the grocery store? They say this new COVID spreads really fast. What are we supposed to do about that?”

By the end of January, there were well over 600,000 new cases nationwide each and every day. Emergency room visits and hospital admissions were going way, way up. The patients had shorter stays, and not as many needed the ICU, but there were a whole lot more of them. And the daily death toll was described as “substantial.” While the overall proportion of ICU admissions and deaths may be smaller, that’s a ratio, a percentage of the whole. When the overall number is enormous, the number of people seriously damaged can still be huge.

Sneaking up

But in the realm of public awareness, it did not take long for emotions to settle down. Because the omicron variant was described as milder than some of its predecessors, many people believed (or tried to believe, or at least proclaimed) that it was no big deal, a walk in the park. Many health care professionals hastened to point out the obvious: milder does not mean mild. It just means, marginally less likely to undergo gruesome ordeals like being on a ventilator, or to die.

Meanwhile, a whole separate crisis continued to build — Long COVID, which has not yet disclosed all the mysteries of its longevity or its ultimate potential for damage. But as the year began, several mentions were made in the media of the increased occurrence of myocardial infarction (heart attack) soon after the patients had seemingly recovered from COVID. The virus was clearly observed to exacerbate several chronic illnesses, leading to the patient’s demise, but was unlikely to be listed as the cause of death — even though that chronically ill patient might have lasted several more years, had COVID not interfered.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble,” TheAtlantic.com, 01/07/22
Source: “Omicron’s wave is at least 386% taller than delta’s — and it’s crushing hospitals,” ArsTechnica.com, 1/26/2022
Image by Navy Medicine/Public Domain

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Year of COVID 2022

Pat Hartman August 12, 2022 No Comments

It takes a while to crunch the numbers, so just before the start of 2022, the federal government released the information that in 2020, COVID-19 was the third most common cause of death in the USA. A companion statistic indicated that the American average lifespan had been shortened by close to two years.

The biggest death-rate increase was among the 35-44 year age group, so it involved a lot of parents. Also, as Childhood Obesity News has pointed out before, many people who succumb to the virus are grandparents and other adults who contribute greater or lesser amounts of child care.

Without them, a lot of working parents were left stranded with no one else to put in charge of their kids during work hours. Living with an unemployed, impoverished parent, especially if single, and with no backup from other relatives or part-time caregivers, is a recipe for a problematic childhood. It has become all too apparent that almost any kind of distress can, in one way or another, lead to childhood obesity. Sooner or later, it is all connected.

Widespread unrest

Regarding the virus itself, the Omicron variant refused to behave as expected, and caused nose-swab antigen tests to read negative even when wildly symptomatic COVID victims were tested.

In Buffalo, freshly unionized Starbucks workers used their new power to walk off the job because of safety concerns. Workers in many companies, unionized or not, were angry because the COVID-linked financial benefits their owners received from the government did not “trickle down” to them.

In California, public and private universities announced delays in the start of in-person classes. But the LA Unified school district planned to start K-12 classes as if everything were normal.

In some parts of the country, school closings caused teachers to feel locked out of this vital part of their lives. Their employment status was reclassified as “inactive,” so their health insurance was useless. They were neither paid their regular salaries nor eligible for unemployment benefits.

A new world

“Compassion fatigue” became a familiar term. If they didn’t catch the virus, and stayed on the job, medical professionals were severely over-tasked, and compelled to master new technical skills on the fly, while cleaning staff and other hospital workers were asked to do more than ever before, and even fill in to answer phones or help move patients. For an eight-hour shift, masks and face shields may be minor inconveniences, but after 14 consecutive hours, they can be major torture devices. In this situation, even at home, workers at every level have to devote extra time to cleaning themselves and their clothes.

Exhausted, discouraged, and deeply hurt by abuse from COVID deniers, nurses quit in droves. Or they stuck with the job and tweeted anonymously. For example,

We have 122 covid-19 patients, 17 are in ICU. Out of the 122, 39 are breakthrough cases, the rest are unvaccinated, the 17 in intensive care are all unvaccinated patients.

Speaking for the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, Amanda Bettencourt told journalist Ed Yong,

In the last two years, I’ve never known as many colleagues who have COVID as I do now. The staffing crisis is the worst it has been through the pandemic.

Yong also mentioned the acute mental and emotional distress of living in two different worlds, one where the plague was desperately real, disrupting every facet of daily life, and another in which massive numbers of people blithely ignored the pandemic and carried on as if everything was just fine.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “COVID helped cause the biggest drop in U.S. life expectancy since WWII,” PBS.org 12/22/21
Source: “We know the hell we’re in. It will get worse before it gets better,” TheGuardian.com, 01/06/22
Source: “Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble,” TheAtlantic.com, 01/07/22
Image by Hospital Clinic Barcelona/CC BY-ND 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — And… How Has COVID Been Doing?

Pat Hartman August 11, 2022 No Comments

The year started off with a bang as someone tweeted about how the COVID-19 cases at Santa Rita Jail (California) had increased by 1250% overnight, with outbreaks among both the staff and incarcerated people. And then three nights later, the number of inmate new cases increased by another 453% — and this was not unusual or atypical among such institutions.

The New York Times reported that nationwide, during the previous three weeks, the seven-day average of newly identified cases had tripled. Under-reporting was already a problem, as more people used home test kits whose results were not recorded in official databases. Of course, numerous Americans with mild or symptomless cases were not counted in any statistics.

The Mayo Clinic fired 700 employees who refused to be vaccinated, which sounds like a lot, but the number actually comprised only less than 2% of Mayo’s vast number of employees. Some hospitals were asking nurses and other staff, who were already severely underworked, to volunteer even more time.

Moral confusion, emotional pain

In many hospitals, there was uneasy discussion of the dreaded T-word — triage. What happens when the hospital only has five ventilators, but 20 patients need them? They can’t be shared. What happens when people with other life-threatening illnesses need the beds occupied by COVID sufferers?

On a battlefield, the traditional rules of triage are well-established and unquestioned. In a public general hospital, not so much. We will not discuss it here, as such debates about which patients should be treated, and which should be left to fate, can become bitter and divisive. It worsens an already desperate situation, even before the lawyers get involved.

“Fairness,” a significant factor in every area of public life, becomes a battle cry. The key point of triage is to utilize scarce resources on those with the best odds of being saved. But this downgrades the chances for people with pre-existing conditions. And, whether or not vindictive emotion is behind the claim, many people believe that those who remain willfully unvaccinated should go to the end of the treatment line.

Joseph Goldstein wrote in The New York Times,

More than 15,000 people with Covid-19 have been hospitalized in the city in the past four weeks, the most since the initial surge. About half of all patients in the city’s hospitals now have Covid-19.

The journalist visited a Brooklyn hospital’s COVID-19 ward and found patients “crammed into every corner.” Thirty-six very sick humans were being cared for by only two nurses, which not only cruelly overburdens the nurses, but is dangerous for the patients. Many hospitals are lucky if even a skeleton crew is on hand, any day of the week. At that particular one, on that particular shift, the Emergency Room had enough doctors but nowhere near enough nurses. The doctor in charge said, “During the first wave we were able-bodied, but now we’re exhausted and many are ill.”

Meanwhile, the country experienced mass confusion over such matters as the difference between isolation and quarantine. The new CDC guidelines were deemed contradictory, already outdated, frustratingly unclear, or impossible. One headline called them a “dumpster fire.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Anthony Fauci Is Right To Distinguish COVID-19 Infections, Which Are Exploding, From Severe Disease, Which Is Not,” Reason.com, 01/02/22
Source: “As Omicron Overwhelms Hospitals, We Must Talk About Triage,” WashingtonPost.com, 01/05/22
Source: “What the Omicron Wave Looks Like at One Brooklyn E.R,” NYTimes.com, 01/15/22
Source: “America’s COVID Rules Are a Dumpster Fire,” TheAtlantic.com, 01/06/22
Image by Jernej Furman/CC BY 2.0

Everything You know About Fat Is Wrong — Probably

Pat Hartman August 10, 2022 No Comments

And… we’re back for another installment of the history of why people are so confused about dietary fat. Even as long ago as 2014, there was unrest among the world’s nutrition experts. A University of Cambridge meta-analysis examined 72 observational studies that pretty much debunked the Fat=Bad paradigm.

On the other hand, some experts held that a large number of observational studies really do not prove more than a single observational study, so there was still plenty of room for controversy over methodology. Three years later, another shock wave hit the establishment:

Researchers in the study, called PURE (Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology), recorded the food intake of over 135,000 people from 18 different countries, including high-, medium-, and low-income nations. They found that those who ate plenty of butter, cheese, and meats lived up to 23% longer lives than those who cut back on fats.

Well, 23% longer is a lot of time! Author Ana Aceves went on to point out that one study was unlikely to persuade health officials to entirely rewrite the dietary guidelines. Although large, it was still an associational study, meaning there was an association but not a direct link between carbohydrate intake and mortality. She added that according to a newer diet study, it was not total fats or saturated fats that threaten longevity, but excess carbohydrates.

One problem has been that people who cut down on fats tend to compensate by eating more carbohydrates like bread, pasta, and rice. Their cardiovascular health does not prosper. Apparently, the authorities were nervous about telling people about the new discoveries, because they might go rogue and think they could safely eat any amount of saturated fats. But apparently, up to about 35% is okay.

Is it the government’s fault?

Elizabeth Nolan Brown also reported on the same study at Reason.com. She called the findings “unexpected” and speculated that they might cause experts worldwide to rethink dietary guidelines. Fruit freaks get less heart disease; legume fiends have “lower rates of death from all causes and from non-cardiovascular causes.” Huge consumers of raw veggies enjoy a lower risk of total mortality, while cooked vegetables do not confer nearly as much benefit.

Brown commented on the part that raised eyebrows:

Perhaps most notably, while higher fruit, vegetable, and legume consumption was associated with lower total mortality risk and less risk of death from non-cardiovascular causes, this benefit appears to max out at three to four servings, or around 375-500 grams, per day.

The researchers discovered that being tested for LDL cholesterol is nowhere near as helpful as everyone has been led to believe, and their work produced many other hitherto unsuspected revelations. Much of the previous confusion about all these matters was attributed to the previous findings being based on limited populations in the same old places, while the PURE study included subjects in Africa, China, the Middle East, and other understudied environments.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Association of Dietary, Circulating, and Supplement Fatty Acids With Coronary Risk,” ACPJournals.org, 03/18/14
Source: “People Who Follow Low-Fat Diets Have Higher Mortality Rates, Study Says,” PBS.org, 08/29/17
Source: “More Evidence That Everything the Government Teaches Us About Eating Is Wrong,” Reason.com, 08/30/17
Image by Arne Hendrics/CC BY 2.0

Everything You Know About Fat Is Wrong, Perhaps — Continued

Pat Hartman August 9, 2022 No Comments

This discussion carries on from yesterday. Disappointingly, no revolution in thought occurred, and Christopher E. Ramsden was able to make only mild claims that ignoring the old study had been a mistake. As Sharon Begley put it, “Observational studies are weaker than randomized ones because people who eat one way, rather than another, might have characteristics that benefit their heart health.”

Or as Dr. Michael Greger expressed it, heaping up a whole slew of observational studies will not grant any more solid conclusions than any single observational study. So, that is a problem. Begley wrote,

Ramsden and his team found […] that substituting vegetable oils lowered total blood cholesterol levels, by an average of 14 percent.

But that lowered cholesterol did not help people live longer. Instead, the lower cholesterol fell, the higher the risk of dying: 22 percent higher for every 30-point fall. Nor did the corn-oil group have less atherosclerosis or fewer heart attacks.

The study that Ramsden et al published reported that among its subjects,

[…] substituting dietary linoleic acid in place of saturated fats increased the rates of death from all causes, coronary heart disease, and cardiovascular disease. An updated meta-analysis of linoleic acid intervention trials showed no evidence of cardiovascular benefit. These findings could have important implications for worldwide dietary advice to substitute omega 6 linoleic acid, or polyunsaturated fats in general, for saturated fats.

Dr. Michael Greger describes how the dairy industry took this and ran with it, and succeeded in changing perceptions about saturated fat among the scientific community. And as for the ordinary consumer? Big Fat doesn’t need to convince customers, “just confuse them.” Like the tobacco industry,

They don’t have to convince the public that smoking is healthy to get people to keep consuming their products. They just need to establish a controversy. Some science says its bad, some says it’s not bad. Conflicting messages in nutrition cause people to become so frustrated and confused they may just throw their hands up in the air and eat whatever they want…

Childhood Obesity News has previously made posts with the facetious title “Everything You Know About ______ Is Wrong,” which is a pretty safe observation to make on almost any topic. Is that because all science is wrong? Absolutely not. But in many fields, some wrong answers need to be tried and rejected before a really good working model of comprehension is produced. Over the decades, students have been taught several different rates for the speed of light. And ultimately, the speed of light may not, after all, be constant. It’s a lot to handle.

Anyway, it may take a lot of variegated input to move any scientific community into agreement, and there are always outliers, explorers who may be contrarian, or simply surprised to discover something new. Stay tuned for other ideas that have been brought up over the past few years.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Records Found in Dusty Basement Undermine Decades of Dietary Advice,” ScientificAmerican.com, 04/19/17
Source: “The Saturated Fat Studies: Set Up to Fail,” NutritionFacts.org, 2015
Source: “Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death…,” BMJ.com, 02/05/13
Image by Vic/CC BY 2.0

Everything You Know About Fat Is Wrong, Perhaps

Pat Hartman August 8, 2022 No Comments

Dr. Michael Greger noted that the relation between diet and cholesterol levels could be studied in three ways: with controlled feeding experiments, with “free-living dietary change experiments,” and through cross-sectional observational studies of large populations. He wrote that there is…

[…] a clear and strong relationship between change in diet and change in serum cholesterol in the interventional designs, but because of that interindividual variability, in cross-sectional designs, you can get zero correlation…

[A] cross-sectional study doesn’t have the power for detecting such a relationship. Thus because of that variability, these kinds of observational studies would seem an inappropriate method to study this particular relationship.

A layperson-oriented article by Sharon Begley, published by Scientific American, succinctly explains the diet-heart hypothesis:

The hypothesis holds that vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid, like safflower and corn, are good for heart health; that saturated fats, such as those in red meat and dairy products, clog arteries and are very bad; and that replacing the latter with the former reduces deaths from heart attacks, heart disease, and strokes by lowering blood cholesterol levels.

This remained the received wisdom for a long time, but a handful of critics urged professionals and laypeople alike to challenge it. Among other reasons, it was suspected that data had been tinkered with in order to make saturated fat look worse and the polyunsaturated kind look better. After 1970, a prominent study influenced the machinery of the U.S. government to deprecate saturated fat, and advocated for polyunsaturated fats.

This was the Seven Countries Study, whose subjects had originally included many more nations:

But in only seven did populations consuming lots of saturated fats have high levels of heart disease, prompting recent accusations of cherry-picking data.

Also, a fellow named Christopher E. Ramsden and several co-authors upset the applecart. Begley describes Ramsden as a specialist in “excavating lost studies, particularly those with the potential to challenge mainstream, government-sanctioned health advice.” He prevailed on an earlier researcher’s son to dig out the original records from a study conducted in Minnesota from 1968-73.

Ramsden and his colleagues discovered what had been hidden for nearly half a century: records on 9,423 study participants, ages 20 to 97, all living in state mental hospitals or a nursing home. It was the largest experiment of its kind.

This 40-year-old data was from research that Begley says is “more than just another entry in the long-running nutrition wars — it is more rigorous than the vast majority of research on the topic.” She elaborates,

It’s possible, Bob Frantz said, that his father’s team was discouraged by the failure to find a heart benefit from replacing saturated fats with vegetable oils. “My feeling is, when the overall objective of decreasing deaths by decreasing cholesterol wasn’t met, everything else became less compelling,” he said. “I suspect there was a lot of consternation about why” they couldn’t find a benefit.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Saturated Fat Studies: Set Up to Fail,” NutritionFacts.org, 2015
Source: “Records Found in Dusty Basement Undermine Decades of Dietary Advice,” ScientificAmerican.com, 04/19/17
Image by Internet Archive Book Images/Public Domain

Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation 4

Again, with the multifactorial

Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation 3

Can’t say no

Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation 2

Addiction and Displacement Theory Presentation

Measuring the pain

Coronavirus Chronicles — Milder Does Not Mean Mild

A new demon

Sneaking up

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Year of COVID 2022

Widespread unrest

A new world

Coronavirus Chronicles — And… How Has COVID Been Doing?

Moral confusion, emotional pain

Everything You know About Fat Is Wrong — Probably

Is it the government’s fault?

Everything You Know About Fat Is Wrong, Perhaps — Continued

Everything You Know About Fat Is Wrong, Perhaps

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

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