Memories of the 28th Century

I don't generally even think about nutrition, but it came to mind recently as a widely popular marketing scam. And the horrible lunch I had today (chicken with coconut curry) tamped it down. The chicken would have been dandy, it it had simply cooked in its fat and a little added water to make it fill the rice, but there was no fat in the chicken, and it was dry, so it was barely edible. Then I remembered that fat has bee relegated to a low place in current American cookery, and that is very unfortunate, because fat is good food. I heard part of a lecture by a longtime professor of nutrition, and he started with something to the effect that dairy products and red meat are the most nutritious foods.

While those are the most nutritious foods, there has been a campaign against them for several decades. Instead of enjoying and being nourished by good foods, like red meat, dairy, and animal fats, people have been persuaded to avoid such good foods by medical people who seem to mean well, but who don't have their facts and logic right. The American people have taken to low fat and low calorie foods that are supposed to be healthier. In theory such foods will keep people from getting fat, except that the human body has a feedback channel that instructs the body to retain fats and carbohydrates, when those items are only available in small amounts. That is a response to famine and drought, and by restricting the consumption of fats and carbohydrates, people are telling the body not to waste fats and carbohydrates, because there may not be any more.

It isn't uniformly true, but many people who eat and drink low calorie foods gain weight, because their bodies are trying to conserve necessary materials that are stored in their bodies.

The problem goes back to the 1960's, when some researchers misinterpreted. In the broad Study of the people of Framingham, Massachusetts, it was noticed that people who had heart attacks had relatively high levels of cholesterol. The researchers made to logical fallacy of believing that correlation shows causation, and they hadn't noticed that the cholesterol levels were similar to the levels of people who did not have heart attacks, and they ignored the fact that all of the people in the Framingham study were middle income and well nourished. But those problems didn't stop them from writing a paper that asserted that high serum cholesterol caused heart disease, and the journal let the paper be published.
Now, in 2021, that conclusion is widely known as the Cholesterol Myth, and it is a classical example of bad research. See the links below for some of the details.

Rather than repeating details about heart health, I am more interested in letting people know that high cholesterol is heart healthy. People who are starving themselves with low fat diets have problems. One of the biggest problems is that researchers frequently use correlation as a way to make conclusions, even though they know that correlation does not show causation. For there to be causation, there must be a causal link; something must be causing the effect, and one must find that link.

The important thin is that that chicken I had for lunch would have been healthier and tastier it the fat and natural flavors had been there, instead of strange and foreign flavors being added.

Fat is not the only think that should be returned to food. The natural sugars and carbohydrates, and meat should be there also. People who want to lose weight should eat less and be more active. Losing fatness isn't a quick thing, but it can be done, as I am finding again. After this Covid problem, lots of people have found themselves with extra fatness, but all of us can get rid of it.


Links
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024687/
https://www.clevelandheartlab.com/bl...t-cholesterol/
This states some of the conclusions that changed over the years.
https://www.openfuture.biz/history/Framingham.html