Politics/Health Talk. Remember the erroneous health advice derived from science?

via Cleveland Clinic.org...

The interesting thing was in the 60s, in the 50s, there was a doctor named Ancel Keys who was a scientist who concluded that fat was evil, that it caused obesity, that it had more calories than carbs, and that it actually also led to heart disease.

And so, the research on that was only cause and effect ... I'm sorry, the research on that was only showing correlation, not cause and effect. And so the assumption was made based on relatively weak data that fat was the enemy. And in fact scientists related to him were also in the field at the time, Dr. Hegsted and Dr. Stare at Harvard, were funded by the sugar industry to write a report in The New England Journal of Medicine that said sugar's fine, fat's bad.

And then the guy who was the author of that paper was paid by the sugar industry, he ended up being the guy who ran our first dietary guidelines, which told us to eat less fat and eat more carbs. That turned into the food pyramid, which was looking like this. Fat and oils on [inaudible 00:02:46] except fats and oils were only at the top here, wasn't even that much, it was like a tiny little bit.

So the idea was to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal and pasta every day. Now, at this point in our culture we understand that seven or 11 servings of bread or pasta is not a health food, and yet that was what our government told us in the 1992 food pyramid, which correlated exactly with the increase in obesity and type 2 diabetes in America and around the world. 'Cause the whole world took on this dietary guidelines advice.

Story here. 

If you look around you'll see that obesity is the medical epidemic that no one wants to talk about.

How many people remember when "low fat" foods dominated the shelves of stores?  How many remember medicine designed to reduce fat intake?

How many remember that this "science" was accepted without debate and apparently without review?

The science was settled.

Industry, the American people...even the world adopted these nutritional guidelines without debate....and it ruined a couple generations.

The morale of the story?

So called experts get it wrong.  Even those that are supposed to be acting in the public interest can be found to have ulterior motives.

An interesting sidenote?

Broscience beat "hard science" and it wasn't even close.  Consider that on other issues that are supposedly "settled science"!