| Americans are infatuated with a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet, although in truth, most Americans eat a high-carbohydrate and high-fat diet. Over the years our diet has taken its toll, and many of us have become less and less sensitive to our own insulin as a result. Insulin is basically a storage hormone that drives sugar into the cell to be utilized or stored as fat. The body desires to control our blood sugars. Therefore, when the body becomes less sensitive to its own insulin, it compensates by making more insulin. |
| Therefore, the diet the ADA and many dieticians support is a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet.
Diabetics have religiously followed the ADA's recommendations for the past thirty-five years. In the mid-seventies, 80 percent of diabetics were dying from cardiovascular disease. And as we enter the new millennium, 80 percent of diabetics are still dying from cardiovascular disease.9 Shouldn't this warrant some reconsideration of our approach?
Once we understand that we need to treat the underlying resistance to insulin, we recognize that carbohydrates are the main concern. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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 Taking a flavonoid-rich green tea extract (375mg) for three months along with a low-fat diet decreased total cholesterol by 11.3 percent and LDL by 16.4 percent in men and women with mild to moderate hypercholesterolemia.291 Another study, the Ohsaki study,292 found that green tea consumption was inversely associated with mortality due to all causes and inversely associated with cardiovascular disease. |
Lester A. Mitscher and Victoria Toews
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 An additional benefit of a low-fat diet is the fact that it helps most people maintain a healthy weight. Besides total fat intake, the type of fat in the diet appears to affect cancer risk. There are many different types of dietary fat; some have tumor-promoting properties, and others have tumor-inhibiting properties.
Saturated fat has the strongest link to colon and prostate cancer. Some research shows polyunsaturated fat to have a moderately significant relationship to cancer. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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| Ornish Lifestyle Modification Program. The low-fat diet has been promoted by Dr. Dean Ornish since the publication of his bestselling book Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing
Heart Disease. What is now known as the Ornish Lifestyle Modification Program is based on the following four components:
1. A very low-fat, high complex carbohydrate diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, and legumes
2. Regular exercise
3. Stress management
4. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 The recent Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study, mentioned on page 78, showed that a low-fat diet did not reduce heart disease.60 The problem with that study is that it lumped all fats together. We now know that some fats are better than others. For example, there are fats in foods like olive oil and fish that actually promote heart health. |
| In fact, following the low-fat diet advocated by the
National Cholesterol Education Program lowers LDL cholesterol as well as treatment with a statin and without the side effects.57
The so-called Mediterranean diet (vegetables, legumes, fruit, cereals, and fish) reduces heart-disease risk and prolongs life.58 Patients with heart disease who followed the Mediterranean diet had a 50% to 70% reduction in recurrent heart attacks.59 These results are twice as good as those of any medication.
It's a pretty simple diet to follow over the long term. |
| As an example, the generic low-fat diet of the WHI reduced LDL cholesterol by only ten points, whereas a diet high in fruits and vegetables, soy, and nuts, and low in animal fat dropped cholesterol by 30%, a figure that equaled the effects of a statin (33%).
A low-carb diet does not prevent heart disease. Look at the doctor who developed it: He died of a heart attack. In addition, women subjects from the Nurses' Health Study (82,802) who had low carbohydrate intake did not experience a reduced occurrence of heart disease. Eating a high-sugar diet increased the risk of heart disease by 90%. |
Marshall Editions
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 Pyruvate has shown to help some with weight loss when combined with exercise and a low-fat diet; take 20-40 g daily. Take 100-500 mg of L-carnitine three times a day to help burn fat for energy. Taking 3 g of fish oil, which has DHA (docosahexanoic acid) and EPA (eicosahexanoic acid) can also help to burn fat.
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Herbs: Take 1,500 mg of green tea extract a day to increase the body's ability to burn energy, which in turn increases metabolism. In addition you can drink green tea two to three times a day. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Hence you are being sentenced to a lifetime of statins and a boring low-fat diet. But even if you have not experienced any heart trouble yet, you are already being considered for possible treatment. Since so many children now show signs of elevated cholesterol, we have a whole new generation of candidates for medical treatment. So yes, current edicts stipulate cholesterol testing and treatment for young adults and even children! The statin drugs that doctors use to push cholesterol levels down are LIPITOR (atorvastatin), Zocor (simvastatin), Mevacor (lovastatin), and Pravachol (pravastatin). |
Michael Pollan
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 This means that when researchers divide the subject population into groups (typically fifths) to study the impact of, say, a low-fat diet, the quintile eating the lowest-fat diet is not all that low—or so dramatically different from the quintile consuming the highest-fat diet. "Virtually this entire cohort of nurses is consuming a high-risk diet," according to Campbell. That might explain why the Nurses' Study has failed to detect significant benefits for many of the dietary interventions it's looked at. |
| One other little grenade is dropped in the paper's conclusion: Although "a major purported benefit of a low-fat diet is weight loss," a review of the literature failed to turn up any convincing evidence of this proposition. To the contrary, it found "some evidence" that replacing fats in the diet with carbohydrates (as official dietary advice has urged us to do since the 1970s) will lead to weight gain.
I have dwelled on this paper because it fairly reflects the current thinking on the increasingly tenuous links between dietary fat and health. |
| Leave aside for now the virtues, if any, of a low-meat and/or low-fat diet, questions to which I will return, and focus for a moment on language. For with these subtle changes in wording a whole way of thinking about food and health underwent a momentous shift. First, notice that the stark message to "eat less" of a particular food—in this case meat—had been deep-sixed; don't look for it ever again in any official U.S. government dietary pronouncement. |
| When the results were announced in 2006, it made front-page news (The New York Times headline said low-fat diet does not cut health risks, study finds) and the cloud of nutritional confusion beneath which Americans endeavor to eat darkened further.
Even a cursory examination of the study's methods makes you wonder what, if anything, it proved, either about dietary fat or meat eating. You could argue that, like the Nurses' Healthy Study, all any such trials prove is that changing one component in the diet at a time, and not by much, does not confer a significant health benefit. |
Mike Adams
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 The low-fat diet debacle
For decades, many people thought you could reverse obesity by following a low-fat diet. The thinking was that dietary fat made you fat and, therefore, carbohydrates were the preferred source of calories. I know of several people who blindly follow this advice even today, guided firmly by their doctors who remain clueless about the relationship between carbohydrates and obesity. Artemis P. Simopoulos, M.D. |
Abram Hoffer, PhD, MD, FRCP(C) and Dr. Jonathan Prousjy, DPHE, DSC, ND, FRSH
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 People on a low-fat diet will increase their sugar intake unless they are advised not to do so. If they do, any gain they might obtain by lowering fat will be overcome by the increased pathological effect of sugar on cholesterol levels. This area of research will have to be studied much more carefully. We are convinced that high sugar intake is a greater risk factor for heart disease than is the fat level of the food. Low-fat diets, rich in complex carbohydrates and low in sugar, should be the best diet for preventing arteriosclerosis. |
| A low-fat diet means that dairy products are eliminated from it, as they are the major source of fats. Dr R.L. Swank and his colleagues have found that patients with MS who adhered to his low-fat diet regimen, as described in his The Multiple Sclerosis Diet Book, experienced good results. Patients who started on the program early had the best results.
Swank also saw a cultural and demographic pattern linked to the incidence of MS. As he explains, "two parallel and little mixed cultures based on food have evolved. These are the beer-butter and the wine-oil cultures. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 Almost buried in the news reports about this latest, largest, most expensive study ever was this incredibly important fact: the women who were supposedly consuming a low-fat diet were actually getting 29 percent of their daily calories from fat. For those on the front lines of nutritional research, that is not "low fat" at all. It is three times the level—around 10 percent of daily caloric intake—that researchers like me recommend through plant-based nutrition.
The Women's Health Initiative study and the conclusions drawn from it bring to mind an analogy. |
Anne Harrington
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 Most epidemiologists at the time attributed the Japanese's longevity to their low-fat diet, and the dietary theory was the starting point for Stallones's work. Would immigrant Japanese-Americans adopt a more high-fat, Western-style diet as they assimilated? And would such a transition affect Japanese-American rates of heart disease?
Syme was interested in something else. He had done earlier research which indicated that men who had either recently moved or changed jobs were more likely to suffer a heart attack than men who had done neither. |
Michael Pollan
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| She did not attempt to pick out from the complexity of the diet (either before or after the experiment) which one nutrient might explain the results—whether it was the low-fat diet, or the absence of refined carbohydrates, or the reduction in total calories that was responsible for the improvement in the group's health. |
Andreas Moritz
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| Please see Chapter 14 about the damaging side effects that arise from being on a prolonged low-fat diet or light-food diet.
But Doesn't Aspirin Protect Against Heart Disease?
If you are diagnosed with heart failure and follow the recommended treatment of taking blood thinners such as aspirin or Coumadin, you could seriously endanger your health. In a recent study, researchers compared blood-thinning therapies to not receiving any antithrombotic treatment. The researchers not only found no advantage in undergoing such treatments, but risks of further complications. |
Connie Bennett, C.H.H.C. with Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D.
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 A low-GI diet is the perfect compromise between a low-fat diet and an Atkins-type, very low-carbohydrate diet."
And it appears that eating fewer fast-acting carbs also can help a person to keep the weight off. Scientists believe that each of us has a "setpoint," Dr. Ludwig explains, and "when you diet, internal mechanisms work to restore your weight to that setpoint. But a low-GL diet," he theorizes, "may work better with these internal biological responses to create the greatest likelihood of long-term weight loss."
Dr. |
Andreas Moritz
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| For the drugs to be effective, you also need to eat a low-cholesterol, low-fat diet. This kind of diet includes cottage cheese, fat-free milk, fish (not canned in oil), vegetables, poultry, egg whites, and polyunsaturated oils and margarines (corn, safflower, canola, and soybean oils). Avoid foods with excess fat in them such as meat (especially liver and fatty meat), egg yolks, whole milk, cream, butter, shortening, lard, pastries, cakes, cookies, gravy, peanut butter, chocolate, olives, potato chips, coconut, cheese (other than cottage cheese), coconut oil, palm oil, and fried foods. |
Byron J. Richards
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 A majority of people cannot sustain metabolic energy on a low-fat diet. This is not simply my opinion. Test it for yourself. There are not many people who will feel metabolically normal when less than thirty percent of their total calories come from fat. Low-fat diets are not the answer to weight loss, maintaining normal body weight, or preventing heart disease.
There are many breakfast options and many recipes for all kinds of breakfasts readily available on the internet or in numerous publications. |
Andreas Moritz
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| All the major European long-term cholesterol studies have confirmed that a low-fat diet did not reduce cholesterol levels by more than 4 percent, in most cases merely 1-2 percent. Since measurement mistakes are usually higher than 4 percent and cholesterol levels naturally increase by 20 percent in autumn and drop again during the wintertime, the anti-cholesterol campaigns since the late 1980s have been very misleading, to say the least. A more recent study from Denmark involving 20,000 men and women, in fact, demonstrated that most heart disease patients have normal cholesterol levels. |
Bill Sardi
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 The same researchers followed up with another study in 2004, this time providing flaxseed to males on a low-fat diet and reported that their PSA and proliferation rates, as proven by biopsy, dropped significantly. [Urology 63: 900-04, 2004]
This is very puzzling because Dr. Myers himself takes estrogen to slow down the growth of his prostate tumor, yet flax oil, which provides a small amount of mild estrogen-like molecules, called lignans, is said to cause prostate cancer risk to rise dramatically, as much as 350%. |
| Prostate Forum, August 5: 7-8, 2000]
But a year later researchers at Duke University provided flaxseed to patients awaiting prostate cancer surgery and found it lowered their testosterone and PSA and that combined with a low-fat diet, flaxseed beneficially altered the markers for prostate cancer. [Urology 58: 47-52, 2001]
In 2002, Duke University researchers also confirmed their earlier work by demonstrating that flaxseed inhibits the growth of prostate cancer. Table below shows the results of that animal study. |
| An animal study reveals that consumption of a high-saturated Western-style diet has a four-fold higher potential to promote colon cancer than does ingestion of a diet with an equivalent amount of fat derived from fish oil or a low-fat diet that includes corn oil. [Cancer Research 61:1927-33, 2001]
Omega-3 oil
Researchers at the American Health Foundation in Valhalla, New York, conducted an experiment among three equal groups of 120 mice to determine the effect of various dietary fats on colon cancer formation. |
| Nutrition Cancer 19: 1-10, 1993] This is such a low-fat diet it would leave most women yearning for fatty foods and push them into such low circulating hormone levels that they would experience mental depression.
The most recent study did not find that dietary fat was related to the invasiveness of breast cancer. |
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