The American Heart Association is taking exception to recommendations backed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. favors fats such as beef tallow and butter rather than the seed oils that are common in products found in the grocery aisle. The following is from the Wall Street Journal:
New nutrition guidance from the American Heart Association advises getting protein from plants rather than meat, choosing low-fat or fat-free dairy and using olive, soybean and canola oils instead of beef tallow and butter.
The recommendations, released Tuesday by the association, contrast with dietary guidelines that the Trump administration introduced earlier this year.
The American Heart Association guidelines have changed little in the past several years despite the science being somewhat mixed. More from WSJ:
Research has found links between processed meats such as sliced ham, bacon and sausage to heart disease, stroke and some cancers. The research on unprocessed red meat, however, is more mixed. Some studies show an association with heart disease and premature death, while others find only a modest link or no link to cardiovascular disease. Some studies have found that red meat consumption raises the risk of diabetes.
The AHA report notes research that shows that diets higher in beans, peas and lentils—and lower in red and processed meat—are associated with a lower risk of heart disease.
Basically, if you eat like a peasant – and work like one – you will be healthier. Rice & beans anyone? Kennedy has criticized some of the members of the dietary recommendation taskforce as beholden to the food industry. That is certainly a possibility. There is not a lot of funding for research that has no lobby to support it. AHA critics counter that Kennedy and his allies are promoting an upside-down pyramid, with steak and cheese alongside vegetables (as an aside, I like cheesy cream sauce on my vegetables).
The debate about the healthiest diet has been going on for more than a century, and the public health community has not always got the nutrition science right. Around the turn of the 20th Century, a German chemist, Wilhelm Normann, taught Procter & Gamble how to hydrogenate liquid fats to make them solidify. Crisco became the first product, made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Yummy! Partially hydrogenated oils, more commonly called trans fats, entered the processed food supply not long afterward. Cheaper than butter and even lard, these products were both tasty and cheap.
In the 1950s Fred Kummerow, a German-born American biochemist, began sounding the alarm that trans fats were unhealthy.
Kummerow authored at least 460 journal articles over the course of his career. He published the first paper suggesting a connection between trans fats and heart disease in 1957. The article, which appeared in Science, was not met with widespread acceptance initially and even received scornful disdain from some associated with the food industry. It took decades before the link between trans fat consumption and heart disease was fully accepted.
Also beginning in the 1950s and for decades after Kummerow suggested a link between trans fats and heart disease, the American Heart Association and other advocates campaigned against butter, saturated fats, eggs pushing Americans even farther along into a diet rich in trans fats. The following is from a 2013 article in the Los Angeles Times:
In the late ‘50s, health advocates proposed reducing saturated fats, such as in butter and beef, from our diets, which propelled the use of margarine instead, a trend that snowballed in the 1980s. That’s when saturated-fat opponents also campaigned against beef fat and tropical oils for frying and fast-food companies responded by using partially hydrogenated oil instead. By 1993, the FDA required that saturated fat and cholesterol be listed on food labels.
In the 1990s a Harvard study concluded that people who ate of lot of trans fats had double the heart attack risk of people who ate little. The FDA did not require trans fats content to be on food labels until around 1999. It would be another dozen years before the FDA removed it from the list of generally accepted as safe.
Some of the dietary recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt. Years ago, low fat was a big fad, not recognizing people do not feel satiated without fat. Then people were advised to eat carbohydrates rather than fat and protein. All the while, people still got fatter. Perhaps Kennedy’s proposals to avoid highly processed foods and eat real food in moderation is a good back to basics approach.
WSJ: Heart Association Clashes With RFK Jr. Over Red Meat, Dairy and Beef Tallow