These restrictions and the carbohydrate increases recommended years ago have led to the huge increase in diabetes. Unfortunately, many physicians still use these outdated guidelines in patient care and are making huge sums of money treating diabetics.

There's also a huge difference between the fats in whole vegetable items (avocadoes, beans, nuts, seeds, etc.), fish fat, animal fat, and refined oils. Cutting down on French fries because of the overuse of bad fat (animal or vegetable (which goes weird in the heat)), salt, and empty starch is a good result. Replacing the oil in peanut butter with sugar is bad. Cutting back fats too much screws up the endocrine system and can be bad for nerves as well, let alone the problems with digestion. Eating chicken without the skin, or cutting the fat cap away from your red meat might be a good idea, giving you more fat allotment to spend on seeds. Living on cheese (some folks eat nothing but pizza, it seems) isn't good. A serving of yoghurt daily could be good.

Similarly, there's a huge difference between the carbohydrate in beans and squash and the carbohydrate in refined sugar. Both are used by the body as glucose, but the sugar is "empty" and the beans and squash (etc.) are full of all kinds of other nutrition.

I always look at the proportions of fat, carbohydrate and protein in beans, nuts and seeds as a good guideline. :) I actually need more protein than that but it's a starting place. :) It's taking me a long time to get there, but I'm trying to replace most of the cheese in my diet with beans. :)

Grain lady, don't forget the demonization of high fructose corn syrup, under layers of funding by oil companies to drive the price of corn down for ethanol. That was one of the most effective campaigns of manipulating the food market ever seen.

I don't need to read any reports or studies.

Just do a search on which population live the longest and most healthy, then copy thier diets.

dcarch

While I greatly respect the Maasai, I'm fairly sure I can't live as they do! It doesn't appeal to me to consume raw blood and milk mixed.

LOL, for a while back around 1980 my husband and I followed the "Hunza diet," after a long-lived Himalayan population. Lots of unleavened bread, apricots, yogurt, and I forget what else. Pretty hard to say on that kind of thing unless you are forced to, without the availability of other foods.

as far as nutritional science goes, given the wildly seesawing claims of the past 30 years, I view them as about as scientific as voodoo practitioners.

Raw blood and milk cocktail sounds very nutritious, though not very appetizing.

The Japanese seem to be very long lived but I'd eat sushi only at gunpoint and barf right away.

My take on all these studies is that it keeps the economy going (people need jobs), other than that they are pretty much useless. I read an interesting book, name escapes me, about why we need fat in our diet, the gist is that we are animals and need to eat fat to have healthy bodies, and our brains benefit from the smiles we produce when we do (endorphins and all that). Maybe it all comes down to variety and moderation for diets. Eat a little of a variety of foods everyday and don't eat the same things every month of your life.
Nancy

The fact is we haven't cut back on the amount of fat we eat at all. Instead we're eating too much of both fats and carbs. I like what Michael Pollan says...good nutrition is following 3 rules: eat real food, eat mostly plants, don't eat too much. And in the great fat debate, the Nutrition Action Letter people clearly come down on the side of scientific data that associates saturated fats with higher heart attack rates. See Fat Under Fire.