Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic: Time to Change Course
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We are witnessing the unfolding of a scientific revolution.
The planets revolve around the sun.
E=mc squared.
And it’s the sugar, not the saturated fat!
Yes, fat is the problem. But it’s not the fat you eat that’s the problem. It’s the fat that your liver makes when overwhelmed with a huge sugar load!
The medical community is beginning to catch on and to acknowledge that the old paradigm is crumbling.
In March of 2015, The Mayo Clinic Proceedings published a review article entitled, “Added Fructose: A Principal Driver of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and Its Consequences.” The article points out that each of us, on the average, consumes 30 times more added sugar than an American did when the Declaration of Independence was written.
Another review article published in April of 2015, in the medical journal Hepatobiliary Surgery and Nutrition, had the provocative title of “Carbohydrate intake and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: fructose as a weapon of mass destruction.” Fructose was identified as the culprit leading to fatty liver disease and the resulting type-two diabetes, coronary artery disease, obesity and stroke.
One of the leaders in this field, Dr. James J. DiNicolantonio, put it this way in the British Medical Journal:
“… The global epidemic of atherosclerosis, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and the metabolic syndrome is being driven by a diet high in carbohydrate/sugar as opposed to fat, a revelation that we are just starting to accept.”
Now, the so-called French Paradox makes sense. Frenchmen and women with their high intake of fatty foods, like brie and frois gras, do not have a correspondingly high incidence of coronary artery disease. Now we know why. Dietary fat doesn’t cause coronary artery disease.
We also now understand how the Inuit could exist on seal meat and seal fat with its high saturated fat content and not develop coronary artery disease. They ate no sugar.
For four decades the wrong dietary advice has been given over and over again. A huge amount of harm has been done.
It’s high time that the Centers for Disease Control, the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association and mainstream medicine revise the guidelines and demonize sugar, the real culprit, and leave fat alone.
As for dietary advice:
Begin by avoiding all added sugars, especially liquid sugar like soda.
Eat your fruits, don’t juice them. Juicing concentrates the sugar and removes the beneficial fiber.
But personal choice is only a small part of what we need to do. We need to make the healthy choice, the easy choice.
We need our hospitals, clinics, dental offices and other health facilities to be free of foods and beverages with added sugar. We need to do the same with schools, day care centers, and municipal, county, state and federal facilities.
We need a national #Soda Tax like the one in Mexico, with the proceeds invested in programs to further reduce added sugar consumption. It’s working in Mexico, let’s learn from our neighbor.
Old paradigms die hard. Galileo spent the last six years of his life in house arrest for the heresy of believing that the earth is not the center of the universe. During Galileo’s time, the Catholic Church was all powerful. The Church found Galileo’s ideas heretical because the science contradicted “in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.”
Today, there are again vested powerful interests that are threatened by scientific truth. A global food system now exists that promotes the consumption of a high #fructose diet. How much longer will it take for us to realize that it’s the sugar, not the fat, that is killing us? How many more of us will succumb to the ravages of a diet high in fructose?