Sunday, March 28, 2010

Even Slate Is Onto It?

"The foundation for the "fat is bad" mantra comes from the following logic: Since saturated fat is known to increase blood levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol, and people with high LDL cholesterol are more likely to develop heart disease, saturated fat must increase heart disease risk. If A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C.
Well, no. With this extrapolation, scientists and policymakers made a grave miscalculation: They assumed that all LDL cholesterol is the same and that all of it is bad. A spate of recent research is now overturning this fallacy and raising major questions about the wisdom of avoiding fat, especially considering that the food Americans have been replacing fat with—processed carbohydrates—could be far worse for heart health."

"In a 2000 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,Harvard researchers compared the food intakes of 75,521 women with their health over the course of a decade and found that the quintile of women who ate food with the highest glycemic load—a measure that incorporates portion size—had twice the risk of developing heart disease than the quintile who ate food with the lowest glycemic load. A 2008 meta-analysis of 37 studies reported a significant association between intake of high glycemic index foods and increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, gallbladder disease, and breast cancer."
"In a 2008 study published in Nutrition Research, researchers reported that subjects who followed high-fat, low-carb diets for eight weeks experienced a 46 percent drop in blood concentrations of small LDL particles, while those who followed a high-carb, low-fat diet experienced a 36 percent spike in them. What's more, processed carbohydrates lower "good" HDL cholesterol, whereas saturated fat increases it."
"Research published by Peter Havel, a professor of nutrition at the University of California-Davis, suggests that compared with glucose, fructose incites less of an insulin response, which ultimately results in lower circulating levels of the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin and higher levels of the appetite-boosting hormone ghrelin—so fructose may make you hungrier.
"It could also put you at greater risk of heart disease and diabetes. When overweight people supplemented their diets with drinks sweetened either with fructose or with glucose for 10 weeks, fructose drinkers ended up with higher concentrations of small LDL particles in their blood after they ate. They also experienced, on average, a 20 percent drop in insulin sensitivity—low insulin sensitivity is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes—over the course of the experiment compared with the glucose drinkers."

http://www.slate.com/id/2248754

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