Teicholz on the dietary guidelines: “At least do no harm”

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The relatively high-carb US dietary guidelines are considered the gold standard for dietary advice, thus it can be difficult for healthcare professionals to recommend a low-carb diet to patients. But is there good scientific evidence behind using these guidelines for everyone, or are there other factors than science involved?

In this presentation from the Low Carb Denver 2019 conference, science writer Nina Teicholz talks about the basis of the guidelines.

This is our #12 published presentation from the Low Carb Denver conference. We’ve previously published the presentations by Gary Taubes, Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, Dr. Sarah Hallberg, Dr. David Ludwig, Dr. Ben Bikman, Dr. Paul Mason, Dr. Priyanka Wali, Dr. Caryn Zinn, Dr. Eric Westman, Drs. Nadia Pateguana and Jason Fung and Dr. Georgia Ede.

Transcript of the preview above

Nina Teicholz: The American Heart Association has also dropped their low-fat diet recommendation. If you go to their website and search the words low-fat, you cannot find them. And what about all the clinical trials on saturated fats?

In 60,000 participants, or more than 60,000 participants they found, they could find no– in none of them in many systematic reviews of literature could they ever find any effect of saturated fats on cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality or total mortality.

And I want to say that these are all trials in which saturated fats are swapped for vegetable oils. There was some talk about vegetable oils yesterday and how they’re almost like butter, but in these– these are trials where they actually looked at the different– they took out some–

half the people had hamburger, regular meat, regular milk, regular cheese and the other half had soy filled milk, soy filled cheese, soy bean oil on their salads, and at the end of those trials they could not find any difference in cardiovascular mortality for the most part and in some there was an increase in cardiovascular mortality the more the men lowered their cholesterol.

But what they did find was that the people on the vegetable oil diets died at much higher rates of cancer, consistently, and that’s a clinical trial. So, you could say that those vegetable oils caused cancer, which is just one of the things that doesn’t get talked about much when we talk about vegetable oils.
So, what is the evidence for the dietary patterns? It is all epidemiological. It all rests on epidemiology, and it is contradicted by the clinical trial evidence.

Transcript

Watch a part of our presentation above. The full video is available (with captions and transcript) with a free trial or membership:
 
The US dietary guidelines: why they matter – Nina Teicholz

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Low Carb Denver 2019