My Big Fat Diet

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a fantastic conference put on by the Nutrition and Metabolism Society called "Saturated Fat and Heart Disease: What is the Evidence?"

The bottom line: The "evidence" is pretty darn slim.

I know that flies in the face of everything we've heard for the past couple of decades, but the fact remains that the only thing we know for sure about saturated fat is that it tends to raise cholesterol. And if you believe that high cholesterol is a perfect marker for heart disease, then you might have a case for completely eliminating saturated fat.

Only problem is, cholesterol is a lousy stand in for heart disease. And while saturated fat has gotten an awful lot of (perhaps undeserved) attention as a risk factor for heart disease, truth be told we should be looking at some much more potent and dangerous risk factors- like sugar, for example.

At the conference, Dr. Jay Wortman showed a fantastic documentary called "My Big Fat Diet". Wortman and his colleagues did a year long study of the residents of Alert Bay, a Canadian town in which the vast majority of the people are overweight and diabetes is rampant. Wortman- along with such respected researchers as Dr. Eric Westman of Duke University, Dr. Mary Vernon and Dr. Stephen Finney- put 100 volunteers on a low carb diet consisting of their traditional foods- fish, fat and vegetables- basically an Atkins diet. No sugar, no starch, no cereal, no nothing.

A year later, the headline of the British Columbia newspapers told the story: "The Town That Lost 1200 Pounds". BBC filmmaker Mary Bissell made an extraordinary documentary of the whole experiment, which was funded by Health Canada and the University of British Columbia. The research was subsequently presented at a conference, and the resultant documentary- My Big Fat Diet- is inspiring and entertaining.

I particularly loved the taped interviews with a local "expert" (a dietitian, not surprisingly) who continued to express the establishment view that this kind of diet just "couldn't" be healthy- no matter that the participants continued to lose weight, raised their HDL cholesterol, lowered their triglycerides, and lowered their hemoglobin A1C. Many were able to get off diabetic medications completely.

A perfect example of "don't confuse me with the facts", an attitude all too often found among "health experts" who've already made up their mind that low-carb can't possibly be good and are remarkably creative in their ability to rationalize and dismiss the evidence when it doesn't support their preconceived notions.

As always, let me know what you think!