"Saturated fat and cholesterol aren’t health hazards, and pretty much every 'This Food Linked To That' study ever published is a joke."

Fat Head » Two Things That Ought To Change Everything: "...several prominent organizations, including the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, have finally admitted that upon further review, cholesterol and saturated fat aren’t health hazards after all. We can’t underestimate that one. Given how entrenched the arterycloggingsaturatedfat! theory was, this is akin to officials in the North Korean government announcing that upon further review, communism doesn’t actually work...

Think about just how profoundly the fear of saturated fat and cholesterol has affected us over the decades. It’s why whole milk was banned from schools and replaced with sugar-laden skim milk. It’s why when you go shopping for yogurt, almost every container is labeled nonfat or low-fat. It’s why doctors and nutritionists wanted to put everyone on a low-fat diet. It’s why Weight Watchers started peddling those ridiculous Smart Ones (one gram of fat) meals. It’s why so many restaurants feature a “heart healthy” section of low-fat foods. It’s why restaurant foods are fried in those lousy vegetable oils.  It’s why hospitals feed low-fat carbage to patients, including diabetics. I could go on and on, but I won’t. The point is, fear of arterycloggingsaturatedfat! has underpinned millions of bad decisions over the decades by everyone from food manufacturers to frustrated dieters. Let’s cross our fingers and hope those days are finally coming to end...

 And we’ve been assured that some foods will save us – whole grains, to name an obvious example. Most of those warnings and assurances have been based on observational studies. This or that is linked to such-and-such, blah-blah-blah. I’ve been yammering on about how unreliable those studies are ever since I started blogging six years ago. 

It’s bad enough that researchers want to draw conclusions from mere correlations. But even the correlations are suspect, because (as I’ve pointed out several times), the data is based on food-recall surveys that simply aren’t reliable. I’ve known that for decades, because when I worked at a magazine, we all had to fill out a food-recall survey for some kind of health evaluation, and it was a joke. We just made stuff up to be done with it. Now a paper published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings says the same thing. 

Here’s part of the abstract: We assert that uncritical faith in the validity and value of M-BMs [memory-based dietary assessments] has wasted substantial resources and constitutes the greatest impediment to scientific progress in obesity and nutrition research. Herein, we present evidence that M-BMs are fundamentally and fatally flawed owing to well-established scientific facts and analytic truths. First, the assumption that human memory can provide accurate or precise reproductions of past ingestive behavior is indisputably false. Second, M-BMs require participants to submit to protocols that mimic procedures known to induce false recall. Third, the subjective (ie, not publicly accessible) mental phenomena (ie, memories) from which M-BM data are derived cannot be independently observed, quantified, or falsified; as such, these data are pseudoscientific and inadmissible in scientific research. 

Pow. Zing. Whamo. The researchers are calling B.S. on M-BMs. But wait, it gets better: they’re also calling B.S. on perhaps the most influential organization to make use of (ahem) “studies” based M-BMs. Here’s how an article in Reason Magazine online describes what the researchers have to say: A new article by University of Alabama-Birmingham researcher Edward Archer and colleagues Gregory Pavela and Carl Lavie, published this week in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, argues that the conclusions drawn by the federal government’s controversial Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) rest on fatally flawed assumptions about unusable data. Consequently, the authors conclude that the DGAC’s work—and the research used to support that work—is so off base as to be scientifically useless...

Saturated fat and cholesterol aren’t health hazards, and pretty much every This Food Linked To That study ever published is a joke. Those two things ought to change everything."