Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic.

Friday 5th. June 2015 Jeff Ritterman MD

In 1977, the McGovern Commission, chaired by then-Senator George McGovern, issued dietary guidelines that we follow to this day. The commission recommended that Americans receive no more than 30 percent of their energy requirements from fat and that we consume no more that 10 percent of our calories as saturated fat.

Yet, without any study recommending the dietary guidelines, and without any science to back up the guidelines, and with some evidence that the contrary was in fact true, 220 million Americans were advised to lower their saturated fat intake.

Unfortunately, these recommendations were not only wrong, they were dangerously wrong. They have helped lead the way to the present epidemics in type-two diabetes, obesity, coronary heart disease, and hypertension: the modern day "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

When the food manufacturers started removing the fat from our food, the taste went with the fat. The answer: Add sugar and lots of it. This worked well economically as the introduction of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) made cheap sugar plentiful.

It didn't work so well metabolically. The huge increases in our sugar intake have exceeded our physiologic limits. The result is the pathophysiology that we see all around us.

Read the full story here.

Eddie