A Diet Rich in Partial Truths

The primary reason I started Diet Blog was to help sort through the conflicting diet and nutrition information I found on the web.

This op-ed from Dean Ornish, president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, illustrates the problem:

The high-protein diet (which is almost always high in fat), for example, has become very popular; just about everyone knows someone who has lost weight on this kind of diet. Given the American epidemic of obesity, isn't that a good thing?

Not necessarily. You can lose weight with fen-phen, too, but that doesn't mean it's good for you. When you go on a high-protein, high-fat diet, you may temporarily lose weight — but you may also mortgage your health in the process. The only peer-reviewed study of the effects of a high-protein diet on heart function found that blood flow to the heart actually worsened and heart disease became more severe.

But high-protein diets help people lose weight because they are based partially on science, which is what makes them seductive. The high-protein advocates are right when they say that people in the United States eat too many simple carbohydrates like sugar, white flour and white rice. These foods are absorbed quickly, causing blood sugar to spike, which in turn provokes an insulin response that accelerates the conversion of calories to fat. There is a clear benefit to reducing the intake of simple carbohydrates, especially to people who are sensitive to them.

So the diagnosis is correct: we are eating too many simple carbohydrates. But the cure is wrong. The solution is not to go from simple carbohydrates to pork rinds and bacon, but from simple carbohydrates to whole foods with complex carbohydrates like whole wheat, brown rice, and fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes in their natural forms.

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