Linda Gardner's Blog: The Scientific Basis of Low-Fat Dietary Advice? “Best Guesses”

Have we been totally wrong about what to eat? Did the low-fat diet start the obesity epidemic? Here’s an interesting 10 minute mini-documentary from The New York Times, featuring two wise men, Gary Taubes and Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian.

NYT: A Healthy Diet’s Main Ingredients? Best Guesses

While the low-fat high-sugar diet of the 80s was a huge mistake, we should not take for granted that we know everything yet. As Dr. Mozaffarian says, conventional low-fat advice may have been based mostly on “best guesses”. But we still might only know about 50% of what we need to know – and we don’t know which 50% of is wrong.

More studies are needed, etc. But I’ll still venture a few guesses about common beliefs in 2016 that we’ll laugh about in the future:

Fear of natural fat like butter
Fixating on calories and neglecting hormonal regulation
Advice to eat often to lose weight (LOL)
All diets being equally good for losing weight
Magical belief in antioxidants and polyphenols etc., based on observational non-evidence
Cow farts being a danger to the environment (if no fossil fuels involved)

What is your best guesses about what is wrong in what people believe today?

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