Posts Tagged ‘USDA’

Confronting the Crisis in Nutrition. The Office of Research Integrity Conference on Quest for Research Excellence.

Posted: March 12, 2012 in Crisis in Nutrition, low-carbohydrate diet, Research Integrity, The Nutrition Story, Volek-Westman principle
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The Office of Research Integrity is hosting a conference on the Quest for Research Excellence and, for the first time, there is session that directly confronts policy and The Crises in Nutrition. The Speakers will delineate the problem — the two worlds of establishment nutrition and the major challenge of low carbohydrate diets, the growing problems of childhood obesity and our failure to deal with it, the confusion in the popular press on scientific issues, and finally, the voice of the patient, the failure to listen to the people who are dissatisfied with official guidelines and who have found workable solutions themselves. Three specific goals are recommended: 1) open hearings in which all researchers are represented, 2) funding research in which all people in low carbohydrate research work with others and finally, 3) a new oversight agency from NSF or Office of Research and Technology Policy.

The three goals may be a useful crystallizing point for moving forward. What can you do?

  1. Contact your elected officials and copy one of the authors from the conference. Use the Abstracts below as a basis for your own version of what needs to be done. The three goals can be more narrowly focussed for your own interests.
  2. Encourage local media to cover the meeting. Information is at http://ori.hhs.gov and the speakers can be contacted directly.
  3. Publicize your version of the three goals on your blog, your facebook page or other social media.

2011 Office of Research Integrity Conference Washington DC

Quest for Research Excellence, March 15, 2012.

Session on Crisis in Nutrition.

Chair: Richard David Feinman Contact Information: feinman@mac.com (917) 554-7794

Introduction and Abstracts.

The interest in nutrition for general health and for the prevention and treatment of disease is probably greater than at any time in history. A fairly large research community has grown up to provide information on the subject but the excellence of the results and their ability to inform the general public is highly questionable. The prospect for the future quality of research is similarly discouraging. This session focusses on a crisis in nutrition: the confusion in the public’s mind and the lack of accountability of official agencies and their failure to consider minority points of view. Four areas are considered in this session: the need to consider work that has been done on carbohydrate restriction (the major alternative to current recommendations), the limitations of current media representations of research, the problem of childhood obesity, and finally, the failure to listen to the patients who have not been well served by current ideas and who have discovered alternatives for themselves. The public, athrough forums and comments to blogs and other social media, have expressed substantial dissatisfaction with the current state of medical nutrition.

Three approaches are suggested as first steps for resolving the current crises:

  1. First, we need hearings to be held by congress or HHS in which all major researchers in nutrition are represented. We have to have everybody in the game. The USDA guidelines committee, the American Health Association nutrition panels have to meet with their critics. In particular, researchers in dietary carbohydrate restriction should be able to meet and discuss issues with their critics. This is what the government can do. Better than taxation or other punitive measures, they can bring out the information. The NIH or congress should hold meaningful hearings where all sides are heard.
  1. Second, we need to fund a study in which researchers in dietary carbohydrate restriction and critics of such diets cooperate to design a long-term comparison of CRD and low-fat diets, Mediterranean diets or whatever. The groups agree on methods of procedure, make-up of the diets, how compliance will be effected, and what parameters will be measured. They “write the paper first, leaving room for the data,” that is, they agree in advance on what the possible outcomes are and what conclusions could be drawn from them. In this way, the public and other scientists will have a sense that the issues have adequately been addressed and the results reliably evaluated.
  1. Finally, what’s needed is the creation of a new oversight organization, possibly under the auspices of the National Science Foundation or the Office of Science and Technology Policy in which scientists with no personal stake in nutrition, assess bias in grant awards and publications. The scientific principles involved in nutrition are neither so technical nor so profound that accomplished scientists from other fields cannot evaluate them. Such organizations might make recommendations (or indicate the limitations in existing knowledge that prevent making recommendations) after hearing all credentialed experts.

In the end, we have to say whether there is really a problem or not. Is their really an epidemic of obesity and overweight? Is there a crisis in the incidence of diabetes, or not? Are our health problems, the rising cost, the patient suffering, real? If they’re real, we have to use everything we have. We have to have real science and we can’t continue with one expert committee after another making recommendations but taking no responsibility for outcomes and refusing to show any willingness to confront their critics.

Crisis in nutrition: I. Research Integrity and the Challenge of Carbohydrate Restriction.

Author: Richard David Feinman.

Objective: Research integrity extends beyond falsification of data and explicit misconduct. We assessed the extent to which established majority opinion recommending dietary fat and saturated fat reduction has failed to cite contradictory evidence, accepted undocumented conclusions and marginalized contributions of alternative points of view, specifically the role of dietary carbohydrate restriction, the major challenge to current recommendations..

Main points: Government and private health agencies have long recommended a reduction in dietary fat, particularly saturated fat, in the treatment or prevention of cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes. While there are many disclaimers, low-fat in some form remains the standard nutritional recommendation. Alternative strategies based on control of insulin fluctuations via carbohydrate restriction, while widely used by many in the community, have been discouraged if not actually attacked. This has contributed to a “two worlds” system that has increased confusion among scientists and the public. While there are many exceptions and some emerging acceptance of carbohydrate restriction — which frequently fails to cite earlier work — there is a perception of a majority opinion with pervasive control of the scientific infrastructure: editorial boards, study sections and health agency administration. Examples will be given of undocumented negative statements about low-carbohydrate diets, misrepresentation of data and extensive failure to cite relevant papers from the literature. Most troubling is the tendency to accept some of the conclusions previously demonstrated in low-carbohydrate research without, again, giving appropriate citations to that research. This has led a significant part of the population to distrust official recommendations and medical science.

There is a need to re-evaluate published data on carbohydrate restriction and to guarantee adequate peer review of future manuscripts and grant applications on macronutrient composition of the diet. More generally, better communication and cooperation between researchers and physicians with different opinions can only benefit science and society, a society that is admittedly not making good progress on obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Conclusions & Recommendations:

Recommendations for better integration of different points of view include government-sponsored meetings where all scientific approaches can present their own opinions and address critics, representation on study sections and editorial boards of people with experience in carbohydrate restriction-insulin control diets and long term comparative trials that include PIs with experience and understanding of the role of the glucose-insulin axis in obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Agreement in advance between the “two worlds” as to the expected outcomes and interpretations would provide most benefit for the public and scientist-community interactions. Given the pervasiveness of the problem, in the end, intervention of new oversight agencies, e.g. from NSF or Office of Science and Technology, may be needed

Figure 1. Comparison of low-carbohydrate diets to low-GI diets and high cereal diets.

Crisis in nutrition: II. The popular media and research publications  

Author: Richard David Feinman.

Objective: The public relies on popular media for description of nutrition research. A major interest is the controversy over macronutrient composition of the diet and particularly the role carbohydrate-restriction, the major challenge to official recommendations. The goal is to assess the extent to which statements to the media and especially press releases from authors, author institutions and journals accurately represent the results of reported research. To determine the extent to which personal bias influences and is taken as fact by the media.

Main points: Authors of research papers should sensibly have great freedom in describing the implications of their research to the media, but it is important that the public be aware of when that opinion does or does not follow directly from the publication. Two examples are given. In one, an animal study (Foo, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2009, 106: 15418-15423), the accompanying press release implied that it was motivated by observations of patients in a hospital which were not described, were unsubstantiated and would have been purely anecdotal. In a second example, a press release stated that carbohydrate-restricted diets (CRDs) were not included in a comparative study because of their low compliance (Sacks, et al. N Engl J Med 2009, 360: 859-873. No data were given to support this assertion and it is, in fact not true — CRDs have, on average, better compliance than other dietary interventions. The study concluded that the macronutrient composition of the diet was not important even though, as implemented, dietary intake was the same for the groups studied and, again, the CRD was not included in the study. It seems likely that that this would have an inhibiting effect on the willingness of individuals to choose a CRD, an outcome that was not justified by the published research.

Conclusions & recommendations: Practices should be evaluated and guidelines should be generated by academic societies, scientific journals and the popular media as to what constitutes appropriate press description of published research. Reasonable principle are that only those specific conclusions that derive directly from the publication. The generally accepted idea that authors make clear what is their personal opinion and what is the product of research should be the norm.

Biography: Richard David Feinman, PhD in Chemistry (University of Oregon) is Professor of Cell Biology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. His current area of research is nutritional biochemistry and biochemical education especially as it relates to macronutrients and bioenergetics. He is founder of the Nutrition & Metabolism Society and former co-editor-in-chief of the journal Nutrition & Metabolism.

Figure 2. The world according to Reuters. Low-fat is good. It’s bad. It’s not as bad as we thought. Wait! Eat more fruits and vegetables. “The low-dat diet craze?” Is that what it’s been? Is?

Crisis in nutrition: III. Childhood Obesity: Prevention and Intervention  

Author: Wendy Knapp Pogozelski, Dept of Chemistry, SUNY Geneseo, Geneseo, NY 14454.

Objective: Almost one-third of American children aged 2-11 qualify as obese or overweight, with obesity-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes greatly on the rise in this population. Despite the labeling of the crisis as “epidemic,” funding to study childhood obesity has been limited and restricted to the traditional intervention strategies (to reduce calories, to reduce dietary fat and to exercise more) despite the fact that these efforts have been largely unsuccessful. The time has come for frank assessment of foundational beliefs about a) the causes of obesity in children and b) effective prevention and intervention strategies. This talk will discuss assumptions that are barriers to research and will compare results from traditional calorie-restriction programs with results from programs that have emphasized carbohydrate control and insulin reduction.

Main points: The current generation of children is predicted to be the first to experience a lower life expectancy than that of its parents. Children across the world are experiencing unparalleled rates of obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Relatively little formal research has addressed the causes of childhood obesity, perhaps due to an assumption that the problem is already understood. Despite reluctance to use children as subjects in studies that depart from the traditional “eat less and exercise more” philosophies, it has been noted that the current efforts, dietary recommendations, educational programs and mandates of school lunch programs could be characterized as experiments. These experiments, like the numerous interventions based on traditional strategies, have had poor results but it has been very difficult to implement or fund those approaches that focus on carbohydrate control despite demonstrable success in this area. We will examine typical meals given in schools and at home, compare data from various obesity interventions and discuss causes of obesity on a molecular level

Conclusions & recommendations: The crisis warrants policy change. 1) Funding for childhood obesity should be increased. 2) A broader range of methods and principal investigators should be instituted, with greater accountability required of funded investigators. 3) The USDA nutritional recommendations, a “one size fits all” guide for school meal programs should be reevaluated and reformulated to take into account all strategies for obesity prevention and intervention. 4) Education for physicians, dietitians and health care professionals, as well as the general public, should be altered to include an understanding of the most positive results in obesity prevention.

Biography: Wendy Pogozelski, PhD in Chemistry (Johns Hopkins University) is Professor of Chemistry at SUNY Geneseo. Her research has been in radiation effects, DNA damage, and DNA computing. Current efforts are directed toward biochemical-based nutrition education for health professionals, educators and the general public. In addition to developing teaching materials that incorporate nutrition research, Dr. Pogozelski writes and lectures on diabetes and works with local and national organizations to improve nutrition education.

Figure 3. Before and After from James Bailes’s No More Fat Kids

Crisis in nutrition: IV. Vox Populi

Authors: Tom Naughton, Jimmy Moore, Laura Dolson

Objective: Blogs and other social media provide insights into how the public views the current state of nutrition science and the official dietary recommendations. We ask what can be learned from online discussions among people who dispute and distrust the official recommendations.

Main points: A growing share of the population no longer trusts the dietary advice offered by private and government health agencies. They believe the supposed benefits of the low-fat, grain-based diets promoted by those agencies are not based on solid science and that benefits of low-carbohydrate diets have been deliberately squelched. The following is typical of comments the authors (whose websites draw a combined 1.5 million visitors monthly) receive daily:

“The medical and pharmaceutical companies have no interest in us becoming healthy through nutrition. It is in their financial interest to keep us where we are so they can sell us medications.”

Similar distrust of the government’s dietary recommendations has been expressed by doctors and academics. The following comments, left by a physician on one of the authors’ blogs, are not unusual:

“You and Denise Minger should collaborate on a book about the shoddy analysis put out by hacks like the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.”

“Sometimes I wonder if people making these statements even took a basic course in biochemistry and physiology.”

Many patients have given up on their health care professionals and turn to Internet sites for advice they trust. This is particularly true of people with diabetes who find that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet is not helping them control their blood glucose. As one woman wrote about her experience with a diabetes center:

“I was so frustrated, I quit going to the center for check ups.”

The data suggest a serious problem in science-community interactions which needs to be

explored.

Conclusions & recommendations: Our findings document a large number of such cases pointing to the need for public hearings and or conference. The community is not well served by an establishment that refuses to address its critics from within the general population as well as health professionals.

Figure 4. Some comments from the Active Low-Carber Forums (140, 660 members on March 12, 2012).

Biographies:

Tom Naughton is a former writer for a health magazine, a contributor to the Encylopedia Britannica’s Health and Medical Annual, a documentary filmmaker, and popular blogger who specializes in health and nutrition issues.

Jimmy Moore’s top-rated “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb” blog has drawn more than 6 million visitors since 2005. His podcast show, “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore” has featured interviews with hundreds of respected doctors and researcher. He has also authored two books.

Laura Dolson, MS is a writer and cancer support provider at Mediconsult.com, and hastaught health and nutrition classes at a junior high charter school in California. Her About.com nutrition website draws hundreds of thousands of visitors monthly.


The Nutrition Mess. Lessons from Moneyball.

Posted: September 23, 2011 in Evidence Based Medicine, Lipophobes, low-carbohydrate diet, The Nutrition Story
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Baseball is like church. Many attend. Few understand.

— Leo Durocher.

The movie Moneyball provides an affirmative answer to an important question in literature and drama: can you present a scene and bring out the character of a subject that is boring while, at the same time, not make the presentation boring?  The movie, and  Michael Lewis’sbook that it is based on, are about baseball and statistics!  For fans, baseball is not boring so much as incredibly slow, providing a soothing effect like fishing, interspersed with an occasional big catch. The movie stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team in the 1990s.  A remarkably talented high school athlete, Billy Beane, for unknown reasons, was never able to play out his potential as an MLB player but, in the end, he had a decisive effect on the game at the managerial level. The question is how the A’s, with one-third of the budget of the Yankees, could have been in the play-offs three years in a row and, in 2001, could win 102 games.  The movie is more or less faithful to the book and both are as much about organizations and psychology as about sports. The story was “an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method” and the science is substantially statistical.

In America, baseball is a metaphor for just about everything. Probably because it is an experience of childhood and adolescence, lessons learned from baseball stay with us. Baby-boomers who grew up in Brooklyn were taught by Bobby Thompson’s 1951 home-run, as by nothing later, that life isn’t fair. The talking heads in Ken Burns’s Baseball who found profound meaning in the sport are good examples. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s comments were quite philosophical although he did add the observation that getting hit in the head with a pitched ball led him to go into politics.

One aspect of baseball that is surprising, especially when you consider the money involved, is the extent to which strategy and scouting practices have generally ignored hard scientific data in favor of tradition and lore. Moneyball tells us about group think, self-deception and adherence to habit in the face of science. For those of us who a trying to make sense of the field of nutrition, where people’s lives are at stake and where numerous professionals who must know better insist on dogma — low fat, no red meat — in the face of contradictory evidence, baseball provides some excellent analogies.

The real stars of the story are the statistics and the computer or, more precisely, the statistics and computer guys: Bill James an amateur analyzer of baseball statistics and Paul DePodesta, assistant General Manager of the A’s who provided information about the real nature of the game and how to use this information. James self-published a photocopied book called 1977 baseball abstract: featuring 18 categories of statistical information you just can’t find anywhere else. The book was not just about statistics but was in fact a critique of traditional statistics pointing out, for example, that the concept of an “error;” was antiquated, deriving from the early days of gloveless fielders and un-groomed playing fields of the 1850s. In modern baseball, “you have to do something right to get an error; even if the ball is hit right at you, and you were standing in the right place to begin with.” Evolving rapidly, the Abstracts became a fixture of baseball life and are currently the premium (and expensive) way to obtain baseball information.

It is the emphasis on statistics that made people doubt that Moneyball could be made into a movie and is probably why they stopped shooting the first time around a couple of years ago. Also, although Paul DePodesta (above) is handsome and athletic, Hollywood felt that they should cast him as an overweight geek type played by Jonah Hill. All of the characters in the film have the names of the real people except for DePodesta “for legal reasons,” he says. Paul must have no sense of humor.

The important analogy with nutrition research and the continuing thread in this blog, is that it is about the real meaning of statistics. Lewis recognized that the thing that James thought was wrong with the statistics was that they

“made sense only as numbers, not as a language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey. ‘When the numbers acquire the significance of language,’ he later wrote, ‘they acquire the power to do all the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry … . And it is not just baseball that these numbers through a fractured mirror, describe. It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power and it is grace, glory, consistency….’”

By analogy, it is the tedious comparison of quintiles from the Harvard School of Public Health proving that white rice will give you diabetes but brown rice won’t or red meat is bad but white meat is not, odds ratio = 1.32. It is the bloodless, mindless idea that if the computer says so, it must be true, regardless of what common sense tells you. What Bill James and Paul DePodesta brought to the problem was understanding that the computer will only give you a meaningful answer if you ask the right question; asking what behaviors accumulated runs and won ball games, not which physical characteristics — runs fast, looks muscular — that seem to go with being a ball player… the direct analog of “you are what you eat,” or the relative importance of lowering you cholesterol vs whether you actually live or die.

As early as the seventies, the computer had crunched baseball stats and come up with clear recommendations for strategy. The one I remember, since it was consistent with my own intuition, was that a sacrifice bunt was a poor play; sometimes it worked but you were much better off, statistically, having every batter simply try to get a hit. I remember my amazement at how little effect the computer results had on the frequency of sacrifice bunts in the game. Did science not count? What player or manager did not care whether you actually won or lost a baseball game. The themes that are played out in Moneyball, is that tradition dies hard and we don’t like to change our mind even for our own benefit. We invent ways to justify our stubbornness and we focus on superficial indicators rather than real performance and sometimes we are just not real smart.

Among the old ideas, still current, was that the batting average is the main indicator of a batter’s strength. The batting average is computed by considering that a base-on-balls is not an official at bat whereas a moments thought tells you that the ability to avoid bad pitches is an essential part of the batter’s skill. Early on, even before he was hired by Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta had run the statistics from every twentieth century baseball team. There were only two offensive statistics that were important for a winning team percentage: on-base percentage (which included walks) and slugging percentage. “Everything else was far less important.” These numbers are now part of baseball although I am not enough of a fan to know the extent to which they are still secondary to the batting average.

One of the early examples of the conflict between tradition and science was the scouts refusal to follow up on the computer’s recommendation to look at a fat, college kid named Kevin Youkilis who would soon have the second highest on-base percentage after Barry Bonds. “To Paul, he’d become Euclis: the Greek god of walks.”

The big question in nutrition is how the cholesterol-diet-heart paradigm can persist in the face of the consistent failures of experimental and clinical trials to provide support. The story of these failures and the usurpation of the general field by idealogues has been told many times. Gary Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories is the most compelling and, as I pointed out in a previous post, there seems to have been only one rebuttal, Steinberg’s Cholesterol Wars. The Skeptics vs. the Preponderance of Evidence. At least within the past ten year, a small group have tried to introduce new ideas, in particular that it is excessive consumption of dietary carbohydrate, not dietary fat, that is the metabolic component of the problems in obesity, diabetes and heart disease and have provided extensive, if generally un-referenced, experimental support. An analogous group tried to influence baseball in the years before Billy Beane. Larry Lucchino, an executive of the San Diego Padres described the group in baseball as being perceived as something of a cult and therefore easily dismissed. “There was a profusion of new knowledge and it was ignored.” As described in Moneyball “you didn’t have to look at big-league baseball very closely to see its fierce unwillingness to rethink any it was as if it had been inoculated against outside ideas.”

“Grady Fuson, the A’s soon to be former head of scouting, had taken a high school pitcher named Jeremy Bonderman and the kid had a 94 mile-per-hour fastball, a clean delivery, and a body that looked as if it had been created to wear a baseball uniform. He was, in short, precisely the kind of pitcher Billy thought he had trained the scouting department to avoid…. Taking a high school pitcher in the first round — and spending 1.2 million bucks to sign — that was exactly this sort of thing that happened when you let scouts have their way. It defied the odds; it defied reason. Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball.”

The analogy is to the deeply ingrained nutritional tradition, the continued insistence on cholesterol and dietary fat that are assumed to have evolved in human history in order to cause heart disease. The analogy is the persistence of the lipophobes, in the face of scientific results showing, at every turn, that these were bad ideas, that, in fact, dietary saturated fat does not cause heart disease. It leads, in the end, to things like Steinberg’s description of the Multiple risk factor intervention trial. (MRFIT; It’s better not to be too clever on acronyms lest the study really bombs out): “Mortality from CHD was 17.9 deaths per 1,000 in the [intervention] group and 19.3 per 1,000 in the [control] group, a statistically nonsignificant difference of 7.1%”). Steinberg’s take on MRFIT:

“The study failed to show a significant decrease in coronary heart disease and is often cited as a negative study that challenges the validity of the lipid hypothesis. However, the difference in cholesterol level between the controls and those on the lipid lowering die was only about 2 per cent. This was clearly not a meaningful test of the lipid hypothesis.”

In other words, cholesterol is more important than outcome or at least a “diet designed to lower cholesterol levels, along with advice to stop smoking and advice on exercise” may still be a good thing.

Similarly, the Framingham study which found a strong association between cholesterol and heart disease found no effect of dietary fat, saturated fat or cholesterol on cardiovascular disease.  Again, a marker for risk is more important than whether you get sick.  “Scouts” who continued to look for superficial signs and ignore seemingly counter-intuitive conclusions from the computer still hold sway on the nutritional team.

“Grady had no way of knowing how much Billy disapproved of Grady’s most deeply ingrained attitude — that Billy had come to believe that baseball scouting was at roughly the same stage of development in the twenty-first century as professional medicine had been in the eighteenth.”

Professional medicine? Maybe not the best example.

What is going on here? Physicians, like all of us, are subject to many reinforcers but for humans power and control are usually predominant and, in medicine, that plays out most clearly in curing the patient. Defeating disease shines through even the most cynical analysis of physician’s motivations. And who doesn’t play baseball to win. “The game itself is a ruthless competition. Unless you’re very good, you don’t survive in it.”

Moneyball describes a “stark contrast between the field of play and the uneasy space just off it, where the executives in the Scouts make their livings.” For the latter, read the expert panels of the American Heat Association and the Dietary Guidelines committee, the Robert Eckels who don’t even want to study low carbohydrate diets (unless it can be done in their own laboratory with NIH money). In this

“space just off the field of play there really is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated. There are many reasons for this, but the big one is that baseball has structured itself less as a business and as a social club. The club includes not only the people who manage the team but also in a kind of women’s auxiliary many of the writers and commentators to follow and purport to explain. The club is selective, but the criteria for admission and retention and it is there many ways to embarrass the club, but being bad at your job isn’t one of them. The greatest offense a club member can commit is not ineptitude but disloyalty.”

The vast NIH-USDA-AHA social club does not tolerate dissent. And the media, WebMD, Heart.org and all the networks from ABCNews to Huffington Post will be there to support the club. The Huffington Post, who will be down on the President of the United States in a moment, will toe the mark when it comes to a low carbohydrate story.

The lessons from money ball are primarily in providing yet another precedent for human error, stubbornness and, possibly even stupidity, even in an area where the stakes are high. In other words, the nutrition mess is not in our imagination. The positive message is that there is, as they say in political science, validator satisfaction. Science must win out. The current threat is that the nutritional establishment is, as I describe it, slouching toward low-carb, doing small experiments, and easing into a position where they will say that they never were opposed to the therapeutic value of carbohydrate restriction. A threat because they will try to get their friends funded to repeat, poorly, studies that have already been done well. But that is another story, part of the strange story of Medicineball.

Portion Control and the Language of Food.

Posted: September 5, 2011 in Dietary Fiber, Intention to Treat, low-carbohydrate diet, The Nutrition Story, USDA Dietary Guidelines
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“Portion Control” is a popular buzz-word in nutrition. It has a serious and somewhat quantitative sound as if it were recently discovered and transcends what it really means which is, of course, self-control. Self-control has been around for long time and has a poor history as a dieting strategy.  Lip service is paid to how we no longer think that overeating means that you are a bad person but “portion control” is just the latest version of the moralistic approach to dieting; the sense of deprivation that accompanies traditional diets may be one of the greatest barriers to success. Getting away from this attitude is probably the main psychological benefit of low-carbohydrate diets.  “Eat all the meat you want” sounds scary to the blue-stockings at the USDA but most people who actually use such diets know that the emphasis is on “want” and by removing the nagging, people usually find that they have very little desire to clean their plate and don’t eat any more meat than they ever did.  Coupled with the satiety of fat and protein compared to carbohydrate, this is surely a major factor in the success of carbohydrate restriction.  In the big comparison trials, the low-fat trials are constrained to fix calories while the low-carbohydrate group is allowed to eat ad-libitum, and the two groups usually come out about the same total calories.

On the other hand, there is an obvious benefit to having a lean and hungry feel if not look and, as Woody Allen might have put it: eating less is good if only for caloric reasons.  So, one tactic in a low carbohydrate diet is to eat a small portion — say, one fried egg, a small hamburger — and then see if you are still hungry before having the second or third portion which while not forbidden, is also not required. The longer you wait between portions, the more satiety sets in.

(more…)

Wait a Minute, Lustig. The Threat of Fructophobia. And the Opportunity.

Posted: July 29, 2011 in low-carbohydrate diet
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“The truth?  If I wanted the truth, I would have called Sixty Minutes.”

— Spiros Focás in Jewel of the Nile.

Sugar is an easy target. These days, if you say “sugar” people think of Pop-Tarts® or Twinkies®, rather than pears in red wine or tamagoyaki the traditional sweet omelet that is a staple in Bento Boxes.  Pop-Tarts® and Twinkies® are especially good targets because, in addition to sugar (or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), they also have what is now called solid fat (the USDA thinks that “saturated” is too big a word for the average American ) and the American Heart Association and other health agencies are still down on solid fat.  Here’s a question, though: if you look on the ingredients list for Twinkies®, what is the first ingredient, the one in largest amount?  (Answer at the end of this post).

The Threat

What went wrong in the obesity epidemic?  There is some agreement that by focussing on fat, the nutritional establishment gave people license to over-consume carbohydrates. The new threat is that by focusing now on fructose, the AHA and USDA and other organizations are giving implicit license to over-consume starch — almost guaranteed since these agencies are still down on fat and protein.  The additional threat is that by creating an environment of fructophobia, the only research on fructose that will be funded are studies at high levels of total carbohydrate where, because of the close interaction between glucose and fructose, deleterious effects are sure to be found. The results will be generalized to all conditions.  Like lipophobia, there will be no null hypothesis.

The latest attack on sugar and on fructose itself (sugar and HFCS are half fructose) comes from Robert Lustig, a pediatrician at University of California San Francisco. His lecture describing fructose as a virtual poison got more than a million and a half hits on YouTube.  The presentation has an eponymous style (Lustig, Ger. adj., merry, amusing, e.g. Die Lustige Witwe, The Merry Widow) and includes a discussion of the science bearing on fructose metabolism. While admitting the limitations of that science, even Gary Taubes was worried. Comments on YouTube and other sites say they liked the science but did not agree with his recommendations — it will turn out that he now wants government control of sugar consumption, especially for my kid and yours.

The presentation of the science is compelling but, while it has a number of important points, it is clearly biased and, oddly, a good deal of it is totally wrong, some of it containing elementary errors in chemistry that border on the bizarre — how hard would it have been to open an elementary organic chemistry text?  In trying to draw parallels between alcohol and fructose, Lustig says “ethanol is a carbohydrate.” Ethanol is not a carbohydrate.  A horse is not a dog. If you said that ethanol is a carbohydrate in sophomore Organic Chemistry, you would get it wrong. Period. No partial credit. Such elementary errors compromise the message and raise the question in what way Lustig is an expert in this field.  It gets worse.

It is biological function that is important and ethanol is not processed like fructose as Lustig says. There is very little chemical sense in saying that ethanol and fructose are processed biologically in similar ways.  And a metabolic pathway is shown in which glycogen is absent. Glycogen is the storage form of glucose and is generally taken as a good thing because of its relation to endurance in athletes but, like fat, glycogen is a storage form of energy and having a lot is not always a good thing.  In any case, it is not true that fructose does not give rise to glycogen.  In fact, fructose is generally better at forming glycogen than glucose is.  This is especially true when you consider the effect of exercise which is why Gatorade® may actually be a good thing if you are in a football game rather than watching one. This is the general error in Lustig’s talk.  Metabolism is not static and has evolved to deal with changing conditions of diet and environment. A metabolic chart, like any map only tells you where you can go, not whether you go there. And the notable absence in Lustig’s talk is data.

It is possible that  sugar and ethanol have behavioral effects  in common but this is not due to similarities in metabolism.  And even the behavioral effects are not settled within the psychology community; alcoholism is far different from “sugar addiction,” if there is such a thing; polishing off the whole container of Häagen-Dazs® may not technically qualify as addictive behavior.

The Threat of Policy

All of this might be okay — Lustig’s lecture was not a scientific treatise — except that he has gone to the next step.  Convinced of the correctness of his analysis, he wants government intervention to control sugar and sweeteners in some way .  There is an obvious sense of deja-vu as another expert attempts to use the American population as Guinea pigs for a massive population experiment, like the low fat fiasco under which we still suffer. It is not just that we got unintended consequences (think margarine and trans-fats) but rather that numerous people have pointed out that the science was never there for low-fat to begin with (brilliantly explained in Fat Head).  In other words leaving aside the question of when we should turn science into policy, is the science any good?

Fructose

It is important to understand that fructose is not a toxin. It is a normal metabolite. If nothing else, your body makes a certain amount of fructose.  Fructose, not music (the food of love), is the preferred fuel of sperm cells. Fructose formed in the eye can be a risk but its cause is generally very high glucose. Fructose is a carbohydrate and is metabolized in ways similar to, if different in detail, from glucose but a substantial amount (can be 60 %) of fructose is turned to glucose — that is why the glycemic index of fructose is 20 and not zero.

The extent to which fructose metabolism has a uniquely detrimental effect is strongly dependent on conditions.  Fructose may be worse than glucose under conditions of very high carbohydrate intake but its effect will change as total carbohydrate is lowered. And since carbohydrate across the board is what is understood to be the problem — Lustig states that clearly in his YouTube — policy would suggest that that is the first line of attack on health — reduce carbohydrate (emphasizing fructose if you like) but as carbohydrate and calories are reduced, any effect of fructose will be minimized.  In the extreme, if you are on a very low carbohydrate diet, any fructose you do eat is likely to be turned into glucose.

The Opportunity

Lustig makes his case against fructose in terms of fundamental biochemistry which is really how it should be.  Can biochemistry be explained to the general population?  Can the problem be explained in a simple but precise way so that we really have the sense of talking about science and not politics?  So what is needed is somebody who actually knows biochemistry.  Maybe somebody with experience in teaching biochemistry to future doctors.  Hey, that’s my job description.  In fact, I’m going to try that in the next few blogs and on YouTube. I and others have  taught courses that try to reduce the three year sequence that professional chemists follow: general chemistry-organic chemistry-biochemistry.  I will try to give everybody a window into organic chemistry, biochemistry and metabolism. In fact, that might be a good focus for government intervention. Instead of punishing the patient, how about funding for teaching biochemistry to the public. For the moment, though, let’s look at some population data.

Sweetener Consumption.

What about sweeteners?  Well, of course, consumption has gone up. Surprisingly, not as much as one would have thought.  According to the USDA about 15 %.  One question is whether this increase is disproportionately due to fructose. The figures below show that, in fact, the ratio of fructose to glucose has remained constant over the last 40 years.  (The deviation from 1:1 which would be expected for pure sucrose or HFCSA, is due to a  relatively constant 20 % or so of pure glucose that  is used in sweetening in the food industry). It is possible that, although the ratio is the same, that the absolute increase in  fructose has a worse effect than the increased glucose but, of course, you would have to prove it.  The figures suggest, however, that you will have to be careful in determining whether the effect of increased sweetener is due to fructose or glucose, or the effect of one on the other, or the effect of insulin and other hormones on both.  An unrestrained, lustige, lack of anything careful is exactly the current threat.

Answer to “puzzler:” The main ingredient in Pop-Tarts® and Twinkies® is flour. Some people say that if you add up the different forms of sugar that will be greater but like all ideas derived from Lustig, there is an advantage in looking at the data: 38 g. of carbohydrate, 17 g. of sugars.

Evidence-based Medicine. Who decides Admissibility. II. Mozart and the Levels of Evidence.

Posted: May 12, 2011 in Evidence Based Medicine, The Nutrition Story
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The phrase “Evidence-based Medicine” (EBM) guarantees its proponents a certain degree of protection. After all, who would be against medicine that is based on the data, on hard facts rather than opinion. On the other hand, a study that needs to cloak itself in such a self-aggrandizing phrase must raise a few eyebrows; as usual, the Dietary Guidelines, moves to the top of the list in that category but there are many examples.  Martin Tobin, professor of Medicine at Loyola College provided an excellent deconstruction of evidence based medicine [1]. Some of his points were that the grading system has divorced itself from basic science.  For example, he points out that:

  • “ homeopathy uses drugs in which less than one molecule of active agent is present. … A meta-analysis of 89 placebo-controlled trials revealed a combined odds of 2.45 in favor of homeopathy. EBM grades meta-analysis as level 1 evidence but completely ignores scientific theory. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this particular meta-analysis, but the example illustrates how a system that grades findings of all meta-analyses as level 1 evidence is inherently flawed.  A grading system that ranks homeopathy as sounder evidence than centuries of pharmacologic science commits the reductio ad absurdum fallacy in logic.” [1]

Among the things that we found in our critique of the USDA dietary guidelines Report [2] was that the cited evidence did not meet their own standards. They were critical of low-carbohydrate diets on the basis of studies that their own analysis gave a “neutral” quality rating, even those that took dietary assessment at baseline and then assessed  cardiovascular mortality up to 12 years later.

But it is really the idea that there is some set of systematic definitions of science that everybody agrees on. My last post mentioned, by analogy with courts of law, the Frye standard which accepts as evidence, opinions supported by  “general acceptance’ in the scientific community.  While still accepted in some state courts, the federal courts have tried to go beyond trust in such narrow descriptions of science. In 1975, Congress established Federal Rules of Evidence.  The rules are quite general and the major impact is to broaden the range of evidence that could be considered.  Rule 401, defined relevance as  “evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence,”  in other words, whatever works.  In a future post, I will discuss Daubert v. Merrell Dow, Inc. (pr. Dow-burt as in English), an outgrowth of the Rules of Evidence and generally considered the key judgment in the modern interaction of science and the law.  In the real world of jurisprudence, ideas on what constitutes scientific evidence have become problematical and Daubert may have had the paradoxical effect of restricting admissible data but, in the analogy with evidence in medicine, the Federal Rules of Evidence and Daubert have better captured the real quality of science in recognizing the need for flexibility. The kinds of absolute criteria — association does not imply causality, random controlled trials are a “gold standard,” etc. are at least different from the spirit of Daubert.

More important, nobody in any physical science would recognize the tables of levels of evidence.  A random controlled trial may be good for one kind of experiment but not for another and EBM is critical of “observational studies” but all of astronomy is observational.  In the end, most scientists would agree with the physicist Steven Weinberg, echoing Judge Potter Stewart’s famous take on pornography:

  •  “There is no logical formula that establishes a sharp dividing line between a beautiful explanatory theory and a mere list of data, but we know the difference when we see it — we demand a simplicity and rigidity in our principles before we are willing to take them seriously [3].”

So where do these arbitrary guidelines in EBM come from?  They were set up by the  medical community, a community that is stereotyped as being untrained in science. I hate stereotypes, especially medical stereotypes since I think of myself as coming from a medical family (my father and oldest daughter are physicians) but stereotypes come from someplace and, of course, it is well known that physicians never study nutrition.  In the end, it makes me think of the undoubtedly apocryphal story about Mozart.

  • A man comes to Mozart and wants to become a composer.  Mozart says that they have to study theory for  a couple of years, they should study orchestration and become proficient  at the piano, and goes on like this.  Finally, the man says “but you wrote your first symphony when you were 8 years old.”  Mozart says “Yes, but I didn’t ask anybody.”

Bibliography 

1. Tobin MJ: Counterpoint: evidence-based medicine lacks a sound scientific base. Chest 2008, 133(5):1071-1074; discussion 1074-1077.

2. Hite AH, Feinman RD, Guzman GE, Satin M, Schoenfeld PA, Wood RJ: In the face of contradictory evidence: report of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee. Nutrition 2010, 26(10):915-924.

3. Weinberg S: Dreams of a final theory, 1st edn. New York: Pantheon Books; 1992.

Evidence-based Medicine: Who Decides Admissibility? I. The Frye Standard

Posted: May 6, 2011 in Evidence Based Medicine, The Nutrition Story
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According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the principle of “evidence-based medicine (EBM),” arose in the 1990s [1]. It is widely invoked in the medical literature as a kind of certification that the conclusions of the author are not mere opinions but are backed up by compelling information in biomedical science.  It sounds good. Or does it? It is certainly self-serving and a little bit suspicious, somewhat like Nixon assuring us that he was not a crook.  Evidence based medicine?  What were we doing before?  How was Pasteur able to function in the absence of such an idea?  One thing to think about is that evidence is what is introduced into courts of law.  But not all evidence is admissible. A judge decides what is admissible and there are many precedents, in particular, on what constitutes scientific evidence in a legal proceeding.

EBM relies on a hierarchy of levels of evidence (e.g. Table 1) with the random controlled trial (RCT) as the highest and expert opinion as the lowest.  Recommendations from health agencies and awarding of research grants are frequently justified on conformity to EBM or at least on their placing primary importance on RCTs.

Evidence from the USDA

Early in 2011, the USDA released its 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans [2].  With the dates suggesting the backward-looking nature of the Guidelines, they were nonetheless based on the Report of a prestigious committee (DGAC) [3] who, in turn, made much of their reliance on a new Nutrition Evidence Library (NEL). I and my colleagues were invited to submit a critique of the Report by the journal Nutrition. The editor, Michael Meguid indicated that the journal wanted a balanced report, pros and cons.  I called Dr. Meguid:

RDF: You know, the report is not particularly balanced. I’m not sure how you write a balanced review of an unbalanced report.

MM:  You can make the critique as strong as you like as long as you carefully document everything. But what’s your main problem with the Report?

RDF: Well, it makes very strong recommendations in the face of contradictory evidence.

MM: Make that the title of your article.

So we wrote an article called “In the face of contradictory evidence: Report of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee” [4]. The journal was kind enough to make it an open access article and it’s available on this blog. In the end, on titles, we were one-upped by Steven Malanga, whose article in the New York Post was called “Fed’s Food Fog.”

For sure, both the Report and the final Guidelines were the proverbial camel-like production of a committee, tedious, repetitive and stylistic dreadful.  But what about the NEL?  What about the evidence?  Style aside, wasn’t this evidence based medicine?

Where do these guidelines come from? The assumption is that evidence follows its etymologic roots, stuff that is visible, stuff that comes from the sensible and true avouch of our own eyes. In fact, it is most often applied, as in the case of the DGAC, to the most controversial and contentious subjects. Calling something evidence is not enough. So what happens in courts of law? In a court of law, a judge decides on whether the jury can hear the evidence.  Who decides admissibility of the evidence in EBM?

Conflict resolution in science.

Science is a human activity. Conflict, controversy and a resistance to new ideas are well known even in the so-called hard, that is, more mathematical, sciences, and even where there are no outside forces as there was in the case of Galileo.  In the twentieth century, conflicts do not generally impede progress for long. Especially in the physical sciences, there is usually agreement on basic assumptions and on the rules of logic, allowing ultimate acceptance of strong evidence. Competing theories may coexist and supporters of both are likely to admit that they are awaiting reconciliation.

What happens when the spontaneous process of conflict resolution in science breaks down?  What happens in conditions where scientific disagreement is strong and a majority position becomes so dominant that it controls the funding and publication of scientific work and can ignore or repress contradictory evidence and repress exposition of alternative theories.  In essence, how do we deal with a recapitulation of the case of Galileo?

There is no system to decide on the admissibility in the cases considered by EBM.   I am not the first person to point out that EBM is largely the position of experts on one side of a scientific conflict [5], the lowest level of evidence on traditional EBM scales (e.g. “Level III: Opinions of respected authorities… of the US Preventive Services Task Force Systems,” Table 1).  EBM is sustained by those who want to use its particular criteria but these have never been subjected to outside affirmation.

In this situation, where science cannot police itself, we have to look for some outside guidance.  What do the courts do?  As one would expect there, is a long and extensive history of the legal system’s  attempt to deal with what constitutes scientific evidence.  On the chance that the legal perspective may help, I will discuss some of the issues.

Frye and the need for rules.

A key decision in the history of science in the courts is Frye v. United States.  In 1923, a Federal Appeals court ruled that the opinions of experts have to be supported by a scientific community. Frye had been convicted of second-degree murder but appealed on the grounds that he had successfully passed a lie-detector test.  At that time the device was a simple blood pressure machine and an expert witness testified as to the results. The court ruled that the lie-detector test “has not yet gained such standing and scientific recognition among physiological and psychological authorities as would justify the courts in admitting expert testimony‚” affirming the judgment of the lower court.

The ruling in Frye gave rise to the idea of “general acceptance,” and, by analogy, this appears to be the main principle in the admissibility of evidence in the nutrition world.  Sufficiently well established that it could be included in a biochemistry text is the idea that “consumption of saturated fats is positively associated with high levels of total plasma cholesterol and LDL cholesterol and an increased risk of CHD”[6] Known to students as “the Lippincott Book,” Harvey and Ferrier is the best selling biochemistry book in the world and it is correct when it states “Most experts strongly advise limiting intake of saturated fats.”

Most, but not all.  A small but not insignificant minority hold otherwise and whereas they agree that dietary saturated fat may raise blood cholesterol, they can provide overwhelming evidence that it is not associated with cardiovascular disease. This has been demonstrated in almost every large trial.

The problem is described in Marcia Angell’s Science on Trial [7].  Angell explains that Frye was not without its critics ([7], page 126).  Opponents, she wrote,

“claimed somewhat improbably, that it would tend to exclude novel, far-sighted testimony by modern-day Galileos. There is no record of this happening once, let alone often.  Furthermore, even if a modern-day Galileo did not make into court at first, that fact should not stop him from prevailing in the scientific community.  Courts do not determine scientific acceptance, as implied by the argument that we need to keep our courts open to the hidden Galileos in our midst.”

But isn’t this exactly what has happened in nutrition and maybe, in general, in the medical community?  The “experts” control editorial boards, granting agencies and academic departments and are as powerful as the Catholic Church in repressing dissent.  They have prestige and, in many cases, undisputed accomplishments, but does science run on general acceptance? Does majority (of experts) rule?

One of the problems with Frye that lawyers have addressed is a question of identifying the field of academic or scientific field in which the general acceptance is to be considered.  Different disciplines hold to different standards.  In the case at hand, many ideas in nutrition would be dismissed out of hand by biochemists. Many methodologies would be considered absurd by physical scientists: Intention-to-treat is perhaps the most absurd.  It has been pointed out that the question of who is an expert might have applied to the techniques in the original Frye case, at least as it might be implemented today: “If polygraph examiners are selected as the relevant field, polygraph results would be admissible.” (http://law.jrank.org/pages/2006/Scientific-Evidence-Frye-v-United-States.html).

The epidemic of obesity and diabetes stands as a testament to the failure of the experts.  A small library can be assembled of books attacking establishment medical nutrition. Uffe Ravnskov’s classic Cholesterol Myths is updated in Ignore the Awkward. Gary Taubes’s recent Good Calories, Bad Calories is the most compelling and James Le Fanu’s Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, the most succinct but just sitting at my desk now I can see a dozen others on the book shelf.  Surprisingly, there has been only one rebuttal, Steinberg’s Cholesterol Wars, the subject of the next post .

Table 1.  Examples of Levels of Evidence from Various Sources. 

US Preventive Services Task Force Systems for ranking evidence about the effectiveness of treatments or screening:

Level I: Evidence obtained from at least one properly designed randomized controlled trial.

Level II-1: Evidence obtained from well-designed controlled trials without randomization.

Level II-2: Evidence obtained from well-designed cohort or case-control analytic studies, preferably from more than one center or research group.

Level II-3: Evidence obtained from multiple time series with or without the intervention. Dramatic results in uncontrolled trials might also be regarded as this type of evidence.

Level III: Opinions of respected authorities, based on clinical experience, descriptive studies, or reports of expert committees.

Bibliography

1. Torpy JM, Lynm C, Glass RM: JAMA patient page. Evidence-based medicine. JAMA 2009, 301(8):900.

2. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 [http://www.dietaryguidelines.gov.]

3. US Department of Agriculture and US Department of Health and Human Services: Report of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee on the dietary guidelines for Americans, 2010. June 15, 2010. In.; 2010.

4. Hite AH, Feinman RD, Guzman GE, Satin M, Schoenfeld PA, Wood RJ: In the face of contradictory evidence: report of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee. Nutrition 2010, 26(10):915-924.

5. Marantz P, Bird E, Alderman M: A Call for Higher Standards of Evidence for Dietary Guidelines. Am J Prev Med 2008, 34(3):234-239.

6. Harvey R, Ferrier D: Biochemistry, 5th edn. Baltimore and Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2011.

7. Angell M: Science on Trial. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.; 1996.

Is whole milk a solid?

Posted: April 19, 2011 in The Nutrition Story
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Coincidence.  My daughter Mimi’s school was debating whether chocolate milk, skim or otherwise, is really a good thing — whole milk of course is not a choice.  At the same time, her first grade class was studying states of matter, specifically solids and liquids.  According to Mimi, they learned that solids do not change shape and liquids flow.  These two topics come together in the bizarre world of the USDA Dietary Guidelines.  Whole milk, it seems, is not a choice because it may be a solid.

Stepping back, the logic of the USDA recommendations is that

1) we now know that  total dietary fat poses no risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD), but

2) saturated fat  is a risk for CVD and therefore Americans must

3) reduce total dietary fat intake and drink skim-milk or fat-reduced milk.  If you are confused about this syllogism, not to worry.  The Guidelines have made it simple. The Advisory Committee has always had a concern for the ability of the public to think.  Dr. Xavier Pi-Sunyer (pr. Pea-soon-yay), a member of the committee wrote an editorial about a scientific report that showed no difference in the effect of different diets (never mind that, in practice, what people ate was about the same, regardless of the “diet” to which they were assigned.) He suggested that it “seems unwise at this point to burden type 2 diabetes patients with trying to pick and choose among different high- and low-GI foods.”  Also, in unveiling the new Guidelines, secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said that he had not read the previous versions.  So, any simplification is welcome. The Dietary Guidelines has, as one of its latest innovations, the introduction of the term SoFAS, which stands for Solid Fats and Added Sugar and was in line for a SAY! Award (Stupidest Acronym of the Year).  So, we simply have to understand what they mean by solid.

If there is anything in science that is well understood and should not be open to conjecture, it is the states of matter.  Outside of the extreme conditions that produce plasmas and other exotica, the idea of solids, liquids and gasses seems pretty much, well, solid.  It turns out, though, that since the term saturated fat is, after all, a chemical term, it is necessary to make things simple for the consumer who is now advised to look for something “solid” instead.  To do this, the DGAC explains: “To determine whether foods contain oils or solid fats, consumers can read the ingredients list to make sure that fats in the foods are oils containing primarily unsaturated fatty acids and that solid fats are not one of the first few ingredients…. Examples of solid fats that may be used in the ingredients list are provided in Table A4-1.” But, of course, labels don’t list “solid fats.”  Got it? To find out if foods contain solid fats, see if it says solid fats on the ingredient list, but since labels don’t list “solid fats” you only have to use Table A4-1 which is shown below.  The table, however, has some surprising entries.  The presence of cream and vegetable oils certainly seems a little strange.  Not to worry.  It is easy to understand if you remember that those oils “are high in saturated fat…therefore, for nutritional purposes, these oils are considered solid fats.”  In other words: when is a solid not a solid?  When the USDA says so.  Not to milk this idea too much, we have to figure out how the consumer is to deal with the fact that “fat in fluid milk also is considered to be solid fat; milk fat (butter) is solid at room temperature but is suspended in fluid milk by the process of homogenization (p. 27).”  Apparently, the simple process of distilling the fluid from milk is all that is required for the consumer to find out whether the fat is solid.

For Mimi, this is not a problem because, the fat has been reduced or removed from the milk that she is offered at school and if there is some added sugar  (8 oz. Nesquik® has 29 g.) at least we know that removal of the fat will make the milk more nutrient dense (p. 5).  In a future post, I will explain how removing nutrients can make food more nutrient dense. For the moment, I think understanding that sometimes a liquid is a solid is enough new information.  Now, for the evidence.

“That which is not”

In one of the countries visited in Gulliver’s Travels, the inhabitants referred to “That which is not” because their language did not have a word for lying.  Now the Guidelines prides itself on transparency and evidence-based conclusions so, at the meeting on saturated fat in Detroit, I asked the representative from the USDA where the evidence was on solid fat.  The literature is large but as far as I knew, there were no studies at all that specifically looked at solid fat. He said he would get back to me on that. That was a while ago.

So in the first grade, we learned that solids hold their shape.  My question: are the USDA Dietary Guidelines solid science?

Nutrition & Metabolism Society

Darwin and the USDA Dietary Guidelines: Nutrient Dense or Just Dense.

Posted: March 24, 2011 in The Nutrition Story, USDA Dietary Guidelines
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Charles Darwin, in his autobiography described

“the oddest case which I have known. A gentleman (who, as I afterwards heard, is a good local botanist) wrote to me from the Eastern counties that the seed or beans of the common field-bean had this year everywhere grown on the wrong side of the pod. I wrote back, asking for further information, as I did not understand what was meant; but I did not receive any answer for a very long time. I then saw in two newspapers, one published in Kent and the other in Yorkshire, paragraphs stating that it was a most remarkable fact that ‘the beans this year had all grown on the wrong side.’ So I thought there must be some foundation for so general a statement.”

I had read this passage a while ago but it suddenly popped up in my mind on reading the new USDA Dietary Guidelines. The Guidlines have a strong recommendation to choose “nutrient dense” food.  Since all the food you ingest contains some kind of macronutrient or micronutrient  and having a food dense in one or another would depend on how much you thought was good I could not really understood what was meant.  I pretty much forgot about it until I saw in a video from a TV broadcast making the same recommendation suggesting that it was intelligible to the general population. I still couldn’t understand what could be meant. The guidelines say, on page 3, “Energy-dense forms of foods, especially foods high in SoFAS, should be replaced with nutrient-dense forms of vegetables…” SoFAs stands for “solid fats and added sugars.” It would be hard to find two more nutrient dense but different substances. So at least nutrient dense is not calorie dense but it is not obvious what it is.  Note added in 2013:when I first posted this, I genuinely did not know that nutrient-dense now means micronutrient-dense but I think the critique of the USDA still stands and for a description of currency of an idea that has no real meaning at all, Darwin’s story is still the best. (And, of course, vitamin deficiencies may be the least of our nutritional problems).

Darwin described how he

“went to my gardener, an old Kentish man, and asked him whether he had heard anything about it, and he answered, ‘Oh, no, sir, it must be a mistake, for the beans grow on the wrong side only on leap-year, and this is not leap-year.’ I then asked him how they grew in common years and how on leap-years, but soon found that he knew absolutely nothing of how they grew at any time, but he stuck to his belief. After a time I heard from my first informant, who, with many apologies, said that he should not have written to me had he not heard the statement from several intelligent farmers; but that he had since spoken again to every one of them, and not one knew in the least what he had himself meant. So that here a belief–if indeed a statement with no definite idea attached to it can be called a belief–had spread over almost the whole of England without any vestige of evidence.”

(In case you think that there is any botanical meaning at all: it is not just the leap-year. It is that there is no right or wrong side of the pod at all).  Is it possible that the USDA guidelines, put together by the famous 13 experts have made a recommendation that was completely devoid of meaning?  Page 11 says that “A nutrient-dense total diet has multiple health benefits and can be implemented in various ways” but what is nutrient-dense?  Although never defined, examples are given on pages 19-20.

• Vegetables, fruits, high-fiber whole grains

• Fat-free or low-fat fluid milk and milk products

• Seafood, lean meat and poultry, eggs, soy products, nuts, seeds, and oils

• Very low in solid fats and added sugars (SoFAS)

• Reduced in sodium

The remarkable thing is that in five out of six, the nutrient density is attained by absence of nutrients: fat-free, low-fat, lean, very-low SoFAS, reduced sodium — and is there anything less dense than skim-milk?  Paraphrasing Darwin, then, here is a dietary recommendation –if indeed a statement with no definite idea attached to it can be called a recommendation — will be spread over almost the whole of the country without any vestige of evidence.