Junk Food Dummies

Daily Mail. August 14, 2009.

This article had me shaking my head in disbelief. When are we going to change our thinking about fats and carbs?!

Some scientists at Oxford University have fed a junk food diet to rats and they concluded that in just 9 days, a high fat diet damaged the rats' short term memory, made them significantly less alert and significantly decreased their ability to exercise. The scientists are now studying the effects of a short-term high fat diet on humans.

So, what's wrong with this? This is not a control experiment! The junk food fed to the rats included burgers and chips - so the team have not in fact proved anything to do with fat, as the carbs are more likely to have been the cause of any observations made. I have never seen a single study where people eating plain meat/fish/eggs/dairy products perform anything other than very well. I have seen numerous studies where people eating sugar, white flour and refined carbohydrates have carbohydrate induced stupors.

The only way to show if fat is the issue with the rats is to feed them fat and only fat! Exactly the same error occurred with the Ancel Keys "Seven Countries Study" (1956-1970). This is the source of all current views that saturated fat is bad for you and causes high cholesterol, which causes heart disease. I do not believe that there is any evidence for this and nor do many other health researchers. What Keys did was to observe the diets of 7 countries and the fat content in each and conclude that Japan has lower heart disease than America and a lower fat diet, so there is the answer! Japan also consumed (at the time) bugger all sugar and white flour and America consumed loads! What Keys more likely observed, therefore, was an association between a high refined carb diet and heart disease. Even then, an association doesn't mean a causation.

Please scientists - stop having a premise and setting out to prove it and do genuine unbiased experiments and report the results as you find them.