Harvard |

Ever wonder why we’ve been misinformed for so long about sugar’s role in weight gain and heart disease? It’s a convoluted story, but part of it involves Harvard professors slanting their research to favor the sugar industry, for a price.

I don’t make this stuff up, folks.

Yesterday, Stat News published an article with this arresting lead:

As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease. Newly unearthed documents reveal what they didn’t say: A sugar industry trade group initiated and paid for the studies, examined drafts, and laid out a clear objective to protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye.

Excerpt from a Q & A with Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard School of Public Health and Amy Myrdal Miller, M.S., R.D. of The Culinary Institute of America.

Do I need to watch my percentage of calories from fat?

Willett: No. When you cook or read nutrition labels, don’t fixate on fat percentages. As long as you use healthy fats, and you keep your portion sizes modest, it doesn’t matter if your dish or meal has 30 percent, 40 percent, or more of its calories from fat. The same is true for your overall diet: Don’t worry about the percentage of calories from fat. Focus on choosing foods with healthy fats.

(Now, if experts could only agree on what is and isn’t a healthy fat! Most everyone agrees that olive oil is healthy, and all agree that trans fats are nothing but bad. However, butter, cream, lard, beef fat, coconut oil, and peanut oil are all hotly debated.)

Article source.

photo credit: USDAgov via photopin cc

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