OPINION:
The winner of the 1926 Tour de France described his diet for the race as consisting of raw eggs, raw meat and a stick of butter. My, how things have changed (“A spoonful less sugar, tad more fat: US diets still lacking,” Web, Sept. 24). Now the cyclists cannot mount their bikes without a sugary gel, bottles of Gatorade and whatever else the sports-food/-drink industry is pushing, which is definitely not raw meat.
The Tufts University epidemiological study is just more unscientific, food-questionnaire rubbish, the purpose of which is to prop up food-industry investments and dogma. These investments basically involve anything coming from government-subsidized grain.
Tufts is still on the low-fat/high-carbohydrate train, which is purported to be good in some sense. The implication is that saturated fat causes artery damage and thus heart disease. It won’t make it into the headlines or the American Medical Association, but at this point the military is so desperate with a 67 percent overweight and obesity rate that it is actually paying for randomized, controlled trials to figure out what to do. It should be noted that U.S. Army food is dictated by the USDA food guidelines, which is the low-fat approach to nutrition.
Recently, the Army funded a study at Ohio State involving ROTC students which were randomized into two arms; one high-fat (ketogenic) and the other high-carbohydrate, or exactly what Tufts recommends. Compliance was measured by blood tests, done at least daily. As it turns out, the saturated fat in the cells of the keto group were a quarter of that in the high-carb group.
What happened? The keto study arm metabolized the saturated fat, and the high-carb group did not. It ended up building up in the students’ tissues, and thus in their blood streams. That saturated fat came from the carbohydrates via the liver, and that is exactly what Tufts is pushing. Unless the Army or the Defense Department gets serious and junks the Tufts/USDA recommendations, they will continue to get fatter and sicker.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston, Va.
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