Low Fat is Junk Science

There's a growing body of evidence, that the dietary guidelines provided by the American Heart Association were based upon flawed studies, and that the recommendations that dietary intake should be low in saturated fat and high in carbohydrates, are actually contributing to increased incidence of CardioVascular Disease (CVD) and Type 2 diabetes. Read "Junk Science" and "The Questionable Link" and "Carbs Against Cardio" , all published last month.

One consequence is that in cutting back on fats, we are now eating a lot more carbohydrates—at least 25% more since the early 1970s. Consumption of saturated fat, meanwhile, has dropped by 11%, according to the best available government data. Translation: Instead of meat, eggs and cheese, we're eating more pasta, grains, fruit and starchy vegetables such as potatoes. Even seemingly healthy low-fat foods, such as yogurt, are stealth carb-delivery systems, since removing the fat often requires the addition of fillers to make up for lost texture—and these are usually carbohydrate-based.
The problem is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically efficient at storing fat. Meanwhile, fructose, the main sugar in fruit, causes the liver to generate triglycerides and other lipids in the blood that are altogether bad news. Excessive carbohydrates lead not only to obesity but also, over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart disease.
The real surprise is that, according to the best science to date, people put themselves at higher risk for these conditions no matter what kind of carbohydrates they eat. Yes, even unrefined carbs. Too much whole-grain oatmeal for breakfast and whole-grain pasta for dinner, with fruit snacks in between, add up to a less healthy diet than one of eggs and bacon, followed by fish. The reality is that fat doesn't make you fat or diabetic. Scientific investigations going back to the 1950s suggest that actually, carbs do.
Sticking to these guidelines has meant ignoring growing evidence that women on diets low in saturated fat actually increase their risk of having a heart attack. The "good" HDL cholesterol drops precipitously for women on this diet (it drops for men too, but less so). The sad irony is that women have been especially rigorous about ramping up on their fruits, vegetables and grains, but they now suffer from higher obesity rates than men, and their death rates from heart disease have reached parity.

Stampfer’s findings do not merely suggest that saturated fats are not so bad; they indicate that carbohydrates could be worse. A 1997 study he co-authored in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated 65,000 women and found that the quintile of women who ate the most easily digestible and readily absorbed carbohydrates—that is, those with the highest glycemic index—were 47 percent more likely to acquire type 2 diabetes than those in the quintile with the lowest average glycemic-index score. (The amount of fat the women ate did not affect diabetes risk.) And a 2007 Dutch study of 15,000 women published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that women who were overweight and in the quartile that consumed meals with the highest average glycemic load, a metric that incorporates portion size, were 79 percent more likely to develop coronary vascular disease than overweight women in the lowest quartile. These trends may be explained in part by the yo-yo effects that high glycemic-index carbohydrates have on blood glucose, which can stimulate fat production and inflammation, increase overall caloric intake and lower insulin sensitivity, says David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital Boston

Being curious about this myself, I decided to take a look at the dietary habits as compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for all Countries, and then to tie that back by country to statistics on Life Expectancy and rates of CVD and Diabetes Deaths. I looked firstly at % of Total Calories Consumed as Fats and then compared that data to Life Expectancy at Birth and generated the following chart:

Sure enough, there's a trend that would indicate that 25 or 30% calories from fat is about the minimum, and the correlation gets stronger above that level.  There's no question that some countries suffer from lower life expectancies due to the prevalence of other diseases and the quality of medical care, so I looked at the same % of Total Calories Consumed as Fats and compared that to rates of CVD and Diabetes Deaths and the correlation held true.

Again the trend shows that higher percentages of calories from fat corresponds to lowere rates of CVD and Diabetes Deaths. 

But what about carbs? Might they be bad for health when consumed in excess?

I looked at the same two metrics for carbohydrates, comparing the % Dietary Calories Consumed as Carbohydrates vs both Life Expectancy and CVD and Diabetes Mortality Rates.

So the data does show some pretty clear trends that higher Carbohydrate Consumption as a Percent of Total Calories, correlates pretty well with Lower Life Expectancy and Higher Rates of CVD and Diabetes Deaths.

If we were to pin point the one country with the highest Life Expectancy, it would be Japan, with an average Life Expectancy of 82.25 yrs. Japan also has the lowest Rate of Deaths fron CVD and Diabetes. their diets are 58% Carbs, 13% Protein and 29% Fat on average. They average 2800 Calories per day. The okinawans are considered to be the society in Japan with the highest Life Expectancy. They practice a form of calorie restriction called Hara Hachi bu, or "Belly 80% Full". Okinawans consume 1800 to 1900 calories per day, have an average BMI of 18-22, and have the highest number of centenarians at 50 per 100,000 people.