Dietary Guidelines in a Post Truth Society

One of my favorite morning radio guys used the term post truth society recently concerning politicians who repeat fictitious statements until they're accepted as dogma. Thus, Muslims in New Jersey danced on rooftops, according to Donald Trump, despite the fact not one media source has footage of this happening.

And it's why the federal government and registered dietitians advise Americans to limit saturated fat to no more than 10% of one's daily calories, despite the fact there is no settled science to support this.

Because if you repeat something enough times, it becomes true. Even when it's not true.

I wish it didn't matter what the feds and dietitians had to say about healthy diets, but their opinions weigh heavily on our nation's health in myriad ways. The school lunch program, nutrition facts on packaged foods and even physician's medical advice are heavily controlled by what a handful of "experts" deem nutritious every five years.

And because medical professionals are kept hostage by licensing agencies, few dare to challenge the word of dietitians who are typically marionettes of the corporations who indirectly pay their mortgages. Thus, the task of declaring, "The emperor has no clothes," has been largely left to journalists like Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz who, at the risk of mixing kiddie lit metaphors here, persist in exposing the Wizard of Oz as just another Joe Schmo from Kansas.

Even though Americans have gotten sicker and fatter since the first iteration of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1980, the new guidelines released this week are very similar to those released five years ago and five years before that. This, despite many studies clearly showing low-carb high-fat diets have the potential to reverse many chronic illnesses caused by the low-fat high-carbohydrate diets the Dietary Guidelines endorse.

I follow quite a few medical experts who favor low-carb high-fat diets and am heartened by the groundswell movement by people with bona fide credentials to change the status quo. One of the most hopeful signs is an organization started last year called the Nutrition Coalition whose aim is "to strengthen national nutrition policy so that it is founded upon a comprehensive body of conclusive science, and where that science is absent, to encourage additional research."

In other words, to stop telling people how to eat based on sketchy, often biased, research.

One of the leaders of this truth-based nutrition movement, Nina Teicholz (New York Times best selling author of The Big Fat Surprise), is a driving force behind the Nutrition Coalition as is another of my #LCHF heroines, Dr. Sarah Hallberg, who has embarked on a ground breaking research project on reversing type 2 diabetes with her Arnett Health Medical Weight Loss Program patients in Lafayette, Indiana.

Meanwhile, I cling to a shred of hope for the future as I meet more and more ordinary Americans who are discovering via personal bio-hacking that conventional dietary foolishness is not only wrong, it's potentially dangerous. An acquaintance with type 2 diabetes recently shared, for instance, that she follows a low-carb high-fat diet because she discovered that following the American Diabetes Association diet made her sicker and more dependent on diabetes medication.