Nutrition Takes a Wrong Turn
In his book "Triumphs of Experience", George Vaillant writes that "countless studies claim to show that the ratio of high density lipoproteins (HDL's) and low density lipoproteins (LDL's) is an important marker for heart disease."
"We cannot find any evidence for that."
Europe's good Health Secret
Prior to WWII knowledge about how to keep your weight under control was well known across Europe . William Banting got that secret from a French doctor, and in England, wrote a booklet about it in 1863. His "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public", recommended eating red meat, fish and game, and all vegetables except root vegetables. To be avoided were, sugar, sweet drinks, beer, cakes, bread and milk. Banting, himself, had lost 46 pounds in one year.
The best nutritional science in Europe was led by German laboratories. The French, Germans and Italians, all understood the secret. In 1921 insulin was identified as the key hormone driving the disposition of fat in the body. German and Austrian scientific research pointed to hormones as being responsible for stockpiling fat. Even in the USA, in 1905, Dr. Nathaniel Yorke-Davis recommended Banting's low carbohydrate diet to President William Taft, who subsequently lost 70 pounds.
In Europe and the USA, people had eaten red meat, and lots of saturated fat for hundreds of years. Medical records show that people suffered from gout and migraine headaches, but heart disease and cancer were virtually unknown prior to WWI. Charles Dickens reported that in the USA, in 1861, Americans were eating twice as much beef as people in England. Even the poor and slaves could expect to eat fish or meat at every meal. It's estimated that in 1909, the poorest Americans ate 136 pounds of meat a year, and that rich Americans ate more than 200 pounds of meat a year. (Today the average American eats about 100 pounds of meat a year about 60% of that poultry.) The first medical description of a heart attack in the USA was recorded in 1912. Dr Paul Dudley White (later to become well known), as a junior doctor examined 700 male patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital (about 1919) many of them over 60 years of age. He wrote that only four reported any form of chest pain.
Indigenous cultural groups that relied on meat for the staple food in the diet, the Masai, the American Indian (Navajo) and the Inuit, all lived long lives, cancer free, without gall stones, and without heart disease. Diabetes was unknown. Tooth decay was uncommon. Numerous doctors for Europe and the USA, in independent studies, reported their amazement at those findings.
Here is a video (11min) where Dr Stephen Phinney explains how athletes have lost weight and increased their endurance for athletic performance.
Finding the Best Human Diet
Too Many Heart Attacks
After WWII there was concern about the growing number of heart attacks. President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955, and his physician Dr Paul Dudley White used the opportunity to make a recommendation to the American public. People should stop smoking, they should reduce stress, and they should reduce the saturated fat in their diet to reduce the total cholesterol in the blood stream. It turns out that White's recommendation on smoking is the only one that stands the test of time. President Eisenhower followed Dr White's instructions to the letter, he stopped smoking, he was the poster boy for a low cholesterol and low fat diet. Yet he suffered several more heart attacks, and eventually died with one in 1969.
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