About three years ago, Denise Minger - a statistics-savvy English major in her early 20s - set the nutrition world ablaze with her careful, methodical parsing of the data behind The China Study. As your probably know, The China Study is that "authoritative" tome that vegans and vegetarians carry around as an instant comeback to any omnivore who dares assert the healthfulness of consuming things with faces. I was very impressed with her ability to take otherwise overwhelming data sets and pull out conclusions that were equally - if not more - valid than what the research scientists were culling from their own studies. Her China Study takedown was the capper. We met for lunch and I pitched her this idea of a book that would inform and educate the general public as to how we have been misled by the "authorities" (public policy makers and researchers) and which would deconstruct the precise history and point out the failed logic, so that anyone could see what a disaster the pyramid was. I wanted it to appeal to everyone - not just Primal/Paleo - as an empowering tool. Death by Food Pyramid is the long-awaited result, and it more than succeeds in achieving its goals.
On these very pages, you've seen her dissect the flawed science pointing the finger at red meat's homicidal tendencies and a low-carb diet's predisposition to give you heart attacks. You've marveled at her witty deconstruction of the purportedly inevitable conclusions to a high-fat diet - type 2 diabetes and breast cancer - as well as the claimed life-extending effects of whole grains. And when you worried whether fish oil would give you prostate cancer, Denise was there to quell your concern. Now, with this book, she sets her sight on the disastrous, farcical USDA Food Pyramid, exposing the twisted liaisons between government and industry that enabled it and dismantling the shoddy science and erroneous conclusions supporting it.
Ultimately, Death by Food Pyramid is about empowering you, the consumer, the eater of food, the arbiter of what goes in your mouth, to make the right choices and bypass the middlemen when it comes to interpreting science. That's what Denise has been doing throughout her short but eventful career, and now she's giving you guys - the readers - the keys to the kingdom.
Of course, empowerment doesn't come easy. It's not instantaneous. Troubling emotions will arise as you read. You'll feel shock - at what passes for evidence-based nutritional guidelines. You'll get angry - at the entrenched special interests shaping government policy and deciding what humans should be eating. You'll be sad - when you realize how far back the experts have set us. You'll be confused - as to how we could have gotten things so terribly wrong even with all the evidence standing right in front of us, waving its arms frantically, and jumping up and down. But you'll also be informed. This stuff stinks, and it shouldn't be like this, but ignoring it won't make it go away or render it impotent. You have to face it. Luckily, you'll come away with the ability to spot the inconsistencies, the bad science, the misleading interpretations that fool so many people (citizens, politicians, doctors, and researchers alike).
Who This Book Is For
Who's this book for? Anyone currently relying on exogenous sources of nutrients for sustenance - whether you're in the United States, subject to the Food Pyramid and its related offshoots, or living abroad and bearing the brunt of similar policies. Tragically, the US-borne "fat bad, meat bad-ish, animal fat lethal, sugar mostly-harmless, grains good" message has disseminated globally. No one is totally free from it, and it's important to know how it started, and what we can do to reverse its damage and take control of our health.
What You'll Learn from This Book
- How our current nutritional guidelines evolved and entered the realm of accepted truths
- How the worst kind of collusion between government and industry sent us down the low-fat, Frankenfood-laden path to obesity
- How to read and parse a scientific study, think like a scientist, and sniff out bad science
- How to decode confusing science jargon and understand studies relevant to your health
- How to determine whom and what to trust for health information
- How to spot a charlatan and run for the hills away from poor nutritional advice
- Why the most confident and self-promoting "health experts" are often the least competent
- How "artery-clogging" became forever wedded to "saturated fat" - and whether that marriage was truly legitimate
- Why cholesterol, both in food and in your blood, became the bad guy in the flawed "lipid hypothesis" heart disease saga
- The limits - and strengths - of epidemiology
- How to discern between causation and correlation (and why the latter isn't always totally useless)
- Why nearly everyone, including those in the low-carb and Primal/Paleo communities, misunderstands the truth about researcher Ancel Keys
- What the media will never tell you about the "real" Mediterranean diet
- How the rise of vegetable oil killed lard and coconut oil (and is killing us!)
- How Crisco captured America's heart (in an embrace tight enough to impair the heart's pumping)
- How 20 years of Big Agra industry interference prevented the release of research condemning trans-fats
- How the much-ballyhooed controlled trials appearing to show the heart health benefits of vegetable oils over animal fats are deeply flawed and inaccurate
- How the way we treat, cook, and select our meat may not be doing us any favors - even if we're Primal
- How to minimize the formation of carcinogens when cooking meat
- Vegetarianism's long and fascinating history in America, rooted in one woman's brain trauma and one man's quest to kill the nation's libidos
- How vegetarian and vegan diets may actually be healthy despite - not because of - their avoidance of animal foods
- Why some people do better on high-starch diets than others - and why you can blame your parents for it
- How to get the best of both plant-based and omnivorous diets
- Where seemingly disparate dietary paradigms intersect, and what we can glean from their commonalities
- The big takeaways from the work of Weston A. Price, particularly the diversity of diets that can sustain human health
- How to transcend conventional (and not so conventional) nutritional advice to find a style of eating that works for you and your body
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