Lardo di Colonnata - A lard specialty from Tuscany, real Mediterranean food!
Nina Teicholz, investigative journalist and author of the International bestseller
The Big Fat Surprise, wrote an article for the
BMJ (formerly
the British Medical Journal) in September 2015, which makes the case for the inadequacy of the scientific advice that underpins the Dietary Guidelines (Teicholz, 2015). The title of the article was "
The scientific report guiding the U.S. dietary guidelines: is it scientific?" Ian Leslie writing for
The Guardian reports that the response of the nutrition establishment was ferocious: 173 scientists - some of whom were on the advisory panel, and many of whose work had been critiqued in Teicholz's book - signed a letter to the
BMJ, demanding it retract the piece (Leslie, 2016).
Prominent cardiovascular and nutrition scientists from 19 countries called for the retraction. However, to this day, the article remains published. The BMJ has officially announced that it will not retract the peer-reviewed investigation after stating that two independent experts conducted formal post-publication reviews of the article and found no grounds for retraction (Sboros, 2016).
Yet, behind every mainstream medical practice, strict questionable guidelines are still followed faithfully every day. Doctors are still following cholesterol targets that are often unattainable without cholesterol lowering drugs,
but many do try to achieve their targets with extremely low fat diets recommended irresponsibly in dietary guidelines.Unfortunately the rest of the world has followed suit on these dietary changes.
Traditional high fat foods have been given up for the low fat scam. Promoters of the highly touted Mediterranean diet, with its olive oil and 'low animal fat', fail to mention the fact that there are still fat loaded recipes that were passed from generation to generation among the Mediterranean people. Lardo di Colonnata with its cured strips of fatback and herbs and spices; Greek barbecue which often involves an entire lamb roasted on a spit; or the kokoretsi which is made from the internal organs of the lamb - liver, spleen, heart, glands - threaded onto skewers along with the fatty membrane from the lamb intestines,
all of these are foods of the long-lived Mediterranean people. Yet the 'American style Mediterranean Diet'
selectively picks foods from the diet of the Mediterranean people to give the picture they desire. Ironically, many of the Mediterranean people have adopted this Americanized version of the 'Mediterranean Diet'.
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