I don’t agree with that. Most (not all) people I work with are either very competent or competent. Incompetent people are pretty rare in my experience.
If all the people on these guideline committees are incompetent, isn’t that an even bigger scandal?
Well 
I’m not going to argue it.
Everyone’s entitled to their own favourite conspiracy theories
Maybe mine is that incompetence is rampant 
And yes, incompetence is atrocious, but IMO we humans are a pretty f*ed up bunch 
Given the health risk of vegetable and seed-based fats, it’s a “healthier” answer, too, though I’d add “dramatically” before “increased.” My first few months, I was guilty of confusing tallow and commercial mayo, in that they are both “fats.” Now I see a big difference.
Not questioning the soundness of the preconceived is a method of self preservation often not lifted to the level of the conscious mind.
It can really rock a person’s world to seriously consider that so much of what they’ve been taught since a babe is just not true. It can certainly rock a professional person’s world to think that what they were taught as absolute in a place like med school just doesn’t hold up to real scrutiny in the real world.
It is often easier to seek out the studies that support misconceptions and continue on in the comfortable and familiar pathways. After all, that’s the way it’s always been, at least in the mind of this person, which is only a few short years in a very long human history.
My brother from another mother!! Hope you’re coming to Ketofest - gotta shake your hand!!
I like to prod the beast too!! Way more fun that way 
To offer a counterpoint: I’m a pretty smart guy - went to college and everything. Have been obese for 51 of my 54 yrs on this planet (3 yrs in HS), and I didn’t figure this out till 7 months ago either
What’s my excuse? Don’t have one. The CW is everywhere. The earth is KNOWN to be flat. How would one even start to imagine otherwise? Requires some free thinking and a willingness to go way way out there
Not easy. Not commonplace. Won’t change till the big public noise changes. And that won’t change till the government changes, and they won’t till the lobbyists change and they won’t since there is no $$$ in being healthy - only $$$ in sickness…
Conspiracy theory- not quite. Ridiculing Magellan for wanting to sail off the edge of the earth - yeah that’s it. We need a high profile Magellan to come back from the circumnavigation
Nailed it on the head. The US gov will have to do a complete 180, like that’s gonna happen anytime soon! 
We subsidize grain growing. Does anyone see the irony here?
Not irony really. Government (McGovern in this case) is not expected to know all the science behind everything. They listen to the advice given them by the experts funded by govt money or not. They were given bum advice. They acted. Now, they can’t really change till the advice changes. And it won’t
I firmly believe it’s going to take a massive class action suit spearheaded by a lawyer whose diabetic daughter loses an eye and a foot, before getting cured by Keto
That will then have to go up the appellate process maybe all the way to the Supreme Court who will then decree that LCHF can not be suppressed by the TLA orgs (AMA, ADA, CDC, NIH etc) since it is free speech
Then the Keto noise will quickly rise to a cacophony as people will want to fix themselves. There will be about a generation of delay. Then things will change. I figure 2050 at the earliest
Keto destroys diabesity, CVD, Alzheimer’s and maybe Cancer. That’s 95% of our healthcare industry, pharma and doctors, and agriculture industry - big food!
Maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of US GDP. Does anyone really believe we can change that much by turning on a dime? Really?
But the “conventional wisdom” can be changed, and Ancel Keys and the American Heart Association did so. The conventional wisdom in the first half of the 20th century was that the American diet was the best in the world, and up until the invention of Crisco and the ramping up of sugar production in the 1920’s, it was. Today, we would call it a low-carb, high-fat diet.
But Crisco put the AHA on the map in the 1940’s with a massive donation, and the AHA has endorsed Crisco and other seed oils as “heart-healthy” ever since. And Ancel Keys, paid by the sugar industry, managed to drown out all opposition to his diet-heart hypothesis, especially once he got onto the AHA’s nutrition committee, and so the conventional wisdom changed.
Today there are too many entrenched interests making too much money off the new “conventional wisdom” for it to be easily changed back.
Nina Teicholz explains in The Big Fat Surprise how the McGovern staffer who wrote the sub-committee’s report came to rely on Mark Hegsted of the Harvard School of Public Health, who was a supporter of Keys’s diet-heart hypothesis. The staffer hated the meat lobbyists who paraded in and out of McGovern’s office, so he found Hegsted’s vilification of saturated fat a very attractive message. He suspected the experts who testified against the diet-heart hypothesis of being in the pay of the meat industry and ignored the fact that Hegsted’s department of nutrition had been established and funded with money from the sugar industry. And of course we now know from sugar industry documents that the industry was paying nutrition researchers to vilify fat in order to take the heat off sugar.
ETA: I’m finding it rather hard not to see a conspiracy there, even though Teicholz doesn’t think it really was one.
Tangent: I just finished “The Big Fat Surprise.” Our library has it available as an audiobook. I thoroughly relished it. I wrote up my thoughts, here:
The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A long time friend in Houston texted me last night and asked me how I lost 30 lbs over the last 7 months.
I texted her back “Ketogenics!!! Butter in my coffee every morning. Bacon and eggs. Cream cheese snacks. Few carbs.”
She texted me back one word. WOW
Guy who works on the other side of the country (2100 miles or ~3400 km away), doesn’t see me often:
“You lost a lot of weight. How’d you do it?”
Cut back my drinking 5%.
“You’re so full of shit.”
Yeah.
Oh, this, This, THIS!!!
There are not many of us on the planet that have any idea about this stuff (I am guessing about 0.0000001% of the global population: yes, that’s us!). As these issues have such a critical impact on our future health as a species, don’t we have a responsibility to shout this from the rooftops?
Now, where’s my nearest rooftop?
Paul
For me, the conspiracy wasn’t back then, that was just folks doing the best they could with the limited evidence they really had. For me, the real conspiracy is right now. The evidence is there, it is clear. It is being ignored. Why? I think we all know why.
But the cost, the COST! In $$s, but worse, in human life. And it just seems these folks at the top don’t care. I don’t know how they sleep at night.
Same way all of us slept before we discovered keto. In blissful ignorance.
The information is now out there. But it’s hard to turn a supertanker. It’ll take time and maybe a lawsuit
That’s my point. I don’t see how these folks can be ignorant of the biggest RCTs ever done in this sphere and the results of these studies. Of course they know. How could they not know? They are just looking the other way. That’s a conspiracy.
