Nina Teicholz recent piece on AHA

(Alec) #1

This piece from NinaT just turned up in my inbox, and is worth a read. I just shook my head with woe as I read this… utterly amazing. How they get away with this without appropriate mainstream challenge is astonishing: it shows the weakness and bias of mainstream media.

#2

Thank you for the link. I just wish some people I know would start to understand diet.

(Joey) #3

@Alecmcq Many thanks for sharing this. Nina continues to light a bright torch for us to see things more clearly. :+1:

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #4

Tragic … and from what must be educated people. I can only assume they haven’t put much effort into this

(Joey) #5

Sadly, it’s not about the effort. Follow the money. :roll_eyes:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #6

There are two forces at work. First, the American Heart Association was a small, minor professional organisation for its first few decades, until a large donation from Crisco in 1948 gave them visibility. They have felt beholden to Procter and Gamble ever since.

Second, in the early nineteen-sixties, Ancel Keys got on their nutrition committee, and he bulled through the recommendation for the “prudent diet,” which was to avoid saturated fats and to lower cholesterol by using–you guessed it–seed oils. The high carbohydrate intake was added later, as the dietary guidelines really got going. I don’t know where the “avoid dietary cholesterol” thing came from, because it was Keys himself who showed that cholesterol intake had no effect on cholesterol levels in the blood. (It may have simply been part of promoting Crisco oil, since the high polyunsaturate content of the seed oils was known to lower cholesterol.)

(Alec) #7

So, the problem here is actually that anyone takes any notice whatsoever of what these people say. For 90% of my life I believed that if a Dr said something, he knew what he was talking about. And by extension if an organisation of doctors said something (especially if they were talking science) they knew what they were talking about and they were presenting unsullied truth (or better the scientific facts as best we currently knew them, as “truth” changes all the time).

Final 10% of my life… I don’t trust them at all. Neither individual doctors nor (or perhaps especially) groups of doctors.

So, the problem is ours…. We are believing in these folks, which is a projection of trust that is actually undeserved… and especially so in the case of the AHA. It just annoys the hell out of me that mainstream media consistently report what the AHA (and doctors in general) say is the best and latest knowledge in the field of health. We know this is utter bollox.

(Jane) #8

My former company used to sell raw materials to Proctor & Gamble. My boss called them Proctor & God, they were so demanding to deal with!

(Jane) #9

…… whatever they are told to report and I will leave it at that LOL.

I was looking for a simple explanation of diabetes when my neighbor casually mentioned her T2D was because she “didn’t produce enough insulin”

And came across a medical site that looked promising until I read the statement “diabetes can be caused by a diet high in sugar, carbohydrates and saturated fats”

Ummm…… saturated fats do not belong in that list! Guess I will keep looking for a source. sigh

(Alec) #10

This looks to me to be a legacy of the medical establishment wanting everyone to stop eating saturated fat…. It seems to me that they simply add “saturated fat” to almost any cause list of diseases, whatever it happened to be, and without any actual evidence of causality.

Another very good reason not to trust anything the medical establishment say…. They are not to be trusted.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #11

Around the time I discovered keto, I was watching videos that popped up in my YouTube suggestions list. One talk was by a guy who said that it was the beef his father ate that caused his father’s diabetes. Even at that point, I knew he was wrong. Next!

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #12

If Dr David Unwin and Ken Berry are to be believed, and I do, then Doctors aren’t exactly lying, they are just passing on the lie THEY’VE been told

(Cathy) #13

Doctors as individuals are not to be blamed in my opinion. They are taught very little about nutrition and of course the conventional positions on that subject are just b.s… Doctors are in the unenviable position of having little time to research and rely on the ‘wisdom’ of the current science. Sadly, that’s not very good when it comes to diet/health.

I think it comes down to personal responsibility for ones’ own diet.

There is a very old (now) youtube clip with Tom Naughton talking about how to understand what the science actually is saying and how to be critical of any research. Not that it is all bad but most nutritional science is flawed by confounding factors. This is something that needs to be considered always in my opinion.

(Kirk Wolak) #14

After spending years educating myself, I’ve found a couple simple litmus tests.

  1. If they advertise a lot on some medium. That medium will NEVER uncover the truth!
  2. If the Rockefeller Foundation is involved, or the Rockefellers themselves, beware. (Look at how they FUNDED medical education, and chased out homeopathic and other modalities)
  3. Now, if the Gates Foundation is involved… I run… (RFK Jr writes that Gates comes in and picks up where the Rockefeller Foundation leaves off)
  4. When I hear there are studies on both sides. This is ALMOST ALWAYS funded research to cover up the evidence the rich/powerful don’t want to be out there. Of course, I either review the studies, or find a source I trust like Ivor Cummins to review them…

AHA, ADA, AMA, FDA, CDC… They are all CAPTURED by those that either provide funding, or revolving doors to get what they want.

While the truth is out there. The average consumer will never bump into it. That’s by design.

You only have to control 2 sets of gate keepers. The editors of mass media, and the editors of the prestigious journals. Do that, and you can make any claim you want, and people will end up believing it, because it will be all they hear, and everything else will be tagged, targeted and tortured to the point that people who know better will keep their mouths shut.

Kudos to Nina. This is why I support her, and give to her organization.
I encourage everyone to give A LITTLE. I don’t care if it is $5.00 … (Also, a check is better than a CC charge at small dollars, because of the processing fees. So, I write checks, and I encourage others to do so. Every time you see a great article like this, it’s worth asking “Would I pay $5-$10 to the author to encourage them to keep going… Or as a Thank You?” And then I send it.

(Kirk Wolak) #15

Right On!
My niece is a freshly minted doctor. She means well… But she is indoctrinated.
She cannot see it. She graduated near the very top of her class. She has amazing skills,
and bedside manner. But she “trusts” the long coat doctors, who trust the “published science”,
and what they were taught.

That, BTW, is what makes Dr. Berry’s book so amazing “Lies my Doctor Told me!”
Because it doesn’t blame your current doctor. It exonerates them… UNTIL they read the book.
Because he admits, he told EVERY ONE of those lies, or at least believed them himself.

Now imagine a doctor who sees that book, and DEFIANTLY REFUSES to read it, stating that EVERYTHING they know/do is backed by the best/most recent science. (Only the ignorance of youth could cause that reaction).

But give that book out… Eventually the truth will be known.

(Cathy) #16

I think indoctrination is a bit harsh. Doctors must trust the current science until that science changes which it will. Human nutritional science is the most flawed in my books but doctors are not the researchers or scientists creating it.

I would certainly hope that my surgeon, emergency, etc. doctors trust the science behind their education and do not decide something different. They must trust their training and hopefully keep up with the current literature.

As patients, we can decide what we are willing to believe and do but I can tell you 100%, that I would never doubt or question my anesthesiologist or e.r. doc in a crisis. However, I can and do decide what diet is correct for me. I also trust that the PCP detects warning signals. He/she should be your consultant. You get to decide what you want to do about it.

(Bob M) #17

You know, I went to a doc and he said that I had lost weight…which I had, and he thought it was due to more exercise. While I HAD been exercising a little more, I have exercised about the same, 3-5 days a week, since I was 15 or 16 years old, yet have gained 90+ pounds and lost a lot of that in the same time. Heck, I lost the most weight when going on Atkins and cutting my exercise back.

Doctors simply believe what everyone else does, as they’ve been told the same things we have: exercise causes weight loss; “over eating” causes weight gain; fruits and vegetables are good for us; “red” meat is bad for us; etc.

Like Cathy, I think that doctors in their specialty really are experts. When I had my cataracts replaced, I went to a guy who has done thousands of these. When I had my shoulder operated on, I went to a guy who had done many, many shoulder operations.

Would I take nutrition advice from either of them? No. But I would take their advice on what to do for the conditions I had.

Edit: And this is where the AHA is problematic, because they’re telling people what to eat to allegedly help with heart disease. But we know that is – at best – a tenuous relationship.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #18

Firstly, that assumes that what is believed to be “the science” actually is science. Second, when a hypothesis, tested or not, becomes enshrined as dogma, it is very difficult to see past it.

American researchers who tried to prove or disprove the diet-heart hypothesis by running RCT’s have been told that if they persisted in challenging the standard “science,” their funding would be terminated, and their careers would come to an end. It is also unethical to run such an RCT, since everyone “knows” that giving one of the groups more saturated fat would be “harming” them.

(Bob M) #19

That’s why Atkins had to pay for an RCT, because everyone simply believed at the time that saturated fat kills.

(Cathy) #20

Agree on all points. It is however, not physicians who change the science but the ‘researchers’.