For most of his life, centenarian Fred Kummerow, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois and longtime leader in the fight to ban trans fat, has started each day by eating a fried egg. It is a small detail that reporters tend to choose to highlight, given that it flies in the face of popular nutritional thinking.
"You need some saturated fat, but you don't have to load yourself up," Kummerow has said, adding: "You got to eat a balanced diet."
You are right again, Fred – on both counts.
It is expected that the latest version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, revised every five years and due out soon, will verify Kummerow's position on saturated fat. Whereas the 2010 and 2005 Guidelines stated that total fat should make up no more than 20 to 35 percent of total daily calories, the new guidelines is expected to contain no such restriction, but instead place the emphasis on fat quality rather than total fat. This move away from recommended limits on total fat is viewed as nothing less than a sea change from four decades of nutrition policy.
"I think it is crucial for all government agencies to formally state that there is no upper limit on fat," says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, upon reviewing the report by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.
As I sit here drinking coffee and eating a piece of dark chocolate, it got me thinking. Boy, how recent studies have turned so much traditional thinking about healthy habits on its ear. Take sugar, for example (as in "take it away"). As I reported last week, a new study by the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University estimates that sugary drinks may cause as many as 184,000 deaths worldwide annually. According to another recent study, drinking a 20-ounce sugar-sweetened soda per day may age you as much as smoking.
Now another new study has emerged, this one published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, finding that some sugars could be associated with depressive disorders. The data came from roughly 70,000 women, none of whom suffered from depression at the study's start, who had baseline measurements taken between 1994 and 1998, and then again after a three-year follow-up. Diets of higher added sugar were associated with greater odds of depression, the researchers found. They also found that some aspects of diet had protective effects against developing depression, including fiber, whole grains, whole fruits, vegetables – as well as lactose, a sugar that comes from dairy products and milk. They emphasized that added sugars, not total sugars or total carbohydrates, were what was found to be the culprit when it comes to depression.
With sugar, moderation remains the key, while also avoiding it as an additive, a common occurrence in anything marked "low-fat."
"There has been so much energy on what we eat and on carbohydrates and it's only very recently that there have been studies to say that we have been ignoring timing and timing might be as important," notes Ruth Patterson, professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California, San Diego.
A number of recent studies are suggesting that the key to weight control is not merely a matter of how many calories you eat, but when you eat them – something people have known intuitively for some time.
Researchers are finding that fasting, as well as other strategies such as eating the bulk of your daily calories early in the day, seems to produce better results. The benefit of frontloading calories seems to stem from humans being historically programmed to burn more energy at the beginning of the day. Another study found that avoiding food for 12 or 15 hours a day was associated with less weight gain over time and better control of blood sugar level, potentially reducing diabetes risk. Professor Patterson believes that weight loss or control would improve if people did away with eating between about 8 p.m. and 8 a.m.
Meanwhile, a new study is underway to see if researchers can verify a small study conducted in the 1980s supporting a long-held belief that many smaller meals throughout the day can be more beneficial than three big ones. This earlier study found that men who ate 17 snacks a day had lower levels of cholesterol than those who ate the same diet concentrated into three meals. The jury is still out on this notion. Yet another study found that two large meals a day were better for weight loss than six smaller ones.
Beyond dispute is that meal timing is proving to be much more important than previously believed. Also indisputable is Americans' waistlines have continued to grow over the last 20 years, despite all efforts to reverse this deadly trend. Now, this just in: In a recent U.K. study, only 34 percent of people said they consider themselves to have a healthy diet, 5 percent more than last year.
In spite of all the growing attention paid to the high sugar content in foods and drinks, 56 percent of people who answered the survey said they haven't changed their eating habits. The research also revealed that when consumers want to purchase healthy food, a third of them will look at the fat content, not the type of fat.
Today, globally, nearly 1 in 9 adults has diabetes. It is projected to be the seventh leading cause of death by 2030, according to the World Health Organization. Yet, according to a study, only about 1 in 8people with so-called pre-diabetes, often a precursor to the full-blown disease, know they have a problem. At the same time, a new analysis found the preventable risk factors in the U.S. still account for 50 percent of deaths from cardiovascular disease among adults age 45 to 79. Clearly, getting people the information they desperately need, in a form that causes them to act on it, is among the biggest current health problems that remain to be addressed.
Write to Chuck Norris with your questions about health and fitness. Follow Chuck Norris through his official social media sites, on Twitter @chucknorris and Facebook's "Official Chuck Norris Page." He blogs at ChuckNorrisNews.blogspot.com.