Oh noes! Trans fats might make you depressed...

o_O

Articles are popping up today about how trans fats cause depression. Now, I'm not saying artificial trans fats are good, quite the opposite. It seems they cause damage on a cellular level as well. But you know what else isn't good? The quality of research that has been put into some of these articles. Like this one:

"Of all these, the participants with a high level of consumption of trans-fats, artificially present in industrial cakes and biscuits and in fast food, and naturally in certain full-fat milk products, "showed an increase in risk of depression of up to 48% compared to those participants who did not consume these,"..."

Where do these people get off? I'd really like to know. I'd like to know how you can have a survey of people and act like it's a clinical trial. I'd like to know how you can have confounding variables out the wazzoo and act like you've controlled for a single variable. I'd also like to know why these people don't understand that CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. It's so simple, and yet soooooo beyond the grasp of your basic nutrition "expert" or "journalist".

I don't need to point out that industrial cakes, biscuits and fast food are very high in carbohydrates. But did they decide that carbohydrates cause depression? No. Of course not.

But the thing that is really wrong with this article, and why I decided to write about it, is that it equates naturally occurring trans fats with the industrially manufactured ones. There are trans fats in nature, but they are not the same in chemical structure as the commercially developed ones. The most common one, Conjugated Linoleic Acid does indeed occur in dairy, eggs and meat. (Of course, those are all bad for you! Run away!) What's ironic, is CLA is known to be an anti-carcinogen. Yeah, how does that grab ya? Certain forms of CLA also reduce inflammation and thereby prevent cardiovascular disease. What was that about not eating eggs, whole milk and meat?

And even Time jumped on the band wagon, and failed to do any research on the difference between artificial and naturally occurring trans fatty acids:

"The results of the study may be especially bad news for Americans. While the average Spaniard gets about 0.4% of his or her calories from trans fats — mostly from natural or whole-food sources like milk, butter, meat and cheese — Americans log an average of 2.5% of total calories from trans fats. Americans not only eat more overall, but also eat worse-quality food, getting many trans fats from sources like processed snack foods and fried or fast food."

What do these "journalists" get paid to do? Copy and paste? It took me five minutes to find out about CLAs, and to realize they're not the same as artificial trans fats. But more than that, I realize that this "study" is flawed, and not even worth considering as evidence of anything, except that out of 12k people, a few got depressed.

Copy and Paste Health Advice

I'm apparently in the wrong industry. I should have been a nutritionist, I could write for a newspaper, and copy and paste articles from the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, etc. I wouldn't even have to think for myself.

Just do a search on Google news on any given day of the week, and I guarantee you will find at least one article (usually more) that have the "typical" dietary advice, that saturated fat is bad for you (they never say why, never cite any studies), that sodium intake is bad for you and if you'll only cut back it will lower your blood pressure (while citing studies that show reducing sodium intake only reduces hypertension by 1-5 mmHg, underwhelming I know), and that cholesterol is bad for you (while recommending you take medicine).

I find it amusing that a lot of articles have started in on denouncing sugar, while at the same time urging you to eat "whole grains." Newsflash: grains turn to sugar upon digestion, whole or not. They just don't get it. Or if they do get it, they're not interested in changing what they're copying and pasting.

But alas, I'd never make a good nutritionist. I'd probably flunk out for citing articles that the schools disagree with, because obviously, nutrition programs are turning out copy and paste robots.

The Misconception of Natural Sweeteners

Lots of things are natural, meaning they occur in nature. Arsenic, cyanide, uranium, deadly nightshade. That doesn't mean you'd want to eat them, or even come into contact with some of them. I don't know how many articles I have read decrying the evils of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and yet saying that regular sugar is fine. Now, I'm not saying that HFCS is the same as sugar, it's not, by a long shot, however, neither of them are good for your health. Other naturally occurring sugars are no better, like honey. Sugar is sugar, and the glucose spikes your blood sugar while the fructose portion damages your liver and raises your triglyceride levels. That includes the fructose in fruit.

We have articles in newspapers like this one, since it's Valentine's day:

"But let's not make fructose the only bad guy here. The real problem is our consumption of all added sugar. Naturally occurring sugars like fructose, found in fruit, and lactose, found in milk, are valuable nutrients."

Overall, this article is better than most, but still has some problems. It fails in that it differentiates the fructose in fruit from the fructose in HFCS. There's not one iota of a difference, with perhaps the exception that if you ate a piece of fruit you might get less than if you ate something laden with HFCS. The problem is, our modern fruit has been bred to be bigger and sweeter. The sweeter it is, the more fructose is in it. Also, the fructose found in sucrose (table sugar) is also the same to your cells.

The problem is, they can't let go of the notion, that "everybody knows it's common knowledge" notion, that fruit is good for you. Five hundred years ago everyone knew the earth was flat too, and the center of the universe to boot. We all know what happened to Galileo when he dared to suggest otherwise.

"Does this research mean that eating fruit will increase your risk of heart disease and diabetes? Absolutely not."

That statement may be blatantly false, considering the study out of New Zealand that I wrote about last week, that I might add no American media picked up (good thing I didn't hold my breath).

Another newspaper article, also acts like natural sweeteners aren't a problem:

"While the massive amount of high-fructose corn syrup consumed by many people isn't a great choice, a more moderate amount of natural sweeteners can be a wonderful complement to a healthy diet."

What exactly is their idea of "moderation"? Eating 100 lbs of sugar a year versus the current 150+? Taubes wrote about this in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and it seems from some reports by doctors who were in Africa and other colonial places a hundred years ago that a sugar intake of approximately 60 lbs was the cut off point of "too much". After consumption rose above that level, and after a time frame of about 20 years consuming such levels, they saw diabetes and metabolic syndrome begin to develop, along with all the other western diseases that go along with them. And really, it might be that a lower consumption just means it takes longer to develop metabolic problems in some people, or maybe even in most people. I doubt seriously the authors of these news articles imagine that we really might need to restrict our sugar intake to a minuscule amount to avoid developing disease.

The first article I cited did have a great line in it:

"If we really looked like what we eat, most Americans would look like kernels of corn."

There's the truth if I ever read it.

Diet Coke causes...

... what? Or another reason why news articles on science in this country are so lackluster.

News organizations are all over the latest finding that diet coke will kill you! I'm not about to say that diet coke is good for you by any stretch of the imagination. However, what I want to know is, how much did the corn industry pay them to write this (from MSNBC):

"The increased likelihood of vascular events remained even after Gardener and her colleagues accounted for risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. Pointing the finger more squarely at diet drinks, the researchers found no increased risk among people who drank regular soda." [emphasis mine]

Regular soda is full of High Fructose Corn Syrup. We all know that sugar causes inflammation, which in turn probably causes most cardiovascular disease.

What I want to know is, why they take a survey of 2500 people as proof of anything. A survey shows nothing. You can't control for variables. In fact, there's no control for variables because it's not a clinical trial. In other words, this isn't science. However, it's touted as being "scientific." Maybe the people who drank diet coke were like I used to be, consuming copious amounts of pastries and candy. The pastries and candy have nothing to do with their consumption of diet coke, but may be the cause of their cardiovascular disease.

The only way to find out if a substance is harmful or not, is to do a double blind clinical trial, where you have everything identical in two groups of people (or lab rats) and assign one group the product they want to test (the variable) and the other a placebo (the control).

At least the LA times isn't on the fear mongering band wagon and pointed out that correlation doesn't equal causation. I think most of these news stories are simply to scare everyone into eating in whatever manner the government wants us to eat.