The Buck Stops Here

From Parade magazine this week:

No one recommends starting every day with a doughnut, but it's better to eat a sugary snack than to fast until lunch, says dietitian Karen Ansel, spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. "A doughnut provides enough glucose to switch your body into gear -- at least for an hour or two, before your blood sugar plummets again."

She should be the spokesperson for the American Society for Promoting Diabetes. The advice to eat a doughnut for breakfast is a bad idea on many levels:

1) The body does not need glucose to start the day;

2) Doughnuts are not nutritious in any way (they lack protein and vitamins and good fats);

3) In fact, as highly processed carbohydrates with a high glycemic load, doughnuts are far worse for your heart than meat, eggs, and milk (see also this).

4) Occasional fasting is affirmatively good for you in many ways.

Labels: Nutrition

Both are opposed to the usual advice to avoid dietary fat. Not random experiments, mind you, but still interesting:

Sara Holmberg, Anders Thelin and Eva-Lena Stiernström. Food Choices and Coronary Heart Disease: A Population Based Cohort Study of Rural Swedish Men with 12 Years of Follow-up. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6, 2626-2638.

Nutritional recommendations are frequently provided, but few long term studies on the effect of food choices on heart disease are available. We followed coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality in a cohort of rural men (N = 1,752) participating in a prospective observational study. Dietary choices were assessed at baseline with a 15-item food questionnaire. 138 men were hospitalized or deceased owing to coronary heart disease during the 12 year follow-up. Daily intake of fruit and vegetables was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease when combined with a high dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 0.39, 95% CI 0.21-0.73), but not when combined with a low dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 1.70, 95% CI 0.97-2.98). Choosing wholemeal bread or eating fish at least twice a week showed no association with the outcome.

In other words, eating fruit and vegetables was associated with a 70% higher risk of heart disease if not accompanied by dairy fat.

Leosdottir, Margret; Nilsson, Peter M.; Nilsson, Jan-Åke; Berglund, Göran. Cardiovascular event risk in relation to dietary fat intake in middle-aged individuals: data from the Malmo Diet and Cancer Study. European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention & Rehabilitation, October 2007, 14 no. 5, 701-706.

The hypothesis that diets rich in total and saturated fat and poor in unsaturated fats increase the risk for cardiovascular disease is still vividly debated. The aim of this study was to examine whether total fat, saturated fat, or unsaturated fat intakes are independent risk factors for cardiovascular events in a large population-based cohort.

Methods: 28 098 middle-aged individuals (61% women) participated in the Malmö Diet and Cancer Study between 1991 and 1996. In this analysis, individuals with an earlier history of cardiovascular disease were excluded. With adjustments made for confounding by age and various anthropometric, social, dietary, and life-style factors, hazard ratios (HR) were estimated for individuals categorized by quartiles of fat intake [HR (95% confidence interval, CI), Cox's regression model].

Results: No trend towards higher cardiovascular event risk for women or men with higher total or saturated fat intakes, was observed. Total fat: HR (95% CI) for fourth quartile was 0.98 (0.77-1.25) for women, 1.02 (0.84-1.23) for men; saturated fat: 0.98 (0.71-1.33) for women and 1.05 (0.83-1.34) for men. Inverse associations between unsaturated fat intake and cardiovascular event risk were not observed.

Conclusions: In relation to risks of cardiovascular events, our results do not suggest any benefit from a limited total or saturated fat intake, nor from relatively high intake of unsaturated fat.

Labels: Nutrition