More data on changing consumption patterns

As a follow-up on a previous post about the changing availability of various foods, where I showed that we'd been following the experts' advice yet getting less healthy, here are some graphs on actual consumption -- not just using availability as a proxy. I've cobbled them together from various editions of The Statistical Abstract of the United States, which has a chapter on food, health, and nutrition.

They only go back to 1985, but the overall pattern is the same -- we've been doing what we were told to do. The higher incidence of heart disease and obesity cannot be blamed on our not eating what the experts bullied us to eat. All the data are per capita consumption, and all units are in pounds. Since the picture is basically the same as before, I don't have anything new to say. The graphs below are to show that consumption data confirm what the availability data suggested.

See Notes at the end for what separate categories are lumped into larger ones, e.g. "animal fats and oils." Click picture to enlarge.



Notes

1. Animal fats / oils includes butter, lard, and tallow. Vegetable fats / oils includes margarine, shortening, and salad dressing.

2. Lower-fat milk includes anything but whole -- 2%, 1%, fat-free, etc.

3. Lunchmeat cheeses include American and Cheddar, while Pizza cheeses include Italian and Mozzarella.

Tracking fat phobia in pop culture

In 1976, a Senate committee lead by George McGovern listened to expert testimony on diet and health, in which some said fat and cholesterol were bad for the heart, while others said that was nonsense. The committee went ahead and told us to stop eating fat and cholesterol, and we did just that, to the detriment of our health. McGovern was just jumping on the bandwagon that had gotten its first oomph from Ancel Keys in the 1950s. But still, it seems like the 1970s were the transition period.

It would be neat to collect examples of just how entrenched this view became in the culture. So in the interest of a social history, let's have a little audience participation and list the big ones that come to mind. Examples could either be fat-phobic or pro-fat -- to see how long the latter held on. The chronology shouldn't surprise us, but it'll still be a good exercise to see how far back we can find examples.

I'll go first. Born in 1980, I don't remember much pop culture before about 1985, except what I saw later. I used to watch re-runs of All in the Family, and I vividly recall an episode where Archie has to go on a diet or suffer health problems -- and of course it's a low-fat diet with vegetables, vegetables, and more vegetables. Googling around, I found out it came in 1976 -- in February, months before the McGovern committee convened, again showing that the latter was merely a high-profile part of something that had already gotten going.

In Fast Times at Ridgemont High -- the best teen movie after Heathers -- Stacy and Mark go out on a date at a German restaurant. The high school girl, who is surely worried about how she looks, orders -- knockwurst! The camera pans to show all the stuff they've eaten by the end, and most of it is dead animals, plus a pastry here or there. Even in 1982, a movie aiming to be as realistic as possible about every little thing teenagers did portrayed a couple stuffing themselves on animal fat and protein. The anti-fat brigade had not decisively won by then.

The Simpsons had at least two episodes that focused on diet. There's the 1992 episode where Homer has a triple bypass surgery and gets guff about cutting back on animal products. Then there's the 1995 episode where Lisa becomes a vegetarian. It's a great portrayal of how holier-than-thou many such people are, as well as the oneupsmanship that drives people toward veganism -- Lisa is ashamed to learn that there are even more hardcore people than vegetarians. To be fair, you see that among the low-carb people too.

However, one of the greatest capsules of common sense to come out of the show is from the 1990 episode where Bart is training to beat Ned Flanders' son at mini-golf. Lisa tries to persuade Marge not to given Bart steak and eggs but complex carbohydrates instead:

Lisa: Oats are what a champion thoroughbred eats before he or she wins the Kentucky Derby.

Homer: Newsflash, Lisa -- Bart is not a horse! Eat your steak, boy.

Last one that I can think of is Mean Girls, which came out in 2004 during the height of the low-carb craze. The main character Cady tries to sabotage the queen bee of her clique, Regina, by fooling her into eating weight-gaining bars. What jargon does Cady use to convince Regina that it'll really help lose weight? Burning carbs! At one point Regina asks anxiously, "is butter a carb?" It even appears that there's an internet game based on this: Carb Invaders. I don't know how many kids have actually played this game, but still.

You try to keep her from eating starchy and sugary foods -- no more than 30 g or it's game over -- but to eat as much protein and fat as she wants, while still getting 2000 calories. It has one of the best game over screens ever, perfectly capturing the catty nature of teenage girl world:

You ate 44
grams of carbs.

Don't worry, just wear loose
clothes, no one will notice.

And for beating the game:

You ate 8
grams of carbs.

Good work. A Mean Girl
must stay fit to maintain her
social dominance.

OK, so what else is there?

Nutritious, energy-giving food on the go

One worry that people may have about cutting the refined carbs out of their diet and eating more animal products is that making meals will take much longer than before. I mean, it's hard to compete with a microwave pizza that's done in three minutes. So here are 2 quick meals, 2 snacks, and 1 drink that will make you sure get enough protein, fat, cholesterol, and vitamins that only animal products provide.

Meal 1

4 slices of pepperoni
2 slices of pastrami
2 slices of liverwurst (or other liver product)
2 eggs
Cream cheese
2 mini bell peppers (or other low-carb acidic vegetable)

Poach the eggs and cut each in half parallel to the ground, making 4 discs. (If you know you won't have much time to cook on a certain day, poach and refrigerate them beforehand.) Cut each pepperoni slice in half to make 8 half-moon shapes, and stack two of these on top of each other, to make 4 stacks. Place one stack on top of each egg disc. Cut each slice of liverwurst in half to make 4, and place one on top of the pepperoni. Then cut the pastrami slices in half to make 4, and place these on top of the liverwurst, making sure to fold it to keep it from spilling far off the side.

Then cut the stem parts off the peppers and slice each in half lengthwise, to make 4 halves. Put a pat of cream cheese on the inner side of each, and use this to glue them on top of the pastrami slices.

This is definitely a rich meal (it will look like a couple snacks, but it will fill you up). However, the acidity and crunch from the peppers balances it out. It tastes somewhat like an omelette, but without the oxidized cholesterol.

Meal 2

4 oz of smoked salmon
2 eggs
1/2 roma tomato
Cream cheese

This is basically lox and cream cheese but substituting eggs for the bagels.

Poach the eggs and cut in half to make 4 discs. Stack 1 oz of salmon on top of each, and stack 1 slice of the tomato on top of the salmon. Place a pat of cream cheese on top.

If getting 1 oz of salmon to stay is iffy, leave some on the side and use the other half of the tomato (sliced) and more cheese to make similar stacks (just with no eggs). Again, it's pretty rich, but the tomato will provide just enough crunch and sweetness.

Snack 1

2 mini bell peppers (on the large size -- as far as mini peppers go)
1 oz pate or liver mousse
1/4-inch thick slice of cheddar cheese (made from raw milk is best)

Cut the stem parts off the peppers and slice in half lengthwise. Cut the pate or mousse into 4 equal portions, and spread them along the inside of each pepper half. Cut the cheese into 4 equal portions, and use the pate or mousse to glue them on top.

Yep, another super-rich taste but with enough crunch and acidity to make it taste not quite so fatty.

Snack 2

Almond butter made only from almonds (i.e., no added sugar, agave syrup, etc.)
Butter from pastured cows

If you eat a ton of this -- and that's not hard to do -- your carb count will reach non-trivial levels, so make sure to eat this only when the rest of your day's food won't be pushing the per-meal limit for carbs.

Open up the block of butter and use a spoon to shave off a thin piece of the butter, then use the spoon to take a small amount of the almond butter -- there should only be 50-100% as much of the almond butter as the cow's butter. Repeat! The texture is best when the almond butter is crunchy and refrigerated.

My housemate looks at me like I'm crazy when I'm spooning a bunch of butter (cut with almond butter) straight into my mouth, but this is the best tasting savory snack I've ever had. You do have to use butter from pastured cows -- it's not that much more expensive -- because the taste is remarkably different from feed-lot butter.

Drink

If you're really in a hurry, just make sure you have some of Turtle Mountain's So Delicious Coconut Milk beverage handy -- unsweetened, of course.

Or else make a cup of tea (caffeinated or not, herbal or not, just unsweetened), and when it's done steeping, mix in a tablespoon or two of coconut oil. It melts at body temperature, so it'll incorporate pretty well into the tea, although there may be some droplets that form on top.

This is a great way to get more anti-microbial lauric acid into your diet, since it's hard to get without coconuts (by far the #1 source of it). And I can't stand the taste of coconuts. The oil tastes pretty mild and is hardly noticeable when mixed in with tea.

None of these takes more than 10 minutes to make, and they will leave you full and energized. They'll also cover most of your vitamin intake for the day. You may need to throw in a handful of almonds or some Atkins ice cream -- AKA, berries drowned in heavy whipping cream -- to cover vitamins E and C, but getting these vitamins rarely takes lots of cooking time. It's A, D, and the B complex that require food that could take a long time to prepare. But by eating cured meats, some of which should always contain liver for vitamin A, you can skip a lot of cooking time when you're in a rush.

Glycation -- how carbs in the diet slacken your skin

Because natural selection did not design us to thrive on carbohydrates, doing so creates myriad problems. The one that most low-carb people focus on is obesity and related symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome. But there are plenty of other reasons to restrict your carb intake. Spreading the word about these other effects is especially important when you're talking to people who clearly don't have a weight control problem.

(And I should know -- at 5'8, I've never weighed more than 140 lbs in my whole life, nor have I ever packed on much body fat at all. I certainly didn't get interested in carb restriction in order to lose weight, but rather to have more even more energy than I normally did.)

Just as no one wants to be fat, no ones wants to age physically. And the clearest sign of aging is not how overweight you are, how tall you are, or even how much hair you have -- it's the quality of your skin. You could take a short, heavyset high school boy and shave him bald, but no one would mistake him for a 30-something. His face would give him away. The same goes for females, of course: even with a pudgy belly and a shaved head, a young girl could not be mistaken for a 30-something woman once you saw the babyfat around her mouth and cheek area and noted the absence of crow's feet wrinkles around the eyes.

There are two proteins that are primarily responsible for giving skin its youthful bounce and elasticity -- collagen and elastin. Through a process called glycation, these proteins can become damaged when a sugar smacks into them. Sometimes a protein and a sugar are designed to fit together, but in this case the process is regulated by an enzyme -- like how an electrician knows which wires are supposed to connect with which doo-hickies, and which tab is supposed to go into which slot. Glycation is when the sugar and protein smack into each other at random, as though you placed all the wires and devices for your entire house into a single box and shook it up -- probably you'd get the wrong wires plugged into a certain device, or the right wire for the device but plugged into the wrong slot. Their function would be compromised, to say the least.

Rather than describe how glycation happens at length, I'll simply direct you to a good and brief review of the process from Skin Inc -- part 1 and part 2 (includes helpful pictures). There are several steps in the process, but what you get in the end are Advanced Glycation End-products -- AGEs (the acronym is not a coincidence).

The total amount of glycation that a protein suffers is just the rate of glycation times the length of time that it's assaulted by sugars. So, proteins with high turnover rates won't hang around long enough to get really screwed up, but one's that have long lives will be hit the hardest. Foremost among them is the collagen in the cardiovascular system. But that also includes the collagen and elastin in your skin. And once they're damaged, they can't perform their function of snapping the skin back into place when you stretch it. The result is wrinkles and slackened skin.

Although you can ingest these freakish protein-sugar combinations, you have to worry most about them forming inside your body. It may sound obvious, but what raises your blood sugar levels? Why, carbohydrates in the diet, especially the ones from sweets and starches that really flood your body with glucose and fructose. The preventative solution is obvious: restrict foods that raise your blood sugar. No Wonder bread, spaghetti, Chinese take-out, french fries, donuts -- or baguettes, penne pasta, basmati rice, artisanal kettle-cooked chips, or almond pastries sweetened with organic free-range agave nectar.

Does that actually work? This doesn't seem to be a very well researched topic, but I did find two studies (one for each extreme) that suggest that it does.

First, there is "Short-Term Low Calorie Diet Intervention Reduces Serum Advanced Glycation End Products in Healthy Overweight or Obese Adults". They split overweight people into a control group and a low-calorie group, and the low-calorie diet resulted in lower concentrations of AGEs. Of course, we know that calories don't have anything to do with it -- did the authors forget what the root word of "glycation" is? -- so let's see what they were fed.

The paper doesn't say exactly what they ate, just that the percent of daily calories that came from protein, fat, and carbohydrates were 47, 7, and 40 (I know, where's the extra 6%?). It's pretty tough to eat more than 30 - 35% of your calories from sheer protein, and 40% energy from carbs is still significantly less than the 45 - 65% that our government recommends. So, this is a lower-carb, low-fat, super-high protein diet. Clearly no one could follow it for long -- they should have reduced protein to about 35, carbs to 5, and fat to 60, and they would've seen an even bigger effect. Still, even this moderate restriction of carbs had an effect.

How do we know it was carb restriction rather than fat restriction that did the trick? The glucose levels of the experimental group dropped by about 5% (other health markers like BMI, blood pressure, etc., also improved by a similar amount). So we know it was the lowered carbs that lowered glucose, and that this lowered the formation of AGEs. That's the most straightforward interpretation based on how AGEs are formed, so that's what we go with.

Second, there is "Plasma levels of advanced glycation end products in healthy, long-term vegetarians and subjects on a western mixed diet". This post is already long enough, so I'll make a new one soon with all the cool charts and tables from this paper, but the up-shot is that all varieties of vegetarians -- semi-vegetarians, ovo-lacto vegetarians, and vegans -- had a higher proportion of the proteins in their blood that were glycated, compared to their omnivorous counterparts.

They were able to rule out a bunch of explanations such as smoking and age, but they couldn't point conclusively to what caused the difference. Glucose levels and overall carb intake were similar. The largest difference was that the vegetarians ate a lot more legumes and pulses, as well as whole grain products and processed cereal products (like muesli). This was especially true for vegans. The authors suggest that there could be some extra factor in these products, or perhaps just the fact that they were more processed. So, even in a dream scenario where you still don't eat more carbs or have higher glucose levels than an omnivore, vegetarians still get zapped with more glycation.

Since, according to the articles from Skin Inc, glycation of collagen and elastin doesn't become obvious until the mid 30s, the massive switch in our diet from fat to carbs may not be so visible among the young. But consider Hollywood celebrities who are in their 30s or beyond -- don't they look much more like mummies these days than they did decades ago? Apparently, there's no effective way to undo the damage done to glycated collagen or elastin, so the present-day luxury of plastic surgery is of no help to them.

On the bright side, since the effects don't immediately set in, if you're well under 35, you can take preventative measures now to make sure its effects will be minimal. And if you've got a son, or any other young dude who you have some influence over, and you want him to still be able to find a wife 10 or 15 years younger when he's 35 years old -- or if you've got a daughter who you want to protect from ever getting divorced -- tell them to throw away their bagels, Ramen noodles, blueberry smoothies from Jamba Juice, and Frappuccino ice cream, and to have some lamb, eggs, and avocados instead. And whatever you do, don't let them experiment with vegetarianism for very long -- persuade them to take up something that will make them more productive, like cocaine.

Did following the experts' diet advice make us any healthier?

To kick things off at my new blog devoted only to health, food, and nutrition, I'm going to show how what we've been eating has dramatically changed in the past 100 years. Most nutrition experts tell us to cut back on red meat and dairy -- and to eat white meat or fish if we must -- while increasing our intake of grains and fruits and vegetables. Since we know that obesity, type II diabetes, and the other symptoms that make up Metabolic Syndrome have been shooting up since roughly the 1970s, we can see whether our changing diet has anything to do with it.

Did we follow the experts' advice? And if so, did it do us any good? Let's see.

The data come from the USDA (see here for the spreadsheets), and they measure the availability of various food types for each year. This isn't the same thing as consumption, but because availability (supply) reflects the demand for it (consumption), when availability goes up or down, we're safe to conclude that consumption is doing so too. The data are all per capita, so we've already accounted for America's changing population size.

We'll start with the demonized foods: red meat (saturated fat! -- actually, most of it is monounsaturated), dairy (more saturated fat! -- which explains why the cheese-eating French have such awful health), and eggs (cholesterol! -- you know, that stuff that gets turned into your pesky sex hormones and vitamin D).




We've been throwing red meat overboard since about 1970. Dairy has been way down since 1940, although there's a moderate rise starting in 1980 (my guess is that it's mostly cheese for pizza). And eggs have plummeted since 1950.

But even the fruits and nuts people will admit that we need some protein -- we should just get it from white meat (chicken breasts with 0 g of fat) or fish (which, unless you eat sardines or salmon, probably won't have any fat either). Have we been choosing these more supposedly healthy forms of protein? You bet. Here are the graphs for poultry and fish:



Poultry has been skyrocketing exponentially since 1940, and fish too has been increasing since 1960.

And what about those cure-all fruits and vegetables? Eat mostly fruits and vegetables, we're told, and you'll be as robust and affable as any PETA member. Unfortunately these data only go back to 1970 instead of 1910, but the trend is still clear -- we've been scarfing down more spinach and blueberries (hopefully not together) than ever before. I've also included graphs for specific foods like the starchy potato vs. the more nutritious dark, leafy green vegetables.





And of course, any healthy diet requires grains -- after all, they form the solid foundation of the Food Pyramid. It's just plain common sense that you can't thrive unless you crunch your way through a sack full of Grape Nuts every morning, isn't it? Here's the graph for grains:


Starting at least in 1910 (and perhaps earlier), we started putting grains to better use -- as bird feed -- but since 1970, we've been steadily reversing that practice. Now when we eat out, it's bread, breadsticks, pasta, rice, noodles, and more bread.

Finally, the one food that everyone agrees is bad for your health -- caloric sweeteners like sugar:


From the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s, we found it necessary to dump more and more sugar on our food -- probably because we'd switched to a tasteless diet of spinach and Special K. Still, for the past 15 years, we've been letting it go (likely as a result of switching to non-caloric sweeteners like Equal). So, we'd misbehaved for awhile, but we've been good -- honest! -- more recently.

To sum up, we've done everything the nutrition experts have told us to do -- and have so for decades. Aside from eating less sugar, all of these supposedly health-promoting changes began no later than 1970, with some beginning as far back as 1940. Surely that's enough time for the benefits to show up in national health statistics, right? Well, let's see what the end results of this gigantic national experiment are.

The experts began telling us what to eat in order to lower rates of heart disease, although once obesity and related metabolic problems became huge, they extended their guidelines to help us get thinner too. Here is a graph showing the incidence of heart disease during the period when all of these dietary changes had begun (from this AHA pdf):


Huh, that's odd -- our hearts seem to stubbornly resist the supposedly heart-healthy food we've been eating. These are total numbers, not per capita rates. Still, the number of people suffering from heart disease doubled from 1970 to 2000, even though the US population was only 1.4 times as big in 2000 (at 282 million) as in 1970 (at 205 million). Therefore, there was a real increase in heart disease rates that cannot be explained simply by a larger population.

Why do we need to look at "hospital discharges with CVD as first listed diagnosis" rather than deaths due to heart disease? Because we could be getting better at saving lives when a person already has heart disease -- in that case, the death statistics will make those sufferers of heart disease invisible. Checking into a hospital due to heart disease sheds better light on the group of people with CVD.

And as if you needed me to tell you what the obesity rates have been like recently, here's a graph showing the prevalence of obesity and overweight:


That's odd -- the lines are pretty flat before the mid-1970s, at least back to 1960 (and possibly before), and they only shoot up sometime in the mid-'70s. Looks like loading up on Total ceral, non-fat salad dressing, and potatoes hasn't done us much good in trimming our waistlines.

So, even though we've been scrupulously following the experts' advice about what to eat -- and those graphs above prove that -- we're more likely to suffer from heart disease, obesity, and other symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome. Does that mean that these so-called experts don't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about? Yes -- that's exactly what it means.

I doubt that eating more spinach has harmed us, obviously. The main culprits are eating more carbohydrates (potatoes, grains, and sweeteners) and eating less of the fatty animals products (red meat, dairy, and eggs). I won't go through the reasons why since, if you're reading a blog called Low Carb Art and Science, I assume you already know why.

But for those of you who, like most of us, weren't aware of how bogus the experts' advice was, here are three links that provide plenty of information in an easily understandable form:

Gary Taubes' lecture at Berkeley, where he reviews the material in his encyclopedic book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Tom Naughton's Fat Head blog, where you can buy the DVD of Fat Head, his hilarious spoof of Supersize Me, which lays out how different types of food promote or discourage obesity, depression, and so on. The movie is currently #1 in Amazon's comedy documentary section. (Imagine that -- a documentary that isn't maudlin or obnoxiously political.)

Michael Eades' blog, where the co-author of excellent Protein Power regularly explains the science behind many health and nutrition concerns that we have, especially when new studies come out.

New low carb blog

Just a place-holder post to make sure everything is working fine.