A real scare, and a dietary scare within

An article in the newspaper today reports on a minor school bus accident where luckily all the children were unharmed. However, my nutrition awareness caused me to trip over this:

"Our staff got the children off the bus, stopped traffic and took them into the school and gave them cookies and juice," said Shawn O'Donnell, head of the school.

The bus driver was quite shaken up and worried about the children's welfare, O'Donnell said.

The accident aside, I would also worry about my child's welfare if strangers were feeding them "cookies and juice"! Once again I'm reminded that such unhealthy choices are deeply ingrained as comfort foods in our culture. As long as kids grow up thinking these things are normal, I fear that we'll never get a handle on obesity and diabetes.

Fat gets the blame again, part II

Two recent articles once again the reveal the bias toward dietary fat. In a Globe and Mail article, I learned something that surprised me:

India has the world's biggest sweet tooth. It consumes more sugar than any other country on the planet thanks to a healthy appetite for sweets, a widespread use of sugar in mainstay dishes and a taste for cavity-inducing chai (tea).

(I thought perhaps the U.S. was a larger consumer of sugar, but according to the Sugar Association Inc., sugar has been mostly replaced by HFCS, so one "can't blame sugar for obesity". That's an astonishing conclusion, since the two products are chemically similar! This is like a tobacco company saying, "Don't blame us for lung cancer, our competition has been outselling us by a wide margin!")

But back to India, where we learn from a report from the BBC that diabetes rates are out of control. Do you wonder what might be causing it?

Part of the blame falls on the adoption of a more Western lifestyle, involving fatty food and too little exercise.

That's right, diabetes, a disease of glucose (blood sugar) metabolism, is caused in part by dietary fat intake! Once again the evidence is right in front of their eyes and they can't make the connection.

Fat gets the blame again

There's a new study being thrown around in the media blaming "fatty diets" for forming addictive behaviours in the brain's (actually rat brains) reward system. Here's the link to Nature Neuroscience.

So here's the diet the rats got addicted to: "The cafeteria diet consisted of bacon, sausage, cheesecake, pound cake, frosting and chocolate..."

This is also a very high sugar diet! Again fat gets the blame and sugar gets a pass.

It's known that low-carbohydrate/high-fat diets work well for weight loss -- even when unrestricted in calories. The mainstream explanation for this is that the diets are so restrictive in food choices that people voluntarily eat less because they get bored with the food, and create a caloric deficit.

So why is a fatty diet so boring in one case (bacon!) and addictive (cheesecake!) in another?