LETTER: Nutrition experts don't always get it right
Over the past four decades, I’ve read or skimmed hundreds of popular nutrition books. I recently stumbled across a 1990 book by Randy L. Wysong. In Chapter 8, with remarkable clarity and brevity, the author explains what causes heart disease.
Google the following: Lipid Nutrition: Understanding fats and oils in nutrition and disease. If you click on “Preview this book” you can read Chapters 8-11 online for free. Note what Wysong says about omega-6 oils and oxidized cholesterol.
Sadly, the scientists who inform U.S. government public-health policy continue to be confused as to what constitutes a safe level of omega-6 polyunsaturated oil intake. For example, in a 2014 article about global consumption of dietary fats the authors said, “Worldwide omega 6 polyunsaturated fat mean intake was 5.9%E (energy consumption) ... Only one of 187 countries (Bulgaria) had intakes at or above the optimal level of 12%E.”
Maryam Farvid of the Harvard group of researchers said in a recent interview, “Our data provide strong support that substituting vegetable oils rich in polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat is beneficial for the prevention of coronary heart disease.”
So how is that working out for Bulgaria? Excerpt from a 2008 research paper: “Cardiovascular risk is high in a large proportion of Bulgarian urban population, especially in men aged over 65. These findings indicate that a comprehensive national strategy and program for management of cardiovascular diseases is urgently needed ... Our results seem very conclusive. A considerably high percentage of the studied population had a high total risk to develop a fatal cardiovascular event in the next 10 years, especially men. This result is consistent with the high cardiovascular disease death rate in the Bulgarian population, although it does not correspond to the relatively low levels of individual risk factors.”
Cardiovascular risk is high, but individual risk factors are low. How do we explain that? Maybe the scientists’ assumptions about “healthy” fat intakes are wrong.
—David Brown, Kalispell