We have large expensive clinical trials with a consistent and reliable outcome; there is no effect of dietary fat on obesity, cardiovascular disease or just about anything else. The unwillingness to face these failures makes this a remarkable phenomenon in the history of medicine – that it persists in the period of sophisticated science and technology makes it nearly unbelievable.
“Unbelievable” is the key word. That a science is incomplete or has flaws is what one expects but that the whole of the establishment opinion on diet-heart is totally meaningless is hard to understand. How could they keep doing the same experiment over and over without success? How could that be? How could they get away with it? Why would they want to get away with it? New trials continue to show nothing. Well, not nothing. They clearly show that low-fat is ineffective for weight loss or just about everything else.
If the diet-cholesterol-heart disease story were as salient and inescapable a risk as they make it out to be, then none of these big studies should fail. Not one. In fact, almost all fail. There has been an increasing admission that high carbohydrate is not a good thing.
In the 20th edition (1985) of Harper’s Illustrated Biochemistry, it was written as follows: It is possible that in humans the frequency of taking meals and the extent to which carbohydrates are converted to fat could have a bearing on disease states such as atherosclerosis, obesity and diabetes mellitus. In the 29th edition, the process of conversion of carbohydrate to fat now has a chapter of its own. The process is known as de novo lipogenesis (DNL), new synthesis of fats, or more precisely de novo fatty acid synthesis. DNL appears to be the explanation of the counter-intuitive result, demonstrated in several studies that high carbohydrate diet leads to increases in saturated fatty acids in the blood (ie. Hypertriglyceridemia).