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Part Eight (sidebar): What If Americans Ate Less Saturated Fat?

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http://nasw.org/mem-maint/awards/01Taubesarticle8.html

 

by Gary Taubes

 

Eat less saturated fat, live longer. For 30 years, this has stood as one

cornerstone of nutritional advice given to Americans (see main text).

But how much longer? Between 1987 and 1992, three independent research

groups used computer models to work out the answer. All three analyses

agreed, but their conclusions have been buried in the literature, rarely

if ever cited.

 

All three models estimated how much longer people might expect to live,

on average, if only 10% of their calories came from saturated fat as

recommended. In the process their total fat intake would drop to the

recommended 30% of calories. All three models assumed that LDL

cholesterol--the " bad cholesterol " --levels would drop accordingly and

that this diet would have no adverse effects, although that was

optimistic at the time and has become considerably more so since then.

All three combined national vital statistics data with cholesterol risk

factor data from the Framingham Heart Study.

 

The first study came out of Harvard Medical School and was published in

the Annals of Internal Medicine in April 1987. Led by William Taylor, it

concluded that individuals with a high risk of heart disease--smokers,

for instance, with high blood pressure--could expect to gain, on

average, one extra year by shunning saturated fat. Healthy nonsmokers,

however, might add 3 days to 3 months. " Although there are undoubtedly

persons who would choose to participate in a lifelong regimen of dietary

change to achieve results of this magnitude, we suspect that some might

not, " wrote Taylor and his colleagues.

 

The following year, the U.S. Surgeon General's Office funded a study at

the University of California, San Francisco, with the expectation that

its results would counterbalance those of the Harvard analysis. Led by

epidemiologist Warren Browner, this study concluded that cutting fat

consumption in America would delay 42,000 deaths each year, but the net

increase in life expectancy would average out to only 3 to 4 months. The

key word was " delay, " for death, like diet, is a trade-off: Everyone has

to die of something. " Deaths are not prevented, they are merely

delayed, " Browner later wrote. " The 'saved' people mainly die of the

same things everyone else dies of; they do so a little later in life. "

To be precise, a woman who might otherwise die at 65 could expect to

live two extra weeks after a lifetime of avoiding saturated fat. If she

lived to be 90, she could expect 10 additional weeks. The third study,

from researchers at McGill University in Montreal, came to virtually

identical conclusions.

 

Browner reported his results to the Surgeon General's Office, then

submitted a paper to The Journal of the American Medical Association

(JAMA). Meanwhile, the Surgeon General's Office--his source of

funding--contacted JAMA and tried to prevent publication, claiming that

the analysis was deeply flawed. JAMA reviewers disagreed and published

his article, entitled " What If Americans Ate Less Fat? " in June 1991. As

for Browner, he was left protecting his work from his own funding

agents. " Shooting the messenger, " he wrote to the Surgeon General's

Office, " or creating a smoke screen--does not change those estimates. "

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