Flaxseed and Omega 3's: Why You're Being Misled

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you probably realize that misleading marketing claims really steam my clams. I just wish we could go to the grocery store, look at a food item, and see the real truth right there on the package, without any of the confusing health claims and advertising. You'd have to have a degree in nutrition just to understand them ha! Which is why I'm writing this article.

There seems to be some confusion about flaxseeds. It's become sort of "cool" to put flaxseeds in everything lately, from cookies, to breads, to granola, to cereal, to whatever. And it seems that taking flaxseed oil as a supplement is in style too. Why? Well, they're a great source of omega 3 fatty acids!!

Okay, technically true. But this doesn't tell the whole story.

Why Your Growing Child Needs to Eat More Fat

The low-fat craze of the 90's just won't die.  I thought we were past low-fat at this point, yet every time I go to the grocery store I'm still bombarded with the fat-free message.  It's worse at Whole Foods, my place of employment. We even have a whole line of "healthy" fat-free salad dressings at our salad bar. And in my current school lunch rotation (part of the joyful road to becoming an RD), fat is being pulled from the menu like never before in favor of whole grains, vegetables, and skim milk.  New York City schools have gone as far to ban butter (!?!?). For the average consumer, the message is loud and clear: fat is bad, mmmkay? We've gotta eat more vegetables! Eat your broccoli, eat your salad! Throw out the butter and oil! Fat's killing the kids!

But there's a problem with that. A big one. Of course vegetables are full of nutrients, but eating them without fat renders their fat-soluble vitamins (mainly vitamin A) useless. And you do NOT want that, especially if you're a little cherub in the 1st grade. Read on now, ya hear?

Nutritionism: Food is More Than the Sum of its Nutrients

In a nutshell, "nutritionism" is the idea that the healthfulness of a food is based on the sum of the nutrients it contains.  I learned about this concept from Michael Pollan, who you may have heard of... he wrote "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food", both phenomenal books that I highly recommend.  Pollan makes the argument that this is a reductionist philosophy that assumes we know more about the composition of foods and the inner workings of the human body than we really do.  I couldn't agree more.

Take the carrot, for example... we all know carrots are good for us.  You've probably heard that they're high in beta carotene.  Well, when researchers have taken beta carotene out of the carrot and given it to people in pill form, it turns out it doesn't do jack shit.  Is beta carotene useless?  Or is it just useless outside the context of the food it comes from? Context matters.  We're not as smart as we think we are, and we don't have it all figured out.  Studying individual nutrients outside the context of a real food tells us very little about what we should eat, and sometimes it just makes things more confusing.  We don't eat nutrients, we eat food.

If we want to learn how eating a carrot affects our health, then we need to study carrots.  Yet, as obvious as that may sound, we don't often study nutrition in this way.  We study the nutrients on their own, and then decide whether a food is good or bad based on which nutrients it contains.  There are plenty of examples where this paradigm has led us astray... here are just a few.

New Study: Replacing Animal Fat with Vegetable Oil = Death

Ahhh it was a good day today when I read this article... "Study raises questions about dietary fats and heart disease guidance".  Here's the scoop... researchers from the United States and Australia have recovered missing data from an old study from the 1970s.  The study, known as the Sydney Diet Heart Study, was a randomized controlled trial in which the participants were told to replace the saturated fats in their diets with polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oil.  The 458 subjects were all men between ages 30-59 who had recently had a coronary event, defined as either a heart attack or angina (1). 

Why was this data missing?  Who knows.  I can't find a good answer.  But had these results been available in the mid 1970s as they should have been, it may have changed the course of the dietary guidelines on fat intake.

Okay so we had two groups, both groups are coming off of either a heart attack or angina.  Let me break it down right quick...

Group 1:  Control group

• Given no dietary advice at all

Group 2:  Intervention group, given the following instructions...

• Reduce dietary saturated fat (animal fats) to under 10% of calories
• Reduce dietary cholesterol to less than 300 mg/day
• Increase polyunsaturated fats (from safflower oil) to 15% of calories

Carbs Cause Cancer, Not Fat

If you're a human being, and you are, more than likely you've been affected by cancer in some way.  Whether it's a close relative, or a friend, or someone more distant, we've all dealt with it.  I've been one of the lucky ones, though.  I only had my first encounter with the deadly disease a few months ago, when my good friend Shawn's mother passed away after a battle with breast cancer.  She was a wonderful woman, and it certainly was, and continues to be, a difficult time for all involved.

Unfortunately, nobody truly understands what causes cancer to develop.  Sure there are some things we know can cause cancer, like excessive sun exposure.  But the truth is there are more unknowns that knowns.  Take diet for example.  It seems intuitive that cancer would be linked to what we eat, and no doubt it is.  But what foods actually cause cancer?  Which foods protect against it?  And how would you even go about studying something like this scientifically, when the disease takes a lifetime to develop?

Well there seems to be have been a breakthrough, according to this recent video presentation by Craig Thompson, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.  And I quote...

"If you overfeed somebody with fat, you don't increase their cancer risk at all.  You overfeed somebody with carbohydrates, and you dramatically increase their cancer rate.  And protein is halfway in between."



Do a double take if you need it.  Queue up the video at about 27:10 for the real meat and potatoes.  And I repeat...  Overeating fat does not increase your risk for cancer, but overeating on carbohydrates DRAMATICALLY increases your risk for cancer.  And I'd like to reiterate, this is not some bozo on the internet saying this... this is the president and CEO of the #2 ranked cancer hospital in the country.  This is mainstream news.  This is real.

Now.  Here are my points, displayed in an organized fashion.

5 Misleading Health Claims

The grocery store is a dangerous place.  It's a constant battle between you and the the big food companies, constantly throwing their health claims at you, hoping to reel you in like a Largemouth Bass.  The truth is, there's very little truth to what they say.  Here are 5 of the most common misleading claims...


1.  "0 Grams Trans Fat"
A few years back, the FDA decided to crack down on the amount of trans fat in the food supply, since it's just about the worst thing you can ever put in your body.  Trans fat, for those of you who don't know, is created by the chemical process of hydrogenation, which turns liquid oils into solid fats (think vegetable oil into Crisco).  It was (and still is, to some extent) common in a lot of processed foods, especially baked goods.

Recently, the FDA added trans fat to the nutrition label, so that consumers could easily see if a product contained trans fat.  Unfortunately, they also created the term "0 grams trans fat", in which "Zero" doesn't mean zero at all, and instead means "less than 0.5 grams per serving".  So if you were a food manufacturer, what would you do??  Obviously reduce the serving size until the amount of trans fat per serving drops below 0.5 grams.  Nice little trick!  In many cases though, the regulation has forced manufacturers to replace hydrogenated oils with other fats or other ingredients.  Probably a good thing.

But still, zero doesn't mean zero.  If you see "0 grams trans fat" on the label, there's a good chance that product actually does contain trans fat (ironic isn't it?)  Check the ingredient list.  If you see "hydrogenated oil" anywhere in that list, you're eating trans fat.  Put it back on the shelf.

Everything You Need to Know About Cholesterol, LDL, and Heart Disease

Ah, back to cholesterol.  I know I've written about cholesterol a lot in the past, but this one is a game changer.  This information blows the doors off the current thinking in the cholesterol-heart-disease world, and it'll change the way you think about cholesterol.  (Credit goes to Dr. Peter Attia, whose presentation at AHS 2012 just blew my mind.  His 10-part series The Straight Dope on Cholesterol is here, and the shortened version on Mark's Daily Apple is here and here.)  What if I told you that the standard cholesterol test your doctor orders for you is useless? And what if I said it's not cholesterol that's important for heart disease risk, it's the LDL particle itself?

Okay, now you're probably thinking Hey Burn!  LDL is cholesterol, it's the bad cholesterol!  Ugh.  Before I go any further, we need to go over some basics.  Cholesterol is cholesterol.  There is no "good" and "bad".  Cholesterol is only one thing, and it's vitally important to every cell in your body.  LDL and HDL are something different.  They're not cholesterol at all, rather they are the molecules that carry cholesterol (and other fats) throughout the body to places where it is needed.  Cholesterol can't just float around the blood by itself; it needs a carrier.  Just imagine LDL as the "boat", and think of cholesterol as the "cargo".  Here's a nice little diagram of an LDL particle.  This little guy will be the subject of today's post.

The LDL particle, chock full of cholesterol.

You can see here that the LDL particle is full of cholesterol.  LDL particles can vary in how much cholesterol they hold, and their size is proportional in this way.  Small ones hold smaller amounts of cholesterol, while larger ones hold more cholesterol.

Bacon Ice Cream, Counting Fat, and Shut the F Up

A couple of things have been irritating me on this Thursday morning.  First, the clouds.  Today was supposed to be sunny, at least according to my iPhone.  I was planning on spending the morning outside and soaking up some vitamin D.  Thank you iPhone for lying to me, and thank you clouds for being sons of bitches.  Secondly though, is Burger King's new Bacon Ice Cream Thingy.  Who in holy hell came up with this thing?  Bacon on ice cream?  That's retarded.  But do you want to know what's even more retarded?  The author of that article's concern about the fat content of the Bacon Ice Cream Thingy.  Oh my god, 510 calories and 18 grams of fat!  That's even more than a bacon cheeseburger! (Her claim, not mine, that's a little hard to believe honestly.)  Sure, she mentions the 61 grams of sugar, but she stressed the fat.  They always stress over the fat.  And I'm sick and tired of it.  There's no reason for it.  Just shut the F up. 

You see, everyone's got this phobia of fat making them fat.  They think that if they eat the fat on that pork chop, or put butter on their potato, or drink whole milk, that they'll get fat.  That's not how it works.  Fat in the diet doesn't make you fat any more than other calories do.  In fact, natural fats are very satiating, and would probably even help you eat less and lose a couple pounds.  There are a lot of reasons someone might gain weight.  Eating fat isn't one of them.  Neither is eating carbohydrates or protein.  Eating too many total calories on the other hand... will get you nice and fat.  Focusing on one particular nutrient completely misses the bigger point.  What makes us fat is not carbs or fat per se...  but if I had to design a food to make you fat, I would design exactly this Bacon Ice Cream Thingy.  Are you confused yet?  I think I may have confused myself there.  The Bacon Ice Cream Thingy WILL make you fat.  But it's not because it has 18 grams of fat, or because it has 61 grams of sugar.  It's because it's loaded up with so much hyperpalatable goodness that you'll eat the whole frickin' thing even if you're not hungry.

The Ridiculousness of the Diabetes Diet

Well, now that the spring semester at UConn is in full swing, and I'm frequently busy spreading the word that skim milk is the dietary solution to everything, I haven't had time to blog much.  And I definitely haven't had time to put together any type of science-intensive post.  But I've had this one on the brain for a while now, and I think it's time to put it to paper.  Or virtual paper.  And this one really fires me up.  Begin rant...

So last semester in my Medical Nutrition Therapy class, we discussed type 2 diabetes extensively.  That's the type that's acquired later in life because of a shitty diet, not the type that you get when you're younger and require insulin injections.  Type 2 diabetes used to be called "Adult-Onset Diabetes", until it started showing up in younger people, and that name sort of went out the window.  I'd rather they kept the name though; it'd be pretty embarrassing to be a 12-year-old and have adult-onset diabetes wouldn't it?  Maybe that would have helped stress to those kids just how god-awful it is that they have diabetes at such a young age.  But that's neither here nor there.

What I want to talk about today is the standard diabetes diet the conventional wisdom folks recommend.  In case you didn't know, diabetes is a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism.  When you're diabetic, your body stops responding to insulin, the hormone that normally gets those carbs into your cells so they can be used for energy.  Well diabetics can't process those carbs so well.  As a result, the glucose just hangs out in the bloodstream, and high blood glucose is extremely toxic.  Given the fact that diabetics have to deal with this carbohydrate metabolism issue, it would seem to follow that they should reduce their carbohydrate consumption, right?  Nope.  Not according to the conventional wisdom.  In fact, the standard diabetes diet doesn't reduce carb consumption at all, and in some cases it may even suggest more carbs; they simply recommend that you spread your carb intake evenly throughout the day.  Doesn't make any sense does it??  But why on earth would any sane person not recommend a low-carb diet for diabetics?  Answer:  because if you eat fewer carbs, you have to eat more fat and protein.  And increasing your fat would give you heart disease, something that diabetics are at much higher risk for.

The Diabetes Diet:  eat more bread

Dietary Fat and Breast Cancer, Part 2

Finally, on to part 2.  Let's talk about a study I found through marksdailyapple.com showing that a high fat and cholesterol diet causes faster growth and proliferation of tumors than a "normal" diet.  The study was done in rats; the control group of rats received rat chow 5010, while the other group received a higher fat "Western Diet 57BD."  Looking at the macronutrient breakdown, there appears to be nothing wrong with the diets.  The rat chow diet consisted of 29% protein, 13% fat, and 58% carbohydrates, while the Western diet contained 15% protein, 41% fat, and 44% carbohydrates.  You can read the whole study and find nothing about the actual ingredients in the diets, but a quick Google search will yield you the spec sheets.  Here are the contents of the control group's rat chow:

• Ground corn
• Dehulled soybean meal
• Wheat middlings
• Fish meal
• Ground wheat
• Wheat germ
• Brewers dried yeast
• Ground oats
• Dehydrated alfalfa meal
• Porcine animal fat
• Ground soybean hulls
• Soybean oil
• Dried beet pulp
• Added vitamins and minerals

And for the Western diet...

• Sucrose (31% by weight)
• Milk fat (21%)
• Casein (19 %)
• Maltodextrin (10%)
• Powdered Cellulose (5%)
• Dextrin (5%)
• Added vitamins and minerals

Problem #1 - The Western diet group didn't even receive real food... these are chemically isolated compounds that have been removed from their real-world context.
Problem #2 - Their diet consisted of 31% sugar????  That's their main carbohydrate source.  Sugar.  There's a lot of research showing a link between insulin and cancer growth, and sugar requires a hefty insulin release. Here, here, and here.  And this study, which studied mammary tumor growth, showed that mice fed sucrose had 100% tumor incidence, meaning every single mouse developed breast cancer.
Problem #3 - Casein.  Casein, which is a protein derived from milk, was used in rat studies conducted by T. Colin Campbell, who wrote The China Study.  He found that a diet of just 5% casein promotes tumor growth in rats.  The diet in this experiment has 19% casein.

So how can the researchers claim that a high-fat and cholesterol diet proliferates cancer cell growth?  If they really wanted to test their hypothesis, they would have done their best to keep as many variables as possible unchanged between the two groups.  They wouldn't have fed the experimental group a laundry list of chemically isolated compounds.  So in my mind we have two possible reasons why the researchers would have used a diet full of known cancer-promoting non-food items.  One, they're stupid.  And I refuse to believe they're stupid, because they wouldn't be where they are today without knowing the basics of science.  The second option, which I like, is that the researchers' goal from the beginning was to confirm their hypothesis.  So they fed the rats a diet which, while higher in fat, was also higher in substances which would be sure to cause tumor growth.  I don't know why they would have done this, perhaps there was some influence from the drug or food industries.  Maybe the researchers had giant egos and were so convinced high-fat diets promoted cancer that they didn't want to risk being wrong.  The only thing I know for sure is that this is really bad science.

Dietary Fat and Breast Cancer, Part 1

Ah, dietary fat.  So delicious, yet so frowned upon.  If you look hard enough, you can find dietary fat associated with just about anything out there, from heart disease, to diabetes, to colon cancer, even in-grown toenails (not really).  But the breast cancer link is something I've heard about for years in the media, and from talking to people who watch too much local news.  A few weeks ago, in one of my classes, my professor showed us a graph of the relationship between dietary fat intake and prevalence of breast cancer by country. Here it is... you'll probably have to click on it to view the full-size version.

I found this one through a Google search.  Interestingly, the two points that don't seem to fit in line with the others, South Africa and Israel, were left out of the graph we saw in class, I guess my professor gave them the Ancel Keys treatment... but that's not the point here.  At first glance, this looks like a pretty strong relationship.  The more fat a nation eats, the higher its rate of death from breast cancer.  And even though this is just a correlation, meaning no cause and effect can be determined, it certainly piqued my interest.  I'm always very skeptical any time a study blames fat for anything; I find it impossible not to be after reading Good Calories, Bad Calories.  And I began to wonder, what else could possibly account for this correlation?  And that's when it clicked.  Sunlight.

If you look closely at the graph, the countries that consume less fat and have less mortality from breast cancer tend to be warmer climates, while the ones that consume more fat and have more mortality from breast cancer are colder climates.  Knowing that vitamin D (from sunshine) seems to have strong anti-cancer properties, of course the countries that get more sun would have less mortality from breast cancer.  If you're interested, watch Dr. Mercola's lecture on vitamin D, I don't want to get into the details here.  So I decided to plot this information in an excel graph.  I estimated the degrees of latitude from the equator for each country, and plotted that against breast cancer mortality rates.  Here's what I came out with...

That's what is called a confounding factor.  Not quite as neat of a correlation as the dietary fat graph, but there's clearly an association there.  So what does all this mean?  Does it mean vitamin D is the problem, not dietary fat?  I'd put my money on vitamin D deficiency playing a larger role in the deaths from breast cancer than dietary fat intake.  Actually, I'd argue against the very notion of lumping all types of fat into one group like this, doesn't make sense... but that's a topic for another day.  From an objective standpoint, you can't infer much of anything this data.  In observational studies like these, there are so many uncontrolled factors involved that you can't determine any cause and effect at all.  Here's a few other confounding factors that could be at play here...

1. People who eat less fat tend to eat more vegetables.
2. People in warmer climates are able to grow vegetables for a longer part of the year, so are more likely to eat them.
3. People in cooler climates tend to eat more refined grains.
4. People in warmer climates are more likely to get more physical activity.

I bet if I could plot that information in three more graphs, I'd get nice correlations as well.  The point is that when you see something on the local news about how breast cancer is associated with dietary fat, it doesn't mean dietary fat causes or even influences breast cancer.  It just means that the two occur at the same time.  Did you hear that fire trucks are associated with fires?  It's true, there's a strong association between fire trucks and fires, every time there's a fire, fire trucks are there... they must be causing the fires!  No...

What these observational studies are actually good for, however, is to form hypotheses that can be tested in more controlled trials.  It's been done in rats, and quite poorly I might add... we'll discuss that in part 2 of this series.