Scanning the latest news clips about nutrition in this country, I found an article that gave some interesting history about WHY this country moved in the direction it did some 30 years ago, that is, to begin to throw out beef and meat and substitute the all-powerful carbs diets! I am including a couple paragraphs from the article, but recommend that people read the entire article, including the video clip provided by author Carol Bardelli. Just click on the title above and it will take you to the full article……I commend Bardelli for her research.
And I quote:
“The US government’s recommendations to eat a diet rich in carbohydrates is based on a 1970s panel on nutrition chaired by then Senator George McGovern. McGovern was a fan of the Pritikin diet and believed vegetarianism was healthy. An aid to McGovern, who wrote the guidelines our government ultimately adopted, was a vegan with no nutrition or medical background. Although nearly all of the nutrition scientists who testified before this panel disagreed with McGovern’s dietary guidelines, McGovern prevailed. See video below.

We were told as a nation to eat less meat and animal fat, and to eat more carbohydrates. This included eating plenty of government subsidized crops like corn, wheat, soy, beet and cane sugars . Unfortunately, most Americans eat too many processed, high calorie carbohydrates, and not enough unrefined low calorie carbohydrates. We also don’t eat enough proteins and fats. We choose potato chips, French fries, and pasta, over beef, bacon, and broccoli. The first group is high in carbohydrates and raises blood sugar and insulin. The second group that we tend to avoid does not. These two eating habits have driven the current obesity epidemic. Dr. Al Sears says this trend, which started around 1957, also precipitated the steep rise in heart disease. Foods that raise blood sugar are a guilty culprit in heart disease, not cholesterol. Read Nutrition 101: What is cholesterol?While animal fats are essential for human health, and are vital to our bodies abilities to make hormones, repair, and fuel our bodies, our government told us to avoid them. Simply put, junk science gave us a fear of eating fat, and government backed agricultural subsidies of carbohydrate crops like corn, soy, and wheat caused an overabundance of high carb foods. Changing our diets from the animal based diet of our ancestors and eating a lot of carbohydrates caused sharp rises in obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.“———————–In truth, we should RETURN to our grandparents’ notions of what constitutes a good diet, namely “eating real food,” for one, along with eating appropriate amounts vs. over-eating (a trap Americans fall into easily). Avoiding processed foods and “non” or “low-fat” choices that actually contain far more carbs than basic, real food, only aggravates our weight problems in this country. In addition, people shouldn’t skip meals as that often leads us to overeat later when our hunger flies off the charts. We all need to read food labels to figure out what’s really IN our food. Again, eating real food, including lean beef, is far superior to throwing hamburger into “hamburger helper” boxed food. Of course, we all do it occasionally, but patterning our daily diet in this manner is deadly. If we would only pursue these 3 simple ideas, perhaps we’d begin to get a handle on this battle of the bulge. Beef is NOT the culprit. Beef is nutrition dense and provides all manner of minerals, in addition to protein and iron, zinc and potassium — all elements children and adults need for good health. The fear that has been poured out over this country about fat has led us down the wrong path, unfortunately.

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