This very interesting article appeared this weekend in the [[New York Times]]. What if the low-fat diet has really been causing the obesity and heart disease? (Free membership required).

The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its *Dietary Goals for the United States,” advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of ”killer diseases* supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat….

Some of the best scientists disagreed with this low-fat logic, suggesting that good science was incompatible with such leaps of faith, but they were effectively ignored. Pete Ahrens, whose Rockefeller University laboratory had done the seminal research on cholesterol metabolism, testified to McGovern’s committee that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets. It was not a scientific matter who might benefit and who might be harmed, he said, but *a betting matter.” Phil Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, testified in Congress to the same effect in 1980. ”What right,” Handler asked, ”has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?*

This is amazing. **READ THIS ARTICLE**. It may change your life.