This past year was full of exciting health-related news.
The fear of fat is fading more and more, except for those few holdouts who insist on staying in the past. During the year more and more experts, opinion leaders, organizations and others updated their knowledge. We took giant steps towards a healthier future.
Here’s a look back at some of the highlights from Diet Doctor, the most shocking and the most inspiring news from 2014!
Cover of the Year
The paradigm shift continues and the outdated fear of fat is on its way out faster and faster. Isn’t it pretty, the cover of this June issue of TIME?
These two covers are thirty years apart.
Worst Advice of the Year
A 9-year old is firmly advised to eat half a pound of root vegetables per meal for the brain to work
Diabetics are routinely exposed to neglect, because of old ingrained dogmas on how they need to eat. Diabetics are getting sicker unnecessarily, and often often their attempts to improve their health are met by opposition from health-care professionals.
The following example is one of the worst I’ve encountered. A mother managed to help her 9-year-old son with type 1 diabetes to become healthier and feel better by eating fewer carbohydrates. The result of the mother helping her child? The diabetes clinic reported her to the authorities!
However, the report was soon abandoned – because everyone involved, including school health professionals, noticed that the child was doing much better than before – but the diabetes clinic continues to put up resistance. Continue Reading →
Scientific Article of the Year
Yet another new major review of all good science shows that saturated fat is as harmless as other natural fats, whether unsaturated or polyunsaturated.
Are butter, and other saturated fats, bad for us? No. Continue Reading →
Statistics of the Year
Swedes are consuming a lot more butter and at the same time getting heart healthier than ever before.
The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare recently released the latest statistics for the risk of myocardial infarctions in Sweden, up to the year 2013. This is encouraging reading for almost everyone… except for those who are desperately looking for signs that increased butter-consumption has something to do with heart disease. During the years that Swedes have doubled their butter intake the risk for heart disease has suddenly plummeted!
How will the outdated fat-fearing people at our agency for dietary guidelines explain away this? They’ll probably continue their usual tactics: acting as though nothing has happened. Or what do you think? Continue Reading →
Quest of the Year
Gary Taubes and Peter Attia
Why are more and more people fat? The conventional view that it’s all about calories (eat less, run more) remains unproven and it doesn’t work very well.
Gary Taubes and Peter Attia are on a quest for the answer to the question. Is it only about calories or is it just as much about the quality of the calories? Is it about carbohydrates and their hormonal effects? Continue Reading →
Fall of the Year
The silly old fear of fat is melting away faster and faster. During the year several more steps in the paradigm shift happened:
- The worlds biggest business paper The Wall Street Journal published a big article that completely rejects the last decades’ unnecessary warnings against butter.
- Saturated fat has no significant roll in heart disease. The belief that saturated fat is harmful has since the beginning lacked scientific support and modern reviews of all science show that it has been a mistake. A great article was published in one of England’s papers.
- The food revolution continues and the credibility of the old theory that butter is harmful is in free fall. Here’s a real slaughter of the fear of fat in one of the leading scientific medical journals, The British Medical Journal. The conclusion? The advice to eat less fat was a gigantic mistake from the beginning, new science shows that it isn’t beneficial. Instead it may have led to an increased intake of bad carbohydrates, which is likely fueling today’s epidemics of obesity and diabetes.
Translation of the Year
Almost four years ago my book “The Food rEvolution” was published in Sweden and instantly became a #1 bestseller, staying on top of the charts for quite some time. It ended up selling over 80,000 copies just in Sweden (huge for a small country) and being translated into eight languages.
Finally it’s possible to get it in English as well. Continue Reading →
Checkup of the Year
Scary stuff – or?
In the summer of 2006, I started eating an LCHF diet and since then I have continued to do so. It has now been eight years and I decided it was time for a thorough checkup.
According to certain fat and meat phobics, I should have been dead a long time ago. Personally, I’m planning to hang in there for about 50 more years. So who’s going to be right? Continue Reading →
PS
My numbers correspond well with studies showing that a low-carbohydrate diet is great for both weight and health markers. However, my numbers don’t correspond well with the silly LCHF myth that you shouldn’t eat LCHF for any longer than seven months because of cholesterol.
Movie of the Year
This might be the best low-carb movie ever.
The creators, Lathe Poland and Eric Carlsen, have done a terrific job of interviewing almost everyone in the low-carb community – like professor Tim Noakes, Gary Taubes et al (and me) – plus many other experts in food and nutrition, like Drs. David Katz, Marion Nestle and Yoni Freedhoff.
They’ve done loads of interviews, but that’s not what’s most impressive about this movie. What’s most impressive is how funny it is. There’s some pretty impressive animation work lightening up the film too. Continue Reading →
Sugar Warnings of the Year
Upper limit for a week?
The war on sugar is heating up. The World Health Organization is planning new dietary guidelines, where the proposed recommendation is to cut sugar intake in half!
Swedish science journalist Dr. Ann Fernholm has been very active in the sugar debate lately wrote an opinion piece on how “Sugar is Harming Our Children”.
Is there a safe amount of sugar? A funny conclusion was drawn from a study. If you eat only 7.4 percent sugar, you’ll not be at an increased risk… compared to others that eat more sugar.
Are today’s high rates of overconsumption of sodas and other sugar sources a direct cause of heart disease? It’s possible, more and more people think so, and a new study gives this idea further support.
Most Confusing Conclusion of the Year
Meat the American way. Not in the picture: the drink.
Is it dangerous to eat meat if you’re between 55 and 65? Will eating lots of meat then suddenly become healthful after you turn 65?
This is the confusing conclusion that some researchers drew from a new American questionnaire study. Continue Reading →
Dietary Guidelines of the Year
Brazil is getting new official dietary guidelines. And they are (almost) perfect!
Most countries have government agencies that needlessly chase percentages of natural saturated fat and recommend instead the use of low-fat products full of additives. Brazil now goes in a completely different direction: Just eat real food.
Sleazy Partnership of the Year
Here’s bad news if you want to be able to trust what you read in the newspaper.
Unilever – the manufacturer behind low-fat margarine among other things – now announces that they have started a “partnership” with major British newspaper The Guardian. The idea is that Unilever pays the newspaper a lot of money (a 7-digit number). Apart from that the partnership is based on… “shared values of sustainable living and open storytelling“. Continue Reading →
Worst Weight-Loss Advice of the Year
How can you recommend a sugar-laden cake to people who want to LOSE weight?
What overweight people “treat themselves” to by following Weight Watcher’s advice is hunger and failure. I don’t think they’re worth it.
Transformation of the Year
Before and after 1 month with Coca Cola
What happens if you drink 10 Cokes a day for a month? Everyone probably realizes that you’ll gain weight, but not everyone knows how much you can gain in just one month! Continue Reading →
PS
The focus on calories is the junk-food industry’s favorite argument. They desperately want to make you believe that obesity is caused by bad character, not bad food. Coca Cola and other companies pay billions for advertisements to make you believe the calorie explanation. And they are happy to pay researchers who can spread the same idea in scientific settings, to make their advertisement more credible.
- Coca-Cola admits its big fat problem. Recently, the soda industry suffered a historic loss in the U.S.
- Coca-Cola’s slogan in Mexico is to “make someone happy.” But how much happiness do you really spread by convincing people in the world’s fattest country to consume even more sugar?
Lawsuit of the Year
Cholesterol-lowering drugs, so called statins, may cause diabetes. This is nowadays well-known and is listed among side effects you’re at risk for. But did pharmaceutical companies know this long before and try to keep it secret for as long as possible? Continue Reading →
Diabetes Meeting of the Year
In September I attended the great diabetes conference in Vienna. What’s wrong with the world’s largest meeting on diabetes research? Nobody talks officially about the real problem. Here’s the obvious thing, that was being ignored at the diabetes conference. Instead, medications, advanced tests and molecules are discussed.
Try to get it right next time! At least, do have the courage to discuss all the research showing that today’s lifestyle advice isn’t working for people with diabetes, but instead unfortunately makes people sicker. To ignore this fact is unreasonable and unethical when 5 million people die from their diabetes every year.
Holiday Recipes of the Year
We here at Diet Doctor invited four interesting LCHF celebrities to share their best tips and recipes for holiday treats without excessive amounts of bad carbohydrates.
- Recipes for a Healthy Holiday Season
- More Delicious Ideas For a Healthy Holiday Season
- Monique’s Delicious Holiday Treats
- Traditional Real Food for the Holiday Season
Inspirational Stories of the Year
Before and after
You can hardly believe it’s the same person. Here’s Lindha Vikström, a Swedish mother of two, with her story about how she cut her weight in half with LCHF.
- Losing 160 lbs in a Year with LCHF! Deah had an impressive story to share.
- “Why Was I Still Fat?” Minna tried to lose weight with the official nutritional guidelines, while wondering why she was still fat. Here’s her story on what happened when she learned about LCHF from a co-worker.
- “I Finally Kept My Promise to My Mom” – a story about a long struggle ending in success… by doing the opposite. A story about regaining health and losing weight – by eating MORE.
- “I Never Knew Dieting Could Be So Tasty” Sophie’s life-altering updated story.
- “Not a Pill in Sight and Happy” Can you eat yourself free from the common digestive disease ulcerative colitis? Recently another reader – Bella – told her story about how she set herself free from her digestive disease.
- “You Have Literally Saved My Life” – An impressive life transformation story from Gareth Hicks.
- More inspirational health and weight stories
Towards a Healthier Future
Things are moving faster and faster. In 2013 LCHF went from fad diet to best in test.
During 2014 we saw numerous reports in the media on the dangers of sugar and that the fear of fat has been a mistake. The fear of fat is fading away more and more, although government bodies and some experts haven’t updated their knowledge.
Thank you to all of you who are part of inspiring others. Hopefully, together we can make the journey towards a healthier future go even faster in 2015.