Jewish Life Digital Edition September 2015 | Page 68

The fight is on:
FATS VS CARBS
What’s really making us pack on the
pounds? I BY DR JONATHAN MOCH

WE LIVE SIMULTANEOUSLY IN TWO WORLDS. THE
outer world of shared reality and the inner world full of thoughts, emotions and
impulses. Researchers suggest the average person has 20 000 thought units a
day. Interspersed in this rapid flow of
consciousness are ideas. Some stick and
enthuse, most fade away. By my estimate,
thoughts of food populate our minds a
thousand times a day. Some stubbornly
refuse to budge. I think (of food), therefore I am?
My life is an exciting journey visiting
diverse ideas spanning the human condition. I’m fortunate that my deep love of
ideas is my profession and their enthusiastic exploration my hobby. Words, assumptions, rules, imagination, debate are
the currency of ideas, and the exciting
stuff is when ‘big ideas’ clash or established ideas crumble under the weight of
expanding new evidence. Thomas Kuhn, a
philosopher of science, famously described this process as a shift in paradigm, when new ideas of reality replace
old ones. Our forefather, Abraham, experienced the paradigm shift of a singular

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Creator of the world, the iconoclastic invitation of the grand idea of monotheism
into a pagan world. Another Jew, Albert
Einstein, turned physics upside down
with his theory of relativity, E = MC2.
Both mindsets changed fundamentally
how we perceive meaning and reality.
There is one current ‘big idea’ in medical
discourse that is boiling in the large pot of
nutritional science. The debate is the centrality in our diets of the two heavyweight
nutrients: fat versus carbohydrates. For
the past 40 years, fat has been getting bad
press, cowered into submission by the big
food industry and by dietary policy perpetrated by medical school training that fat is
both bad and ugly. Cut out fat, whatever
form, became the mantra and the correct
answer, regardless of the multiple choice
question being asked. However, the past
decade has seen fat rise from the floor,
bruised and battered, and wrestle again
with its nemesis, carbohydrates. It appears
now the momentum of the pendulum has
shifted dramatically in favour of fat, as scientific studies are regularly appearing to
support the grand proposition that fat

does not make you fat, rather processed
sugar does!
We are (physiologically) what we eat,
and the debate then focuses on what the
best foods are to eat so we can achieve
our optimal health. Scientists like to measure and then apply statistics to their
findings to prove (or disprove) a hypothesis. In medical trials, certain variables are
controlled, such as gender, age, and education level. This enables scientists to better measure the efficacy of a particular intervention being considered, say, a new
drug for hypertension, as compared to a
similar demographic control group which
does not take this particular medicine.
Often, neither the experimental group
nor the control group knows if they’re
taking the real stuff or a placebo (a sugarcoated pill with no effective chemical substance). These are called randomised control trials (RCTs) and they’re the
backbone of medical science advancement. More recently, a method of metaanalysis emerged that clumps the data
from similar studies together, and the
numbers are then crunched to test
whether the intervention is probably effective or not.
Against this brief background, nutrition
studies is a difficult science as it’s extremely challenging to fulfil the criteria of an
RCT over a long period of time (not to
mention very expensive and it also requires tens of thousands of participants).
Nonetheless, articles are accepted and
published in leading peer-reviewed journals, highly respected by the scientific
community. This evidence is now filtering
through to the committees of experts in
nutrition, who objectively examine the
emerging results, and advise national governments and schools, and provide reams
of copy to media outlets. It’s not perfect
science, but it’s the best we have, like other
imperfects: democracy (political stability)
and capitalism (economic growth).

TWO MAJOR TRENDS ARE
GERMINATING

FIRSTLY, there are good fats and bad
fats: the goods ones are omega 3s and are
found in cold sea fish such as mack erel,
sardines, tuna, herrings, and salmon; and

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BLESS THE HANDS THAT FEED US