What Motivates Organizations to Say Sugar is OK & Fat is Bad?

Sandy Lee writes:

I just can’t understand why the powers that be can’t restudy, re-view and re-evaluate such nonsense!! Why won’t main stream just turn around and say YES the obesity problem is due to SUGARS and such useless carbs Period!

Granted, there is now a push to get rid of corn syrups in everything and a push toward more fiber/whole grains and no trans fats, all great steps, but just rip that old band aid off and face up to the Whole Truth??? NOW

Sandy, I wish it were that easy. There are a whole lot of obstacles for us to get around.

First of all, there are no monolithic Powers That Be. There are a whole lot of different Powers That Be, and they all make up their minds separately, in their own time, and they all have their own motives. There are, for instance, medical schools, a whole lot of medical schools, and a great deal of the funding for those medical schools comes from the pharmaceutical industry, as does a lot of the money for medical research. That’s a clear danger, but the alternative, at least as far as I can tell, is to fund medical schools and medical research with tax money. For good or ill, a large faction of Americans is very much against that.

Sugar and the USDA, FDA, AHA and ADA

There are government agencies like the USDA and the FDA, who, again, are deeply beholden to various industries. There are professional associations like the AHA and the ADA, ditto.

There are all the individual doctors, some of whom are savvy to low carb, some of whom are just starting to glimpse the value of carb restriction because of positive reports from their patients, and some of them who are deeply resistant to the whole concept. Why the resistance, when it appears so obvious to all of us that carb restriction works? First of all, it goes against everything they’ve been taught. But perhaps more powerful, imagine how it must feel to be a doctor who has, for thirty years, in good faith, recommended a low fat, low cholesterol diet, the substitution of animal fats with vegetable oils, all of the conventional wisdom of the past few decades, to your patients, only to face the creeping realization that not only may you not have helped, you may be responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, infertility, and even cancer. How very human to deny, deny, deny, not simply to one’s patients, but to one’s self.

Sugar and US Doctors

Let’s not forget, too, that all of those doctors are people first, with their own food addictions, and their own emotions. Emotion is a big part of this. People are very attached to the idea of food as love, and it is painful for them to realize that Grandma baking them cookies, Mom making them a birthday cake, the junk food they associate with summer days at the beach, all of that, is dangerous. It hurts. It’s like admitting that the relationship with the guy you adore just isn’t working out, and never will. That’s true for doctors as much as for everyone else.

Sugar and Registered Dieticians

Another branch of the Powers That Be is the registered dieticians; they face the same stuff the doctors do, with the additional burden of nearly always having to administer the diets the doctors recommend, regardless of their own understanding. Even the RDs who accept that low carb diets work can lose their jobs if they recommend such a diet against doctor’s orders.

Then there’s the mainstream media, everybody’s favorite whipping boy. Yes, they embraced low carb in 2003, because it was NEW and EXCITING and CONTROVERSIAL, and gee, who knew you could lose weight eating steak instead of pasta salad? But, of course, the media as a whole has the attention span of a hyperactive five year old who has drunk an entire pitcher of Kool Aid. As soon as low carb was becoming generally accepted, it had to be dead, because they needed to move on to the Next Big Thing, and the fact that the human body doesn’t change every year be damned.

Sugar and the Mainstream Media

More importantly, the mainstream media, and especially television and the women’s magazines, is funded by advertising. What kind of advertising? You tell me: What percentage of the ads you see on TV are for processed food, fast food or chain restaurants, or drugs, both over-the-counter and prescription? How many ads do you see for low carb commodities like steak and salad greens? There’s no ad revenue in low carb. That means there’s little incentive for the media to report the good news.

Sugar, Bad Diet Advice and Its Consequences

Which leads to our biggest obstacle: The vast fraction of our economy that is built on bad diet advice and its consequences. What would happen to the economy — I mean, really think about this — what would happen if overnight everyone stopped swilling down soda, eating piles of sugary, starchy junk? What would happen to the restaurant industry, the food processing industry, the agricultural industry, the pharmaceutical industry, heck, the dental treatment industry? Even things like the cosmetics industry would take a hit, because people who eat right naturally have better skin and hair than people who don’t. There are very powerful economic forces that have every reason to want the status quo to continue. Addiction and ill-health are very, very lucrative.

In short, “the Powers That Be” pretty much amounts to the whole dang society. There is no short cut. It’s a matter of reaching people one at a time, of telling our stories, of speaking out, of saying to the doctor “yes, I’ve lost weight and my blood work is better — it’s because I’m on Atkins,” of telling our friends, “I know, I ate a low fat diet too, but it just made my diabetes worse; let me tell you what helped.” It’s like Gandhi said: You must be the change you want to see in the world.

Of course, Gandhi also said, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

I’m pleased to report that we’re way past the “ignore” phase, moving from the “ridicule” into the “fight” stage. I hope to see “win” in my lifetime.

© 2004, 2011 by Dana Carpender. Used by permission of the author. What do you think? Please send Dana your comments to Dana Carpender.