CATCHING UP WITH THE SCIENCE: America’s Changing Attitudes About Fat: Fat Phobia In Decline.
Related: Sloppy science bears substantial blame for Americans’ bad eating habits. “A spectacular case of sloppy science came crashing to a close last month. Cornell University’s Brian Wansink, a world-renowned scientist who seized headlines with his research on American eating habits, had many of his papers retracted and resigned from his professorship. Wansink’s fall is not just the tale of a single scientist gone astray. It is, instead, an indictment of an entire type of nutrition science that has led to mistaken dietary advice dispensed to Americans for decades. . . . Defenders of the current guidelines’ argue that the urgency of our obesity and diabetes epidemics virtually demands that we march forward with recommendations based even on imperfect data. Yet mistakes of the past, such as the now-jettisoned caps on dietary cholesterol and total fat, show the real harm of rushing to create policy based on weak science. Most people still don’t even know about these reversals in our dietary guidelines — that the weight of evidence has now shifted to sugars and refined carbohydrates as the more likely dietary culprits. However, un-learning diet rules once they have been learned proves to be extremely difficult.”