Friday, I posted my Letter to Dr. Bryant Stamford regarding his two fallacious articles in my local paper. He responded as follows:

HI, Scott…
thanks so much for the detailed note.
there is the misconception that in some way i’m defending simple sugar products — refined sugar.
i’m not. i think, andi believe the research literature will agree, that simple sugar is a big problem — MAJOR.
in my column i said that the high carb diet was wrong and was never intended to be what it bacame. thus, in fairness
to Atkins, his attack on the high carb diet was justified.

saturated fat also is a big problem.

thus, can you have a healthy diet that has lots of carbs and lots of fat in it. you bet. just don’t include
processed sugar and saturated fat and it’s a winner.

i’m also taking issue with oversimplications… eat all fat, eat all carbs. that’s foolishess and if we have learned anything
about health and weight control it’s that extreme measures don’t work… especially in the long run.

as far as ornish and esselsthyn goes… their research is pretty impressive. check out the latest from esselstyne.

at any rate, the bottom line as always is, let’s all apply some common sense to the issues and when we do
we will find the correct approachs.

take care… bryant

If you’ve read my first email to him, he obviously decided not to answer the great majority of my questions. Here is my reply.

Hi Dr. Stamford,
Thanks for the reply. It sounds like we agree on much more than we disagree on (which is actually typical amongst the “warring factions”). Avoid processed foods. Eat real foods. The rest will work itself out. I notice that you say that “eat all fat” or “eat all carbs” (and it would seem the correlaries of “eat no carbs”/”eat no fat”) are foolish, but then you go on to say “eat no saturated fat.” What are your thoughts on some of the emerging research showing that saturated fat isn’t the killer it’s made out to be? I’m wondering where your focus on saturated fat comes from. Is it the effects on cholesterol? If so, I urge you to read Anthony Colpo’s book The Great Cholesterol Con (or Malcolm Kendrick’s by the same name…different book though. I mistakenly said Uffe Ravnskov in my first email). I have a copy of Colpo’s book that I’d be happy to share with you if you’d like.

The biggest problem with the Atkins diet isn’t the macronutrient ratios. It’s what most of the followers turned it into. I doubt most Atkins followers have read his books and many use the processed low-carb products which are the dietary equivalent of the processed low-fat products. They’re still processed and they’re still full of garbage ingredients. People that follow the Atkins Diet properly typically consume far more vegetables than the average person, yet still have to listen to “Atkins Diet is a killer.” It’s all very anti-common sense, i.e., it’s not the diet per se, it’s the improper implementation.

I prefer to put dietary advice into an evolutionary framework, following fairly closely The Paleo Diet concept of Dr. Loren Cordain mixed with some Weston A. Price Foundation advice on saturated fat. In that context, it’s the polyunsaturated vegetable oils that are wholly unnatural since it’s only in the 20th century that we were able to press vast quantities of corn, peanuts, etc to get the miniscule amounts of oil from them. It jives with Ray Peat’s discussion of how coconut oil emulsions are used to nourish patients intravenously, except organ transplant patients. They get unsaturated fatty emulsions to suppress the immune system and reduce the chances of organ rejection. It’s quite interesting. It’s also telling that the polyunsaturated fats we’re told are so good for us have to be highly refined and deodorized to even be shelf stable. The saturated fats from coconut and palm fruits do not. They are able to retain their very high vitamin content precisely because of their stability. You find the same issues in cooking…polyunsaturated fats oxidize very easily in the presence of heat; saturated (and to a lesser degree monounsaturated fats like olive oil) do not. When looked at in that context, saturated fats are the best oils to cook in.

So when it’s put in an evolutionary context, it yields a diet focused predominantly on grassfed/pastured meats (poultry, fish, and eggs too) and vegetables, with some nuts, seeds, and oils (olive, coconut, and palm), and enough fruit, tubers, and squashes to drive activity levels. Dairy and grains are both foods that humans did not evolve with and as such, the typical person experiences quite a boost in health when cutting these two items (especially if we’re talking about pasturized/homogenized milk, which is nothing more than another processed food, devoid of the goodness it once contained). I think it all comes down to, not saturated fat and not red meat in general, but the fact that the meat the average consumer is eating is grain-fed, antibiotic- and hormone-laden, overly fattened meat. As fat concentrates toxins, it’s likely that consumers are picking up large amounts of environmental toxins from the fat of this unnaturally raised meat, along with the growth hormones passed along in the fat (could this be a driver of the earlier puberty we’re seeing?). Along with that, the omega-6:omega-3 ratios are highly skewed and, as we know, omega-6’s are inflammatory while omega-3s are anti-inflammatory. Perhaps again, it’s not the whole category of “red meat,” but the sub-category of “improperly raised red meat.”

Thoughts?

Can you point me to some research by Esselstyne? Let me know if you’d like to read The Great Cholesterol Con.

Thanks
Scott

Awaiting…


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