spinline.net: The Blog

People over 30, do you remember a short-lived soda from the early 80s called Like Cola? Despite heavy TV advertising it failed dismally. I was trying to remember the jingle for some reason so I scrounged up some YouTubes of their ads.

I remember these commercials for the “flavored by the cola nut” angle they pushed. Duly programmed, I’m pretty sure I (unsuccessfully) lobbied my parents to buy this stuff, insisting that we experience the delicious genuine flavor that only real Brazilian cola nut extract can provide, or something.

Anyway, what I did not remember until I saw these was how heavily the caffeine-free aspect was played:

(See also Pepsi Free.) What the heck is going on here — was there some kind of anti-caffeine health scare going on the 80s or something? Well, if it isn’t our old friends at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, America’s Greatest Public Health Menace!

A quick Google search returns these two snippets — the first, from the book Junk Science Judo:

The CSPI petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in November 1979 to label coffee and tea for caffeine content and, once again, issue warnings to pregnant women. …

The FDA soon caved, issuing a 1980 warning to pregnant women to minimize their consumption of coffee, tea, and colas — even though, the FDA acknowledged, the evidence wasn’t conclusive. … Baby rats had been born with missing parts of toes when their mothers were force fed caffeine at the human equivalent of 24 cups of coffee per day.

The CSPI’s campaign unraveled soon enough, though. In June 1981, a review panel at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences concluded that the pregnant rats may simply have been poisoned by the high doses of caffeine. This caused them to lose weight and the weight loss itself affected the development of the baby rats.

And there’s this from a book called Uncommon Grounds:

More consumers … were switching to decaffeinated coffee as health concerns peaked in the early 1980s. … health fears escalated, so that even the average coffee drinker worried about what his morning cup might be doing to him.

Throughout the late 1970s, Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CPSI) had hammered away at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to remove caffeine from the list of drugs “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS). … In November 1979 Jacobson filed a petition with the FDA asking for warning labels on coffee and tea packages reading: “Caffeine May Cause Birth Defects.”

Remember that this Michael Jacobson of CSPI is the same anti-meat douchebag who bullied fast food restaurants into ditching delicious and nutritionally benign beef tallow as their frying oil in favor the dangerous hydrogenated vegetable oils that they are only now abandoning.

Anyway, it’s kind of weird to think that the health-conscious were so fastidious about avoiding caffeine back then. These days your average organic tofu-eater would take double espressos through an IV if he could.

Hi, everyone! Have you all missed my blogging? Hello? Well, I’m back with a little roundup of some health tidbits culled from the healthblogosphere (by which I mean the three or so blogs I visit).

• Dental roundup! Tooth decay is a disease of civilization, following the modern diet, says Stephan of Whole Health Source. And Jenny at Diabetes Update writes on the connection between periodontal disease, elevated blood sugar, diabetes, and heart disease. It seems that gum disease may be a cause for the latter conditions. Insane!
• Getting out in the cold is good for your health! Apparently it promotes “brown” (versus “white”) fat. And who wouldn’t want that? Cold baths for everyone! UPDATE: After posting this item, I decided to try to take a cold shower for these purported health benefits and to see if I could stand it. It was really horrible for about three seconds but then it became bearable, pleasant even, probably because that’s when I turned on the hot water. What kind of idiot takes a cold shower? Afterwards I knocked a bottle of moisturizer into the toilet. That had nothing to do with the experment. It was just an accident. END OF UPDATE
• Another couple of posts from Whole Health Source — these on omega-6 fats. Much of the omega-3/omega-6 advice out there concerns increasing the former, but it seems like omega-6 fats (like corn and soybean oil) may have harmful effects independent of the amount of omega-3′s consumed. See here and here.
• This excellent John Schwenkler piece on the war on raw milk should be read in tandem with this Junkfood Science post on same. spinline.net The Blog executive summary: The federal government is a bunch of jackbooted thugs for trying to prevent people from consuming raw (unpasteurized) milk if they want it. Then again, raw milk doesn’t confer any health benefit versus pasteurized, and, of course, might contain pathogens. Then again, factory farms are pretty filthy places, pasteurization notwithstanding. Guess you can’t win…
• That’s all for now.

There’s a nice article on the joys (and benefits) of eating fat over at a site called Table Matters. (h/t Blowhards.)

Lard is also natural. “Tub of lard” is now a derogatory phrase, but I wish I had one. Pork fat, fat back, bacon, lard, and leaf lard (for that flaky pie crust) are all good fats containing approximately 11 percent polyunsaturated fat. Wrap almost anything in bacon and voila — ecstasy. It is not for nothing that pork belly is the cutting-edge chef’s new favorite.

Goose, duck, even chicken fat are also good (with between 11 and 13 percent polyunsaturated fat). What makes a terrine de foie gras transporting? Fat. Pork rillettes? Fat. A duck deprived of its fat would fall flat. Cook potatoes in duck or goose fat and you’ll never want them any other way.

However, the article disappointingly ends with this old canard:

… in the end, it’s calories that make you fat. Too many in and not enough expended. We may be a nation of fatties, but it is not because of an overindulgence in glorious gorgeous fat: It’s overindulgence in general. Eat a little less; eat much better.

What Nonsense!

(When I originally sat down to write this, I somehow ended up watching ten minutes of The Price is Right online. How does that happen? But I’m happy to report that Drew Carey is doing a fine job, and that Taylor won the yellow Mustang.)

Stephan at Whole Health Source has reviewed twelve major trials that purport to “evaluate the relationship between saturated fat and risk of death,” and finds the following:

The first study to show an increase in deaths from replacing saturated animal fat with polyunsaturated vegetable fat was the tragically named Anti-Coronary Club study. After four years, despite lowering their cholesterol substantially, the intervention group saw more than twice the number of deaths as the control group. Amazingly, rather than emphasizing the increased mortality, the study authors instead focused on the cholesterol reduction. This study was not properly controlled, but if anything, that should have biased it in favor of the intervention group.

The second study to show an increase in deaths from replacing saturated animal fats with polyunsaturated vegetable fats was the Sydney Diet-Heart study. This was one of the larger, longer, better-conducted trials. After five years, the intervention group saw about 50% more deaths than the control group.

…

Overall, the data from controlled trials are clear: replacing animal fat with vegetable oil does not reduce your risk of dying! The same is true of reducing total fat. … Proponents of the theory that saturated fat is unhealthy have the burden of proof on their shoulders, and the data have failed to deliver.

Measuring heart disease mortality specifically, rather than total mortality, also yields unimpressive results.

So not only do the best data not support the idea that saturated fat increases the overall risk of death, they don’t even support the idea that it causes heart disease!

In sum,

Eat the fat on your steaks folks. Just like your great-grandparents did, and everyone who came before.

Whooo!

Way back when, Dr. Eades had some informed speculation on the subject of saturated fat and health.

What about saturated fat? How does a decrease in saturated fat cause obesity? First, the decrease in saturated fat has tracked with the increase in vegetable oils, which are typically rich in omega-6 fats. Omega-6 fats have been shown in numerous studies to be proinflammatory. They have also been shown to worsen alcoholic fatty liver disease, and, one would assume, [non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder] as well. …

Saturated fat is a healthful food. Read this article by Mary Enig that describes in detail the health benefits that come from eating saturated fat. …

So how does avoiding saturated fats lead to obesity. In my opinion in a couple of ways. First, indirectly, by having them replaced by vegetable oil, particularly hydrogentated vegetable oil, i.e., trans fat. Due to their stability, saturated fats have cooking properties that no other natural fats have. Food chemists have created trans fats to have the same cooking properties – and in some situations even better cooking properties – as saturated fats. But the addition of trans fats to the diet creates a host of other problems. The medical literature is crawling with studies showing that trans fats drive the development of obesity.

The other reason is that saturated fats compose the lion’s share of normal membranous fats and of the brain. When membranes don’t work as well, especially mitochondrial membranes, our energy storage and regulation system doesn’t work as well. Anything that impairs membrane functioning impairs signaling function. If signaling function falls off, then various hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. lose function. As insulin loses function, more insulin is required, more insulin leads to more downregulation of receptors, all of which ultimately leads to obesity.

Meanwhile, over at Animal Pharm, there’s a post that I must admit I understood little of but it’s entitled “Saturated Fats as Potent Anti-Atherogenic Drugs” which has got to be a good thing, right?

John Schwenkler pens a conservative defense of arugula, and muses on the poverty of movement “conservatives” who scorn it. “So whether we’re Slow Food conservatives, libertarian grass farmers, or gastronomically traditionalist organic-loving liberal foodies, let’s all stand firm against the attempt to treat our diets as just another pawn in the politicians’ scheme,” Schwenkler writes. “Hotdogs, corn on the cob, and warm apple pie are entirely deserving of their all-American reputation – but what good is our freedom if they won’t let us eat arugula?”

Via Dreher, who adds: “Food snobbery is one of my pet peeves. You get it from pseudo-foodies, who turn up their noses at more proletarian fare, but given where I come from philosophically, and the circles in which I run, I more often encounter its reverse: a knee-jerk condemnation of any attempt to stand athwart the Great American Junk Food Conveyor Belt and say ‘Stop!’ as evidence of snobbery and effete liberalism.”

Full disclosure: I don’t even know what Arugula tastes like.