It's Time To Flush Federal Dietary Guidelines Down the Drain

Nutrition: As the federal government wrestles with how much meat and cholesterol it will recommend in its updated dietary guidelines, the public should be asking why the government is involved in this issue at all.

The quickly quashed story has been how SALT standards have been based on no science whatsoever for the past 20 years.

Any nutritionist worth his salt, any expert who earns his salary would recognize that salt is a valuable and essential nutrient.

Have ignored all the dietary warnings - many of which have gone full circle and what was OK, then bad, is now OK again, and vice versa. At 62 I take supplements that I choose and am on zero prescription meds. I ate a boatload of eggs and bacon and pizza and cheeseburgers along the way, never got into diet sodas because the real sugar concoctions taste better, put a lot of salt on my red meats and love ice cream too.

The only "advice" I ever followed was to keep getting a lot of exercise and staying with it through the decades.

It’s also about cost control...in Uncle Sam’s mind, if he’s going to fund Medicare and Obamacare, then he believes that he has a vested interest in forcing people to be healthy so that he can ration it.
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That’s true. That’s the excuse. But, like many if not most government initiatives, what is achieved is the opposite of the intended goal. In this case we have traded a slim, healthy population for a fat unhealthy one and that is certainly due in part to government nutritional guidelines.

It’s about const control, in that low-fat, high-carb foods are cheap to make, and store well.

The primary driver behind the nutritional recommendations is how much it would cost the government to meet their own guidelines.

That's why i never suggested a 100% protein diet. All I'm saying is that humans require a balance composed of protein, fat and carbs. You can kill yourself in any extreme--a diet of straight carbs, fat or protein. You will die in a different fashion, but you will still die.

Too much protein is almost impossible, as the article you reference shows--300 plus grams?! You would be eating non-stop all day. Lol

And that doesn't take into account the fact that you would be hard-pressed to find such pure protein: most of our diet consists of fatty meats. If you ate only caribou , rabbit, or possibly the leanest cuts of poultry, you could approach the limit, but no reasonable person would do so.

It's a simple calculation: 3 calories per gram of protein, 3 calories per gram of carbs (which is metabolized as blood sugar if refined), and 9 calories per gram of fat. A reasonable balance is higher protein, less carbs, and the required fats (a small proportion). check out The If Calculator to see what you actually need. (Not associated with the site--just use it as a reference...)

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