Quick Study Analysis: Is the Low-Carb Diet Killing America?
tl;dr: LOL
A vegan on X (I know) made the claim:
“Another perspective is this is how it has looked since Gary Taubes and Nina [Teicholz] have risen to prominence in America, while other countries have moved ever more to plant dominant diets”
It must be fun to blame Gary and Nina for Americans being so sick while they are bankrupted by ‘health-care’ expenses.
But is it even remotely credible?
The line in that chart diverged from the other countries around, say, 1980.
Gary didn’t publish the article that kicked off his low-carb career until 2002, and his big book Good Calories, Bad Calories followed in 2008.
Nina published her “Heart Breaker” article in 2004, and her book Big Fat Surprise followed 10 years later.
Now what’s really amazing—to me at least—is how many people are actually adhering to a low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet.
“Of the 1.4% of participants who reported following a low-carbohydrate diet, estimated adherence (<26% energy from carbohydrates) using 24-hour recalls was 4.1%…” (Kowalski, 2024)
So 1.4% of the 30,219 people interviewed for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 2007-2018 said they were on a LCHF diet.
“As part of the NHANES dietary interview process, participants were asked the question “Are you currently on any diet, either to lose weight or for some other health-related reason?” Participants who answered affirmatively to the previous question were asked the follow-up question: “What kind of diet are you on?” and interviewers provided the following diets to choose from: low-carbohydrate, low fat/low cholesterol… other special diet.” (Kowalski, 2024)
Then they checked. They used the ridiculous definition for LCHF of less than 26% of calories from carbs…
“Participants completed up to 2 24-hour recalls that provided information on daily food intake.” (Kowalski, 2024)
Now with all the usual caveats about epidemiology, NHANES, and food-recall questionnaires, this is a pretty broad target.
Of the 1.4% of the people who said they were eating LCHF, only 4.1% were eating less than 26% of their calories from carbohydrates! That’s amazing to me, that the number is so low…
But it’s clearly not plausible that how 0.06% of Americans eat has had any effect whatsoever on the health of the country as a whole.
The safe assumption is always that anything a vegan says is a falsehood. And that the Dietary Guidelines was a massive mistake.
References
Kowalski, C., Dustin, D., Ilayan, A., Johnson, L. K., Belury, M. A., & Conrad, Z. (2024). Are People Consuming the Diets They Say They Are? Self-Reported vs Estimated Adherence to Low-Carbohydrate and Low-Fat Diets: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2007-2018. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2024.07.006
Taubes, G. (2002, July 7). What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html
Taubes, G. (2008). Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health. Penguin RandomHouse. https://amzn.to/3ZdNHVB
Teicholz, N. (2004, June). Heart Breaker. Gourmet, 100-105,157.
Teicholz, N. (2014). The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. Simon and Schuster. https://amzn.to/4eJ6Umt
This. "The safe assumption is always that anything a vegan says is a falsehood."
No surprise there. What continues to surprise me, although it probably should not, is how much traction their lunacy engenders. I have a wonderful friend who has been vegan for years, raising her children as vegans from very small and convincing her (now) husband to follow the same religion. To my surprise, during her search for a new PCP, the candidate she initially liked the most told her, point-blank, "I cannot treat you as a vegan. The first step to recovering from your symptoms is to fix your diet." She immediately looked elsewhere, and her vegan friends cheered! I shook my head in amazement.
Said it once. Might as well repeat it. If your diet is a religion, you're doing it wrong.
This. "And that the Dietary Guidelines was a massive mistake."
Characterizing them as "a mistake" is giving lying sacks of crap too much credit.
We need a graph of Americans who have followed and acted on the work of Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz compared with the rest. I suspect that any upward slope in the graph shown is because their efforts made a negative slope graph tip up.