Helpinghands wrote:I was wondering around various vegan site when I ran into this article on Vegan.com. It was a piece written by Ginny Messina a well respected vegan RD. The article is titles "Vegan Nutrition Guide". And here is the part I found disturbing:
Don’t hesitate to include other fat-rich foods in your diet, too, if you like them. Low-fat diets are based on an outdated understanding of nutrition that’s been largely discredited. Current recommendations support a wide range of fat intakes for good health, anywhere from 20 to 35 percent of daily calories. (This translates to 22 to 39 grams of fat for every 1,000 calories you eat.) What matters most isn’t how much fat you consume, but rather the type of fat you choose.
I kept thinking, "discredited" by whom? And where in the world does a very well educated vegan RD come up with this kind of thinking? And why?
I wonder whether Dr. McDougall, Essy, Ornish or Jeff would like to comment on this piece and possibly straighten this lady out.
Ginny Messina's explanation is a bit confusing.
She says
Current recommendations support a wide range of fat intakes for good health, anywhere from 20 to 35 percent of daily calories.
This 20 to 35 percent figure does not distinguish between essential fat and non-essential fat.
But then she writes
What matters most isn’t how much fat you consume, but rather the type of fat you choose.
Here she seems to be hinting, without explicitly saying, that we simply need to consume sufficient amounts of essential fat in order to be healthy.
Why not say that? Why not tell people which kinds of fats are essential and how much we are likely to need? Why would a diet that is very low in total fat but containing sufficient amounts of essential fat be considered unhealthy?
How would Ginny Messina explain the excellent results received by patients of Dr. Esselstyn?
ADDED:
Another thought about fat. When we eat food with fat in them, we get different kinds of fat. Some monounsaturated fat, some saturated fat and some polyunsaturated fat.
So, it is very hard to consume a diet that is low in saturated fat, the kind of fat that is implicated in heart disease and diabetes, while consuming a diet that is high in total fat.
That's another reason why Ginny Messina seems way off base here.
Last edited by Spiral on Sun May 21, 2017 1:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.