There is no doubt that modern medical advances have saved, prolonged, and extended the quality of countless lives. This is certainly a good thing. However, there is a downside to our medical advancement. As we delve deeper into how the body works we begin to gain confidence in our understanding of the body’s operation. Medical professionals start to get an ego and they start insisting that they know best despite an actual lack of conclusive scientific evidence.
This medical arrogance sometimes leads to amazing discoveries. Unfortunately it sometimes allows disastrous advice to make it into the mainstream. The biggest example of such a mistake was the supposition that hydrogenated trans fatty acids were healthier than natural saturated fat. Over the past two decades this error may be responsible for tens or even hundreds of thousands of cases of heart disease, many of which became fatal.
Trans fat has been an error that has been extremely difficult to fix as the food manufacturing and restaurant industries fight to keep their trans fat. They like trans fat because it’s cheap and extends product shelf life. They say people like the flavor. This has required the FDA to institute stricter labeling requirement (which the food manufacturers still manage to use to their advantage to hide trans fat) and to legal action by many states to ban trans fat.
Sometimes these new findings seem so obvious to those in the field. For example, once a link between blood cholesterol and heart disease was established the medical community immediately started pointing fingers at eggs. They warned people to stop eating so many eggs because they have cholesterol.
Unfortunately there are several problems with this advice. First of all, there is no concrete evidence that shows that eating cholesterol increases blood cholesterol. The evidence suggests that eating trans fat and saturated fats has a much higher impact. The other problem is that newer evidence suggests that the ratio of good cholesterol to bad has more of an impact than the actual numbers.
The point here is not to disparage medical science or those working in the field. But rather, to make sure we keep our eyes open to facts and continue to do our homework. What was once touted as a critical leap in health science may suddenly become one of the most dangerous nutritional practices around short of eating cyanide.
