The Wuhan pandemic has unleashed the inner totalitarians of the West, from the neighbourhood curtain-twitchers ringing government snitch-lines to state and city leaders drunk with their sudden, absolute power. But the worst tinpot-dictators are proving to be the “public health experts”.
The Wuhan pandemic has given these wannabe dictators powers beyond their wildest dreams. At their behest, whole economies have been shut down and cities placed under house arrest. Should any of we hoi polloi dare voice misgivings at this rule-by-medical-degree, we are summarily put in our place. “Speaking as an epidemiologist” they sternly tell us plebs to clap a cloth muzzle on our pie-holes and shut the hell up. Heaven help us if we’re male and we dare disagree with these almost-always-female lab-coated demagogues.
But why on earth should we pay the slightest attention to misery-gutsed “public health officials” who have such an appalling track record of just being plain wrong?
A couple of weeks ago, a respected US scientific publication — the Journal Of the American College of Cardiology, no less — came out with a review of the literature saying there was no evidence that cutting saturated fats from your diet would help you live longer. And that eating more of the much-libelled lipids — found most abundantly in red meat and dairy — might help you avoid stroke.
Don’t expect the public health lobby to come clean on their longest-running mistake, though. Because then they’d have to admit that they’ve been no better than cigarette companies telling us that smoking Camels was “the doctor’s choice”.
That you didn’t read about it is no surprise. It is one in a long list of trials, studies, reviews and meta-analyses that have found similar results and gone the same way — sunk without trace, ignored by the people who create our dietary guidelines.
This issue was brought into focus last month when eye surgeon Dr James Muecke, 2020’s Australian of the Year, wrote in the Canberra Times: “A flawed dietary guideline, which we have obediently and blindly followed for 40 years, is literally killing us. We’ve been encouraged to eat less fat and consume more carbs and yet we’ve never been fatter, our teeth never more rotten, and type 2 diabetes and its complications never more prevalent.”
Worse, though, is the whole basis for this towering edifice of medical bullshit. They just made it up.
There have only ever been eight [randomised trials] into the question of whether saturated fat will cause heart disease. The authors of the JACC paper looked at the six most recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses of those randomised trials. They wrote that the “results showed that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat has no significant effect on coronary outcomes or on total mortality.”
Compare that with the origin of the saturated-fat-is-bad-for-you quackery.
The theory which had captured the debate was that saturated fats were clogging up their arteries like lard down a drainpipe. It had never been proven, but everyone thought it was probably true in the same way that most people still think it is.
Yet, even the earliest studies failed to show a link between saturated fats and increased mortality.
From the beginning, and over the five years of the study, the researchers saw that the margarine group were 50 per cent more likely to die than the butter, meat-and-three-veg group. The researchers looked for confounders like smoking, weight, age and exercise but found nothing that could make sense of these numbers.
Sure, the polyunsaturated group had lowered their cholesterol – but they still died at a significantly higher rate than the butter’n’lard lads.
An egg a day won’t kill you, either. Oh, and red meat might not be quite the cancer factory they’ve told you.
“The JACC paper confirms there’s no link between natural dietary saturated fats and cardiovascular disease, which includes foods like full fat dairy, eggs, unprocessed meat and dark chocolate, which is nice. It’s a powerful study and should put the issue to bed forever.”
Need I remind you, either, of the embarrassingly wrong modelling of COVID-19 deaths? And remember when they were solemnly telling us not to wear a mask?
Yet these are the clowns who are suddenly running our lives with an iron surgical glove.
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