Are the government’s nutrition standards making us fat and unhealthy?

As I wrote back in May in my review of the documentary Fed Up, the federal government’s nutrition standards are often driven by lobbyists and corporations, rather than actual nutrition. The results can lead to the government subsidizing the very types of foods it tells us we shouldn’t eat. 

Now a new study has been released showing the benefits of a low-carb, high protein, high fat diet, which just so happens to be the opposite of what the government recommends. From The New York Times:

Many nutritionists and health authorities have “actively advised against” low-carbohydrate diets, said the lead author of the new study, Dr. Lydia A. Bazzano of the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. “It’s been thought that your saturated fat is, of course, going to increase, and then your cholesterol is going to go up,” she said. “And then bad things will happen in general.”

The new study showed that was not the case.

By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass — even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.

While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.

“They actually lost lean muscle mass, which is a bad thing,” Dr. Mozaffarian said. “Your balance of lean mass versus fat mass is much more important than weight. And that’s a very important finding that shows why the low-carb, high-fat group did so metabolically well.”

There is a lot of information as well as misinformation about nutrition, which is why individuals, not government, are best suited to decide their personal nutrition needs.