When is a high fat diet not a high fat diet? Masai

Just a quick post to comment on this paper from a link emailed to me by Dave Lull.

It turns out that eating saturated fat is fine if you burn 2500kcal above basal metabolic requirements. Phew. That must be an awful lot of saturated fat being burned off to make it safe.

I only have the abstract of this paper, so can't get much of an idea of the size of the blinkers worn by the authors. They look pretty enormous from the here. In fact my window faces East and from Berkshire (far inland in southern England) I think I can see the tops of their blinkers way over there on the other side the North Sea (can't see any surf, must be flat, it is August).

If we go back to 1980 and another of my favourite idiots, we have Gibney's abstract here. He's now a major noise in Irish obesity promotion. He explains that it was the Masai's, and I quote:

"variable and generally low energy intakes"

that kept them healthy.

Now does 2500kcal over BMR count as a generally low intake? Why would variation in intake protect against IHD and the demon hypercholesterolaemia?

It's competition time. Who is the bigger idiot, Gibney or Mbalilaki? I know, I know, it's impossible to decide. You can stop trying now.

Equally difficult is to decide if Mbalilaki will do as well in influencing nutrition policy as Gibney seems to have done. Just pubmed him to see how well he has done for himself since 1980. They probably both know how to get on pretty well as dietitians. But as scientists? The biggest mistake I can see in the press release is to describe Mbalilaki et al as scientists.

Peter

PS if anyone has access to the full text of Mbalilaki's paper I'd be interested to see if she "forgot" to check sugar intake of the "high fat" urban Bantu. I would expect her to have skipped it and so to snatch the idiot's crown from Gibney by a gnat's whisker. Please don't let her disappoint me.