Weight Maven

I watched the first part of this BBC production yesterday and recommend it (part 1 of the first episode above, also see parts 2, 3, and 4).

As an overall piece, I think it does a pretty good job at pointing out how our food environment has changed in the last 30 or 40 years. Yes, Lustig and Taubes are featured, but the series is not just about pointing the finger at one macronutrient.

Here are the men identified in the series:

• Earl Butz — Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, he was responsible for changes in policy in the early 1970s that led to farmers growing more and more corn. The surplus of corn led to the increasing use of HFCS in foods, largely because it was much cheaper.
• Ancel Keys — American scientist who was convinced that saturated fat was responsible for cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately for us, he was an arrogant SOB who had a lot of influence, which included leading the scientific community in scorning John Yudkin, a British scientist whose book, Pure, White and Deadly was published in 1972 pointing out sugar’s role in disease. [Note: see Denise Minger's The Truth About Ancel Keys: We’ve All Got It Wrong for her take on the Seven Countries study.]
• George McGovern — McGovern was chairman of the US Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, a group that was responsible for, among other things, the prominence of grains in the USDA guidelines and food pyramid. With Keys’ work, this helped pave the way to the phenomenon of low- and no-fat fuods (e.g., SnackWells). Turns out reducing the fat is not always a good thing.

Don’t have time to watch? Read Jacques Peretti’s summary of his documentary.