US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)

Plenty of people make that claim, just search carbohydrate loading. The scientific reasoning is very simple. Aerobic exercise performance is limited by the rate of oxygen uptake, turning fats into usable energy takes considerably more oxygen than it does for CHO. You can in a single race/session exhaust your glycogen stores, but the supply of fats is essentially limitless. So for ideal performance you want to maximize your glycogen stores before an event, and for long ones, take additional CHO during, though rate of consumption is usually significantly higher than replenishment through digestion if you are going at all fast.

That point when you have exhausted your glycogen stores is what they call bonking. Now you can fine-tune your low carb diet to hopefully have enough glycogen at any point to sustain you through an exercise session (more realistic for running than cycling) but everyone else just eats a high-carb diet.

> You can't protect people from themselves

You can't protect all people from themselves, but you can protect a lot of people from themselves.

If you look at smoking [1] in the US, smoking went from 42.4% in 1965 to 16.8% in 2014. Raising awareness, taxing cigarettes, outlawing advertising, warnings on packaging, these things work.

The same could be done with alcohol if society wanted. One of the reasons why it hasn't happened with alcohol is because alcohol is ingrained into our culture.

> by the percentage of people saved by life saving drugs that make it to market faster/would otherwise be blocked.

Do you have any estimates for this? Do you have estimates about how many people would die by allowing poorly-vetted drugs on the market?

> which of course goes down significantly when people realize that they shouldn't blindly trust everything in our markets

How would you suggest the average person go about evaluating a drug/treatment?

> sentenced to die directly by rejecting appeals from terminally ill patients to get access to experimental drugs/procedures

sentenced to die implies that experimental drugs/procedures would save them. Undoubtedly some could be saved, but I doubt it would be more than a small fraction.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/ci...

If you're looking to avoid confusion you should refer to them as starches, they are the complex carbs (such as rice, beans, potatoes etc.) that give us energy and should form the largest proportion of any healthy diet.

- These starches should preferably be unrefined (yes, quit that white bread, discover the great taste of brown rice) and eaten alongside some green and yellow vegetables to get extra vitamins, minerals and fibre.

- If you're trying to lose weight faster, avoid consuming oil and fatty foods (e.g. nuts, avocado), use sparingly otherwise.

- Avoid dairy products at all costs.

- Add meat in small amounts if you really can't live without it.

You'll be getting more than your daily calorie/vitamin/mineral/fibre needs, and by not eating a tonne of refined carbs, fats, dairy, and meat you'll be less of a burden on the planet/country/healthcare systems too!

I mostly follow the above advice, but I'm pragmatic when eating out, not everywhere caters to a vegan/plant based diet, or even vegetarian. So while you'll occasionally catch me eating a delicious chicken burger or even possibly a steak, 99%* of the time I eat a plant based diet with zero added oil.

As for the myth of sugar turning to fat: it's a process known as de novo lipogenesis, and yes it happens efficiently in cows, but in humans not so much unless you're eating carbs in greatly excess of your body's energy needs[0]. In 99%* of normal circumstances, the human body will increase its metabolism to cope with the extra calories from carbs. The problem really _is_ consuming too much fat.

* estimated ;)

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10365981 "Only when CHO energy intake exceeds TEE [total energy expenditure] does DNL [de novo lipogenesis] in liver or adipose tissue contribute significantly to the whole-body energy economy. It is concluded that DNL is not the pathway of first resort for added dietary CHO, in humans."

Your comment reminds me of a thread I read in the Primal Diet's forum. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/forum/forum/the-primal-bluepr...

Quite a few of them are having heart attacks: "So my first heart attack, 8 years after a stroke, was unexpected. My heart is determined to kill me. I've had at least 4 attacks, the last one keeping me in hospital 6 days"

Yet they still all stay on that diet, because of some convincing bloggers with no credentials as doctors or researchers and some conspiracy theories.

I use to look around in a naive way and take my conclusions:

- Grandfather, 89, ate everything moderately during his life, mostly organic. He evites fat and bread and walks every day. Low energy person.

- Grandmother, passed at 82, cancer. Same diet as my grandfather. Much less exercise though.

- Grandmother, 92, ate a lot until 50's, mostly organic, obese. Since then barely eats, mostly vegetables and yogurt. Right weight and good health. No exercise.

- Grandfather, passed at 71. Ate more fat than anyone I know. Death by heart attack or stroke. Very energetic person with a lot of exercise.

Can you see a pattern? I can't.