The American Heart Association Diet: Is It Based on a Flawed Theory?

Could the American Heart Association diet -- and diets like it, such as the ones prescribed by the National Institutes of Health and the USDA -- be premised on a bad theory? And, if so, what might this imply about the culture of science as it is generally practiced today?

Three Blind Mice: Have our public health authorities really all made a fundamental mistake about what a balanced diet should be?

For decades, we've been told that "a calorie is a calorie" and that the alpha and omega of weight control is calorie control. It's not the quality of the calories that we eat that matters -- it's the quantity, pure and simple. This is the message that the American Heart Association diet and other mainstream weight loss programs have hammered home.

Perhaps the most compelling reason why most of us believe that calories "count" is that everyone around us seems to believe that they do. From your next door neighbor to your doctor to the Surgeon General, practically no one disputes that overeating and inactivity lead to weight gain and that, conversely, eating less and exercising more lead to weight loss. As we've been discussing, the basic convictions of the American Heart Association diet come from a theory about energy balance in the body that is technically known as the Caloric Balance Hypothesis. The public support for this hypothesis is utterly overwhelming.

However, as we have explored at length, there's an alternative theory about what controls our weight. The Lipophilia Hypothesis argues that calories don't count. The heart of the American Heart Association diet is wrong. Instead, what counts is the hormonal and metabolic environment of our fat tissue. This theory says that low-carb diets are healthiest and that the "balanced" American Heart Association diet -- with its copious amounts of fresh fruits and whole grains; and its restricted amounts of fats -- may in fact be unhealthy, since fruit juices and starches elevate insulin levels and thus cause us to store fat in our fat tissue.

At first glance, Lipophilia may seem like a compelling (if surprising) idea. But in order for us to feel comfortable embracing this theory, we must somehow account for how it is possible that nearly every public health expert on Earth supports the other theory. Could all these people -- many of the engineers of the American Heart Association diet are utterly brilliant, no doubt -- possibly have made such a significant and costly error about the nature of a healthy diet?

One way to go about answering this question -- other than simply examining the relative merits of the two hypotheses, which we do elsewhere on this site -- is to search for like examples.

In other words, can we find other instances of institutional blindness of this magnitude? Can we find examples of other whole communities of experts becoming biased towards bad/implausible hypotheses -- while simultaneously ignoring much better ones? If we can, that would in a sense validate our alternative point of view -- or at least make it more plausible.

Below, we will attempt to show that institutional blindness of the kind that Lipophilia alleges led to the American Heart Association diet can and does occur in science... and with an alarming frequency: