There was an unusually large amount of nutrition news in the New York Times this week, starting off with Wednesday's Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds.

The study's results were published in three different articles this week in JAMA - The Journal of the American Medical Association, one on heart disease, one on breast cancer, and one on colorectal cancer.

The news was quite a shock to all the low-fat advocates, who wrote letters of dismay explaining why they didn't believe the results of this study - the largest ever done on the question of whether cutting back on fat helps health.

On the other hand, the news was no shock at all to anyone who's aware of the absence of modern disease in populations who eat "primitive" diets. Some of those diets, like the diet of the Inuit First Nations of the Arctic, are very high in fat, while other "primitive" diets aren't. It's clearly not the quantity of fat in a diet that causes modern chronic diseases (for starters, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, but including many, many more).

What research has shown is important, although the news hasn't yet reached the New York Times, is the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids. Mammals, including humans, can't make these kinds of fats. They have to be obtained through the diet.

In primitive diets, the ratio of these two fats is balanced. Modern diets, on the other hand, are full of omega 6 fatty acids and very low in omega 3s. Omega 6 fats are needed to produce inter-cellular hormones that promote inflammation when necessary. Omega 3 fats are needed to produce complimentary hormones that stop inflammation.

Modern chronic diseases are a result of inflammation caused by this dietary imbalance. If you've never heard this before, you must think I'm selling something. I'm not selling anything but good health - here's a link to PubMed. Do a search on ratio of omega-6/omega-3 and you'll quickly find 336 research articles on the topic.

The reason there are so many articles is that the omega 6/omega 3 theory has been around for some time, although it hasn't hit the papers yet. One of the people primarily responsible for promoting the theory has been Artemis P. Simopoulos. A good place to start if you're interested in more information is her 1999 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Essential fatty acids in health and chronic disease.

Aspartame

The remarkable thing about research that looks at the health effects of aspartame is that you can predict the results of a study merely by looking at who sponsored it.

On the one hand, most of the independent studies of aspartame have recommended limiting its availability in human diets. On the other, no study sponsored by an organization with a financial interest in the results has ever found a problem with aspartame. Interesting, isn't it? It gives me the willies about all industry-sponsored research. Can anyone spell d-r-u-g-s?

Today's New York Times story, The Lowdown on Sweet?, reported on a $1 million, 1,900-rat, seven-year study.

The research found that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers…

The article goes on to review the history of aspartame research, the difficulty the creator, G. D. Searle & Company, had getting FDA approval, and the financial connections between the regulators who eventually approved aspartame and Searle. Interesting fact of the day: our current Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, ran Searle during the years when aspartame was up for approval.

Sliced Apples

Also today, the New York Times Magazine has a long article, Twelve Easy Pieces, on prepackaged sliced apples.

The article says that the famous apple of Eden isn't that tempting anymore.

Processing foods now means redesigning them, making them easier to eat for a population that is steadily less willing to go to any trouble at all. . . .By making a healthful, fresh fruit that looks and acts more like a bag of chips, a handful of companies like Crunch Pak may have finally figured out a way to compete with the hassle-free junk foods that blazed into this era of hyperconvenience. Some marketers say that the reformation of our venerable apple ? and the sense that this improvement was necessary ? suggest that we may soon buy most of our produce this way. . . .

Industry insiders now talk about elevating a food's "snackability," which, in short, means engineering it with enough convenience that picking up a piece and putting it in your mouth becomes an almost perfunctory transaction. A snackable food is crumbless and fussless. It is most likely broken into bite-size pieces, encouraging us to eat more. . . .

"You look at the number of meals being eaten in automobiles," Steve Lutz says (research by John Nihoff, a Culinary Institute of America food historian, estimates that 19 percent of all meals or snacks in this country are eaten there), "and you'd think the apple is convenient already. But when you finish it, you have a core to deal with. You have waste. Plus, once you've started an apple, you're sort of committed to eating the whole thing."

Now if we can just get some omega 3s added to those apple slices, while passing on the aspartame, we'll be one step down the road to good health.