A new American study of the effects of diet on weight gain—ironically led by an Iranian—shows the traditional American diet to be just about the worst choice one could make to stay slim, while the traditional Iranian diet is ideally healthy.
The study didn’t just look at calories, but at how some foods stick more to the ribs and add weight regardless of the formal calorie count. For example, yogurt led to a substantial weight loss, prompting researchers to theorize that bacteria in the digestive tract influenced weight loss. However, others think it may just be that people attracted to yogurt tend to be attracted to healthy practices in general.
The largest weight gain by far came from French fries, followed distantly by potato chips and sugar-sweetened drinks. On the other end of the scale, weight loss resulted from consumption of yogurt, nuts and fruits. The two ends were a fair description of traditional American fare and the traditional Persian diet.
The study was led by Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian of the Harvard School of Public Health. News of what he reported got widespread coverage in the American media last week, even making the front page of The Washington Post.
Asked about the Persian vs. American diet, Mozaffarian told the Iran Times, “The traditional Iranian diet—rich in vegetables, herbs, nuts, fruits and yogurt, with small amounts of rice and cheese and sweets as an occasional special treat—gets an A+. Unfortunately, the modern Iranian diet—large amounts of white rice, meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and sweet/deserts, with few vegetables, herbs, nuts or fruits—grows increasingly similar to the US diet.”
Clearly, President Ahmadi-nejad has totally missed a massive and beastly American conspiracy that is harming the Iranian public! Will the French fry soon appear to beat the Iranian public into obese submission?
Mozaffarian does not, however, deal with such political matters. His diet study was published last Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine with his cautionary note: “The conventional wisdom is simply, ‘Eat everything in moderation and just reduce total calories’ without paying attention to what those calories are made of. All foods are not equal, and just eating in moderation is not enough.”
The study was based on reports collected on the habits of more than 120,000 Americans. The data covered not just food intake but also such things as sleeping habits, television watching time, and exercise.
Mozaffarian said, “The big picture of what’s new and unique here is we looked at multiple things simultaneously. Most studies just focused on one thing or a few things at a time. I wanted to see if you took the whole picture together. That hasn’t been done before.”
Mozaffarian’s parents were both born in Tehran. Mozaffarian was born in the United States during his father’s medical specialty training. But the family returned to Tehran while he was a child. His father started the Department of Endocrinology at the University of Tehran while his mother was an accountant for the National Iranian Oil Co. The family returned to the United States just before the revolution and Mozaffarian got all his higher education in the United States—BS from Stanford, MD from Columbia and doctorate in public health from Harvard.
Mozaffarian’s wife, Rebecca, also works at Harvard, and they have two daughters, Jasmine and Sophia.
Mozaffarian’s research interests are the effects of behavior and lifestyle—particularly dietary habits—on cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
The “evil” food showing up in Mozaffarian’s study is clearly the potato, which wasn’t known to the world outside the Western Hemisphere until 400 years ago. But all types of prepared potatoes were not equal. Boiled, baked and mashed potatoes promoted weight gain, but potato chips were rated three times as bad and French fries six times as bad as boiled, baked or mashed potatoes.
