Crain

2 rounds for time of:
34 push-ups
50-yard sprint
34 deadlifts, 135 lb.
50-yard sprint
34 box jumps, 24-inch box
50-yard sprint
34 clean and jerks, 95 lb.
50-yard sprint
34 burpees
50-yard sprint
34 wall-ball shots, 20-lb. ball
50-yard sprint
34 pull-ups
50-yard sprint

Josh getting after a heavy power clean in 15.4.

Josh getting after a heavy power clean in 15.4.

Rethinking Diet – When Will Journalists Catch Up

If you’re like many of your peers at the gym, your understanding of what constitutes a healthy diet may have changed in the last decade or two. We in the CrossFit community, aided by results based methods and the basic understanding that observational studies do not show causation, came to realize that the government recommendations for a healthy diet were wrongheaded. Those recommendations serve various lobbies well, but they don’t serve our health.

Other parts of society are catching on – check out this short write-up in The Week – Rethinking Fat and Cholesterol.

Lingering in the transition from the government’s archaic, scientifically unfounded recommendations to any realistic, real food diet are the connotations of words like salt, fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. For decades, those words were one and the same with unhealthy, fattening, and heart attack causing. But since it’s now easily attainable knowledge that science does not support causation of heart disease or obesity with salt, saturated fat, or cholesterol, when will journalists catch up? Reporters regularly still claim this causal relationship without citing any evidence, but they should know better. How long will people have to read or watch the news and edit a reporter’s claims about food as the story is relayed? I had to do it just last week when The New York Times wrote in its Chipotle study write-up:

“The distributions of two other metrics of a meal’s health — salt and saturated fat, shown in the charts below — are just as revealing. Most orders at Chipotle give you close to a full day’s worth of salt (2,400 milligrams) and 75 percent of a full day’s worth of saturated fat.” entire article here: “At Chipotle, How Many Calories Do People Really Eat?

The New York Times authors, are so convinced salt and saturated fat are bad and the government guidelines good that they do not even explain why they are reporting those numbers. But at this point a person has to be blind to all sources of media or stuck in a “fat fear mindset” to think there is nothing wrong with the government’s diet recommendations.

Journalists may not be what they once were, but reporting causal relationships between diet and health that are not supported by science goes against their ethical code of truthfulness, accuracy, and public accountability. We can’t count on the government for scientifically sound information on diet. We can’t count on the press to report matters of diet responsibly. Good thing we’ve got the Roots community!