Saturated fat does not clog the arteries: coronary heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition, the risk of which can be effectively reduced from healthy lifestyle interventions | British Journal of Sports Medicine

Preventing the development of atherosclerosis is important but it is atherothrombosis that is the real killer
The inflammatory processes that contribute to cholesterol deposition within the artery wall and subsequent plaque formation (atherosclerosis), more closely resembles a ‘pimple’ (figure 1). Most cardiac events occur at sites with <70% coronary artery obstruction and these do not generate ischaemia on stress testing.4 When plaques rupture (analogous to a pimple bursting), coronary thrombosis and myocardial infarction can occur within minutes. The limitation of the current plumbing approach (‘unclogging a pipe’) to the management of coronary disease is revealed by a series of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) which prove that stenting significantly obstructive stable lesions fail to prevent myocardial infarction or to reduce mortality.

I would wager the decrease in sugar/refined carb consumption is the most significant factor in the results.

Acne Vulgaris | Acne | JAMA Dermatology | The JAMA Network

Conclusions: The astonishing difference in acne incidence rates between nonwesternized and fully modernized societies cannot be solely attributed to genetic differences among populations but likely results from differing environmental factors. Identification of these factors may be useful in the treatment of acne in Western populations.

Here's a clue perhaps?

Minimal carbs, lots of fat, incredible dieting results – but no science - The Globe and Mail

All human diets before agriculture were effectively carbohydrate-poor, and many, particularly in northern latitudes, were fat-rich. And until the industrial revolution, virtually all human diets were absent the highly refined grains and sugars that the LCHF philosophy specifies as the primary causes of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

As early as 1825, French culinary expert Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose The Physiology of Taste is among the most famous books ever written about food, was arguing that carbohydrates cause obesity. In the 1860s, the LCHF diet became widely known as a Banting diet, after British undertaker William Banting, who wrote the first bestselling diet book based on his LCHF conversion experience. Variations on LCHF then spread from England to the European continent, embraced by German medical authorities as the most effective diets for reversing obesity.

By the early 1950s, physicians from some of the best medical schools in the world – Harvard, Stanford and Columbia, for instance – were publishing articles in the academic literature advocating for LCHF diets to treat obesity, advising obese patients to eat "as much as [they] like" of meat, fish, fowl, eggs, animal fats, cheese and green vegetables, while avoiding all carbohydrate-rich foods and beverages, particularly "all sweets." This is what Hilde Bruch, the leading mid-20th-century authority on pediatric obesity, believed. It's what Benjamin Spock taught in six editions and almost 50 million copies of Baby and Child Care, the bible of child-rearing from the 1950s onward. "Rich desserts," Dr. Spock wrote, and "the amount of plain, starchy foods (cereals, breads, potatoes) taken is what determines, in the case of most people, how much [weight] they gain or lose."

Gary Taubes on Calories vs. Carbs, The Case Against Sugar, and More | diaTribe

“Pharmaceutical companies regularly spend $1 billion to develop drugs to treat diseases that are related to obesity and diabetes, and that will often be used by a small percentage of the population afflicted.

“The US Fitzgerald, the destroyer that recently collided with a cargo vessel off the Sea of Japan, cost $1.5 billion and is one of 62 similarly expensive ships in its class. Our nation spends this money because we think it’s important to the defense of the US population and, well, world peace.

“Obesity and diabetes alone supposedly cost the US healthcare system roughly one billion dollars PER DAY.

“Isn’t it worth spending this kind of money to find out whether we’re fooling ourselves about the nature of a healthy diet, particularly as these obesity and diabetes epidemics are blowing up worldwide?”

I’d bet in this day and age we could do five to ten randomized controlled trials for one day’s worth of direct medical costs from obesity and diabetes and, with them, answer reliably virtually all of the critically important nutrition questions.

Coming from my perspective – trained to think by physicists and having spent much of my professional life studying episodes in which scientists fooled themselves and so simply got the wrong answers – I do not understand why we wouldn’t do such tests, and why we wouldn’t want to argue that they’re necessary. They’re inexpensive compared to the money we spend on other vital questions and issues.

Atlantic salmon from Cooke Aquaculture have escaped in the Pacific — Quartz

It’s unclear whether or not these Atlantic salmon will affect the Chinook salmon population. The concern is that the Atlantic salmon will outcompete Chinook salmon for food, breed with them to create hybrids, or spread diseases like sea lice.
“What my research showed is that they do escape, they do survive, they will ascend rivers, they will reproduce with each other and they will produce viable offspring that are competitively equal or superior to Pacific salmon,” John Volpe, an ecologist at the University of Victoria, told the Globe and Mail.

Gary Taubes, the Man Who Knows Why America Is Fat | GQ

Is the "French paradox" bullshit? Do French people actually eat a high-fat, bread-filled diet and remain skinny?
Historically, the French seem to lag about 100 years behind us in sugar consumption. We seem to use about twice as much sugar as the French. When I lived in Paris in the '80s, I saw that for the most part women of a certain age did not eat bread. Also French white bread has a lower sugar content than in America. It has about 2 percent sugar, where white bread in the U.S. can be 10 or 12 percent. So it's really not a paradox if you look at sugar consumption, only when you look at fat consumption.

There is nothing inevitable or natural about chronic disease | Aeon Ideas

Indeed, evidence suggests that lack of chronic disease in these groups flows from how they live, how they move, how they eat. Diet looks to be an especially powerful driver – adoption of a Western diet, rich in processed foods, has mirrored the development of chronic disease worldwide, and prospective studies with healthy and diabetic subjects have documented the powerful influence of food on health.

The case for eliminating sugar. All of it. - Vox

The other point you make is also very important. Clearly there are people who live very long, happy lives eating significant amounts of sugar. Maybe it even makes them healthier, who knows. Anything is possible. I get emails from these people regularly now, often explaining that they are living proof that my theory, as one such [correspondent] put it two days ago, is bullshit. If I’m in a punchy mood, I write them back and say something along the lines of, “My Uncle Max smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, lived to be in his nineties, and died of old age. Does that mean cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer?”

And the same logic holds. The fact that some people clearly tolerate sugar, if not thrive on it, is simply not evidence that those of us who are obese and/or diabetic didn’t get that way because of the sugar we, or our mothers, or our mothers’ mothers consumed.

Sugar is a toxic agent that creates conditions for disease | Aeon Essays

The sugars and refined grains that make up such a high proportion of the foods we consume in modern Westernised diets trigger the dysregulation of a homeostatic system that has evolved to depend on insulin to regulate both fat accumulation and blood sugar. Hence, the same dietary factors – sugars and refined grains – trigger both obesity and diabetes. By focusing on the problems of eating too much and exercising too little, public health authorities have simply failed to target the correct causes.

Is Sugar Killing Us? - WSJ

The sugar industry has long defended itself against the notion that sugar is uniquely fattening by repeating the mantra that a calorie is a calorie. The worst that can be said of sugar, the industry argues, is that it tastes good, which leads us to consume too much of it. “There is no difference between the calories that come from sugar or steak or grapefruit or ice cream,” proclaimed industry ads in the 1950s.

That is not actually true, though nutritionists have been slow to come around. Beginning in the 1960s, researchers led by the British nutritionist John Yudkin began to publish the results of experiments in animals and trials in humans suggesting that sugar’s distinctive chemistry had a role in producing an entire cluster of biochemical abnormalities known today as “metabolic syndrome.”

Among these abnormalities is resistance to the hormone insulin, which orchestrates the body’s use of fuels—proteins, carbohydrates and fats, and whether we store them or burn them. That key function apparently goes awry when we consume too much sugar and our cells resist the hormone. Insulin resistance is also the fundamental defect in Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, and it is common in obesity as well.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 75 million Americans now suffer from metabolic syndrome. If sugar consumption is the trigger, as 50 years of research suggests, then it might be as much of a direct cause of diabetes as smoking cigarettes is of lung cancer. Without sugar in our diets, diabetes might be an exceedingly rare disease—as it appears once to have been.

The sugar conspiracy | Ian Leslie | Society | The Guardian

One of the scientists who called for the retraction of Nina Teicholz’s BMJ article, who requested that our conversation be off the record, complained that the rise of social media has created a “problem of authority” for nutrition science. “Any voice, however mad, can gain ground,” he told me.

The problem of authority for nutrition "science" as it currently exists is not due to the internet but being horribly and disastrously wrong for such a long time. Hopefully this can change that.

Fat: The New Health Paradigm - Credit Suisse

This report is based on more than 400 medical research papers and books written by academics and industry experts, as well as two in-house surveys of doctors, nutritionists and consumers. Eating cholesterol, for instance, has basically no impact on the level of cholesterol in the blood or on potential heart diseases, and the link between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk has not been proved. "But we found that 40 percent of nutritionists and 70 percent of general practitioners surveyed believe that eating cholesterol-rich foods has damaging cardiovascular effects. This is not true, according to the extensive research that has become available in recent years," said Giles Keating, Vice Chairman of Investment Strategy & Research and Deputy Global Chief Investment Officer for Private Banking & Wealth Management. A high intake of vegetable oils (containing omega-6 polyunsaturated fats) has not been proved to be as beneficial as earlier thought, and trans-fats have been shown to have negative effects on our health. In short, saturated fats and monounsaturated fats are not behind the high rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome in the US. The two leading culprits are the higher intakes of vegetable oils and the increase in carbohydrate consumption.

Undernews: Study: Monsanto helped kill the monarch butterfly

"The report makes it abundantly clear: two decades of Roundup Ready crops have nearly eradicated milkweed—the monarch caterpillar’s sole source of food—in cropland of the monarch’s vital Midwest breeding ground."

Half of All Children Will Be Autistic by 2025, Warns Senior Research Scientist at MIT | The Alliance for Natural Health USA

"This month, the USDA released a study finding that although there were detectable levels of pesticide residue in more than half of food tested by the agency, 99% of samples taken were found to be within levels the government deems safe, and 40% were found to have no detectable trace of pesticides at all. The USDA added, however, that due to 'cost concerns,' it did not test for residues of glyphosate. Let’s repeat that: they never tested for the active ingredient in the most widely used herbicide in the world. 'Cost concerns'? How absurd—unless they mean it will cost them too much in terms of the special relationship between the USDA and Monsanto. You may recall the revolving door between Monsanto and the federal government, with agency officials becoming high-paying executives—and vice versa! Money, power, prestige: it’s all there. Monsanto and the USDA love to scratch each others’ backs. Clearly this omission was purposeful."

Genetically Modified Organisms Risk Global Ruin, Says Black Swan Author — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium

"One of the arguments that genetically modified crops are safe is that it is no more unnatural than the selective farming that people have been doing for generations. However, Taleb and co argue that this kind of farming is different from the current practice because any mistake in the form of a harmful variation will almost certainly be localised and die out as a result. This is the natural process of selection.

"Over many generations, humans have chosen and adapted biological organisms that are relatively safe for consumption, even though there are many organisms that are not safe, including parts of and varieties of the crops that we do cultivate.

"By contrast, genetic engineering works in a very different way. This process introduces rapid changes on a global scale. But selection cannot operate on this scale, they argue.

“'There is no comparison between tinkering with the selective breeding of genetic components of organisms that have previously undergone extensive histories of selection and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from a fish and putting it into a tomato,' they argue. 'Saying that such a product is natural misses the process of natural selection by which things become “natural.”'”

Jacques Pepin’s last series for KQED shares his 'Heart & Soul’ - San Francisco Chronicle

"He says it has not been any more emotional for him to film this series, even knowing this is his final one.

"After all, he’s adamant that this is not the last you’ll see of him. He plans to do a book tour next year, continue teaching at Boston University and the International Culinary Center, and appear at Aspen Food & Wine.

“'I’ll do the same as I’ve always done, but just less of it,' he says. 'I won’t become a hermit. There is no retirement. As long as I’m hungry, I will cook.'”

To me, his series are the best TV shows, not just cooking shows, ever.

Inside Scoop SF: Thomas Keller and Jacques Pepin on their Bouchon dinners, classics and generational bridges

"The idea was born during Bouchon’s quarterly brainstorming meeting, where Thomas Keller meets with the Bouchon chefs to discuss special dinners and the like. Doing a menu centered around the legendary chef was a natural fit, says Keller, and it worked out especially well because Pepin is currently in the Bay Area shooting a new television show."

Yes!

Voracious Worm Evolves to Eat Biotech Corn Engineered to Kill It - Wired Science

"First planted in 1996, Bt corn quickly became hugely popular among U.S. farmers. Within a few years, populations of rootworms and corn borers, another common corn pest, had plummeted across the midwest. Yields rose and farmers reduced their use of conventional insecticides that cause more ecological damage than the Bt toxin.

"By the turn of the millennium, however, scientists who study the evolution of insecticide resistance were warning of imminent problems. Any rootworm that could survive Bt exposures would have a wide-open field in which to reproduce; unless the crop was carefully managed, resistance would quickly emerge."

Yeah go ahead, put the food supply in the hands of corporations whose primary, and usually ONLY, motivation is raising their stock prices. What could possibly go wrong?

via boing boing

Why Nutrition Is So Confusing - NYTimes.com

"And they do what are called observational studies, observing populations for decades, documenting what people eat and what illnesses beset them, and then assume that the associations they observe between diet and disease are indeed causal — that if people who eat copious vegetables, for instance, live longer than those who don’t, it’s the vegetables that cause the effect of a longer life. And maybe they do, but there’s no way to know without experimental trials to test that hypothesis.

"The associations that emerge from these studies used to be known as “hypothesis-generating data,” based on the fact that an association tells us only that two things changed together in time, not that one caused the other. So associations generate hypotheses of causality that then have to be tested. But this hypothesis-generating caveat has been dropped over the years as researchers studying nutrition have decided that this is the best they can do."

South Dakota's cattle cataclysm: why isn't this horror news? | Carrie Mess | Comment is free | theguardian.com

"Can you even imagine what that would feel like? Standing with your hands tied as your life's living, breathing and mooing work is destroyed. I can't imagine, I don't know how I would recover from a loss like that. This wasn't just one or two herds of cows. This wasn't just one or two families that lost animals. This wasn't just a few cows. Tens of thousands of cows are gone. Some ranchers lost their entire herds. All of their cows, gone."