高普考/三四等/高員級◆英文題庫下載題庫

In an early 19th-century best seller, a famous food writer offered a cure for obesity and chronic disease: a low-carbohydrate diet. The notion that what you eat shapes your medical fate has had a strong influence throughout history. 47 For many Americans, it is more a canon than a principle to suggest that what you eat affects your health. Accordingly, they believe that you control your own destiny and that it is never too late to reinvent yourself.48 If not, you get healthy. That very American canon is what lies behind the criticism and disbelief that greeted a recent report that a low-fat diet might not prevent breast cancer, colon cancer, or heart disease, after all. 49 It raises important questions about how much even the most highly motivated people can change their eating habits and whether the relatively small changes that they can make really have an effect on health. The study, of nearly 49,000 women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet, found that the diet did not make a significant difference in development of the two cancers or heart disease. 50 And when it comes to this urge, it is remarkable how history repeats itself. Over and over again, medical experts and self-styled medical experts have insisted that one diet or another can prevent disease, cure chronic illness, and ensure health and longevity. So, when the study’s results were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the study investigators braced themselves for attacks.