Posted by mgh2 1 day ago
If you’d like to take a look at a critical review of her other work on this topic, I’d highly recommend this damning analysis of her “Big Fat Surprise” book: https://thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/the-b...
At least in the United States, the nutrition science of the last 100 years has overseen the most incredible deterioration of metabolic health in human history. There are some folks doing good work out there, as there always have been, but listening to mainstream nutrition science as if their word is law is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.
The recommendations regarding fat hasn't changed in 30 years in most countries. FDA recommended limiting saturated fat already in 1980 (didn't bother looking further) and has recommended not exceeding an energy intake from fat over 30% since at least 1990. 30%e from fat is not a low fat diet.
The guidelines from 1980 explicitly mentions reducing saturated fat and sugar.
I think the problem is that we haven't been listening.
Reduced fat is an interesting one. If you actually look at what Keys was investigating all the way back in the mid 20th century, the hypothesis was always that saturated fat increased CVD risk. The translation of that into policy and marketing aimed at total fat cannot be placed entirely at the feet of mainstream nutrition science.
As to the claims that sugar is addictive, this is unsupported - sugar does not meet the DSM-V criteria for addictive substances based on current evidence (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-8077-9_...)
As for added sugar - again, you’re labelling policy decisions as nutrition science. The DGs that I’m aware of recommend as little added sugar as possible, but when you’re making policy you have to strike a balance between strict enough to make a difference, but not so restrictive that no one listens. That’s different from what mainstream nutrition science would claim (which is indeed that there are no benefits to added sugar and several risks).
The same point applies to your claim that nutrition science has a role in getting people to adhere to satiating diets. No, nutrition science is to help us understand what those diets might look like. It is not responsible for getting populations to adhere to them.
This is false, in the 90s when I grew up there was no such criterion, and the posters of the pyramid prominently depicted sliced white bread.
The worst part of the food pyramid was the indication to use all fats and oils sparingly. There's never been any point in which the evidence suggested that olive oil or other monounsaturated fats should be avoided
Citation please or I'm calling extreme bullshit. Everything I've ever read has argued for putting more nutrient dense fruits and vegetables as the basis for a healthy diet.
More importantly, I think the nutrition community was woefully naive to the point of being negligent when they tried to defend the food pyramid. One quote I heard was "When we were recommending lower far intake, we never imagined Snackwells." Well, why TF not??? It should have been blatantly obvious that by demonizing fat and making people feel like carbs were "free" that companies would react appropriately and come up with fat-free, sugar-stuffed replacements that had a huge amount of calories, left you feeling unsatiated, and tasted like sweet cardboard. Probably even worse was frankenfood like Olestra.
I agree with the original point - while I think the field of nutrition science has improved a lot over the past decade, they have a ton to answer for and never did an appropriate "mea culpa" for all the great harm they caused.
As for whole grains vs fruit vs vegetables, here's a SR and MA of studies looking at different food groups and the RR of all cause mortality: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
Three servings of whole grains per day: 0.79 (21% reduction in ACM) Three servings of vegetables per day: 0.89 (11% reduction in ACM) Three servings of fruit per day: 0.90 (10% reduction in ACM)
So the evidence seems to support the suggestion that consumers should focus on whole grain consumption as a base for their diet.
pic from wikipedia named USDA pyramid 1995-2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#/medi...
Even with that first sentence though, the base of that shitty food pyramid really just doesn't talk about "whole grains" - it calls it the "bread, cereal, rice and pasta" group, with a graphic that includes spaghetti, crackers, a baguette, a bowl of cereal, etc. And having lived through that time when the food pyramid was taught in school, they certainly weren't delineating between highly refined flours and things like oatmeal, brown rice, quinoa, etc.
looks like I agree with you on this part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41964513
Grains are cheap and energy dense, if your goal is to feed a large population it makes a lot of sense to put them at the base of the pyramid, that's what will keep you alive, as in, not starving. Higher up are fruits and vegetables, also cheap, they will provide with nutrients that you need to stay healthy on top of the calories that will keep you alive. Higher up are animal products, expensive but rich in proteins and a few other nutrients that are a bit lacking in the base layers, they help you get stronger and more performant in addition to healthy and alive. On top are pleasure foods, not really necessary for your body, but enjoyable.
I take it like a mirror of the "hierarchy of needs" pyramid rather than nutritional advice for people with effectively unlimited resources.
Many, many people disagree with that. Most days I eat no grains at all and the rest of the time, I strictly limit my grain intake. For example, I just finished a meal where I used one tablespoonful (uncooked volume) of rice (boiled with some peas). (The meal also included meat and butter, the source of most of my calories.) White rice is the only grain I eat anymore, and I would never eat brown rice, which is loaded with oxalate and other phytotoxins. I added to this just-finished meal B vitamins in the form of pure refined powder (which I liberated from capsules).
It is very obvious from how it makes me feel that brown rice is bad for me.
The cultures that have eaten rice for thousands of years eat almost exclusively white rice. Brown rice was not even possible to make before the spread of tech for precision machining (which reached East Asia in the 1900s). You have to remove the hull from the rice before you can eat it, and before precision machining, removing the hull (traditionally done by pounding the rice with a log) also removed most of the bran and germ. Yes, some bran and some germ remained stuck to the rice -- so it was mostly-white rice, as opposed the polished, completely-white rice we have today with no bran and no germ at all. Still it had only a small fraction of the amount of bran and germ that modern brown rice has.
Look at the dose response curve for wholegrain consumption in this bad boy (and yes, it’s looking at whole cereal grains, not including fruits and vegetables). Greater consumption associated with better outcomes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
I've read that, too, many times, and I stopped believing it after I watched videos (on Youtube) of people preparing rice the traditional way. Particularly, I paid close attention to the color of the rice after the processing steps: it was white with bits of brown stuck to it.
I searched for bookmarks for those videos, but cannot find them.
(I don't know about wheat: I only investigated rice.)
https://youtu.be/qGNUPqHvTso?si=WWnY3OLALTBREVMs&t=525
I bookmarked another video, but it has been made private since I watched it.
Here is a very illuminating moment: the rice has already been pounded, then winnowed (the separated hulls removed), but there are still many kernels that need to be hulled (roughly one kernel in every 150 or 200 kernels), so the rice is put back in the mortar for another round of pounding. In other words, although there is more pounding to do to make the rice edible, already most of the bran is off the rice (and thrown away along with the hulls). (When only a few unhulled kernels remain, she removes them one by one with her fingers.) This supports my assertion that it is impossible with traditional methods to get the hulls off while leaving on most or even a significant fraction of the bran. Again: I think you need precision machines that only became available in Europe in the 1800s and in East Asia in the 1900s to get the hulls off (which I think you really need to do if you eat rice every day and want to keep your teeth) while leaving most of the bran on the kernel. I.e., people in traditional rice cultures did not have the ability to consume anywhere close to as much rice bran as is possible by eating modern brown rice.
Policy and advocacy is deceptive, dishonest, and lacks nuance.
my humble research found that diffs in nutrition between whole grains and refined grains carbs is very small compared to say whole grain to some complex carbs from leaf veggies. The same goes to glycemic index, satiety index, etc.
yes, because they consists of 90%-95% of water, then if you cook them, water evaporates and you get some amount of carbs.
But leaf veggies is one side of spectrum, with refined carbs on another, there are bunch of stuff in between.
When I joined a Christian Health Sharing ministry, they determined that I needed remedial help, due to hypertension and dyslipidemia. They assigned me to monthly virtual meetings with a dietician. The dietician's advice horrified me, because it would've made me sicker, and exacerbated my conditions. I approached the ministry's administrators, requested a replacement dietician, and they replaced her alright. The new dietician had basically the same credentials and the same letters after her name, but she was way more flexible, listened to my reasoning, and supported my choices with encouragement.
My parents followed every "diet fad" in the 1970s-1980s, from 2% milk, to margarine, to yolk-less-egg-whites, to reducing red meat, to low-sodium everythings, to bottled fluoridated water. It was sheer torture and disgusting. My mother didn't know the first thing about flavor or pleasure in cooking, and never used the spices in her rack. Our food was always bland. For breakfast she'd slap down a jug of milk, a box of Chex, a bowl and a spoon, and abandon me to go do housework. I would sit there and read the mendacious lies known as "Nutrition Panel" on the side, and simply stewed in my resentment for the whole thing. It's a travesty.
Chex, I suppose it depends on whether it was wholegrain or not. Wholegrain cereal is associated with pretty good health benefits, refined not so much.
So why wouldn’t replacing butter with margarine be a positive step for one’s cardiovascular risk profile?
https://youtu.be/reLIPoZQZ-8?si=lLXfhsdm89zlOWsI
Those commercials played multiple times a day in my childhood, and they never failed to piss me off, because they clearly demonstrated that "milk and a box of Chex" was not by any means a "balanced breakfast".
This is the fallacy that makes pseudoscience thrive right now: The idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Wannabe influencers position themselves as the anti-establishment position. People who are frustrated with institutions blindly fall in line behind them.
The fallacy doesn’t stand up to even the simplest critical thinking, yet it triggers something subconsciously that leads far too many people to see a contrarian statement and assume it must be true.
Meanwhile, these people are grifting away, selling books and pitching Athletic Greens (or the latest sponsor of the day). This person is no exception.
All metrics I see show faith in these institutions going to zero. Most good science I see is making (and has been making for decades) a really strong case that this loss of faith is deserved.
Credentialism is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption.
Good institutions have mechanisms in place to correct themselves.
And most of the past failures of our institutions were discovered and corrected by ... the institutions (sometimes the very same institution or other institutions whose role was to counterweight the institution at fault)
Unfortunately the trap we all fell into is that we interpret this success at catching and fixing failures as proof that the institutions have failed and thus that they will never be trustworthy ever again.
We need to train ourselves that the trust we put in the institutions does not mean we trust everything that comes out of them, but we trust that the mistakes will be eventually corrected as they happen.
But that's not what's happening now. The society has equated the point-in-time failure of an institution with the failure of the entire process and also extended that feeling across the board towards areas of our society that haven't failed us much.
Nothing good will come out of that. For one, it will remove any incentive from future institutions to try to be objective and self-correct. If self-correction becomes a "capital sin" for institutions, they will be selected to favour absolute unquestionable truths which cannot possibly ever need a correction.
But also. it completely ignores the fact that most institutions are useful, even while they suffer from failures/corruption and that destroying them altogether is going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I want them to share their uncertainty, nuance, and reasoning. Anything less I view as well intended lies.
Institutions as a concept are critical. Some institutions are net negative. Blindly following and support all institutions because some or even most are useful is a fallacy of its own.
I think the nutritional institution credibility is bankrupt at the moment. given the importance, I am willing to take the risk and put in the work to find my own way in the Forrest.
Furthermore, most institutions can only provide heuristic advice, which even when true, is t always true, or true for everyone. It should never be treated as dogma
It might turn out that they’re arguing the earth is round, or maybe they’re arguing that the earth is a doughnut shape. The validity of what anyone says has to stand on its own merit. But shutting it down because someone is “a joke” (amongst a science that is largely, itself, a joke), is not conducive toward improving our understanding.
What unique feedback mechanism is this and how can i find out if i have this too ? circular reasoning "what makes them different is that they are shown to be different"
> they manage to escape heart attacks because their vessels are larger than average. Wow. I don’t know what to make of the Masai, except that they are indeed a unique people.
Maybe they are not "unique people" and there are other non-genetic reasons their blood vessels are larger.
I call BS on this so called review because author didn't bother to explain his points.
Get a blood lipids panel and see what your ApoB is like!
> Maybe they are not "unique people" and there are other non-genetic reasons their blood vessels are larger.
I don't think this effect has been observed in post mortem of other populations, so that would make them fairly unique, no?
not sure how this tell me if i have 'unique feedback mechanism' . wtf does that phrase even mean.
So you could get your LDL-c checked, up your butter consumption and then get a retest and compare the results to the expected value.
Much like in her book, Nina is grossly misrepresenting the evidence, and I’d say just flat-out lies or at the very least misleads the author. See my comment here for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41958014
To me it’s no secret that the mainstream nutrition science is a joke. The latest Nordic nutrition guidelines I’ve heard of recommend the same amount of sugar and red meat per week — 350 grams.
If that’s not enough to tell you everything these organisations do is based on false premises, I have a bridge to sell you.
Please provide a source. The Danish health authorities absolutely do NOT recommend sugar consumption. Instead, they recommend eating 600g of fruits and vegetables, 100g of legumes, 30g of nuts, and 90g of whole grains DAILY, as well as 350g of fish and no more than 350g of meat WEEKLY. Source: https://foedevarestyrelsen.dk/Media/638651862095615836/AOK-a...
Why?
Personally, I think that’s hilarious. Enjoy your bacon and butter.
I repeatedly found that people who are thoughtful and not snarky — and often, nuanced — when discussing a topic I have no deep expertise on were much more correct on topics that I did have expertise on and could properly evaluate.
We're all on a time budget at the end of the day. And I do share the sentiment: the scientific literature in nutrition is known not to be very good. You don't have to be an expert, it suffices to notice that there are a lot of people coming to contradictory conclusions, and that the consensus seems to have changed drastically over the past decades, not being particularly driven by any groundbreaking changes in available scientific methods.
Teicholz is considerably snarkier than Willett so, even by that metric, you should lean in favour of Willett’s position that SFA is unhealthy, I guess?
Tone is something that can be adopted intentionally or unintentionally. If you hear a pilot on a radio dryly say something in a calm and detached tone, it could be in the context of an emergency. Pilots are enculturated to adopt that tone (for various reasons). Meanwhile particular cultures have different levels of acceptability when it comes to tone: some cultures perceive other cultures as more angry, or detached, because of the norms of communication within those cultures.
In short, I think the tone of “calm, scientific detachment” is often weaponized to lend undeserved credibility to an argument, because people tend to believe people more when they adopt that tone.
Furthermore, tone does have a purpose if used alongside a well done argument. For example, in the article the OP linked to, there is a rather exhaustive refutation of the book in question. The tone of the author previews that their entire opinion on the book is negative, given all the arguments they put forth in their review. If the author of the review had adopted a calm and thoughtful tone, perhaps it would indeed have been more effective because the reader would decide. On the other hand, most people won’t read the entire review, so the tone of the author makes it clear what their opinion is.
That said I am not wholly disagreeing with you: would be interesting to do a study using some varying markers to identify tone, and identify, I don’t know, argumentative complexity, and see if snarkiness is associated with a lack of complexity. Assuming you can find markers with predictive power.
Seems a waste of effort trying to attribute motive to such things. Just read what they have to say, verify what they say against their references and then make an inference based on that. Don’t see why tone has to come into it at all.
I'm much more likely to listen to a person who has a calm, neutral or positive tone than someone who is screaming the same words at me.
Words are only a part of human communication, and arguably not the most important part.
"Can I help you?" Has a vastly different meaning depending on the tone and body language of the speaker.
I claimed that Teicholz was a joke because she makes misleading and often false claims about nutrition science evidence. The response was that the critique I linked to was more of a joke, not because of its content but because of its tone.
So sure, tone matters in certain contexts. If it matters more to someone than the content of what is being said to someone in the context of assessing scientific research, then I think that person has a wild way of interpreting evidence.
Very true. This fact has been deeply exploited by con men across social media in the past decade. When someone knows they’re coming from an unfounded, misleading, or deliberately wrong position they make up for it by heaping on friendly tone. They present in a warm, welcoming, and empathetic tone that appears inviting and friendly, unlike the cold academic discussions where facts reign supreme and tone is an afterthought.
It’s a real problem right now. There are countless influencers and podcasters pushing bad science who get a free pass because they are all smiles, super nice, and present themselves as helping you (while pitching you products and trying to get you to buy their book)
The other kind is heavier on snark than it is on evidence. It uses the snark to persuade, rather than the evidence. That's "I can't be bothered to actually make a real case here (whether or not the data is actually on my side), so I'm just going to make the other side look stupid, and hope that you decide to agree with me so that you don't feel stupid too".
The first kind can be persuasive. (In fact, it can be more persuasive than the dry kind of refutation.) The second kind is a huge red flag - if they're right, it's only by accident, because they can't be bothered to really deal with the evidence.
I suspect that, when different people are reacting to snark in such an article, they're reacting to different versions of it.
Hi KempyKolibri. Was this intervention so important that you needed to signup for HackerNews for the first time to call her a joke ? I think this is quite against this forum guideline but (unsurprisingly) you are being upvoted.
Perhaps that's why there is a lot of sketchy results, hyperbole in communication, and a cycle of debunking (of the debunking) around.
And it makes sense. We are omnivores, the entire point of being omnivores is to be able to fuel our body with whatever food is available, and it probably played an important role in the development of the human species. It means our body is very tolerant regarding what we eat, and while some types of food may be healthier than others, the effect will be small compared to other factors like generics, lifestyle, exposure to harm, etc...
What I think is important though is that we should have a diet as varied as possible. It is not necessary, but the less varied your diet is (it includes veganism), the more you need to pay attention. With a varied diet, you are very unlikely to miss something, and if you eat too much of the same thing, you may exceed the ability for your body to deal with a particular substance, making it toxic. Another problem is the psychological aspect. Essentially, the abundance of food that we have now messes with our brain, causing addictive behavior. And I think this is the focus of most serious nutrition science today, and that's also what Ozempic is all about.
I've also found that particle sizes are also important: keeping things in their natural sizes and chewing them yourself does a couple of important things such as mixing them with enzymes, sending signalling about what's coming into the digestive tract, and making food the right size, instead of ultra fine, which provides a different mix of nutrients to the lower parts of the gi tract (and lowers absorbed calories from nuts).
We’re good survivors for sure, but try eating only deep fried donuts for a year and let me know how omnivorous you feel.
If it was the case, we wouldn't have an article like this. We would have very obvious results, and we don't. Some claim we do, but if you look closer, it is not obvious at all.
Note that by "it doesn't matter", I don't mean that anything goes. Only eating deep fried donuts is not good, for the same reason eating only apples is not good, you won't get everything you need from a single food source. If you do that, you will get what are now very obvious and easily identified diseases, like scurvy, anemia, etc... Also, eating too little or too many calories is also not good, especially too little, but the effect (starving to death) is even more obvious.
What I meant by "it doesn't matter" is that with a varied diet and the right number of calories, the details don't matter. And I am convinced that a base diet of fried donuts to the appropriate amount of calories, with supplementation (vitamins, ...) to compensate for deficiencies is fine, or at least, not terrible.
And I also believe that "the appropriate number of calories" is the tricky part. Hunger mechanisms are supposed to regulate this, but they are not adapted to modern society, where rich food is plentiful. Hence the psychological aspect, which Ozempic targets.
Anecdotally (fwiw), in my household my daughter had been struggling with severe rashes that appeared to be triggered by food. An elimination diet caused us to conclude that she is highly reactive to vegetable oils (canola (rapeseed) oil, sunflower seed oil and soybean oil have all been introduced as food challenges and all produce a reaction within 3-6 hours)
We currently cook only with tallow and her symptoms have improved considerably (we tried olive oil and avocado oil for awhile but it was unclear on her)
As a challenge to anyone objecting to this comment, I ask you to look up the history of canola oil and say whether such a substance would be accepted into the food supply today.
And my question to everyone is, what is the mechanism by which seed/vegetable oils could lead to rashes? The only theory I've heard has been around omega-3/6 balance, but I am looking for alternative theories. I conjecture it has something to do with heating, as she isn't affected by ice cream containing these oils.
Because there's very little scientific evidence to be concerned about seed oils themselves and a lot to show that they're fine to good for you.
If you want to talk specifically about inflammation, there's not really any evidence that inflammatory markers in humans are increased by seed oils themselves, e.g. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.ATV.0000163185.28...
The idea that seed oils cause inflammation is largely based on mechanistic studies that don't seem to bear out when the larger and more complex ecosystem of our biology is introduced.
> And my question to everyone is, what is the mechanism by which seed/vegetable oils could lead to rashes? The only theory I've heard has been around omega-3/6 balance, but I am looking for alternative theories.
Canola oil has high levels of omega-3s. If it was the omega-3/6 balance theory then it would be one of the best options for oil use.
Individuals can have bad reactions for a variety of reasons, of course. And there is a very high correlation between seed oils and food that is just generally shitty for you, so if you cut them out of your diet you are also cutting a lot of garbage out, which will likely have an impact independent of the oils themselves, and this is likely what drives a good portion of anecdotal positive experiences.
So then we’re just left with “lots of people on the internet believe a thing to be true, surely there’s something in it.”
Hopefully I don’t need to come up with a counter example here, you can just see how poor an argument this is.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The BMJ got in trouble for believing her and had to issue retractions because of it:
https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/26/9616122/bmj-nina-teichol...
There is no evidence that Nina Teicholz should be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to her arguments and plenty of evidence that she should be treated with skepticism.
which part of that do you consider bullying? is it any opinion that goes against the underdog?
(I have it, discovered by a full-genome sequencing by myself, accidentally around the age of 50.)
that's because it's literally a 4chan /pol/ schizo theory
You are free to comment whatever you want, but I don’t see any evidence to support your hypothesis on a population wide basis.
>I ask you to look up the history of canola oil and say whether such a substance would be accepted into the food supply today.
If you are referring to genetically modified rapeseed plants to be herbicide resistant, then it would most definitely be accepted into the food supply today. Genetically modifying plants still happens all over the world.
https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturated-oils.shtml
You said that you suspect it is the heating of the oils, but even the oil found in ice creme has been heated somewhere in the process unless it is cold pressed. Can she eat sun flower seeds, olives or avocado without a reaction? Have you tried coconut oil as an alternative?
Have you doing that she has the same issue with coconut oil? Specifically, the saturated ones that come in a jar?
We need our carbon chains to be consistenty hydrogenated one way or the other, but not with both types in one molecule.
Saladino says that it would have been impossible for an ancestral human (particularly in Northern Eurasia where meat from grass-eating animals constituted the majority of calories) to get more than about 3% of calories as linoleic acid whereas the US average is now about 11%. Sunflower seed oil for example is 67% linoleic. corn oil, 53%, soybean oil, 52%. (Most of the omega-6 fatty acid in the human diet is linoleic acid.)
Here is Paul Saladino explaining it:
Imagine watching a super compelling Youtube video explaining why dinosaurs never existed, and so you now think that's a credible hypothesis. You would probably know more facts about dinosaurs and paleontology than the average person, but I'd argue that your understanding of dinosaurs has actually gone down.
I see a similar thing happening here. You and Paul are able to cite lots of facts about Linoleic Acid. But there's a whole body of experimental human research showing that, if anything, LA-rich oils probably slightly improve insulin sensitivity, inflammation, lipids etc. But Paul either isn't aware of this or chooses not to show you because it contradicts his claims. So you're left with the wrong impression about LA and seed oils, despite thinking that your understanding has gone up.
Is it possible to create a Reddit style voting system where votes are weighed more depending on a level of trust/expertise to review scientific papers. The voting could be on multiple factors, such as on the different types of validity, the overall impact, how transparent they are with methods and data, how well it fits with other literature, etc. The end result could be a paper titled “A survey of saturated fat’s impact on cardiovascular health” where experts very publicly discuss the papers merits and common people interested in their health can review and understand where the science is. Decentralized informational authority.
The only serious problem here is that some people immediately trust a random article from someone who denies mainstream science simply because it’s a contrarian take.
I don’t understand the people who will question everything that comes from professionals and institutions, but within minutes of reading an article that is contrarian they think “Yep this all checks out and I have no further questions”. To see it happening in real time in this thread is wild.
IOW, we did not merely "read and trusted one random article" but assessed the presented evidence. You OTOH, merely provided ad-hominem attack on both the author and anyone who dared believe the presented evidence, which smacks of trying to shame people in not voicing their opinion.
I think the question still makes sense, why people are willing to ignore a ton of evidence from a lot of different unaffiliated people and focus on one article by one person that really doesn't add up to much of an argument - I think the answer is just that this is what they want to hear, so it must be right.
If you're in the sugar industry, you give funding to people investigating how saturated fat causes heart disease. You support organizations that back up your preferred theory. These orgs run media campaigns, slap a "heart-healthy" label on food products, and sometimes fund research. Forming popular consensus on "fats = bad" leads to additional funding from government or other charitable causes.
Increased funding leads to an increased density of scientists working on the problem, which in turn increases the legitimacy of the field, especially among people just getting into their careers. If it's common wisdom in the cardio field that saturated fats are the worst cause of heart disease, that's where they're going to focus their efforts.
It's one of those things where you simply don't need to buy anyone off. You just put your thumb on the scale early enough, and consistently push popular opinion toward a direction that's beneficial for you.
Does trust in X erode when X is wrong? Yes.
Scientific knowledge evolves as new discoveries are made, immutable and unequivocal “truth” is the realm of religion, not science (which makes the former much more appealing to many than the latter).
Trust really should not erode if X acted in good faith based on the consensus knowledge at the time.
When scientists have weak theories that they're not sure of, they're not supposed to share those breathlessly with the public, and certainly not try to shape public laws based on the theories they know are weak.
And nutrition science has been guilty of this for over a century. You can find people in the field making confident recommendations and setting dietary standards from the time when they didn't know vitamins were a thing. If you followed the science on nutrition and adjusted your diet accordingly around 150-100 years ago, you could literally get scurvy or other vitamin deficiencies. The field has evolved a little bit, but it's still extremely weak as scientific fields go.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
There was little or no effect of reducing saturated fats on non‐fatal myocardial infarction (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.87 to 1.07) or CHD mortality (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.82 to 1.16, both low‐quality evidence), but effects on total (fatal or non‐fatal) myocardial infarction, stroke and CHD events (fatal or non‐fatal) were all unclear as the evidence was of very low quality. There was little or no effect on cancer mortality, cancer diagnoses, diabetes diagnosis, HDL cholesterol, serum triglycerides or blood pressure, and small reductions in weight, serum total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and BMI."
This is your citation for saturated fat is evil?
And yes, that is my citation in support of that claim. Quote: “There was a 17% reduction in cardiovascular events in people who had reduced SFA compared with those on higher SFA”
and
“When we subgrouped according to replacement for SFA, the PUFA replacement group suggested a 21% reduction in cardiovascular events”
I explain why the null findings on insensitive endpoints aren’t the gotcha some people think they are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41960046
they have table with breakdown of events by type, and in both rows with significant reduction it says that quality of evidence is "very low".
One of the main purposes of meta-analyses is to summate multiple studies that may have insufficient statistical power in isolation to find a significant effect, but when summated they do.
I _think_ you're trying to suggest that the insignificant individual event types aren't contributing to the significant findings on the combined event endpoint, so we should ignore the GRADE quality of those (correct me if I'm wrong). But that's not how meta analysis functions - those events are also contributing to the significant finding on that endpoint (which is also why the GRADE quality of the combined endpoint is moderate). They just aren't significant _in isolation_.
to me, it looks like several rows clearly don't add up in key findings table(they derive "moderate quality" conclusions from "very low quality" observations), which makes whole publication as data astrology quality.
Just get rid of the agency altogether.
Some alternative theories I've come across:
- There's a theory that cholesterol is good for you. It's necessary for brain functioning. Low levels of "bad" cholesterol have been linked to depression.
- There's a theory that the high levels of cholesterol in blood clots found around ripped arteries may be due to the body trying to heal a rupture with cholesterol.
- There's a theory that seed oils and table sugar, which have only been mass consumed for the last 100 years or so, are what cause heart disease.
Personally, I have a very high level of both good and bad cholesterol. They shot up after I started eating a lot of non-veg food. And after they shot up, I stopped having depressive episodes.
These aren’t alternative theories, they’re just reductive takes that try to ignore the big picture.
Reductive takes are really seductive for people who want to reduce everything into “good” or “bad” categories, but the body doesn’t work like that.
The part that confuses people is that the message has been simplified to “cholesterol bad” for so long that people are confused to discover that cholesterol is actually used by the body. Upon discovering these facts, reductive logic switches from “cholesterol bad” to “cholesterol good”, which is just as reductive.
The truth is that cholesterol is useful within the body, but that doesn’t mean that more of it is better. Despite all of the proponents of alternative theories trying to spin a different story, the bottom line is that cumulative lifetime LDL exposure is still correlated with heart disease.
That is the only thing you need to know about the debate if you want to reduce it to something simple. More LDL over time means more heart disease. A lot of people will try to “well actually…” various things around this, but it’s true.
Even the comments below are trying to tell you your own observation is impossible (that diet can’t affect cholesterol levels) when that’s clearly not true.
Cholesterol has become a hotbed of alternative medicine that doesn’t follow the science but sells well on social media. Don’t put too much confidence behind “alternative theories” when we have decades of evidence that excessively high cholesterol levels over a lifetime are correlated with heart disease.
In general it matters what you replace the saturated fat with, though: you should replace it with unsaturated fat. Replacing it with carbs/simple sugars can apparently elevate LDL cholesterol and triglycerides: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2943062/
Olive oil is good, candy is bad. (News at 11.)
So if you’re, say, a vegan with very little cholesterol intake then adding some would result in significantly higher serum cholesterol. However, for most people in western populations, they’re already above the point where the effect tails off, which is why dietary guidelines generally don’t focus on dietary cholesterol anymore.
LDL doesn't mean much, but rather the ratio of HDL:LDL. Low cholesterol is bad for the brain. Of course these are oversimplified statements.
There are known cases of older men with low testosterone level and high LDL, who after testosterone replacement therapy experienced a significant decrease in LDL. It's thought that the liver kept churning cholesterol in attempts to synthetize enough testosterone to no avail.
I believe that depression and cognitive dysfunction is a side-effect of too low cholesterol when people take statins, especially older folks, but excessive LDL also accumulates in arteries and lead to hypertension and/or diminished blood flow to organs, which itself leads to dementia, heart attacks, etc.
Pregnant women have extremely high cholesterol (ridiculously high).
- There's a theory that if evolution designed pregnant women to have high cholesterol, then cholesterol cannot be the poison it's made out to be.
Cholesterol levels rise during second and third trimesters, but it’s not true at all to say that all pregnant women have “ridiculously high” cholesterol. Around 24% of women who have normal range cholesterol will go over the normal range for a few months, but it’s not accurate at all to say they all have “ridiculously high” cholesterol
Here is a good overview: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4989641/
Cholesterol metabolism is related to hormones that change during pregnancy, so downstream fluctuations in cholesterol aren’t surprising. Do not mistake this for intentional evolutionary pressure to increase cholesterol.
> if evolution designed pregnant women to have high cholesterol, then cholesterol cannot be the poison it's made out to be.
This is an incredibly pseudoscientific way of thinking. Pregnancy puts many pressures on the body, not all of which are good.
Did you know that blood coagulability also rises during pregnancy, which is clearly linked to cardiac events. There is an increased risk of cardiac events during pregnancy.
Saying “X happens during pregnancy therefore X must be good” is an extremely unscientific and uninformed take. I’m not surprised it’s being leveraged by the cholesterol truthers, but it’s wrong. This is the level of reasoning that seems to appeal to people on TikTok and Twitter who consume feel-good science in 15 second clips, but it makes anyone who has read any actual research on the subject depressed at how susceptible people have become to bad science that is dangerous to their health.
Tried with paleo (meat and veggies) as I thought the carbs were the culprit and I decreased the frequence of the accidents.
Finally I went carnivore and within a week I had zero symptoms. I was strict carnivore for 8 weeks (lost 8kgs) then I tried reintroducing other food but without great success.
These days I eat mainly butter, eggs and steak and I've been good for 2.5 years now (I was eating organs too at first but I don't really feel any difference if I don't eat them). Eating the occasional sweet from a bakery makes me feel a bit bloated. Eating some fruit For 1.5 years eating vegetables would cause the diarrhea to reappear, after 1.5 years I can eat vegetables occasionally without problems. It's like a "limit" got reset or something.
do you know the parable of the drunk gentleman looking for his keys under a streetlamp at night? a policeman asked him where did he drop his keys, he pointed at a dark alleyway further away, so the policeman asked why he didn't look there instead, he replied "well there's no bloody light over there".
is it possible that you were deficient in some other nutrient, possibly even a trace one like some metal ion or maybe just some amino acid, and that's what caused the improvement in symptoms when you started eating flesh again? is it possible that you simply enjoyed the taste and then felt better about yourself? or any number of other changes in your life at the same time - taking more time cooking your meals, learning new recipes, trying new spices with it, etc?
A few years ago, I have been diagnosed with incipient atherosclerosis. This was an unpleasant surprise for me, so I have immediately made serious changes in the food that I eat.
At that time, I was eating very high quantities of dairy, which has a high proportion of saturated fat.
Because I could not see any other factor that could cause the atherosclerosis, I have eliminated dairy from my food and I have changed completely the composition of the fats contained in my food.
I eat only food that I cook myself, so I know exactly which is the composition of the fat contained in it. Nowadays, at least 90% of my daily intake of fat comes from a combination of oils that I use when cooking food (typically 60 mL of extra virgin olive oil + 20 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil + 10 mL of cod liver oil + 1 drop of an oil containing D3 and K2 vitamins).
Instead of any other kinds of dairy, now I use only a cheese substitute that looks and tastes like melted cheese, but it is made from whey protein concentrate (which has almost no fat) mixed with some vegetable oil and a few other ingredients for better flavor.
After changing completely the fatty acid profile of my fat consumption, after a year the symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and there have been also other very noticeable signs of improved cardiovascular health. For instance, previously, I had cold feet and when sleeping I had to take care to keep them warm. Some months after changing the diet, they had become warm (presumably due to improved blood flow) and I have no longer needed any protection against lower temperatures.
So my diet change has very certainly improved a lot my health in a relatively short time of no more than a year, and that has persisted for the last three years. I cannot know if this is really caused by the change in the fatty acid profile, but I cannot see any other significant difference, except if the abundant dairy that I was eating before contained some other harmful substance or if the significant increase in the amount of eaten EV olive oil and cold-pressed sunflower oil has provided some benefits beyond the better fatty acid profile.
Logically, it is plausible that a reasonable amount of saturated fat, which is correlated with the amount of physical work, should not have any harmful effect.
As long as you burn enough calories daily to use all the fat intake for energy, it should not matter if that fat is saturated fat. However, when the fat is not completely used and some of it is deposited, then it is plausible that it is preferable if oleic acid (mono-unsaturated fatty acid) is the most abundant in food, because in normal conditions this is the most abundant fatty acid in the human reserve fat. When other fatty acids are much more abundant than oleic acid, they must be processed and converted before storage and the capacity for the conversion may be overwhelmed.
The negative connotations for "seed oils" are not applicable to all seed oils, but they refer only to the seed oils where linoleic acid is the most abundant acid.
Linoleic acid is an essential nutrient, but the need for it can be satisfied with 15 to 20 mL per day of a suitable seed oil, like sunflower oil. A greater daily intake than that can cause problems, because the excess linoleic acid must be converted into other fatty acids and also because some of its derivatives have physiological roles for which an excess quantity is not desirable.
Given these, it seems plausible that some fat composition is preferable to others. Like I said, I have acted on this assumption and it has worked very well for me, even if the real mechanism cannot be known, at least not yet.
Obviously the resulting obesity from consuming excess calories is a risk factor for CVD in itself, but the body of evidence would suggest that someone consuming >10% E from SFA, even if they’re in caloric equilibrium, will be at greater CVD risk than someone consuming less, all else held equal.
The main mechanism by which SFA is thought to increase CVD risk is by downregulation of LDL receptors, which occurs during the digestion/absorption of SFA, and is not a result of excess SFA hanging around in the body in some way. If you consume SFA, this pathway will be in play, regardless of how much is burned vs stored.
There’s no good evidence that seed oils/linoleic acid, refined or not, pose a risk for humans. There’s a lot of talk on the subject about on social media, but it’s almost entirely speculation based on animal studies.
I once bought the anti seed oil line, but on closer investigation of the evidence I changed my view and have replaced most of my SFA intake with MUFA/PUFA, mostly in the form of canola and olive oil.
Certain famous men in the past smoked pipe all day and lived very long lives. E.g. Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell. Do you have any theories on why smoking didn't harm them as much. Do you think back then there might not have been some interaction factor that's prevalent today, etc.?
The other thing cholesterol is used to make, also quite nice to have, is bile. Used for fat digestion and such. A lot of bile. From a lot of cholesterol. Seems like a waste though, to excrete all that finely synthesized bodily chemical. BUt aha, the body realizes this and so resorbs it. THus there is a cycle and recycle of cholesterol and bile. Aha! What if we can trick the body to not resorb it and just release it. Such a drug has been developed. Well, hard to call it a drug. There is no fanciness, no elegant molecular binding to an esoteric receptor, no, nothing of the sort. It's called metamucil, and as the name tells us, it mostly works by being a big chonky mucinous blob of very impressively thick goop. The "magic" of how it works is literally the bile gets trapped in the thick goop and excreted. And thus we've bled off some bile from the cholesterol recycling loop, and thus, cholesterol. And that's why this weird blobby old person fiber supplement is cholesterol magic.
Cholesterol is the principal sterol of all higher animals, distributed in body tissues, especially the brain and spinal cord, and in animal fats and oils. — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol
I thought it was obvious, hence the original broad quote, but the bizarre Wikipedia response made me think that perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. Hence the clarification with my follow up.
What’s the evidence for the claim “cholesterol by itself isn’t harmful?”
And got a response that is more than just an evidence. A smart person would not just change the goalpost but one with nefarious intentions, maybe.I thought it was obvious, hence the original broad quote, but the bizarre Wikipedia response made me think that perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. Hence the clarification with my follow up.
So for clarification on your view - do you think that high levels of LDL-C (proxying for ApoB) increase risk of CVD?
What I think is that your behavior is quite strange, to create a fake profile just to post a link "debunking" the author. Do you have something personal against her?
And then when you got corrected, in place of recognizing you said something wrong, you double-down your irrational behavior: "shadow boxing against an imaginary interlocutor". Yeah because the original interlocutor makes stupid questions.
By "imaginary interlocutor" I was referring to a misreading of the parent reply, not mine. This was the person who said: "Anyone else have alternative takes on cholesterol based on personal experience?"
The question is then whether when that person said "alternative takes on cholesterol" they meant "alternative takes on the function of an individual molecule of cholesterol" and not "alternative takes on the significance of high serum cholesterol". Considering their next two bullet points refer to high and low levels of serum cholesterol, I thought it was fairly obvious.
Apparently it wasn't for some people, and those same people are then claiming that making this clear is some sort of dodge/goalpost shift/deceptive behaviour. But it clearly isn't. If you read the above, where someone was obviously referring to high serum cholesterol, and in response someone says "cholesterol by itself isn’t harmful", is it reasonable to quote that claim and ask for evidence, by which you mean "I want evidence that high serum cholesterol isn't harmful"? If it is reasonable, which I believe it is, then no deception, goalpost shifting or correcting has actually taken place here.
The full pathway and supporting evidence can be found here: https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/41/24/2313/573522...
If a patient is already accumulating arterial wall damage then it might be necessary to limit serum cholesterol through dietary changes or statins or something. But I would claim that those interventions usually come too late, and that most of the damage can be prevented through other interventions thus making serum cholesterol levels less relevant.
It's like if you have a truck driving around full of toxic waste. Maybe that's cause for concern, but if you can take other measures to ensure it won't crash and spill the cargo then maybe it's fine.
These factors may increase the effect of high LDL-c on CVD, but I’m not sure on what basis we should assume that those without them aren’t at risk from high LDL-c.
Before the doing the plant-based diet, I had such high cholesterol that I would have needed to start taking statins before age 35. After the 90 day diet experiment, my cholesterol dropped by 130 mg/dL. I no longer need to be put on medication, and am within a healthy range.
For me, at least, saturated fat is the most important nutrient I can monitor and avoid. Low saturated fat, high fiber is the diet for me.
I wasn't able to keep the vegan diet, but it was worth trying for a time because I learned some new recipes and new habits.
> In other words, although diet could successfully lower blood cholesterol, this reduction did not appear to translate into long-term cardiovascular gains.
That said, as other commenters here have highlighted the author of the study has a spotty track record so, uh, big grain of salt.
In my case it was not the suggestion of a doctor, but rather dating and now marrying a vegan. I converted to a plant based diet starting with eating plant based just with her, and then I became fully vegan for health reasons.
Truth is, it's complicated and neither your observation, nor mine, is enough to conclude anything.
Hen tested (via ultra fast CT scan) the blood flow after the experiment -- there was no change.
It may sound depressing, but it's actually very good for what is normally a progressive disease.
The experimenter is currently now doing another 7 year experiment, eating a somewhat healthier than normal diet + statins.
After getting off the ornish diet, there was hardly any change in total cholesterol.
*The diet was ornish-like because it was hard to get anything to eat when going out. The experimentar ate salmon if there was nothing better.
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of enforcing low cholesterol.
The goal would be to prevent further damage and restriction. By all accounts that test is a positive result.
Atherosclerosis is correlated with lifetime exposure to high cholesterol. Once you reach the point of having open heart surgery for severe problems, the goal is to slow further progression as much as possible.
Hoping to reverse a lifetime of accumulated exposure to high cholesterol with 7 years of slightly below average cholesterol just isn’t going to happen. Stopping further progression is great though!
following the normal course of events leads to subsequent surgical interventions based on the people I've seen...
The first part is obvious.
The second part smuggles in a fundamentally incorrect take on the "eating too much"/obesity problem, namely that it has something to do with willpower: including "not too much" in the advice implies that we need to be told not to eat too much, but that a diet that naturally induces overeating is otherwise OK.
The third part is arbitrary and unfounded, and if you ignore it you can ignore the second part as well: get some good fatty meat on your plate and you can safely eat to satiety.
Is it, though? It seems like many struggle with the first part.
Does snacking on a vending machine Duchess Honey Bun or a sleeve of Oreos qualify as "eat food?" How about popping open a cup of instant ramen or microwaving some frozen taquitos? I'd call all of that eating junk, but I think that's the root of the issue.
But yes for those people I do think the "eat food" thing should be emphasised and laid out in more detail, maybe. Hard for me to have an opinion there as I just can't put myself in the shoes of someone who eats that kind of stuff.
The third part feels as arbitrary and unfounded as any other dietary advice I read, so I'm inclined to take the simplest advice available.
I think it's still an oversimplification - people with large amounts of muscle mass, low body fat, and high levels of daily physical activity just don't get a lot of the same metabolic diseases even if they eat huge amounts of animal protein, outside of really poor genetic luck (or complications related to steroid use, etc.) - but it's a pretty good starting point vs. the modern diet.
Even this term "ultra-processed" is highly suspect when you start investigating it more deeply. Plenty of traditional foods are quite processed - bread being one of the oldest. Is it better to eat 200g of bread (artisanal, wood fired, using traditionally-milled non-GMO pesticide free grains), or a steak?
> Is it better to eat 200g of bread (artisanal, wood fired, using traditionally-milled non-GMO pesticide free grains), or a steak?
I don't think there's a real answer here in a vacuum. It depends on what else you eat, your current health, your level of physical activity, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t...
"Dietary advanced glycation products intake is associated with dementia" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41209509
"A database for dietary AGEs and associated exposure assessment" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962796
But if you are saying it's just correlation you're wrong, because the research has also described the mechanism. Wikipedia has a nice list of the effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product...
> "In the context of cardiovascular disease, AGEs can induce crosslinking of collagen, which can cause vascular stiffening and entrapment of low-density lipoprotein particles (LDL) in the artery walls. AGEs can also cause glycation of LDL which can promote its oxidation. Oxidized LDL is one of the major factors in the development of atherosclerosis."
> "AGEs have been implicated in Alzheimer's Disease,cardiovascular disease, and stroke. The mechanism by which AGEs induce damage is through a process called cross-linking that causes intracellular damage and apoptosis."
(AGE is a bad search term but the term glycotoxin is used as well.)