28 ms·
40 year old study could have reshaped American diet, was never fully published
- gwern 10y ago> The lead investigators of the trial, noted scientists Ancel Keys and Ivan Frantz, are deceased. No wonder.
- gjm11 10y agoI'm not sure what point (if any) gwern is making here but, e.g., Ancel Keys died in 2004 at the age of 100. So, indeed, no wonder he's deceased: he would have had to be staggeringly old to still be alive now. [EDITED to add:] On the face of it, the most obvious reading of gwern's comment is (it seems to me) something like "ha ha, of course they're dead, because they had stupid theories about diet and health so we should expect them to have died by now". If that is what gwern meant, then I think he was being unreasonable. (But I'm not at all sure it is.)
- zach 10y agoI totally read it as "oh, no wonder it 'was never fully published' before now, since the lead investigators were the infamous Ancel Keys and a now-deceased collaborator."
- gnoway 10y agoWell also, as pointed out elsewhere, Keys championed reduction in saturated fats, etc. to prevent heart disease. If the results of a trial he conducted disputed that idea, that might have harmed his reputation.
- eveningcoffee 10y agoIt almost feels like a claim that it is safe to put lead into gasoline.
- gwern 10y agoYes. This is not even the first time Keys has been caught dropping or suppressing data in his own studies to support his slant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Countries_Study#Early_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Countries_Study#Early_cr...
- foota 10y agoI read it as a joke about the fact that the study is so old they're almost certainly dead (coming from a 21yo 40 years seems like a long time so that could be why I read it differently?)
- Houshalter 10y agoI read it as a reference to the old idea that "science progresses one funeral at a time". That the information was suppressed because it didn't go along with their opinions, and had to wait until now to come out.
- CompelTechnic 10y agoI agree with this interpretation.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jinushaun 10y agoTo me, the problem is not scientific studies, but mainstream reporting of scientific studies that turn into popular fads and trends. Science doesn't deal in absolutes, but society does. This is true for dietary fat, autism, gluten, paleo, salt, etc.
- pc2g4d 10y agoI think you give "science" too much credit. "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and all that. In an abstract sense, yes, everything in science is subject to criticism and reevaluation. But in a human sense, entire fields are dominated for decades by strong personalities whose theories aren't necessarily stronger but have greater social support. I present to you Noam Chomsky re: linguistics as a prime example. Surely I oversimplify, but I think it's important to acknowledge the human factor in what passes as scientific consensus in a field at any given time.
- nxzero 10y ago"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" which has been cited over 3000 times covers this topic: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
- Retric 10y agoDominate theories are not necessarily accepted as consensus. It can be hard to notice outside of the field but Noam Chomsky had far less support inside linguistics than you might think. It's a classic case where it's hard to pickup most people saying 'I have no idea', when there is a lot of talk about theory x. PS: The counter argument was simply children get feedback while learning a language. Mute children have a much harder time picking up their native language so it's not a passive process.
- sbov 10y agoActually this just reads like scientists being blind to their own biases. One of the guys heading the original study was Ancel Keys, the father of the lipid hypothesis.
- Kinnard 10y ago"Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints, by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences."[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
- iandanforth 10y agoArticle does not contain the word "sugar." Article invalid.
- lukas099 10y agoThe article isn't about sugar at all. It's about a study of effects of different types of fats.
- jrapdx3 10y agoThe subject of the article says as much about the politics of science as it is a comment on the science itself. To the extent the findings have been ignored, or perhaps even shunned, is not at all unique. Many important advances in medicine had a notoriously difficult time being accepted, as an example, the idea that bacterial infection was the cause of stomach ulcers had been around for decades before gaining traction. I think the substance of the science discussed revolves around the composition of dietary fat. As the article notes, the recommendation for increasing the proportion of "polyunsaturated" oils is likely a major factor. Indeed, common vegetable oils contain a high proportion of linoleic acid, the "base" omega-6 dietary source. It has been shown in numerous studies that the omega-6 (N-6) to omega-3 (N-3) ratio is important since these essential fats are linked to immune system functioning. N-6 fatty acids are associated with pro-inflammatory factors, N-3 primarily leads to anti-inflammatory products. In the archaic/traditional diet, N-6 and N-3 were present in roughly equal proportion, but with marked increase in vegetable oil consumption, N-6 to N-3 becomes "imbalanced", e.g., 10:1. Inflammatory processes are well-known to play a role in cardiovascular disease, so it's not hard to see how increased N-6 fatty acid intake is a contributor. However this info has not been a secret in the fields of obesity and metabolic disease treatment and research, where the impact of dietary fat intake has been discussed and published for more than 20 years. Since the mid-90's I've recommended sharply reducing polyunsaturated vegetable oil intake as part of "lifestyle" changes supporting optimum health, particularly for patients with predisposition to metabolic disease. FWIW I've followed my own advice for at least as long, the results have impressed my internist who jokes that I've become quite an uninteresting case. (Don't have references at hand. If anyone wants I'll post them.) Edit: grammar!
- swsieber 10y agoI would love references!
- seizethecheese 10y agoThanks for the insightful comment. What would be a good substitute oil for cooking?
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- williesleg 10y agoThe only thing I learn is that science, no matter how right it is, is ultimately wrong. Oh, and everybody's got an agenda.
- lisper 10y agoSimilar political dynamics are playing themselves out today with respect to Ebola and septic shock: http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/12/the-cure-for-ebola.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/12/the-cure-for-ebola.html
- InclinedPlane 10y agoSee also: Salicylates and Pandemic Influenza Mortality, 1918–1919 Pharmacology, Pathology, and Historic Evidence: http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/49/9/1405.full http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/49/9/1405.full
- narrator 10y agoThe context of the early 70s was that "The Limits To Growth" and "The Population Bomb" had just been published and there was a real concern in the air that the world was going to run out of food quickly unless something drastic was done. I think this created a strong confirmation bias that favored any scientific validation of vegetarianism as good news. Saturated fat being the main component of meats that is not in vegetables, and carbohydrates being the main components of vegetables that are not in meats, the confirmation bias was decidedly pro-carbohydrates, anti-saturated fats. IMHO, whenever you get people saying "Wouldn't it be wonderful if the science said <x> because it would help with <some other thing that is hard to figure out>" you get one of these situations.
- epalmer 10y agoThanks for this. This seems very plausable. I'm now eating low carb and shuning most vetegable oils. I do use Olive Oil and eat more fish. I use just a little coconut oil. Lost ~28 lbs and have not been sick at all since going ketonic. Still have to lose more weight. I do eat red meat and chicken, turkey. Cheese is a favorite and my bias is I don't want to have to give up cheese.
- codyb 10y agoI remember reading that cheese (and dairy products) are actually relatively addictive, apparently because of casein. Here's a link, but it's not the original study just an article about it. I'm sure a google search for "casein yale food addiction study" might turn up better results. http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/food-drink/cheese-triggers-the-same-part-of-brain-as-hard-drugs-study-finds-a6707011.html http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/food-drink/chee...
- bcheung 10y agoThat's correct. Cheese has a really high concentration of the casein protein which breaks down into casomorphins in the gut which then act like an opioid. Cheese is also very high in advanced glycation end products (AGEs) which are known to cause aging.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- asangha 10y agoGary Taubes wrote a great book showing how politics marred nutritional science: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462 http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scienc...
- Tycho 10y agoWe don't need scientific studies to figure out what to eat. Just look at what has worked for millennia and avoid newfangled processed food.
- dragonwriter 10y agoSystematic evaluation of what has worked for millennia is science. If you mean just gathering unstructured anecdotes of uncertain provenance about the past and using them to construct just-so stories as guides, well, that's not particularly likely to be more useful than just randomly guessing what you should eat, though it's pretty close to how many diet fads get created.
- Tycho 10y agoAll these dietary fads seemed to emerge around the same time as nutritional science.
- bcheung 10y agoThe book "Death by Food Pyramid" goes into great length about the history of how the food pyramid came to be and the story of how it got corrupted.
- agumonkey 10y agoVery reminiscent of the dismissal of Yudkin's sugar theory.
- jeremyw 10y agoThe article stops short of highlighting the most explosive detail. The study’s investigators suppressed these data just as one of them, Ancel Keys, was consolidating political power and unifying opinion around his cholesterol hypothesis. And when, twenty years later, the contradictory results were published, they lied about the conclusions. There has always been suspicion of knowing cherry-picking. But the evidence of fraud, by the central figure of saturated fat phobia, is much clearer now.
- OldSchoolJohnny 10y agoYup, ironically Ancel Keyes is probably responsible for a huge number of deaths, the road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say.
- stephengillie 10y agoThe nearly-unbelievable rigor of astrophysics and particle physics grants too much credibility to dietary and nutrition studies. Until a satisfactory level of rigor is established, these efforts will remain equal in validity to any other nutrition advertisement. Calling it "science" is harmful.
- garyclarke27 10y agoContinuued promotion of the false premise that, eating saturated fat and cholesterol is unhealthy,has literally killed and caused misery to hundreds of millions. ie Those responsible are mass murderers. Butter was demonised, yet grass fed butter is far healthier than any oil, including olive oil. Ghee has the highest smoke point, many vegetable oils turn to poison when heated because they are unsaturated ie far less stable, they also spoil very easily. I make ghee by gently boiling Rachel's organic butter for 30 minutes, then filtering through cheese cloth, it tastes great and smells lovely and nutty, unlike shop bought ghee which smells off to me.
- andreirailean 10y agoMental patients didn't have a say on their diet 40 years ago. This experiment says a lot about the level of care for the wellbeing of those who are locked up and are not given a choice (supposedly for their own benefit). I wonder if these kinds of experiments are still being done at mental institutions and elsewhere people are treated like Guinea pigs.
- sevensor 10y agoThis was my first thought as well. You couldn't possibly do a study like this today, or at least I hope not, because the issues around informed consent are too thorny when it comes to mental patients.
- fsloth 10y agoI had the understanding that individual genetics control response to dietary fats. I never see individual genetics referred to with these diet instructions and studies - which makes me very vary of them. Am I completely wrong (i.e. did my 23 and me test give unscientific advice)?
- erikb 10y agoThis headline sounds really interesting. But if you think about it more you find that this is true for a lot of papers. I guess there are quite a few papers that never make it to being published, because it's hard work and the competition is tough. And each one of these might have had an impact if it had succeeded in getting published.
- gobbo 10y agoThis article leaves out or does not stress enough some important information: _How long was the experiment conducted for? _How many people have been monitored after the experiment? _Did the people go back to the previous diet, once the experiment was over? To the first question, one can find hidden in the article: "Willett faulted the experiment because many of the patients were on the special diets for relatively brief periods - many were being released from the mental institutions. But about a quarter of the patients remained on the diet for a year or longer". If people stayed on this diet for a year or so max of their 65+ years of life, this data seems utterly non-relevant to support either thesis. It is fundamental to know if the people (and how many) continued with the new diet for a sizable portion of their life. In any case the results should at least not include people that have been on the diet for just a couple of months. It is hard to believe that a diet of low fat for just a random year in somebody's life (~1.5% of life span) would make a big difference against the remaining 98% of life spent eating fat. The question whether a low fat diet is better than a high fat one is very intriguing, but this data, as presented in the article, seem inconclusive.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago>It is hard to believe that a diet of low fat for just a random year in somebody's life (~1.5% of life span) would make a big difference against the remaining 98% of life spent eating fat. // It's not inconceivable though: I've friends who have lactose intolerance who once they have stayed off lactose for a while can then consume it relatively normally so long as they maintain a relatively low dose. It seems possible that the body could "clean" itself during a period of low fat dieting sufficient that it can handle a normal Western diet for the rest of a normal Western life-span? If a mechanism for fat storing that was detrimental was related to one's age when the fat was deposited that might also explain how a short period of dieting would be beneficial over a lifetime. Most everything [I've read] in dietary science seems inconclusive.
- enibundo 10y agoIs it this difficult to know what to eat Americans? Just don't eat processed food and don't abuse with only one type of food ffs.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoThis is a case where I'm inclined not to blame the Americans. The modal human eats a more or less traditional diet that coevolved with them over a very long period. Unsurprisingly, Japanese in Japan do pretty well on their diet, Greeks in Greece do pretty well (though not as well) on theirs, and so forth. Japanese in the US show pathologies like obesity at elevated levels compared to the ones in Japan. The American diet is a pretty recent phenomenon and hasn't settled. The quest for the one perfect diet which is optimally healthy for everyone in the world, though, is obviously misguided.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago>Japanese in the US show pathologies like obesity at elevated levels compared to the ones in Japan. The American diet is a pretty recent phenomenon and hasn't settled. // Are countries with a higher degree of capitalism in general or a greater profit motive in their food production more likely to have diet that leads to poor outcomes?
- thaumasiotes 10y agoYou know, Japan itself is ranked 22nd in the Heritage index of economic freedom ("degree of capitalism") for 2016. And a raw country-to-country comparison of health outcomes will be badly confounded by the effect of race. Japanese in the US perform worse on health metrics than Japanese in Japan. They still do better than whites in the US.
- enibundo 10y ago> The quest for the one perfect diet which is optimally healthy for everyone in the world, though, is obviously misguided. I'm not talking about what the country eats but more on a personal level. At my workplace everyone eats meat and most of them eat junk food but I am vegetarian and I look after what I eat. I don't wanna sound like a hippie, but just listen to your body and be conscious of what it likes and how you feel after eating certain kind of foods. Personally speaking, after eating junk food I feel like shit. Voila!
- codexjourneys 10y agoThe worst part is that for 20 years (until about 10-15 years ago), anyone stating that maybe saturated fat wasn't so bad was demonized and called anti-science. There seemed to be very little opportunity for reasoned discussion or actual comparison of results in the wild. Demonization of the opposing viewpoint, instead of reasoned discussion and further inquiry, IS the definition of anti-science.
- hga 10y agoIt's still happening to this day: http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-agriculture/2016/03/teicholz-disinvited-from-food-policy-panel-stabenow-grassley-let-usda-fda-review-syngenta-merger-fda-to-release-food-safety-tests-on-cucumbers-213410 http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-agriculture/2016/0... But I suppose more as a rearguard action, you're correct that it's not as bad as it once was.
- fauria 10y agoIn line with this submission, two posts linking to an article on The Guardin about sugar hit the front page of HN lately: The Sugar Conspiracy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941 The sugar conspiracy: sugar—not fat—is the greatest danger to our health: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11471806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11471806 It revolves around a lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig (UCSF) that was also posted on HN six years ago. I found it amazing: Sugar: The Bitter Truth (UCSF lecture): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006980
- mhkool 10y agoDr Mark Hyman, an MD who practises functional medicine, recently launched abook titled 'Eat Fat Get Thin'. Today I received an email from him titled 'The results are in...' : Dear Marcus, Before I launch any program, I test it. Not just on my patients, which I have done for decades (in fact on over 20,000 patients), but on people all over the country following the program at home. We had over 1,000 people do the Eat Fat, Get Thin beta program and the results and stories were amazing. Here are the average results from the first group to go through the program: Weight Loss: 7.1 pounds (some lost up to 46 pounds) Waist Reduction: 1.9 inches (some lost up to 13 inches) Hip Reduction: 1.7 inches (some lost up to 16 inches) Blood Pressure Reduction: systolic (top number) 9 points, diastolic (bottom number) 4.5 points Blood Sugar Reduction: 23 points Participants also reported an astounding 69% drop in ALL symptoms from all diseases. If you’re ready to lose extra pounds… have more energy… and start feeling amazing click here to join the Eat Fat, Get Thin Challenge. I am following the work of Dr Hyman for a long time and already knew that a diet with good fats is healthy, but the result of 69% drop of symtoms of all diseases is astonishing and makes you think: the bad foods make you sick and the good foods make you healthy.
- bkovacev 10y agoAmerican diet in the 70s was not what the American diet is today.
- jsuich 10y agoI know the lead publisher. These guys are the real deal and are doing seriously sincere and in depth work.
- gamuni 10y agoYeah... it could have...