15 ms·

I remember when butter was bad for you and my dad, who was great butter lover switched to a particular type of margarine that was marketed as being good for you

I remember when butter was bad for you and my dad, who was great butter lover switched to a particular type of margarine that was marketed as being good for you. Later it turned out it had the wrong sort of fats in it. Then later again butter became OK again.

cies 8y ago
AFAIK, butter is still worse then no butter (and more calories from whole plant foods instead). Margarine may or may not be worse than butter (I think it is worse). It is better to avoid/reduce all refined fats (oils), except maybe for a high DHA omega 3 supplement. If you want to eat for health, look into WFPB, they have a lot of science on their side.
- quakenul 8y ago
  Getting definitive information on nutrition always seems to be a lot harder than it should be in 2018
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - barking 8y ago
    Then there was the 6 glasses of water a day that became dogma but had no basis.
    - Izkata 8y ago
      It was based on a misunderstanding: People need the equivalent of 6 glasses of water a day, but a large chunk of that comes in through food and drink you already have. For most, adding one or two glasses of water a day would put you up at the goal. That said, I don't recall where the target number came from.
      - DougMerritt 8y ago
        They need no such thing. The target number (usually quoted as 8) is pure folk mythology, there never was a study that concluded that that was the right number for some medical/biological reason. This has been in the news. The correct number depends on individual, weather, activity level, etc. The actual medical recommendation is merely that healthy people should pay attention to their thirst and drink when thirsty, and plan ahead for exertion and desert excursions etc. Certainly some people don't pay attention to their own thirst, but that's not to say that 6 or 8 are the correct numbers. That may be too much or too little.
  - cfuen71 8y ago
    Nutrition is a pseudo-science.
    - firmgently 8y ago
      I think the problem with it (as with a lot of science) is that control is very difficult. The more you want a controlled experiment, the more abstract and unrealistic you have to be. Eg. (completely made-up illustration) eggs might be good for you if you eat a lot of tomatoes, bad for you if you don't eat a lot of tomatoes, better if you eat tomatoes a couple of hours before the eggs rather than afterwards. Maybe if you have curly hair the rules are reversed... but not if it's red curly hair. To get any consistency in results you have to control things to a point of being unrealistic, and then the results aren't very useful because nobody's real diet and genetic makeup fits with the fake abstract setting of the experiment. Then results get simplified and abstracted even more to make easily understandable conclusions... like maybe for 78% of people cacao is good, but for 0.3% of people it doubles the risk of stroke (although this bit doesn't get studied because it wasn't in the initial hypothesis). Results are reduced to "cacao is good for you"... but you might not part of the 78%. Maybe you're in the 0.3%. I'm not trying to say that science is useless, just that applying it isn't as simple as people like to make out (and a lot of people don't want to accept that life may not be as methodical and predictable as they want it to be). Nuance is too hard.
      - cies 8y ago
        Well said. This is exactly the problem with nutrition science. Just makes it a bit hard, but not at all impossible.
  - cies 8y ago
    See the book How Not To Die. As I see it it is converging quite a bit lately. But it is hard, sure. We know so much, but how to boil it down to something we can practice (that's what WFPB seems to be about to me).
  - tananaev 8y ago
    The problem with nutrition is that it's a very sensitive topic for people. Everyone wants to hear that what they eat is healthy, so "science" delivers on that demand. For myself I decided to go with WFPB diet because pretty much everyone agrees that fruits, vegetables, greens and whole grains are good for you. There's no controversy there.
    - mohaine 8y ago
      That doesn't mean it is good for you (or bad). For many years everyone said to avoid eggs for cholesterol. There was no controverse. Basically without more good science on the subject, we are all just mostly guessing.
- barking 8y ago
  WFPB, whole food plant based diet. No meat, no fish, no dairy. You can eat fruit but you can't juice it. Seems a bit of a misery diet to me.
  - cies 8y ago
    Juicing, cooking, tofu making is minimally pocessed and generally accepted in WFPB circles. I't the point where you refine something (oil from seeds, sugar from beets) where it is against the protocol. > Seems a bit of a misery diet to me. I was not trying to make you happy. I stated it has a lot of science on it's side. There are some great cooking resources on how to make it taste/look/whatever great. Wanna know more about the science, see How Not To Die.
    - tananaev 8y ago
      I like the interpretation of minimally processed food as something that you can fairly easy make in your own kitchen. Freshly squeezed juice is fine. Packaged juice from concentrate with added refined sugar is not.
      - cies 8y ago
        Correct. Still juicing what you can eat WITH the fiber is better consumed as a whole. I therefor prefer juicing veggies over fruit (which I prefer to blend if not eat straight)
    - bodas 8y ago
      Surely milk is good for you, whereas American-style cheese is perhaps better avoided. It seems somewhat misguided to knock out whole food groups like that.
      - cies 8y ago
        Source for milk begin healthy? As the evidence of the contrary is mounting up to a stack that can rival smoking.
    - 8y ago
- pkaye 8y ago
  How about between butter and sugar? Which is worse?
  - barking 8y ago
    Sugar is currently very bad for you. It's really bad for your liver though I can remember a time when it was thought that fatty food was hard on the liver and that sugar wasn't.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    Butter is not bad it came from the time where liver function and metabolism was not as well understood, the worst thing you can have is insulin resistance which both high carb and high protein diets can cause as they both revolve around glucose. I would highly recommend to avoid any diet which is less than 30-40% in calories from fat. That said the worst thing you can have is high fat and high carb since the insulin would cause your body to store all the fat and turn the extra sugar into more fat.
    - cies 8y ago
      > I would highly recommend to avoid any diet which is less than 30-40% in calories from fat. Our GI tract is very similar to that of primates. I think it is best to eat like they do: HCLF. > That said the worst thing you can have is high fat and high carb 100% agree. > the insulin would cause your body to store all the fat and turn the extra sugar into more fat. Nope. The extra glucose with spike in your blood (as the fay blocks your insulin on the cells), glucose is only converted to fat a tiny bit.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Our GI track is simmilar to some other primates primarily chimps but very different from others say Gorillas. Gorillas nearly only eat leaves while chips are omnivores that hunt even monkeys and even practice cannibalism. Glucose will turn into triglycerides and be stored into fat but more importantly what insulin does is instruct your fat cells to store energy.
  - 8y ago
- 1stranger 8y ago
  > AFAIK, butter is still worse then no butter (and more calories from whole plant foods instead). Many would dispute this if you're alluding to it being heavy in saturated fat which there's heavy dispute over. > Margarine may or may not be worse than butter (I think it is worse). Doesn't seem consistent with your logic of less refined is better. > If you want to eat for health, look into WFPB, they have a lot of science on their side. So basically veganism. Pretty much a non-starter for most people.
  - cies 8y ago
    I see a many clear reasons to avoid/reduce any processed fat (oils, butter, etc). It is not part of what primates ate, so good chance we're not well adapted to it. It is too calorie dense. It blocks insulin. It becomes fat (carbs barely become fat), especially when combined with carbs (as is common). It often comes with cholesterol. > Doesn't seem consistent with your logic of less refined is better. That's why I continue to say its better to avoid both. More or less as bad as butter is still quite bad either way. > So basically veganism. Yeah. When applied for health reasons, it's called a plant based diet. Since you can make junk-food from plants, the WFPB word came about. > Pretty much a non-starter for most people. Stopping smoking is also hard. Wanne live longer/healthier? Look into WFPB. Wanne do what you always did? It is still legal, no worries as of yet.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      > It is not part of what primates ate, so good chance we're not well adapted to it. It’s animal fat. It gets broken down into glycerides. > It is too calorie dense. If you need fewer calories eat less. > It blocks insulin. Insulin is part of glucose metabolism. Dietary fat does not effect it. > It becomes fat (carbs barely become fat), especially when combined with carbs (as is common). Untrue. If you have a calorie deficit you’ll lose weight, a surplus you’ll gain it. Whether the energy comes from fats or carbs is irrelevant. > It often comes with cholesterol. Serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol are unrelated.
      - cies 8y ago
- dogma1138 8y ago
  High carb or low carb high protein diets which any low fat diet would turn into is a terrible idea in the both short and long term as they are glucose focused you want to avoid high blood sugar and high insulin levels since insulin causes your body to store fat. Fats are not inherently bad for you, doesn’t matter if they are plant based or not.
  - cies 8y ago
    All primates eat high carb. They are not fat. It is fat that blocks insulin on yr cells. No (or little) fat and you can absorb your carbs as nature intended. > Fats are not inherently bad for you, doesn’t matter if they are plant based or not. I agree. It is the refined fats that are bad.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      It’s not really not true, apes have very different diets e.g. Gorillas are folivore and mostly consume leaves they can actually digest cellulose (they ferment it which is why they have a huge belly as their colon is huge), while chimps are omnivores that actually eat meat and hunt colobus monkeys, as well as consume eggs, insects, birds, nuts and honey. Also the human genetic and epigenetic landscape is utterly different just like the difference between any other species. And you also ignore our gut flora which is drastically different than apes in the wild (you would also not find apes with the same flora ofc, Gorillas and Chimps would have drastically different floras). But sure eat like a gorilla around 50-60 I don’t remember if it’s lbs or kg of leaves a day but at those figures it doesn’t matter and see how long would you survive. (just in case someone somehow would take that jest seriously, please don't eat like a Gorilla you will die, and if not you will suffer irreversible damage to your colon to the point where you quite possible wish you were dead)
      - cies 8y ago
        https://seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-infobooks/gorilla/diet-and-eating-habits/ https://seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-infobooks/gorilla/di... I read "Western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla): This subspecies consumes parts of at least 97 plant species. About 67% of their diet is fruit, 17% is leaves, seeds and stems and 3% is termites and caterpillars." Another type of gorilla eats more/mostly leafs. Still gorilla eat HCLF. I'm not saying eat only leafs. I'm saying other primates eat fruit-leaves-bugs mostly (yes some chimps hunt, but given enough fruit they are not so much compelled to). And we have a quite similar GI tract. Not the same, but much more similar than comparing to cats or cows. We are not made for processed food. We are made for HCLF. We are quite similar to other primates GI-tract wise. What do you not agree with?
- bitL 8y ago
  Butter from grass-fed cows contains CLA/Tonalin, an extremely beneficial type of fat. Remove butter at your own risk...
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  America said cooking with lard was bad for us and all that resulted in was lard being substituted with sugar. Cos the moment you take the fat away everything is tasteless.
  - conception 8y ago
    Unless you add salt!
    - rleigh 8y ago
      Yep, and there's so much salt in mass manufactured biscuits and the like I can no longer bear to eat them. Add more butter instead! Cutting back on refined sugar really makes things taste better, lots of subtle flavour makes previously bland stuff like oats taste really nice. But the downside is being unable to stomach the excessive amounts of salt and sugar in a lot of stuff. The upside is I save a fortune on buying junk food since most of it now tastes awful.

cies 8y ago

AFAIK, butter is still worse then no butter (and more calories from whole plant foods instead). Margarine may or may not be worse than butter (I think it is worse). It is better to avoid/reduce all refined fats (oils), except maybe for a high DHA omega 3 supplement. If you want to eat for health, look into WFPB, they have a lot of science on their side.

quakenul 8y ago
Getting definitive information on nutrition always seems to be a lot harder than it should be in 2018
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- barking 8y ago
  Then there was the 6 glasses of water a day that became dogma but had no basis.
  - Izkata 8y ago
    It was based on a misunderstanding: People need the equivalent of 6 glasses of water a day, but a large chunk of that comes in through food and drink you already have. For most, adding one or two glasses of water a day would put you up at the goal. That said, I don't recall where the target number came from.
    - DougMerritt 8y ago
      They need no such thing. The target number (usually quoted as 8) is pure folk mythology, there never was a study that concluded that that was the right number for some medical/biological reason. This has been in the news. The correct number depends on individual, weather, activity level, etc. The actual medical recommendation is merely that healthy people should pay attention to their thirst and drink when thirsty, and plan ahead for exertion and desert excursions etc. Certainly some people don't pay attention to their own thirst, but that's not to say that 6 or 8 are the correct numbers. That may be too much or too little.
- cfuen71 8y ago
  Nutrition is a pseudo-science.
  - firmgently 8y ago
    I think the problem with it (as with a lot of science) is that control is very difficult. The more you want a controlled experiment, the more abstract and unrealistic you have to be. Eg. (completely made-up illustration) eggs might be good for you if you eat a lot of tomatoes, bad for you if you don't eat a lot of tomatoes, better if you eat tomatoes a couple of hours before the eggs rather than afterwards. Maybe if you have curly hair the rules are reversed... but not if it's red curly hair. To get any consistency in results you have to control things to a point of being unrealistic, and then the results aren't very useful because nobody's real diet and genetic makeup fits with the fake abstract setting of the experiment. Then results get simplified and abstracted even more to make easily understandable conclusions... like maybe for 78% of people cacao is good, but for 0.3% of people it doubles the risk of stroke (although this bit doesn't get studied because it wasn't in the initial hypothesis). Results are reduced to "cacao is good for you"... but you might not part of the 78%. Maybe you're in the 0.3%. I'm not trying to say that science is useless, just that applying it isn't as simple as people like to make out (and a lot of people don't want to accept that life may not be as methodical and predictable as they want it to be). Nuance is too hard.
    - cies 8y ago
      Well said. This is exactly the problem with nutrition science. Just makes it a bit hard, but not at all impossible.
- cies 8y ago
  See the book How Not To Die. As I see it it is converging quite a bit lately. But it is hard, sure. We know so much, but how to boil it down to something we can practice (that's what WFPB seems to be about to me).
- tananaev 8y ago
  The problem with nutrition is that it's a very sensitive topic for people. Everyone wants to hear that what they eat is healthy, so "science" delivers on that demand. For myself I decided to go with WFPB diet because pretty much everyone agrees that fruits, vegetables, greens and whole grains are good for you. There's no controversy there.
  - mohaine 8y ago
    That doesn't mean it is good for you (or bad). For many years everyone said to avoid eggs for cholesterol. There was no controverse. Basically without more good science on the subject, we are all just mostly guessing.
barking 8y ago
WFPB, whole food plant based diet. No meat, no fish, no dairy. You can eat fruit but you can't juice it. Seems a bit of a misery diet to me.
- cies 8y ago
  Juicing, cooking, tofu making is minimally pocessed and generally accepted in WFPB circles. I't the point where you refine something (oil from seeds, sugar from beets) where it is against the protocol. > Seems a bit of a misery diet to me. I was not trying to make you happy. I stated it has a lot of science on it's side. There are some great cooking resources on how to make it taste/look/whatever great. Wanna know more about the science, see How Not To Die.
  - tananaev 8y ago
    I like the interpretation of minimally processed food as something that you can fairly easy make in your own kitchen. Freshly squeezed juice is fine. Packaged juice from concentrate with added refined sugar is not.
    - cies 8y ago
      Correct. Still juicing what you can eat WITH the fiber is better consumed as a whole. I therefor prefer juicing veggies over fruit (which I prefer to blend if not eat straight)
  - bodas 8y ago
    Surely milk is good for you, whereas American-style cheese is perhaps better avoided. It seems somewhat misguided to knock out whole food groups like that.
    - cies 8y ago
      Source for milk begin healthy? As the evidence of the contrary is mounting up to a stack that can rival smoking.
  - 8y ago
pkaye 8y ago
How about between butter and sugar? Which is worse?
- barking 8y ago
  Sugar is currently very bad for you. It's really bad for your liver though I can remember a time when it was thought that fatty food was hard on the liver and that sugar wasn't.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  Butter is not bad it came from the time where liver function and metabolism was not as well understood, the worst thing you can have is insulin resistance which both high carb and high protein diets can cause as they both revolve around glucose. I would highly recommend to avoid any diet which is less than 30-40% in calories from fat. That said the worst thing you can have is high fat and high carb since the insulin would cause your body to store all the fat and turn the extra sugar into more fat.
  - cies 8y ago
    > I would highly recommend to avoid any diet which is less than 30-40% in calories from fat. Our GI tract is very similar to that of primates. I think it is best to eat like they do: HCLF. > That said the worst thing you can have is high fat and high carb 100% agree. > the insulin would cause your body to store all the fat and turn the extra sugar into more fat. Nope. The extra glucose with spike in your blood (as the fay blocks your insulin on the cells), glucose is only converted to fat a tiny bit.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Our GI track is simmilar to some other primates primarily chimps but very different from others say Gorillas. Gorillas nearly only eat leaves while chips are omnivores that hunt even monkeys and even practice cannibalism. Glucose will turn into triglycerides and be stored into fat but more importantly what insulin does is instruct your fat cells to store energy.
- 8y ago
1stranger 8y ago
> AFAIK, butter is still worse then no butter (and more calories from whole plant foods instead). Many would dispute this if you're alluding to it being heavy in saturated fat which there's heavy dispute over. > Margarine may or may not be worse than butter (I think it is worse). Doesn't seem consistent with your logic of less refined is better. > If you want to eat for health, look into WFPB, they have a lot of science on their side. So basically veganism. Pretty much a non-starter for most people.
- cies 8y ago
  I see a many clear reasons to avoid/reduce any processed fat (oils, butter, etc). It is not part of what primates ate, so good chance we're not well adapted to it. It is too calorie dense. It blocks insulin. It becomes fat (carbs barely become fat), especially when combined with carbs (as is common). It often comes with cholesterol. > Doesn't seem consistent with your logic of less refined is better. That's why I continue to say its better to avoid both. More or less as bad as butter is still quite bad either way. > So basically veganism. Yeah. When applied for health reasons, it's called a plant based diet. Since you can make junk-food from plants, the WFPB word came about. > Pretty much a non-starter for most people. Stopping smoking is also hard. Wanne live longer/healthier? Look into WFPB. Wanne do what you always did? It is still legal, no worries as of yet.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    > It is not part of what primates ate, so good chance we're not well adapted to it. It’s animal fat. It gets broken down into glycerides. > It is too calorie dense. If you need fewer calories eat less. > It blocks insulin. Insulin is part of glucose metabolism. Dietary fat does not effect it. > It becomes fat (carbs barely become fat), especially when combined with carbs (as is common). Untrue. If you have a calorie deficit you’ll lose weight, a surplus you’ll gain it. Whether the energy comes from fats or carbs is irrelevant. > It often comes with cholesterol. Serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol are unrelated.
    - cies 8y ago
dogma1138 8y ago
High carb or low carb high protein diets which any low fat diet would turn into is a terrible idea in the both short and long term as they are glucose focused you want to avoid high blood sugar and high insulin levels since insulin causes your body to store fat. Fats are not inherently bad for you, doesn’t matter if they are plant based or not.
- cies 8y ago
  All primates eat high carb. They are not fat. It is fat that blocks insulin on yr cells. No (or little) fat and you can absorb your carbs as nature intended. > Fats are not inherently bad for you, doesn’t matter if they are plant based or not. I agree. It is the refined fats that are bad.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    It’s not really not true, apes have very different diets e.g. Gorillas are folivore and mostly consume leaves they can actually digest cellulose (they ferment it which is why they have a huge belly as their colon is huge), while chimps are omnivores that actually eat meat and hunt colobus monkeys, as well as consume eggs, insects, birds, nuts and honey. Also the human genetic and epigenetic landscape is utterly different just like the difference between any other species. And you also ignore our gut flora which is drastically different than apes in the wild (you would also not find apes with the same flora ofc, Gorillas and Chimps would have drastically different floras). But sure eat like a gorilla around 50-60 I don’t remember if it’s lbs or kg of leaves a day but at those figures it doesn’t matter and see how long would you survive. (just in case someone somehow would take that jest seriously, please don't eat like a Gorilla you will die, and if not you will suffer irreversible damage to your colon to the point where you quite possible wish you were dead)
    - cies 8y ago
      https://seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-infobooks/gorilla/diet-and-eating-habits/ https://seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-infobooks/gorilla/di... I read "Western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla): This subspecies consumes parts of at least 97 plant species. About 67% of their diet is fruit, 17% is leaves, seeds and stems and 3% is termites and caterpillars." Another type of gorilla eats more/mostly leafs. Still gorilla eat HCLF. I'm not saying eat only leafs. I'm saying other primates eat fruit-leaves-bugs mostly (yes some chimps hunt, but given enough fruit they are not so much compelled to). And we have a quite similar GI tract. Not the same, but much more similar than comparing to cats or cows. We are not made for processed food. We are made for HCLF. We are quite similar to other primates GI-tract wise. What do you not agree with?
bitL 8y ago
Butter from grass-fed cows contains CLA/Tonalin, an extremely beneficial type of fat. Remove butter at your own risk...
philliphaydon 8y ago
America said cooking with lard was bad for us and all that resulted in was lard being substituted with sugar. Cos the moment you take the fat away everything is tasteless.
- conception 8y ago
  Unless you add salt!
  - rleigh 8y ago
    Yep, and there's so much salt in mass manufactured biscuits and the like I can no longer bear to eat them. Add more butter instead! Cutting back on refined sugar really makes things taste better, lots of subtle flavour makes previously bland stuff like oats taste really nice. But the downside is being unable to stomach the excessive amounts of salt and sugar in a lot of stuff. The upside is I save a fortune on buying junk food since most of it now tastes awful.