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Intake of saturated fatty acids and risk of coronary heart disease
- clumsysmurf 6y agoIt seems every other day there is contradictory information, I don't know what to believe. This is from a few days ago "High fat or 'ketogenic' diets could prevent, reverse heart failure" https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-high-fat-ketogenic-diets-reverse.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-high-fat-ketogenic-di...
- geddy 6y agoThat study you linked was done in animals, and I have a feeling it was dug up to support the notion that keto is in any way shape or form, good for you.
- codebolt 6y agoBased on advice from certain experts like Rhonda Patrick and various anecdotes from others I think the combination of sugar and fat in particular exacerbates the damaging effects of both. This study seems to focus on one variable, but there may be all sorts of bias in that those who consume a lot of saturated fat also have poor nutrition otherwise and lead unhealthier lives overall.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago>I think the combination of sugar and fat That might just be that together they are particularly palatable. You would have a hard job eating a bowl of sugar or a bowl of cream but mix them together and it's much easier.
- fsloth 6y agoI think it's silly to focus on single variable. I'm Over 40 and my body is showing it. I've done quite a lot of health research over the past few years. My personal metric at the moment is to lower my cholesterol and have been moderately successful without medication, so I think I'm doing something at least partially right. I think the beneficial geeky rules of thumbs for healthy living that are simple rather than perfect, are: 1. One needs in ones diet 1.1 Protein 1.2 Fiber 1.3 Carbohydrates 1.4 Fats 1.5 Vitamins 2. Prefer foods with: 2.1 Unsaturated fats like olive oil, salmon, etc 2.2 Fibers 3. Generally avoid food with: 3.1 Fast sugars 3.2 High inflammatory index 3.3 High saturated fat content 4. Don't eat more than you consume. 5. For exercise, as the bare minimum, try to walk at least 8000 steps per day or equivalent. This will statistically reduce mortality considerably. 6. Sleep enough 7. Don't stress about the above rules! Pay attention, but don't judge - yourself or others. 8. Look into other stuff that's probably good for you like stretches, breathing exercises and strength exercises. These are not hard and fast rules. But things that one can pay attention to, and through self observation perhaps make slow adjustments. So don't stop eating burgers, but pay attention to the number of calories you eat, and of what the calories are composed of. Eat what you like, but don't delude yourself. For geeks metrological devices may offer motivation. I have a bracelet that measures my steps and my sleep, and I feel it as a successful facilitation tool. But don't treat the device as a life coach, or the numbers as something that you should strive to optimize.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago4. will (literally) kill you because your metabolism slows down as you age and you have to choose between obesity and eating much, much less. Exercise helps but will only get you so far. In my 20s I would eat ~1000 calorie meals with an entire pizza, salad, rich dressing, and a big slab of chocolate fudge cake. I was never slim, but I wasn't obese either. If I tried that today I'd be breaking the scales in a few months. Having to cut down on food a lot has been one of the hardest adjustments to make. Quite a few of my friends have never managed it and they're now dangerously beyond a reasonable weight.
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- moltar 6y agoThe answer is fasting. That’s the missing feature of our modern life. Humans need to fast to clear out the glycogen stores and liver fat.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoI would love to see the research backing this, because that would be a quite simple lifestyle change for most people. However, it does also have an air of "this one trick will solve obesity!", which should be viewed with skepticism.
- voisin 6y agoThere are hundreds of links on HN about fasting. You cannot lose fat without first depleting glycogen stores. You can exercise these stores away and then in the absence of further caloric input your body turns to fat stores. Or if you fast, the absence of caloric input means your body will naturally burn its glycogen stores (takes longer if you aren’t exercising, for obvious reasons).
- DougWebb 6y agoI think most people would disagree with your definition of "quite simple". Going from three meals a day to a 16:8 eating pattern (16 hrs fasting, 8 hrs eating window) isn't too bad. It's basically skipping breakfast. Shortening the eating window until you're eating one meal a day is tougher. Then extending the fasting period > 24 hrs is tougher still. You can't just jump into this stuff while you're carb-addicted and your body is screaming for glucose. Getting used to a keto-style diet, even if your carb intake is just low but not keto-low, helps a lot.
- fsloth 6y agoThe proposals to consume a large percentage of daily intake of calories in form of fats, but avoid saturated fats, are not mutually exclusive. There are sources with high fat content but low amount of saturated fats like like salmon or olive oil. Animal fat with high saturated fat content is not the only alternative. For example, salmon or egg has 3% content saturated fats. Beef has 6%, and as ground beef with delicious fat added to make the burger patties more delicious, the content can go up to 10%. Butter has saturated fat content of 50%.
- scottlocklin 6y agoNow do France. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1768013/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1768013/ Correlational studies are inherently flawed when you have something as complex as diet. It's probably quite true that in a random sample of 80,000 health care workers in America, the people with more grease in their diets drop dead faster. It doesn't happen in France, Spain etc etc. Meaning it probably has nothing to do with saturated fatty acids, and probably much to do with whatever goes along with it. Who knows what it actually is? Soybean oil, wonder bread, dunkin doughnuts, HFCS, diet coke, being disgustingly overweight, never walking anywhere, granola, fruit juice (bleh -sugar water), dietary iron, twinkies, nacho "cheese," brined ham, trail mix, marshmallows, potato chips, microwave popcorn, soy protein -any number of things the Frogs and Spaniards don't eat or do, but fat Americans do. Using linear regression, grease/saturated fat probably correlates well with all this other garbage, and with dropping dead sooner, assuming you censor out other world populations with different national diet tendencies. Of course including Spaniards in the data set, you get a different answer.
- fsloth 6y agoThe moderate consumption red wine seems to be a plausible component of the low number of realized CHD deaths?
- scottlocklin 6y agoIt's a nice story, but it's about as likely as brie causing fewer realized CHD deaths. There's no way you could deconvolute either from their diet; the red wine meme is probably just upper middle class people telling each other their vices are healthy. The "French paradox" isn't the only one indicating the statistics are horse shit on saturated fat: consider the Israeli paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox
- boringg 6y agoYeah the red wine health benefits were denied recently when the underlying study failed to take account for other variables such as social class and lifestyles. Amazing how flawed some of the old studies are. Wouldn’t be surprised if somehow the alcohol lobby was involved back then
- geddy 6y agoGreat, now let’s stop pretending that meat dairy and eggs are health foods and that low carb high fat diets are ideal for you, particularly here on the usually-scientific HN. We’ve known of a direct causal link between high saturated fat intake and heart disease for years but this study (published in 2016 by the way) should be the nail in the coffin on the idea that high saturated animal fat is healthy.
- tsimionescu 6y agoWhat's this supposed direct causal link? Total cholesterol, like we believed before? Or LDL cholesterol, like we believe now? Or none of the above, like the the failed drugs (other than statins) that reduce LDL and improve the ratio between LDL and HDL, but have 0 effect on heart disease outcomes[0]? [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/eli-lilly-abandons-heart-disease-drug-in-final-stages-of-trials.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/eli-lilly-abando...
- fsloth 6y agoToo much saturated fat is a statistical killer in some populations, sure. Please investigate the ratio of saturated fats in the food produce you highlighted before making quite coarse statements. The saturated fat content typically in egg (3% saturated fats) and for example, ground beef with 30% fat content (10% saturated fats) is quite different. Fat content of industrially produced dairy products can vary quite a lot as well. So it's quite different thing to eat all of calories for example from butter (50% saturated fat of total weight) or lean ground beef.
- el_oni 6y agoIn HNs defense, dietary science is a minefield of special interest groups, small sample sizes, animal models and poor controls. Not to mention the editorializing of every p < 0.05 by the media and bloggers, along with all of the n=1 anecdotes. Its so much harder to find valid reliable sources than to find sombody with a book to sell. The other problem is that people want a silver bullet. Being told to eat a varied diet with enough macro and micro nutrients is less satisfying than being told that "the thing you want to eat is good and you should cut back on the things you enjoy less".
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- nestorD 6y agoSlate star codex has an article I found good at covering both side of whether high saturated fat is good or not: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-...
- im3w1l 6y agoHe mentioned an interesting thing just in passing > But it also allows lots of other things with high saturated and low unsaturated fat. Red meat (but not chicken or pork; most chickens and pigs are fed high-PUFA feed that gives them high-PUFA meat) That the healthiness of meat depends on what the animals in turn ate. This seems an understudied thing. How are today's animals different from the ones great grandpa ate?
- Quarrel 6y agoIt also varies very much country to country. The US subsidises corn, so has a surfeit of corn, so they feed a lot of corn to animals. This gives US animals a different profile to say, Australian grass fed animals (although obviously Australia also sometimes finishes animals on grain, but it isn't corn much). All in all dietary studies are a total shit show of confounding variables even when done incredibly well. Then there are the thousands a year that are not done well, but if they have the right headline get coverage.
- Protostome 6y agoFrom a statistical perspective, the effect size is very small... all hazard ratios are very close to 1. It implies that saturated fat consumption is not strongly associated with the outcome.
- tomlue 6y agoIf I am going to trust a random internet comment, I would prefer to trust the conclusions of the actual paper. They say just the opposite, that saturated fats (SFAs) are associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease: "Conclusions. Higher dietary intakes of major SFAs are associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease. Owing to similar associations and high correlations among individual SFAs, dietary recommendations for the prevention of coronary heart disease should continue to focus on replacing total saturated fat with more healthy sources of energy."
- cik2e 6y agoThe comment is not referring to whether they are associated, but by how much, i.e., effect size. These type of studies aren’t very useful anyway because nutrition is super complex and full of interacting variables. It’s much more likely that the causality is actually between a number of other underlying factors that are correlated with higher saturated fat intake.
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- jonplackett 6y agoI've tried giving up various things and giving up sugar just makes fat drop off you. Saturated fat made no difference. I'm pretty convinced sugar is the main problem in modern diets. It doesn't make sense that a type of fat that would have been available since caveperson times would be so bad for us, and we know the sugar industry tried to deflect the blame onto saturated fat (and probably that is ongoing) https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
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- jvanderbot 6y agoBut the article concerned heart disease, not weight, and saturated fat, not sugar. So there isn't much to suggest that removing sugar is not a good thing, and that removing saturated fat is not also a good thing. And perhaps our digestive and circulatory system evolved remarkably well to keep us running decades past our reproductive years mostly regardless of meal composition.
- chrisco255 6y agoIt's a correlative study. It's not as if they did a randomized clinical trial and fed sat fats with no sugar to a group of humans for 40 years. There are so many confounding variables when it comes to nutrition, all studies should be taken with a grain of salt (not too much, you don't want to overdo your sodium intake).
- Darmody 6y agoWhen you look at the studies about nutrition you find a lot of contradictory conclusions except when it's about sugar. Saturated fats may be bad, yes, but sugar is undoubtedly bad. When I'm asked about nutrition tips removing sugar is the first thing I suggest. Not matter if we're talking about losing weight, gaining weight, building muscle or simply eating healthy.
- ilaksh 6y agoWhat's the difference between fatty acids and fats?