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The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided. It seems more likely that the supposedly "heart healthy" seed oils are causing heart disease

The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided. It seems more likely that the supposedly "heart healthy" seed oils are causing heart disease. The Carnivore Code has some very good insights (at least in my opinion) [1] And this talk on how seed oils are destroying our health is also pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGnfXXIKZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGnfXXIKZM [1] https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Returning-Ancestral/dp/1734640707 https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Returning-An...

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
It's what the science says so far. It's amazing that since there are gaps in our knowledge people readily jump over to woo woo fad diets.
- nradov 6y ago
  The science in this area is actually pretty low quality from a strict evidence-based medicine standpoint. It mostly consists of poorly controlled observational studies, which are only one step above the woo woo fad diets. We still don't have a solid theoretical framework for how all the pieces fit together.
  - Pulcinella 6y ago
    We (and by we I mean the government) just need to bite the bullet and and pay for a multi billion dollar study where we pay tens of thousands of people to control* and monitor what they eat, exercise, etc for 20 years and just figure this out. None of this “well we had 20 grad students journal what they did for 6 months and this is the result” low quality studies. *Morally correct and ethically of course. I’m not saying we force people into large hamster cages.
    - nradov 6y ago
      Unfortunately such a study still wouldn't produce valid results. The problem is that study subjects don't report accurate data. They lie because they're ashamed of their choices, or they forget, or they just don't know how to accurately count what they eat. Consider a hypothetical study subject who goes to watch the game at his local bar, drinks 7 beers, eats a plate of hot wings, and then stops at Taco Bell for nachos on the way home. When he wakes up the next morning what do you suppose he'll enter on the form?
    - lazyasciiart 6y ago
      You want to look at the Framingham studies. Not what you're describing, but it's far far above the 20 grad student model https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?study_id=phs000158.v4.p4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?...
- wtetzner 6y ago
  > It's what the science says so far. No, it's what some interpret the science to mean. It's not like the Carnivore Code is just a nonsense fad diet. It's a book describing the science behind it. You may or may not agree with its conclusions, of course. And I'm not even suggesting to start eating a carnivore diet. I don't. I just think it's worth reading for some valuable insights. Additionally, I would argue that the science on seed oils points to them being bad for our health. If you watch that video, the conclusions are all based on research. There's no such thing as "the science", as if there's only a single conclusion that can be derived from experiments. That's not how science works.
- pjkundert 6y ago
  If the epic, explosive scale of obesity, diabetes and heart disease under the modern government recommended high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet doesn't give you pause, then.... I just don't know what to say.
  - boatsie 6y ago
    It makes you wonder what would happen if they recommended the opposite for a generation, what would happen. Would recommending a ketoish diet improve health outcomes? Or does the recommendation mean almost nothing and people will just eat whatever is sold by big food.
    - lazyasciiart 6y ago
      Yes, the recommendations appear to mean almost nothing. Americans didn't even reduce the amount of fat consumed since the government started recommending that they eat less fat. They just haven't increased it as much as they increased the amount of carbs consumed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/did-the-governments-dietary-guidelines-help-make-us-fat/2019/02/22/e0f6a800-3604-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/did-the-govern...
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    Those aren't their recommendations. https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2020-12/Dietary_Guidelines_for_Americans_2020-2025.pdf https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2020-1...
    - wtetzner 6y ago
      They do recommend eating polyunsaturates over saturated fats. That isn't doing us any favors.
didibus 6y ago
> The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided From my personal sifting through research, it seems there's a lot of correlation with different diets which shows people with more health problems often have an animal based diet and people with less health problems often have a more pesceterian diet. What is absolutely not clear is any of the cause/effect. It's also unknown of the nuances. For example, what else correlates with those? It often is true that people with pesceterian diets are from specific isolated genetic lineages. It is also often true that when they're not, they tend to be individuals that pay much more attention to their overall health, making sure they don't eat too much, eat high quality produce (organic, wild caught, etc), exercise more, and often are more financially wealthy. Personally I agree with you, but I also agree with the opposite: > The idea that vegetables/fruits/nuts/seafood products are unhealthy seems to be misguided Historically, we've always consumed all these things. Meat, seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, seeds, human lineage ate all of this for a very long time. Why would any of it be bad for us? More recently as I've been thinking about this, I'm wondering if it's more related to our modern production of those things, and our changing consumption habits. Take meat for example, the meat we eat today is very low quality. The animals are themselves unhealthy, fed garbage food, and have a lifestyle unlike their natural one. Can we compare the effect of eating unhealthy meat to healthy meat? We know grass fed beef has way more nutrition than non grass fed beef for example, so there's clearly major differences between eating one or the other. Now take vegetables, we've not been hard pressing canola into an oil extract and consuming it in high quantity before. This is a modern change. In fact, I don't even think canola is a plant we would have eaten the seeds off in the past. So my current thoughts are that low grade produce and processed foods might have a lot more to do with it. And all of the "diets" no matter if you think they are a fad or which affinity you have will emphasize this point: Avoid processed foods and try to get the highest quality ingredients. In the past, we'd probably eat an animal that had eaten canola itself and processed it for us, and we'd get the canola nutrients through eating the animal. But also, we wouldn't be eating animal all the time at the quantities we do now. Because winter, and hunting is hard, and lack of preservatives. But also because once we became sedentary, meat was expensive and most people could afford very little of it. And like I said when we did, it would be this very high quality meat. Very different from what we eat today. We also wouldn't be consuming all these processed vegetables byproducts, like oils. Appart from those that were very easy to extract, like Olive oils. Everything else that requires modern industrialization to extract it was probably consumed in much less processed forms, such as eating the seeds themselves, or grinding a much smaller amount and getting much smaller amount of oil out of them. Modernity has brought major changes in that all foods are now of a lower quality, and come in a much more processed form. It made a lot of foods more accessible which mean eating as much as we do is also a modern change. And it allowed us to modify the proportions of what we'd eat, like way more sugar and salt, way less veggies and fruits. In my opinion these are the more consistent factors. So from my readings, I currently conclude the best course of action for your average healthy person is to eat less food overall, eat unprocessed foods of the highest quality (organic, grass fed, wild caught, etc.), In mostly equal quantity of each kind (based on calories), like consume the same calories of meat, fish, veggies, fruits and grains.
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115815.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

It's what the science says so far. It's amazing that since there are gaps in our knowledge people readily jump over to woo woo fad diets.

nradov 6y ago
The science in this area is actually pretty low quality from a strict evidence-based medicine standpoint. It mostly consists of poorly controlled observational studies, which are only one step above the woo woo fad diets. We still don't have a solid theoretical framework for how all the pieces fit together.
- Pulcinella 6y ago
  We (and by we I mean the government) just need to bite the bullet and and pay for a multi billion dollar study where we pay tens of thousands of people to control* and monitor what they eat, exercise, etc for 20 years and just figure this out. None of this “well we had 20 grad students journal what they did for 6 months and this is the result” low quality studies. *Morally correct and ethically of course. I’m not saying we force people into large hamster cages.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Unfortunately such a study still wouldn't produce valid results. The problem is that study subjects don't report accurate data. They lie because they're ashamed of their choices, or they forget, or they just don't know how to accurately count what they eat. Consider a hypothetical study subject who goes to watch the game at his local bar, drinks 7 beers, eats a plate of hot wings, and then stops at Taco Bell for nachos on the way home. When he wakes up the next morning what do you suppose he'll enter on the form?
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    You want to look at the Framingham studies. Not what you're describing, but it's far far above the 20 grad student model https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?study_id=phs000158.v4.p4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?...
wtetzner 6y ago
> It's what the science says so far. No, it's what some interpret the science to mean. It's not like the Carnivore Code is just a nonsense fad diet. It's a book describing the science behind it. You may or may not agree with its conclusions, of course. And I'm not even suggesting to start eating a carnivore diet. I don't. I just think it's worth reading for some valuable insights. Additionally, I would argue that the science on seed oils points to them being bad for our health. If you watch that video, the conclusions are all based on research. There's no such thing as "the science", as if there's only a single conclusion that can be derived from experiments. That's not how science works.
pjkundert 6y ago
If the epic, explosive scale of obesity, diabetes and heart disease under the modern government recommended high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet doesn't give you pause, then.... I just don't know what to say.
- boatsie 6y ago
  It makes you wonder what would happen if they recommended the opposite for a generation, what would happen. Would recommending a ketoish diet improve health outcomes? Or does the recommendation mean almost nothing and people will just eat whatever is sold by big food.
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    Yes, the recommendations appear to mean almost nothing. Americans didn't even reduce the amount of fat consumed since the government started recommending that they eat less fat. They just haven't increased it as much as they increased the amount of carbs consumed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/did-the-governments-dietary-guidelines-help-make-us-fat/2019/02/22/e0f6a800-3604-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/did-the-govern...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Those aren't their recommendations. https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2020-12/Dietary_Guidelines_for_Americans_2020-2025.pdf https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2020-1...
  - wtetzner 6y ago
    They do recommend eating polyunsaturates over saturated fats. That isn't doing us any favors.

didibus 6y ago

> The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided From my personal sifting through research, it seems there's a lot of correlation with different diets which shows people with more health problems often have an animal based diet and people with less health problems often have a more pesceterian diet. What is absolutely not clear is any of the cause/effect. It's also unknown of the nuances. For example, what else correlates with those? It often is true that people with pesceterian diets are from specific isolated genetic lineages. It is also often true that when they're not, they tend to be individuals that pay much more attention to their overall health, making sure they don't eat too much, eat high quality produce (organic, wild caught, etc), exercise more, and often are more financially wealthy. Personally I agree with you, but I also agree with the opposite: > The idea that vegetables/fruits/nuts/seafood products are unhealthy seems to be misguided Historically, we've always consumed all these things. Meat, seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, seeds, human lineage ate all of this for a very long time. Why would any of it be bad for us? More recently as I've been thinking about this, I'm wondering if it's more related to our modern production of those things, and our changing consumption habits. Take meat for example, the meat we eat today is very low quality. The animals are themselves unhealthy, fed garbage food, and have a lifestyle unlike their natural one. Can we compare the effect of eating unhealthy meat to healthy meat? We know grass fed beef has way more nutrition than non grass fed beef for example, so there's clearly major differences between eating one or the other. Now take vegetables, we've not been hard pressing canola into an oil extract and consuming it in high quantity before. This is a modern change. In fact, I don't even think canola is a plant we would have eaten the seeds off in the past. So my current thoughts are that low grade produce and processed foods might have a lot more to do with it. And all of the "diets" no matter if you think they are a fad or which affinity you have will emphasize this point: Avoid processed foods and try to get the highest quality ingredients. In the past, we'd probably eat an animal that had eaten canola itself and processed it for us, and we'd get the canola nutrients through eating the animal. But also, we wouldn't be eating animal all the time at the quantities we do now. Because winter, and hunting is hard, and lack of preservatives. But also because once we became sedentary, meat was expensive and most people could afford very little of it. And like I said when we did, it would be this very high quality meat. Very different from what we eat today. We also wouldn't be consuming all these processed vegetables byproducts, like oils. Appart from those that were very easy to extract, like Olive oils. Everything else that requires modern industrialization to extract it was probably consumed in much less processed forms, such as eating the seeds themselves, or grinding a much smaller amount and getting much smaller amount of oil out of them. Modernity has brought major changes in that all foods are now of a lower quality, and come in a much more processed form. It made a lot of foods more accessible which mean eating as much as we do is also a modern change. And it allowed us to modify the proportions of what we'd eat, like way more sugar and salt, way less veggies and fruits. In my opinion these are the more consistent factors. So from my readings, I currently conclude the best course of action for your average healthy person is to eat less food overall, eat unprocessed foods of the highest quality (organic, grass fed, wild caught, etc.), In mostly equal quantity of each kind (based on calories), like consume the same calories of meat, fish, veggies, fruits and grains.

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115815.