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Sugar is an excellent example. In fact, the sugar industry has been behind the effort to deflect blame to fat for the last 50 years. https://www.npr.org/secti

Sugar is an excellent example. In fact, the sugar industry has been behind the effort to deflect blame to fat for the last 50 years. 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...

lovecg 5y ago
It’s kind of hard to discern from the article, so is fat good and was unfairly blamed? Or fat and sugar are both bad, but they emphasized the fat part?
- DenisM 5y ago
  FWIW, my reading of the tea leaves is that fat alone is fine, sugar alone is bad, and sugar+fat maybe worse. The basic logic of the anti-sugar sentiment is this: Excess of blood sugar is toxic and so it triggers a shot of insulin, intended to drain sugar from the blood and hide it in various places: the muscle tissue, the liver, and last resort - the fat cells. Normally it works just fine, but sometimes the system gets overwhelmed with a big sugar rush and starts producing too much insulin, draining too much sugar, overshooting the target, causing hunger, craving for more sugar, and eating more sugar. The human then goes into the infinite loop of sugar binging accumulating fat on the go. Now if you add dietary fat into the mixture it's possible that the fat cells will suck it up too. That I don't know for sure.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. Monounsaturated fats seem to be generally just good. Omega-3, also, seems good, and Omega-6 less so, but part of that could actually be more about the ratios of omega-6 to -3, which can be 15:1 in the Western diet but people have better health outcomes when they bring omega-6 consumption down and increase omega-3 to get the ratio closer to 4:1 to 1:1. Saturated fats are still debated - some studies did show replacing saturated fats with vegetable fats did reduce cardiovascular disease etc., but then that might be more that there are some protective effects to the vegetable fats and adding them in rather than replacing might have had a similar effect… Then there are about a million confounding variables. Doing a decent amount of exercise is a big one, because it’s harder to control for than the other common health detriment - smoking, but things like whether your dairy is grass-fed (as it is here in Australia and much of Europe) vs. grain fed apparently makes a big difference (grass fed apparently has a lot more things like CLA, omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin K2, the benefits of which seem to potentially more than cancel out any problem from the saturated fat). One other big problem is that a lot of “low fat” products tend to have more sugar added to make up for it. Too much sugar is bad, yes, and it’s pretty alarming how seemingly little you need to be over that threshold. Literally a single can of coke is almost the entirety of the sugar one should be consuming in a whole day! Fruit juice is also pretty bad unfortunately - basically just as bad as soft drink (I love soft drinks, apple juice, sweet ice tea, it’s been a challenge to cut most of it out!).
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    > I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. You can say that again... I was recently looking at the nutrition content of Wendy's cheeseburgers; they actually do a pretty good job at displaying nutrition facts and also scaling it with custom orders. Anyway, I noticed that a triple cheeseburger could have ~4g of trans fats. Wait a sec, is Wendy's ignoring regulations about trans fats? No, as it turns out. I discovered that some trans fats from nature are actually beneficial (palmitoleic acid and vaccenic acid in the beef patties). This went totally counter to everything I thought I knew. In other words, it never ceases to surprise me how nuanced nutrition can be and how easily we oversimplify it.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      A Wendy’s triple cheeseburger still sounds like a poor choice.
    - stephen_g 5y ago
      Yeah, it's interesting, hey? I mentioned Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) - that's another one that is technically a trans fat, but seems to be beneficial (although apparently supplementation doesn't seem to have the same benefits as getting it in food, so maybe there's another interaction, like how foods that contain CLA also often contain Vitamin K2 as well).

lovecg 5y ago

It’s kind of hard to discern from the article, so is fat good and was unfairly blamed? Or fat and sugar are both bad, but they emphasized the fat part?

DenisM 5y ago
FWIW, my reading of the tea leaves is that fat alone is fine, sugar alone is bad, and sugar+fat maybe worse. The basic logic of the anti-sugar sentiment is this: Excess of blood sugar is toxic and so it triggers a shot of insulin, intended to drain sugar from the blood and hide it in various places: the muscle tissue, the liver, and last resort - the fat cells. Normally it works just fine, but sometimes the system gets overwhelmed with a big sugar rush and starts producing too much insulin, draining too much sugar, overshooting the target, causing hunger, craving for more sugar, and eating more sugar. The human then goes into the infinite loop of sugar binging accumulating fat on the go. Now if you add dietary fat into the mixture it's possible that the fat cells will suck it up too. That I don't know for sure.
stephen_g 5y ago
I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. Monounsaturated fats seem to be generally just good. Omega-3, also, seems good, and Omega-6 less so, but part of that could actually be more about the ratios of omega-6 to -3, which can be 15:1 in the Western diet but people have better health outcomes when they bring omega-6 consumption down and increase omega-3 to get the ratio closer to 4:1 to 1:1. Saturated fats are still debated - some studies did show replacing saturated fats with vegetable fats did reduce cardiovascular disease etc., but then that might be more that there are some protective effects to the vegetable fats and adding them in rather than replacing might have had a similar effect… Then there are about a million confounding variables. Doing a decent amount of exercise is a big one, because it’s harder to control for than the other common health detriment - smoking, but things like whether your dairy is grass-fed (as it is here in Australia and much of Europe) vs. grain fed apparently makes a big difference (grass fed apparently has a lot more things like CLA, omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin K2, the benefits of which seem to potentially more than cancel out any problem from the saturated fat). One other big problem is that a lot of “low fat” products tend to have more sugar added to make up for it. Too much sugar is bad, yes, and it’s pretty alarming how seemingly little you need to be over that threshold. Literally a single can of coke is almost the entirety of the sugar one should be consuming in a whole day! Fruit juice is also pretty bad unfortunately - basically just as bad as soft drink (I love soft drinks, apple juice, sweet ice tea, it’s been a challenge to cut most of it out!).
- ravenstine 5y ago
  > I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. You can say that again... I was recently looking at the nutrition content of Wendy's cheeseburgers; they actually do a pretty good job at displaying nutrition facts and also scaling it with custom orders. Anyway, I noticed that a triple cheeseburger could have ~4g of trans fats. Wait a sec, is Wendy's ignoring regulations about trans fats? No, as it turns out. I discovered that some trans fats from nature are actually beneficial (palmitoleic acid and vaccenic acid in the beef patties). This went totally counter to everything I thought I knew. In other words, it never ceases to surprise me how nuanced nutrition can be and how easily we oversimplify it.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    A Wendy’s triple cheeseburger still sounds like a poor choice.
  - stephen_g 5y ago
    Yeah, it's interesting, hey? I mentioned Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) - that's another one that is technically a trans fat, but seems to be beneficial (although apparently supplementation doesn't seem to have the same benefits as getting it in food, so maybe there's another interaction, like how foods that contain CLA also often contain Vitamin K2 as well).