12 ms·

High carbohydrate intake, not fat, was associated with higher risk of mortality (2017)

85 points by jeremylevy 5y ago

boppo1 5y ago
But what about the whole movement toward plant-based diets?
- Tagbert 5y ago
  It probably depends on what you mean by “plant based”. If you mean a broad range of plants with plenty of fiber and nutrients, that is probably good. If you mean “eat all the rice, corn, and potatoes”, then your results may be wanting.
  - simmerup 5y ago
    I don’t understand the hate for potatoes, they have tons of nutrients.
    - LinuxBender 5y ago
      Potatoes have many nutrients including Potassium which most people are deficient in but they also spike insulin without an equal rise in glucagon. Many people are developing insulin resistance and steadily heading towards pre-diabetes so these days folks are watching out for things that spike insulin.
      - 1_player 5y ago
        Potassium deficiency is very rare, and causes arrythmias and other electrical problems just like ingesting too much of it. I think you mean magnesium, whose deficiency is widespread and it is though to be caused by depletion of it in the soil due to intensive agricultural practices.
        commoner 5y ago
        > Potassium deficiency is very rare Potassium-deficient diets are not rare. Using the U.S. as an example, only 3% of people in the U.S. consume adequate levels of potassium in their diet according to the most recent NHANES survey.[1] The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has identified potassium as 1 of 4 "shortfall nutrients" (nutrients that are underconsumed by the U.S. population at large) that are of public health concern in 2015.[2] That is why the FDA has required food manufacturers to include potassium amounts in the "Nutrition Facts" label since 2016.[3] [1] https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/4/3/368S/4591617 https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/4/3/368S/4591617 [2] https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937-017-0230-0 https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937... [3] https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-magazine/issues/2016/june/features/fda-overhauls-nutrition-facts-label https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma...
        1_player 5y ago
        Given that 68% of people in the US are deficient from the other electrolyte, magnesium, I maintain that potassium deficiency is rare(r), and certainly is scarier to supplement that Mg is. https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2005/9/americans-magnesium-deficient https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2005/9/americans-magn...
        commoner 5y ago
        What? 97% of U.S. people have potassium-deficient diets, which is greater than the 68% of U.S. people who have magnesium-deficient diets (according to your source). I agree that anyone who is taking potassium supplements should carefully monitor their potassium intake, but almost all foods have low enough levels of potassium that excessive potassium consumption is extremely rare. The FDA limits most potassium supplements in the U.S. to 99 mg per dose, an insignificant 2% of the Daily Value.* * https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfessional/ https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfession...
        LinuxBender 5y ago
    - bsder 5y ago
      Starchy carbohydrates, unfortunately, are one of the two ways to consume way too many calories way too quickly. It's hard to eat 2000 calories of steak in a sitting. It's almost impossible to eat 2000 calories of lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, etc. in a sitting. It's really easy to consume 2000 calories of potatoes, wheat, or rice in a sitting. The other easy way to consume way too many calories is to slather your food with butter or oil. A tablespoon of oil or butter isn't terrible and may even be healthy for you--a quarter cup, however, is approaching 1000 calories. That's not so good. And people tend to use whole sticks of butter in cooking (1 stick is 1/4 cup) per dish or easily put a quarter cup of salad dressing (mostly oil) on their vegetables.
      - joe-collins 5y ago
        An entire large potato is 300, 400 calories. Even "loaded" with fixings, I can't imagine eating 2000 calories in potato-centered food in one sitting.
      - seanhunter 5y ago
        > It's really easy to consume 2000 calories of potatoes, wheat, or rice in a sitting. You would have to eat 1.5kg of cooked rice to eat 2000 kCal of rice. You would have to eat 1.9kg of potatoes. I don't know what you call "really easy" but about 180g of rice is a normal portion. The same would require about 800g of steak, by the way.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Eating a small serving of potatoes is generally fine for most people who have a healthy metabolism (i.e. not insulin resistant). But they do have a high glycemic index. https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTHLIBRARY/tools/glycemic-index.asp https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTHLIBRARY/tools/glycemic-index.a...
    - porknubbins 5y ago
      Potatoes are their own worst enemy in a way since they are delicious fried in high temperature oil which is not super healthy for a number of reasons. But yes I agree with you in general, I hear you can technically survive on potatoes and butter.
      - retrac 5y ago
        Yes, potatoes contain all the proteins necessary in the human diet. So in a pinch, just potatoes + a multivitamin will, uh, suffice for a while. Oats and most legumes (soy, peas, lentils, etc.) are like this as well. And spinach. Many other plant foods, like wheat, do have all the proteins required by humans, but not in quantities sufficient to meet the minimum intake at normal calorie levels if you ate them near-exclusively. This is conjecture, but I suspect this is the underlying reason for why so many vegetarian dishes are based on a pairing of wheat or rice with a legume. Peanut butter + crackers. Tahini + pitas. Curry + rice. Bean + wholegrain salad. All the same pattern.
        sjtindell 5y ago
        Hah, you’re comment cracked me up remembering some dude who showed up in a food thread the other day saying that he’d been eating for like $0.30 cents per meal by eating nothing but potatoes. Built different.
        entropyie 5y ago
        A lot of the nutrients are in the skin, so the real trick is to buy organic (no pesticide), then eat the skin also... Reducing food waste is a bonus.
- lm28469 5y ago
  What about them? They're mostly low carbs
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    When people talk about food it seems they forget about nuance. Somebody catches wind that a high carb diet is bad and before long they're full carnivore and start proselytizing that eating a fruit will kill you.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      I'm on carnivore, and although fruits are no-no (for me at least), in my own research they're better than grains and other vegetables. Unlike leafy vegetables, most fruits are evolved to be eaten by animals, and have the seeds pooped out or discarded in the ground. That's why they taste so fricking good. Though evolution didn't make them this big and full of sugar, we did. And then we juice them so you can consume 20 apples in one sip, and call that healthy. In my eyes and personal opinion, the diet we are most genetically optimal for is high fat, mostly carnivore, with seasonal fruits and berries, and remembering that modern fruits are nothing like what we have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years. And ideally insects, though they weren't a huge part of our diet. We after all are big herbivore hunters and scavengers.
      - deeviant 5y ago
        Wait, are you actually serious? You don't eat fruits or vegetables because you think they are unhealthy?
        brnt 5y ago
        Fruits have a ton of sugar, which I both don't need and don't really like. OTOH, you can pry my veg from my cold dead hands.
        deeviant 5y ago
- deeviant 5y ago
  What about it?
- Zababa 5y ago
  The movement toward plant-based diets is almost always made for ethical reasons. The health reasons are mostly due to healthy user bias. It's not surprising to me that maximizing some ethics and maximizing health would lead to different diets.
  - tashoecraft 5y ago
    Yeah that’s not true and is mostly due to your bias.
NumberWangMan 5y ago
The Harvard School of Public Health released some comments about this soon after: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2017/09/08/pure-study-makes-headlines-but-the-conclusions-are-misleading/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2017/09/08/pure...
- austinjp 5y ago
  Indeed. Probably the most pertinent quote is this: "The main messages for nutritional advice have not changed: follow a healthy dietary pattern that includes abundant amounts of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts; moderate amounts of reduced-fat dairy products and seafood; and lower amounts of processed and red meat, sugar-sweetened foods and beverages, and refined grains."
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Metabolically, fruit is not very different from “sugar sweetened foods and beverages” (and imho gram for gram, fructose is worse than sucrose). The same goes for whole grains. Fat is the most calorie dense nutrient. The human race has spent a majority of its time just trying to stay alive. Up until very recently, this meant eating substantial quantities of fat, and specifically animal fat. Harvard Medical is part of the problem. People stop getting published if you’re contra-establishment, which means you stop getting juicy grants and donations.
    - Baloo 5y ago
      From what I've read though, the sugar content in fruit isn't metabolised in the same way as say a bar of chocolate.
      - qeternity 5y ago
        This is why I said it was worse. I’m being downvoted by people who don’t actually know the science. Fructose must be metabolized by the liver, whereas glucose can be metabolized directly in skeletal muscles as glycogen.
commoner 5y ago
(2017) Non-paywalled link (PDF): http://mdrf-eprints.in/1071/1/Associations_of_fats_and_carbohydrate_intake_with_cardiovascular_disease_and_mortality_in_18_countries_from_five_continents_-_PURE_-_Lancet.pdf http://mdrf-eprints.in/1071/1/Associations_of_fats_and_carbo...
ComradePhil 5y ago
None of these studies are done with proper control, because there are restrictions to human experimentation. Even if it was studied for entire lifespans of a billion people, there would still not be enough data to conclude that any particular factor is definitely causative. So, it is incredibly dishonest to present this (or any nutrition "science" study for that matter) as science. It's no better than guessing or astrology.
- wyre 5y ago
  What? Science isn’t science because humans can’t be properly controlled for a study? Are you implying a study over a billion people over their lifespan wouldn’t be worth pursuing because it can’t be controlled? That’s ridiculous if you are. The study doesn’t even say it’s causative, but associated.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    > Science isn’t science because humans can’t be properly controlled for a study? No, non-science isn't science just because someone wants it to be. > Are you implying a study over a billion people over their lifespan wouldn’t be worth pursuing because it can’t be controlled? It should be pursued, and correlations explored and studied but the findings should be presented as what they are.
- deeviant 5y ago
  If you believe a peer reviewed paper on the Lancet is no better than guessing, you may have misconceptions and misunderstandings about what science is and how it works.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    OR if you believe studiying self-reported data from 130k people gives us definite causative link between a single nutrient and lifespan/mortality, you should do yourself and the world a favor and get out of profession where any intellect may be required.
- 5y ago
1_player 5y ago
Now we need two decades before all the studies of the past 10 years are common knowledge and I can buy full fat yogurt in my corner store, but right now it's only stocking reduced fat ones with added sugar, because some pillock in the 50s construed the idea that saturated fat is going to kill us. Sorry, but the obesity epidemic isn't because everybody is eating butter. /r/ketoscience has plenty interesting studies about high fat low carb if you're interested in doing your own research. And I'm a big fan of the "Low Carb Down Under" Youtube Channel for latest research talks. https://youtube.com/c/lowcarbdownunder https://youtube.com/c/lowcarbdownunder
- rkk3 5y ago
  I love non-fat greek yogurt, extremely high in protein %, but yeah don't understand the non-fat & added sugar stuff.
- dontcare007 5y ago
  Yogurt is VERY easy to make. And you can make it with whole fat milk.
- nfw2 5y ago
  Nutritional literature is notoriously contradictory. Here's an article that says higher intake of dairy fat is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease. https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(21)00429-5/fulltext https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(... And here's one that says the exact opposite of that. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003763 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
  - 1_player 5y ago
    The vast majority of nutritional studies are based on epidemiology and pretty much useless. Since diet is so hard to control for, it looks at aspects of the diet of a group of people and tries to determine which variable are correlated with specific outcomes. Most nutritional science is a whole load of crap. Which is why I invite anyone to learn and experiment with their body. The stakes are low, the benefits potentially great and it's easy to tell what feels good and what doesn't. It's not science, but again, most of nutrition isn't either.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

85 points by jeremylevy 5y ago

boppo1 5y ago

But what about the whole movement toward plant-based diets?

Tagbert 5y ago
It probably depends on what you mean by “plant based”. If you mean a broad range of plants with plenty of fiber and nutrients, that is probably good. If you mean “eat all the rice, corn, and potatoes”, then your results may be wanting.
- simmerup 5y ago
  I don’t understand the hate for potatoes, they have tons of nutrients.
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    Potatoes have many nutrients including Potassium which most people are deficient in but they also spike insulin without an equal rise in glucagon. Many people are developing insulin resistance and steadily heading towards pre-diabetes so these days folks are watching out for things that spike insulin.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      Potassium deficiency is very rare, and causes arrythmias and other electrical problems just like ingesting too much of it. I think you mean magnesium, whose deficiency is widespread and it is though to be caused by depletion of it in the soil due to intensive agricultural practices.
      - commoner 5y ago
        > Potassium deficiency is very rare Potassium-deficient diets are not rare. Using the U.S. as an example, only 3% of people in the U.S. consume adequate levels of potassium in their diet according to the most recent NHANES survey.[1] The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has identified potassium as 1 of 4 "shortfall nutrients" (nutrients that are underconsumed by the U.S. population at large) that are of public health concern in 2015.[2] That is why the FDA has required food manufacturers to include potassium amounts in the "Nutrition Facts" label since 2016.[3] [1] https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/4/3/368S/4591617 https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/4/3/368S/4591617 [2] https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937-017-0230-0 https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937... [3] https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-magazine/issues/2016/june/features/fda-overhauls-nutrition-facts-label https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma...
        1_player 5y ago
        Given that 68% of people in the US are deficient from the other electrolyte, magnesium, I maintain that potassium deficiency is rare(r), and certainly is scarier to supplement that Mg is. https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2005/9/americans-magnesium-deficient https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2005/9/americans-magn...
        commoner 5y ago
        What? 97% of U.S. people have potassium-deficient diets, which is greater than the 68% of U.S. people who have magnesium-deficient diets (according to your source). I agree that anyone who is taking potassium supplements should carefully monitor their potassium intake, but almost all foods have low enough levels of potassium that excessive potassium consumption is extremely rare. The FDA limits most potassium supplements in the U.S. to 99 mg per dose, an insignificant 2% of the Daily Value.* * https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfessional/ https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfession...
      - LinuxBender 5y ago
  - bsder 5y ago
    Starchy carbohydrates, unfortunately, are one of the two ways to consume way too many calories way too quickly. It's hard to eat 2000 calories of steak in a sitting. It's almost impossible to eat 2000 calories of lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, etc. in a sitting. It's really easy to consume 2000 calories of potatoes, wheat, or rice in a sitting. The other easy way to consume way too many calories is to slather your food with butter or oil. A tablespoon of oil or butter isn't terrible and may even be healthy for you--a quarter cup, however, is approaching 1000 calories. That's not so good. And people tend to use whole sticks of butter in cooking (1 stick is 1/4 cup) per dish or easily put a quarter cup of salad dressing (mostly oil) on their vegetables.
    - joe-collins 5y ago
      An entire large potato is 300, 400 calories. Even "loaded" with fixings, I can't imagine eating 2000 calories in potato-centered food in one sitting.
    - seanhunter 5y ago
      > It's really easy to consume 2000 calories of potatoes, wheat, or rice in a sitting. You would have to eat 1.5kg of cooked rice to eat 2000 kCal of rice. You would have to eat 1.9kg of potatoes. I don't know what you call "really easy" but about 180g of rice is a normal portion. The same would require about 800g of steak, by the way.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Eating a small serving of potatoes is generally fine for most people who have a healthy metabolism (i.e. not insulin resistant). But they do have a high glycemic index. https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTHLIBRARY/tools/glycemic-index.asp https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTHLIBRARY/tools/glycemic-index.a...
  - porknubbins 5y ago
    Potatoes are their own worst enemy in a way since they are delicious fried in high temperature oil which is not super healthy for a number of reasons. But yes I agree with you in general, I hear you can technically survive on potatoes and butter.
    - retrac 5y ago
      Yes, potatoes contain all the proteins necessary in the human diet. So in a pinch, just potatoes + a multivitamin will, uh, suffice for a while. Oats and most legumes (soy, peas, lentils, etc.) are like this as well. And spinach. Many other plant foods, like wheat, do have all the proteins required by humans, but not in quantities sufficient to meet the minimum intake at normal calorie levels if you ate them near-exclusively. This is conjecture, but I suspect this is the underlying reason for why so many vegetarian dishes are based on a pairing of wheat or rice with a legume. Peanut butter + crackers. Tahini + pitas. Curry + rice. Bean + wholegrain salad. All the same pattern.
      - sjtindell 5y ago
        Hah, you’re comment cracked me up remembering some dude who showed up in a food thread the other day saying that he’d been eating for like $0.30 cents per meal by eating nothing but potatoes. Built different.
      - entropyie 5y ago
        A lot of the nutrients are in the skin, so the real trick is to buy organic (no pesticide), then eat the skin also... Reducing food waste is a bonus.
lm28469 5y ago
What about them? They're mostly low carbs
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  When people talk about food it seems they forget about nuance. Somebody catches wind that a high carb diet is bad and before long they're full carnivore and start proselytizing that eating a fruit will kill you.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    I'm on carnivore, and although fruits are no-no (for me at least), in my own research they're better than grains and other vegetables. Unlike leafy vegetables, most fruits are evolved to be eaten by animals, and have the seeds pooped out or discarded in the ground. That's why they taste so fricking good. Though evolution didn't make them this big and full of sugar, we did. And then we juice them so you can consume 20 apples in one sip, and call that healthy. In my eyes and personal opinion, the diet we are most genetically optimal for is high fat, mostly carnivore, with seasonal fruits and berries, and remembering that modern fruits are nothing like what we have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years. And ideally insects, though they weren't a huge part of our diet. We after all are big herbivore hunters and scavengers.
    - deeviant 5y ago
      Wait, are you actually serious? You don't eat fruits or vegetables because you think they are unhealthy?
      - brnt 5y ago
        Fruits have a ton of sugar, which I both don't need and don't really like. OTOH, you can pry my veg from my cold dead hands.
        deeviant 5y ago
deeviant 5y ago
What about it?
Zababa 5y ago
The movement toward plant-based diets is almost always made for ethical reasons. The health reasons are mostly due to healthy user bias. It's not surprising to me that maximizing some ethics and maximizing health would lead to different diets.
- tashoecraft 5y ago
  Yeah that’s not true and is mostly due to your bias.

NumberWangMan 5y ago

The Harvard School of Public Health released some comments about this soon after: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2017/09/08/pure-study-makes-headlines-but-the-conclusions-are-misleading/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2017/09/08/pure...

austinjp 5y ago
Indeed. Probably the most pertinent quote is this: "The main messages for nutritional advice have not changed: follow a healthy dietary pattern that includes abundant amounts of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts; moderate amounts of reduced-fat dairy products and seafood; and lower amounts of processed and red meat, sugar-sweetened foods and beverages, and refined grains."
- qeternity 5y ago
  Metabolically, fruit is not very different from “sugar sweetened foods and beverages” (and imho gram for gram, fructose is worse than sucrose). The same goes for whole grains. Fat is the most calorie dense nutrient. The human race has spent a majority of its time just trying to stay alive. Up until very recently, this meant eating substantial quantities of fat, and specifically animal fat. Harvard Medical is part of the problem. People stop getting published if you’re contra-establishment, which means you stop getting juicy grants and donations.
  - Baloo 5y ago
    From what I've read though, the sugar content in fruit isn't metabolised in the same way as say a bar of chocolate.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      This is why I said it was worse. I’m being downvoted by people who don’t actually know the science. Fructose must be metabolized by the liver, whereas glucose can be metabolized directly in skeletal muscles as glycogen.

commoner 5y ago

(2017) Non-paywalled link (PDF): http://mdrf-eprints.in/1071/1/Associations_of_fats_and_carbohydrate_intake_with_cardiovascular_disease_and_mortality_in_18_countries_from_five_continents_-_PURE_-_Lancet.pdf http://mdrf-eprints.in/1071/1/Associations_of_fats_and_carbo...

ComradePhil 5y ago

None of these studies are done with proper control, because there are restrictions to human experimentation. Even if it was studied for entire lifespans of a billion people, there would still not be enough data to conclude that any particular factor is definitely causative. So, it is incredibly dishonest to present this (or any nutrition "science" study for that matter) as science. It's no better than guessing or astrology.

wyre 5y ago
What? Science isn’t science because humans can’t be properly controlled for a study? Are you implying a study over a billion people over their lifespan wouldn’t be worth pursuing because it can’t be controlled? That’s ridiculous if you are. The study doesn’t even say it’s causative, but associated.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  > Science isn’t science because humans can’t be properly controlled for a study? No, non-science isn't science just because someone wants it to be. > Are you implying a study over a billion people over their lifespan wouldn’t be worth pursuing because it can’t be controlled? It should be pursued, and correlations explored and studied but the findings should be presented as what they are.
deeviant 5y ago
If you believe a peer reviewed paper on the Lancet is no better than guessing, you may have misconceptions and misunderstandings about what science is and how it works.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  OR if you believe studiying self-reported data from 130k people gives us definite causative link between a single nutrient and lifespan/mortality, you should do yourself and the world a favor and get out of profession where any intellect may be required.
5y ago

1_player 5y ago

Now we need two decades before all the studies of the past 10 years are common knowledge and I can buy full fat yogurt in my corner store, but right now it's only stocking reduced fat ones with added sugar, because some pillock in the 50s construed the idea that saturated fat is going to kill us. Sorry, but the obesity epidemic isn't because everybody is eating butter. /r/ketoscience has plenty interesting studies about high fat low carb if you're interested in doing your own research. And I'm a big fan of the "Low Carb Down Under" Youtube Channel for latest research talks. https://youtube.com/c/lowcarbdownunder https://youtube.com/c/lowcarbdownunder

rkk3 5y ago
I love non-fat greek yogurt, extremely high in protein %, but yeah don't understand the non-fat & added sugar stuff.
dontcare007 5y ago
Yogurt is VERY easy to make. And you can make it with whole fat milk.
nfw2 5y ago
Nutritional literature is notoriously contradictory. Here's an article that says higher intake of dairy fat is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease. https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(21)00429-5/fulltext https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(... And here's one that says the exact opposite of that. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003763 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- 1_player 5y ago
  The vast majority of nutritional studies are based on epidemiology and pretty much useless. Since diet is so hard to control for, it looks at aspects of the diet of a group of people and tries to determine which variable are correlated with specific outcomes. Most nutritional science is a whole load of crap. Which is why I invite anyone to learn and experiment with their body. The stakes are low, the benefits potentially great and it's easy to tell what feels good and what doesn't. It's not science, but again, most of nutrition isn't either.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]