5 ms·

The move from saturated fats (e.g. butter, beef tallow) to trans fats (e.g. margarine) was not necessarily a good one. Sometimes I wonder if most nutritional ad

by isolli 4y ago

The move from saturated fats (e.g. butter, beef tallow) to trans fats (e.g. margarine) was not necessarily a good one. Sometimes I wonder if most nutritional advice just follows constantly changing fads...

dfxm12 4y ago
I don't think the move was due to nutritional advice. For example, margarine is cheaper than butter, and really gained in popularity during the depression and the war when dairy supply was shortening (ahem). It also has different culinary properties from butter, including being possibly vegan and behaving differently in baked goods. Overall though, at least since 2000, butter is far outselling margarine, so it seems like these days, it is a niche product and not really a "healthy" butter alternative.
- Jensson 4y ago
  But fastfood restaurants and precooked meals continue to use margarine instead of butter. For example McDonalds switched away from animal fats in early 90s and never switched back. They wont mention margarine in the ingredients, instead they just say "vegetable oils".
  - dfxm12 4y ago
    That has nothing to do with nutritional advice, which is what OP is saying. That has to do with lower cost and/or maybe some other property (like longer shelf life).
    - kaesar14 4y ago
      Correct me if I’m wrong but McDonalds originally made that switch due to the “animal fats are bad for you” push during that time which is what OP is probably referencing?
    - allturtles 4y ago
      It was for health reasons, this is well-documented in secondary sources [0] and primary sources [1]. [0]: https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-french-fries-taste-different/ https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-french-fries-taste-differe... [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1990-07-24-9003020215-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1990-07-24-900302...
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    That isn't margarine, though. https://theconversation.com/how-palm-oil-became-the-worlds-most-hated-most-used-fat-source-161165 https://theconversation.com/how-palm-oil-became-the-worlds-m...
  - analog31 4y ago
    They also switched from beef tallow to vegetable shortening for the fryers, perhaps for the sake of vegetarians.
- acdha 4y ago
  It was. The 80s were crammed with doctors & advertisements promoting margarine as the responsible choice and saying that using butter or lard would kill you. That’s because the Nixon administration felt that they needed to do something about the obesity crisis, and they added nutrition to what had previously been a commission about hunger and gave them a deadline for a plan. Unfortunately, the need to get recommendations out on a political schedule meant that they went ahead of the available evidence. This Washington Post piece from 1977 debating the then-proposed guidelines includes an interesting quote: > Dr. Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at Harvard University and one of the three nutritionists who helped write the report, said: "There will undoubtedly be many people who will say we have not proven our point; we have not demonstrated that the dietary modifications we recommend will yield the dividends expected. > "The question to be asked therefore, is not why should we change our diet, but why not. "What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat - and cereal products - especially whole-grain cereals? There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected." That “but why not” line of reasoning is interesting given the mixed status of the recommendations in the next sentence. Eating more fruits, vegetables, whole-grains, etc. and less sugar is still widely accepted as good advice now but the remainder of the guidelines are problematic, particularly now that we have a better understanding of e.g. how fat interacts with satiation or how the food industry scrambled to produce alternate versions of familiar foods without key ingredients. What we do know now is that millions of people had worse health outcomes due to that rush because even though studies came out only a few years later in the 80s rejecting the theories about salt, fat, specific foods like eggs, etc. the ghost of that Nixon-era rush job hung around until the 2010s and isn’t completely gone yet. You can still see a ton of food loaded with sugar because the recipe was modified decades ago to remove the fat & salt which made it taste good, not to mention how often people pass over vegetables because someone said it was unhealthy to butter or fry them without considering that this made the most likely outcome skipping them entirely.
  - isolli 4y ago
    A devastating example of ignoring the "first do no harm" principle.
bluGill 4y ago
Doing a long term nutritional study is hard. You can often say about attempts as having one of two outcomes: "despite our best efforts we were unable to get participants to eat their assigned diet", or "This result only applies to those confined to prison/a hospital bed" (both of which implies other major lifestyle differences from normal people that were not controlled for). Otherwise people will eat what you tell them to for a week and then go back to whatever they were doing before (and often they don't remember what they ate and make things up later to fill out the diary) This study gets around this because the trans-fat ban (which took a long time to come because of the above factors) was a nationwide thing and so lack of access means we can make assumptions. Even then they had to figure out what was this ban, what was smoking becoming less common, and what was increased use of statins, which is statistics that depending on input assumptions.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  That's why the Pollan advice to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants" is so good and more profound than is commonly understood. 1) Eat food. This is basically saying eat stuff that is traditionally considered food in different cultures (i.e., stuff that has been eaten for centuries) because doing nutritional studies is hard, but the fact that certain cultures have thrived for centuries and even millenia eating "food" provides decent evidence that it works. 2) Not too much. This is necessary as a restriction to #1 because in the past it wasn't easy or even possible to eat "too much" since you didn't have modern conveniences that make it easy to prepare food and you couldn't just order it for delivery. So you have to explicitly ensure you don't eat "too much", something that was implicitly enforced in the past. 3) Mostly Plants. If there is one thing all nutritional studies have found, and the one thing that pretty much all the science in this area can agree upon, is that eating plants (i.e. vegetables) is good for you, and for the most part, the more the better. But also note that he is saying "Plants" and not "Veggies" in a nod to the idea that it should be largely simply prepared and as close to its natural formation as possible, so buying a bag of "veggie straws" does not count.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > eating plants (i.e. vegetables)…in a nod to the idea that it should be largely simply prepared and as close to its natural formation as possible Plenty of cultures heavily process their plants, and for good reason: the raw form is less nutritious. Plants != vegetables. Vegetables exclude fruits and uncultivated plants; wildflowers are delicious and definitively plants but debatably veggies [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable
Zigurd 4y ago
A lot of it is motivated by a search for easy answers: Eat too much butter, get fat. The answer should be "Eat less butter, move more." It is unsurprising that "Eat margarine instead" is the wrong answer. Not everything about traditional food is good. Cured meats, for example. But a too-convenient solution is often too convenient to be true.
echelon 4y ago
Just consider the biochemical basis. The body can deal with saturated and unsaturated fats. It has the enzymes to transport and handle them. They're a normal constituent of membranes. Trans fats have no place in the body, and they do not arise naturally. You don't have the programming to deal with them. Their structure increases membrane rigidity, decreases lipid raft mobility, impairs cellular function. Don't put trans fats into your body in any quantity.
- amelius 4y ago
  > Trans fats have no place in the body, and they do not arise naturally. But, from wikipedia: > A type of trans fat occurs naturally in the milk and body fat of ruminants (such as cattle and sheep) at a level of 2–5% of total fat.
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    But it’s a vey small amount relative to what is added in processed food. And it still has no nutritional benefit.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Trans fats do exist naturally - they exist in meat and milk fat, just not to the level we're not consuming them. As usual, it's the dose that makes the poison.
Hnaomyiph 4y ago
I think the move wasn’t following fads. In the mid 1900s there was ample evidence pointing at sugar being the culprit for rising obesity rates and other weight-related aliments, but there was a large push from industry to willfully ignore that and label fats as the bad guy. As a result consumers wanted low-fat foods and “healthier” alternatives to traditional fats.
- ParksNet 4y ago
  Fat goes rancid. Sugar is shelf stable and preservative. Nutrition is not guided by fads, but by food manufacturer and retailer profit margins.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  A good doc on the subject, reminds one of the tobacco industry a bit earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Coated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Coated
kleton 4y ago
Just this year, the American medical association changed their recommendation for children from whole milk to 1% milk. I thought it was mendela effect when the pediatrician said this at the last yearly checkup.
phkahler 4y ago
>> The move from saturated fats (e.g. butter, beef tallow) to trans fats (e.g. margarine) was not necessarily a good one. Sometimes I wonder if most nutritional advice just follows constantly changing fads... The reason for change is often forgotten or even misunderstood. From what I've read there is nothing wrong with eating saturated far or unsaturated fat, but transfat (a.k.a. partially hydrogenated) is very bad for you, as it chokes the machinery for "consuming" one or the other by being a bit of both. After the crusade against fat, people also seemed to get the idea that eating fat makes you fat (the original reasoning had more to do with heart disease), but keto and low-carb diets that work would beg to differ. You gotta read the actual results to get to the bottom of things.

by isolli 4y ago

dfxm12 4y ago

I don't think the move was due to nutritional advice. For example, margarine is cheaper than butter, and really gained in popularity during the depression and the war when dairy supply was shortening (ahem). It also has different culinary properties from butter, including being possibly vegan and behaving differently in baked goods. Overall though, at least since 2000, butter is far outselling margarine, so it seems like these days, it is a niche product and not really a "healthy" butter alternative.

Jensson 4y ago
But fastfood restaurants and precooked meals continue to use margarine instead of butter. For example McDonalds switched away from animal fats in early 90s and never switched back. They wont mention margarine in the ingredients, instead they just say "vegetable oils".
- dfxm12 4y ago
  That has nothing to do with nutritional advice, which is what OP is saying. That has to do with lower cost and/or maybe some other property (like longer shelf life).
  - kaesar14 4y ago
    Correct me if I’m wrong but McDonalds originally made that switch due to the “animal fats are bad for you” push during that time which is what OP is probably referencing?
  - allturtles 4y ago
    It was for health reasons, this is well-documented in secondary sources [0] and primary sources [1]. [0]: https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-french-fries-taste-different/ https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-french-fries-taste-differe... [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1990-07-24-9003020215-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1990-07-24-900302...
- kixiQu 4y ago
  That isn't margarine, though. https://theconversation.com/how-palm-oil-became-the-worlds-most-hated-most-used-fat-source-161165 https://theconversation.com/how-palm-oil-became-the-worlds-m...
- analog31 4y ago
  They also switched from beef tallow to vegetable shortening for the fryers, perhaps for the sake of vegetarians.
acdha 4y ago
It was. The 80s were crammed with doctors & advertisements promoting margarine as the responsible choice and saying that using butter or lard would kill you. That’s because the Nixon administration felt that they needed to do something about the obesity crisis, and they added nutrition to what had previously been a commission about hunger and gave them a deadline for a plan. Unfortunately, the need to get recommendations out on a political schedule meant that they went ahead of the available evidence. This Washington Post piece from 1977 debating the then-proposed guidelines includes an interesting quote: > Dr. Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at Harvard University and one of the three nutritionists who helped write the report, said: "There will undoubtedly be many people who will say we have not proven our point; we have not demonstrated that the dietary modifications we recommend will yield the dividends expected. > "The question to be asked therefore, is not why should we change our diet, but why not. "What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat - and cereal products - especially whole-grain cereals? There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected." That “but why not” line of reasoning is interesting given the mixed status of the recommendations in the next sentence. Eating more fruits, vegetables, whole-grains, etc. and less sugar is still widely accepted as good advice now but the remainder of the guidelines are problematic, particularly now that we have a better understanding of e.g. how fat interacts with satiation or how the food industry scrambled to produce alternate versions of familiar foods without key ingredients. What we do know now is that millions of people had worse health outcomes due to that rush because even though studies came out only a few years later in the 80s rejecting the theories about salt, fat, specific foods like eggs, etc. the ghost of that Nixon-era rush job hung around until the 2010s and isn’t completely gone yet. You can still see a ton of food loaded with sugar because the recipe was modified decades ago to remove the fat & salt which made it taste good, not to mention how often people pass over vegetables because someone said it was unhealthy to butter or fry them without considering that this made the most likely outcome skipping them entirely.
- isolli 4y ago
  A devastating example of ignoring the "first do no harm" principle.

bluGill 4y ago

Doing a long term nutritional study is hard. You can often say about attempts as having one of two outcomes: "despite our best efforts we were unable to get participants to eat their assigned diet", or "This result only applies to those confined to prison/a hospital bed" (both of which implies other major lifestyle differences from normal people that were not controlled for). Otherwise people will eat what you tell them to for a week and then go back to whatever they were doing before (and often they don't remember what they ate and make things up later to fill out the diary) This study gets around this because the trans-fat ban (which took a long time to come because of the above factors) was a nationwide thing and so lack of access means we can make assumptions. Even then they had to figure out what was this ban, what was smoking becoming less common, and what was increased use of statins, which is statistics that depending on input assumptions.

asdajksah2123 4y ago
That's why the Pollan advice to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants" is so good and more profound than is commonly understood. 1) Eat food. This is basically saying eat stuff that is traditionally considered food in different cultures (i.e., stuff that has been eaten for centuries) because doing nutritional studies is hard, but the fact that certain cultures have thrived for centuries and even millenia eating "food" provides decent evidence that it works. 2) Not too much. This is necessary as a restriction to #1 because in the past it wasn't easy or even possible to eat "too much" since you didn't have modern conveniences that make it easy to prepare food and you couldn't just order it for delivery. So you have to explicitly ensure you don't eat "too much", something that was implicitly enforced in the past. 3) Mostly Plants. If there is one thing all nutritional studies have found, and the one thing that pretty much all the science in this area can agree upon, is that eating plants (i.e. vegetables) is good for you, and for the most part, the more the better. But also note that he is saying "Plants" and not "Veggies" in a nod to the idea that it should be largely simply prepared and as close to its natural formation as possible, so buying a bag of "veggie straws" does not count.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > eating plants (i.e. vegetables)…in a nod to the idea that it should be largely simply prepared and as close to its natural formation as possible Plenty of cultures heavily process their plants, and for good reason: the raw form is less nutritious. Plants != vegetables. Vegetables exclude fruits and uncultivated plants; wildflowers are delicious and definitively plants but debatably veggies [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable

Zigurd 4y ago

A lot of it is motivated by a search for easy answers: Eat too much butter, get fat. The answer should be "Eat less butter, move more." It is unsurprising that "Eat margarine instead" is the wrong answer. Not everything about traditional food is good. Cured meats, for example. But a too-convenient solution is often too convenient to be true.

echelon 4y ago

Just consider the biochemical basis. The body can deal with saturated and unsaturated fats. It has the enzymes to transport and handle them. They're a normal constituent of membranes. Trans fats have no place in the body, and they do not arise naturally. You don't have the programming to deal with them. Their structure increases membrane rigidity, decreases lipid raft mobility, impairs cellular function. Don't put trans fats into your body in any quantity.

amelius 4y ago
> Trans fats have no place in the body, and they do not arise naturally. But, from wikipedia: > A type of trans fat occurs naturally in the milk and body fat of ruminants (such as cattle and sheep) at a level of 2–5% of total fat.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  But it’s a vey small amount relative to what is added in processed food. And it still has no nutritional benefit.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
Trans fats do exist naturally - they exist in meat and milk fat, just not to the level we're not consuming them. As usual, it's the dose that makes the poison.

Hnaomyiph 4y ago

I think the move wasn’t following fads. In the mid 1900s there was ample evidence pointing at sugar being the culprit for rising obesity rates and other weight-related aliments, but there was a large push from industry to willfully ignore that and label fats as the bad guy. As a result consumers wanted low-fat foods and “healthier” alternatives to traditional fats.

ParksNet 4y ago
Fat goes rancid. Sugar is shelf stable and preservative. Nutrition is not guided by fads, but by food manufacturer and retailer profit margins.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
A good doc on the subject, reminds one of the tobacco industry a bit earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Coated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Coated

kleton 4y ago

Just this year, the American medical association changed their recommendation for children from whole milk to 1% milk. I thought it was mendela effect when the pediatrician said this at the last yearly checkup.

phkahler 4y ago

>> The move from saturated fats (e.g. butter, beef tallow) to trans fats (e.g. margarine) was not necessarily a good one. Sometimes I wonder if most nutritional advice just follows constantly changing fads... The reason for change is often forgotten or even misunderstood. From what I've read there is nothing wrong with eating saturated far or unsaturated fat, but transfat (a.k.a. partially hydrogenated) is very bad for you, as it chokes the machinery for "consuming" one or the other by being a bit of both. After the crusade against fat, people also seemed to get the idea that eating fat makes you fat (the original reasoning had more to do with heart disease), but keto and low-carb diets that work would beg to differ. You gotta read the actual results to get to the bottom of things.