18 ms·

Saturated fat: villain and bogeyman in development of cardiovascular disease?

48 points by deegles 4y ago

whoisjuan 4y ago
So what causes heart disease? Trans-fats, carbohydrates, sugar, lack of fiber? ... I guess it has been evident to me for a while that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease, but it's not apparent what does.
- wyager 4y ago
  I would imagine that being sedentary and/or obese is a significant risk factor, although it is surprisingly difficult to quickly locate estimates of relative effect size. Official sites like the CDC's mostly reiterate the popular weak-effect nonsense about cholesterol etc. without any numeric scale comparisons.
- Yiin 4y ago
  Vegetable oils: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzQAHITIUhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzQAHITIUhg
  - dekken_ 4y ago
    yes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  It seems like we really don't actually know. Sugar and trans-fats are the only things everyone can agree is bad, and it's not even totally clear whether sugar is actually that bad for people who aren't overweight and aren't sedentary (although most people are overweight and sedentary now anyway so it may not matter). (Even fiber, for example, might not be that important in itself so much as it is simply a proxy for vegetable consumption considering that fiber supplementation does nothing.)
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    I think it's just added sugar and sugar found in processed food that is bad. Dark red fruits with high sugar content is good.
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  LDL. Which is awkward because it's an important molecule in the body, yet if it hits the arterial walls in such a way, the body has this crazy pathological response to it.
  - boringg 4y ago
    I thought it went LDL repairs your cell walls so when your walls suffer from damage through inflammation LDL goes to patch it up.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Oxidized LDL (oxLDL)
    - Blackthorn 4y ago
      Survey paper of interest (have not read, for future reference): https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2020.613780/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2020.6137...
- chongli 4y ago
  I think not enough has been said for the neurobiology of food. A lot of modern foods (high processed) have been engineered to maximize food rewards using a mixture of salt, fat, carbohydrates, and proteins / amino acids / MSG. These foods tend to be highly calorie dense and extremely rewarding / addictive while at the same time producing low satiety (so you don't feel full and want to keep eating). Doritos is the classic example of this.
oneepic 4y ago
No comments on saturated fat vs liver disease (ie fatty liver) though. The common wisdom, I believe, is that you want to avoid sat-fat if you have fatty liver disease. That may not be a killer like cvd, but it is a big deal too.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- joecool1029 4y ago
  A lot of people in here pointing to fructose though as a primary driver of problems, not saturated fat. Unlike glucose which can be used almost everywhere in the body, excess fructose has to be processed in the liver. In a caloric excess (which can be further exasperated by consumption of additional saturated fat), it's going to be converted to fat in the liver. More on that topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4838515/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4838515/
  - oneepic 4y ago
    Thanks for the article, looks like that one is from 2016. I'll share another article I found with a quick search -- "Saturated fat is more metabolically harmful for the human liver than unsaturated fat or simple sugars" : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29844096/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29844096/ Now I'm not so sure which is the "primary driver". There are quite a few competing thoughts but maybe the point is you should lower both. That's probably one reason many docs (including mine in the past) recommend cutting both.
    - joecool1029 4y ago
      > Now I'm not so sure which is the "primary driver". There are quite a few competing thoughts but maybe the point is you should lower both. On that I don't think we disagree. However, saturated fat on its own isn't super palatable. There was a community I discovered a few years ago deliberately trying to up their saturated fat intake (specifically steric acid) and on it's own it's about as pleasurable as chewing on a candlestick (steric acid is used as a stiffener in paraffin candles). One thing I remember seeing too is that inflammation increases damage caused by de novo lipogenesis. I am wondering if consumption of stable saturated fats vs. consumption of unstable (and commonly rancid polyunsaturated fats) exasperates things.
wyre 4y ago
While I can accept on the face that saturated fatty acids doesn’t have an effect on cardiovascular disease, their conclusions are near useless without access to the full paper and their methods of analysis. It’s not hard to observe the American diet being high in SFA and Americans leading CVD morbidity. It’s also not hard to find diets high in SFA like keto and paleo and their practitioners being relatively healthy. I suspect it is the combination of high amounts of SFA and sugar that are driving the high rates of CVD.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  > It’s also not hard to find diets high in SFA like keto and paleo and their practitioners being relatively healthy. Keto actually looks like it might be bad for long term use based on some studies. For someone who finds that it helps them lose weight, it will still be beneficial as long as they they continue to lose weight, but it probably isn't great as a long-term lifestyle change when not losing weight.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Since most people who go on a keto diet cheat about as much as anyone on any diet (i.e. a lot), the real effect is not so much remaining in a ketogenic metablolic state for years at a time as it is cutting out some number of doughnuts, and while the original idea is extreme, the product is a result just about anybody could get behind. It's kind of like how most religions have some insane stuff in their holy texts, but regular nice people turn it in to a positive reminder to be kind by filtering it with their human inexactness.
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      I find keto diet is much more satiating than low fat or "zone" type diets. I lost 80lbs this way and kept it off by doing a moderate version of it 1 meal a day of "zone" type mix and other two keto style. Obviously I eat whatever I want some days, but 90% of the time I'm good about it. My goal was always to be satiated and not to be in ketosis however. I have kept the weight for ~7 years now.
sendfoods 4y ago
- disclaimer: I am no health expert - Still, personally, the North Korelia Project [1] and the public debates/podcasts with its author(s) convinces me of the link [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30083543/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30083543/
hinkley 4y ago
I buy into the counter theory that high fructose corn syrup is killing us all and that arteriosclerosis is one of its manifestations. I think some people are even trying to blame it for osteoporosis. Something to do with blood pH and bones dumping calcium to buffer it. Bullshit or not, my life does seem to be better without cheap soda in it. I drink fancy soda as a treat, instead of being on a hedonic treadmill of several a day. Every time I quit soda in my 20’s and early 30’s I lost 10 lbs. Eventually it stuck. The advent of Kombucha changed that landscape quite a bit. Now I have a beverage that’s < 100 calories and I can’t chug.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  You forget one thing: outside of US, people don't put HFCS into everything like there's no tomorrow. We use sugar proper across the pond, and while it's a poison, it's not to the extent fructose is.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    There are at least 56 different names for sugar on food labels in the USA
  - joshe 4y ago
    Table sugar is also high fructose. Sugar is also called sucrose, it is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. High fructose corn syrup is "available at various fructose levels. HFCS 42, used in beverages, processed foods, cereals and baked goods, comprises 42 % fructose and 53 % glucose. HFCS 90 comprises 90 % fructose and 10 % glucose... HFCS 55, which is used in soft drinks." -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983097/#:~:text=HFCS%20is%20available%20at%20various,%25%20fructose%20and%2010%20%25%20glucose https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983097/#:~:tex.... I think sucrose tastes better but it seems to be processed in the body the same way as corn syrup. Btw, fruit juice or honey are also high in fructose. Most likely they are all equally bad. All stored in the liver and all build insulin resistance.
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
boringg 4y ago
The way I think about it - the higher your fat content in your diet the likely the higher amount of fat (cholesterol) circulating in your blood veins. It might not be a big deal if your body doesn't attach that fat the walls of your arteries however if you have inflammation in your arteries the fat will attach to the arteries and over time that causes a whole host of problems. My unqualified suspicion is that if you manage inflammation you likely won't arterial walls lined with cholesterol (which is trying to repair the damage to your arterial walls from inflammation). However I also suspect that as you get older your vein structures change and theres probably a time in your 30s-50s where you biology changes and you start adsorbing more cholesterol (from fat) onto your arteries that cause CVD.
- oifjsidjf 4y ago
  Fat doesn't "attach" to the artery walls. Atherosclerosis is found ONLY in largest arteries where the blood pressure is highest and where the blood vessel splits into 2 because there the fluid (blood) flow gets distorted and slight vortexes are created. Those vortexes then cause the blood pressure to be exerted perpendiculary to the blood vessel wall at artery junctions. It's the high blood pressure + vortices + damaged blood vessel lining that PUSHES particles into the blood vessel walls. There is no atherosclerosis in veins (because those carry blood back to the heart at lower pressure). If fats would "attach" to the blood vessels you'd expect atherosclerosis even in veins, but you never get it there. Also: atherosclerotic plaque is only 0.5% cholesterol and 0.5% fat. The other 99% is "scar tissue" and other stuff. It's time to put this silly "fat attaches to blood vessel walls" thing to rest, it's 2022. You might wish to check out Bart Kay's youtube channel, he explains it nicely there.
  - swayvil 4y ago
    What causes the scar tissue? Smoking? Irregular exercise?
    - oifjsidjf 4y ago
      Macrophages/white blood cells who wish to save you from those stuck particles. The real question is what causes the blood vessel walls to get damaged (since the scar tissue is the healing response of the body, but if the damage keeps on piling it grows too much instead of being gradually reduced over time). The problem is that there are millions of causes of inflamation etc... In general the best answer is "modern diet" full of sugars + fat at the same time. Carbs in high doses are poisonus, there is a reason the the lives of diabetics end in limb amputation, blindness and severe pain due to nerve damage due to sugar destroying them from the inside out...
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Atkins was saying this 40-50 years ago and continued until his death.
smm11 4y ago
Sugar and fat are the culprits. As in, fatty processed foods everyone eats. Saturated fat alone is not the issue. Heck, your brain is made out of it. Sugar IS the issue. And sugar is a molecule. Fruit and HFCS are the same thing. Keto is the way to lose weight. Low carb/high fat is the way to move forward.
- boringg 4y ago
  Worth noting that because your body is made of something that doesn't mean that it is good or bad for your diet.
browningstreet 4y ago
The carnivore books I've read have long lists of citations, it's not an unscientific set of positions they've taken. Their choice of bogeyman is seed oils, which has seen a significant increase in consumption over the 20th century compared to most other things (meat has been mostly flat, and has declined over the last 30 years).
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  Got a source? This one could not be interpreted as mostly-flat / declining meat consumption... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumption-by-type-kilograms-per-year https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti...
  - browningstreet 4y ago
    https://youtu.be/ULBj3Ne45wE https://youtu.be/ULBj3Ne45wE at 19:13
    - reducesuffering 4y ago
      That is a non-sourced .png from a clearly biased Youtuber. You're going to believe that over OurWorldInData's source, United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)? I think that establishes you're being misled on this aspect. Now, what other aspects of "carnivore" diet are you being misled on? Extra ironic that you claim carnivore research is so well-cited, while your first and only example isn't and is contradicted by known facts.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Doesn't the preponderance of evidence show that saturated fats aren't horrible but still- when people replaced them with unsaturated fats their heart disease risk dropped?
mfer 4y ago
What is cardiovascular disease? If we dig into that we find things like atherosclerosis and other types of diseases. Something like atherosclerosis happens, in large part due to LDL cholesterol [1]. There are many studies and papers on it. Scientists know a fair amount about what's going on here. Saturated Fat is a leading cause of high LDL cholesterol [2]. Dietary cholesterol plays a role in elevated cholesterol but to a lesser extent. A way to think about it is that animals (including humans) produce the LDL cholesterol they need. Cows, pigs, and other animals do too. When you eat them you eat extra LDL cholesterol that ends up in your system. I just grabbed a couple quick links on the topic. There are many podcasts with cardiologists on this, books by dietitians, and papers by researchers. On a personal note, I had high cholesterol and cut out dietary cholesterol and saturated fats (to the level recommended by the american heart association [3]). In a few months my LDL cholesterol dropped about 70 points. I know it's anecdotal but it worked for me and several others I know. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33966809/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33966809/ [2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-cholesterol/symptoms-causes/syc-20350800 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-ch... [3] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/fats/saturated-fats https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
- dnissley 4y ago
  Aren't there certain cultures with high saturated fat intake but very low occurrence of heart disease? E.g. Inuits
  - mfer 4y ago
    The data on their life expectancy shows it was far lower than average. What caused this? Was it heart disease? Infant mortality? Something else? Did they live long enough on average to get heart disease? The inuits eat more of a western diet now so getting data on their traditional diet must be difficult. In any case, we don't have enough data to justify them as a data point supporting high saturated fat diets.
    - dnissley 4y ago
leobabauta 4y ago
I think jumping to conclusions based on this paper is not a good idea: * The authors are not experts in this field. They seem to be experts in business management [0], other science fields [1], and the culinary arts [2] but not cardiovascular disease or anything related to it. * Experts in this field have done extensive reviews, and there is a strong link between saturated fat & CVD, especially if you take into account replacing SFA with PUFA. * All the world's health bodies agree — from Wikipedia: "Recommendations to reduce, limit or replace dietary intake of trans fats and saturated fats, in favor of unsaturated fats, are made by the World Health Organization, American Heart Association, Health Canada, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the UK National Health Service, the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, the Australian Department of Health and Aging, the Singapore Ministry of Health, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the New Zealand Ministry of Health, and Hong Kong's Department of Health." [3] * In my observation, many people strongly dispute the link between SFA & CVD usually subscribe to fringe health beliefs like all-meat diets, etc. Note: I do think limiting sugar/HFCS is a good idea as well. [0] Reimara Valk: https://www.aud.edu/aud-school/school-of-business-administration/faculty-and-staff/reimara-valk/ https://www.aud.edu/aud-school/school-of-business-administra... [1] James Hamill: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Hammill%20James%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Hammill%20Jam... [2] Jonas Grip: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/jonas-karl-grip-89875a12 https://ch.linkedin.com/in/jonas-karl-grip-89875a12 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat
- p_j_w 4y ago
  >I think jumping to conclusions based on this paper is not a good idea Something that I think most people on HN need to realize is that we are not experts on biology or medical science, so we shouldn't be reading these papers and coming up with conclusions on how to live our lives. Until the organizations that you list in your 3rd bullet point start changing their recommendations, we'd all be well served to follow their advice.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    The tech community is saturated with hubris and inflated egos.
noyeastguy 4y ago
Sure. But what is known about atherosclerosis is that plaques are not _on_ the arterial wall, but _inside_ the arterial wall. For plagues to form, fats have to be pulled into the arterial wall. How does this happen? Inflammation as designed opens up the arterial wall as a way to allow immune cells passage. Atherosclerosis happens when you have a bunch of fat in your arteries and you open them up to go inside. That's why cheeseburgers and pizza are the perfect heart disease vectors (Western diet). The bread parts cause inflammation via innate immunity (saccharomyces receptors) and the saturated fat parts (cheese and meat) flow in. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18163971/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18163971/
- oifjsidjf 4y ago
  "Fats" don't flow in, lipoproteins do at high blood pressure parts. It has nothing to do with saturated fats being pushed in. It's more likely that foods high in saturated fats cause inflammation of the blood vessels. But there is no difference between saturated and unsaturated fats since they are all transported in lipoproteins once they are in the blood. The issue is inflamation, not the actual lipoprotein cargo (fat, cholesterol,..) that gets pushed in. The real question is what causes the blood vessels to get damaged.
  - mfer 4y ago
    saturated fats are associated with increasing LDL cholesterol. Here's another paper on it... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9101427/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9101427/ From the paper... "Thus, an important mechanism by which reductions in dietary saturated fatty acids decrease LDL-cholesterol in humans..." unsaturated (e.g., polyunsaturated) fats do not have the same association. There are now many studies and papers linking saturated fat to increased LDL cholesterol. This is why groups, like the American Heart Association, recommend low intake of saturated fats (20 grams per day or less).
    - Amezarak 4y ago
      It’s not at all clear that LDL is actually bad. Some studies show that LDL is inversely correlated with all cause mortality. That is, the lower your LDL, the sooner you die. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8586008/#:~:text=Multiple%20studies%20have%20shown%20that%20low%20LDL-C%20level,men%2C%20the%20death%20result%20from%20any%20cause%20increased https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8586008/#:~:tex.... There are also fascinating studies showing a strong link between aggression and violence and low LDL in all animals with vertebrae.
rjdagost 4y ago
With this kind of uncertainty, is it any wonder that many people don't trust medical science when we are told to behave in a certain way, or when we are told to take a certain medical treatment? How many years have we been told that saturated fat is the nutritional devil? This is a great example of why censorship of "misinformation" is not justified- who is to say what constitutes misinformation?
oifjsidjf 4y ago
There was an interesting study on rabbits done (can't find it now): First they gave one batch of rabits only saturated fat -> the developed atherosclerosis. Then they gave the other batch unsaturated fats -> no atherosclerosis. Now you might think, "ok, saturated fat bad." But wait! Then they removed ALL fat from the 3rd batch of rabbits and you'd expected no atherosclerosis: but NO! Even at no fat the rabits developed atherosclerosis.

48 points by deegles 4y ago

So what causes heart disease? Trans-fats, carbohydrates, sugar, lack of fiber? ... I guess it has been evident to me for a while that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease, but it's not apparent what does.

wyager 4y ago
I would imagine that being sedentary and/or obese is a significant risk factor, although it is surprisingly difficult to quickly locate estimates of relative effect size. Official sites like the CDC's mostly reiterate the popular weak-effect nonsense about cholesterol etc. without any numeric scale comparisons.
Yiin 4y ago
Vegetable oils: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzQAHITIUhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzQAHITIUhg
- dekken_ 4y ago
  yes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k
resoluteteeth 4y ago
It seems like we really don't actually know. Sugar and trans-fats are the only things everyone can agree is bad, and it's not even totally clear whether sugar is actually that bad for people who aren't overweight and aren't sedentary (although most people are overweight and sedentary now anyway so it may not matter). (Even fiber, for example, might not be that important in itself so much as it is simply a proxy for vegetable consumption considering that fiber supplementation does nothing.)
- hackerlight 4y ago
  I think it's just added sugar and sugar found in processed food that is bad. Dark red fruits with high sugar content is good.
Blackthorn 4y ago
LDL. Which is awkward because it's an important molecule in the body, yet if it hits the arterial walls in such a way, the body has this crazy pathological response to it.
- boringg 4y ago
  I thought it went LDL repairs your cell walls so when your walls suffer from damage through inflammation LDL goes to patch it up.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Oxidized LDL (oxLDL)
  - Blackthorn 4y ago
    Survey paper of interest (have not read, for future reference): https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2020.613780/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2020.6137...
chongli 4y ago
I think not enough has been said for the neurobiology of food. A lot of modern foods (high processed) have been engineered to maximize food rewards using a mixture of salt, fat, carbohydrates, and proteins / amino acids / MSG. These foods tend to be highly calorie dense and extremely rewarding / addictive while at the same time producing low satiety (so you don't feel full and want to keep eating). Doritos is the classic example of this.

oneepic 4y ago

No comments on saturated fat vs liver disease (ie fatty liver) though. The common wisdom, I believe, is that you want to avoid sat-fat if you have fatty liver disease. That may not be a killer like cvd, but it is a big deal too.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
joecool1029 4y ago
A lot of people in here pointing to fructose though as a primary driver of problems, not saturated fat. Unlike glucose which can be used almost everywhere in the body, excess fructose has to be processed in the liver. In a caloric excess (which can be further exasperated by consumption of additional saturated fat), it's going to be converted to fat in the liver. More on that topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4838515/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4838515/
- oneepic 4y ago
  Thanks for the article, looks like that one is from 2016. I'll share another article I found with a quick search -- "Saturated fat is more metabolically harmful for the human liver than unsaturated fat or simple sugars" : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29844096/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29844096/ Now I'm not so sure which is the "primary driver". There are quite a few competing thoughts but maybe the point is you should lower both. That's probably one reason many docs (including mine in the past) recommend cutting both.
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    > Now I'm not so sure which is the "primary driver". There are quite a few competing thoughts but maybe the point is you should lower both. On that I don't think we disagree. However, saturated fat on its own isn't super palatable. There was a community I discovered a few years ago deliberately trying to up their saturated fat intake (specifically steric acid) and on it's own it's about as pleasurable as chewing on a candlestick (steric acid is used as a stiffener in paraffin candles). One thing I remember seeing too is that inflammation increases damage caused by de novo lipogenesis. I am wondering if consumption of stable saturated fats vs. consumption of unstable (and commonly rancid polyunsaturated fats) exasperates things.

wyre 4y ago

While I can accept on the face that saturated fatty acids doesn’t have an effect on cardiovascular disease, their conclusions are near useless without access to the full paper and their methods of analysis. It’s not hard to observe the American diet being high in SFA and Americans leading CVD morbidity. It’s also not hard to find diets high in SFA like keto and paleo and their practitioners being relatively healthy. I suspect it is the combination of high amounts of SFA and sugar that are driving the high rates of CVD.

resoluteteeth 4y ago
> It’s also not hard to find diets high in SFA like keto and paleo and their practitioners being relatively healthy. Keto actually looks like it might be bad for long term use based on some studies. For someone who finds that it helps them lose weight, it will still be beneficial as long as they they continue to lose weight, but it probably isn't great as a long-term lifestyle change when not losing weight.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Since most people who go on a keto diet cheat about as much as anyone on any diet (i.e. a lot), the real effect is not so much remaining in a ketogenic metablolic state for years at a time as it is cutting out some number of doughnuts, and while the original idea is extreme, the product is a result just about anybody could get behind. It's kind of like how most religions have some insane stuff in their holy texts, but regular nice people turn it in to a positive reminder to be kind by filtering it with their human inexactness.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    I find keto diet is much more satiating than low fat or "zone" type diets. I lost 80lbs this way and kept it off by doing a moderate version of it 1 meal a day of "zone" type mix and other two keto style. Obviously I eat whatever I want some days, but 90% of the time I'm good about it. My goal was always to be satiated and not to be in ketosis however. I have kept the weight for ~7 years now.

sendfoods 4y ago

- disclaimer: I am no health expert - Still, personally, the North Korelia Project [1] and the public debates/podcasts with its author(s) convinces me of the link [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30083543/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30083543/

hinkley 4y ago

I buy into the counter theory that high fructose corn syrup is killing us all and that arteriosclerosis is one of its manifestations. I think some people are even trying to blame it for osteoporosis. Something to do with blood pH and bones dumping calcium to buffer it. Bullshit or not, my life does seem to be better without cheap soda in it. I drink fancy soda as a treat, instead of being on a hedonic treadmill of several a day. Every time I quit soda in my 20’s and early 30’s I lost 10 lbs. Eventually it stuck. The advent of Kombucha changed that landscape quite a bit. Now I have a beverage that’s < 100 calories and I can’t chug.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
You forget one thing: outside of US, people don't put HFCS into everything like there's no tomorrow. We use sugar proper across the pond, and while it's a poison, it's not to the extent fructose is.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  There are at least 56 different names for sugar on food labels in the USA
- joshe 4y ago
  Table sugar is also high fructose. Sugar is also called sucrose, it is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. High fructose corn syrup is "available at various fructose levels. HFCS 42, used in beverages, processed foods, cereals and baked goods, comprises 42 % fructose and 53 % glucose. HFCS 90 comprises 90 % fructose and 10 % glucose... HFCS 55, which is used in soft drinks." -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983097/#:~:text=HFCS%20is%20available%20at%20various,%25%20fructose%20and%2010%20%25%20glucose https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983097/#:~:tex.... I think sucrose tastes better but it seems to be processed in the body the same way as corn syrup. Btw, fruit juice or honey are also high in fructose. Most likely they are all equally bad. All stored in the liver and all build insulin resistance.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago

boringg 4y ago

The way I think about it - the higher your fat content in your diet the likely the higher amount of fat (cholesterol) circulating in your blood veins. It might not be a big deal if your body doesn't attach that fat the walls of your arteries however if you have inflammation in your arteries the fat will attach to the arteries and over time that causes a whole host of problems. My unqualified suspicion is that if you manage inflammation you likely won't arterial walls lined with cholesterol (which is trying to repair the damage to your arterial walls from inflammation). However I also suspect that as you get older your vein structures change and theres probably a time in your 30s-50s where you biology changes and you start adsorbing more cholesterol (from fat) onto your arteries that cause CVD.

oifjsidjf 4y ago
Fat doesn't "attach" to the artery walls. Atherosclerosis is found ONLY in largest arteries where the blood pressure is highest and where the blood vessel splits into 2 because there the fluid (blood) flow gets distorted and slight vortexes are created. Those vortexes then cause the blood pressure to be exerted perpendiculary to the blood vessel wall at artery junctions. It's the high blood pressure + vortices + damaged blood vessel lining that PUSHES particles into the blood vessel walls. There is no atherosclerosis in veins (because those carry blood back to the heart at lower pressure). If fats would "attach" to the blood vessels you'd expect atherosclerosis even in veins, but you never get it there. Also: atherosclerotic plaque is only 0.5% cholesterol and 0.5% fat. The other 99% is "scar tissue" and other stuff. It's time to put this silly "fat attaches to blood vessel walls" thing to rest, it's 2022. You might wish to check out Bart Kay's youtube channel, he explains it nicely there.
- swayvil 4y ago
  What causes the scar tissue? Smoking? Irregular exercise?
  - oifjsidjf 4y ago
    Macrophages/white blood cells who wish to save you from those stuck particles. The real question is what causes the blood vessel walls to get damaged (since the scar tissue is the healing response of the body, but if the damage keeps on piling it grows too much instead of being gradually reduced over time). The problem is that there are millions of causes of inflamation etc... In general the best answer is "modern diet" full of sugars + fat at the same time. Carbs in high doses are poisonus, there is a reason the the lives of diabetics end in limb amputation, blindness and severe pain due to nerve damage due to sugar destroying them from the inside out...

stjohnswarts 4y ago

Atkins was saying this 40-50 years ago and continued until his death.

smm11 4y ago

Sugar and fat are the culprits. As in, fatty processed foods everyone eats. Saturated fat alone is not the issue. Heck, your brain is made out of it. Sugar IS the issue. And sugar is a molecule. Fruit and HFCS are the same thing. Keto is the way to lose weight. Low carb/high fat is the way to move forward.

boringg 4y ago
Worth noting that because your body is made of something that doesn't mean that it is good or bad for your diet.

browningstreet 4y ago

The carnivore books I've read have long lists of citations, it's not an unscientific set of positions they've taken. Their choice of bogeyman is seed oils, which has seen a significant increase in consumption over the 20th century compared to most other things (meat has been mostly flat, and has declined over the last 30 years).

reducesuffering 4y ago
Got a source? This one could not be interpreted as mostly-flat / declining meat consumption... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumption-by-type-kilograms-per-year https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti...
- browningstreet 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/ULBj3Ne45wE https://youtu.be/ULBj3Ne45wE at 19:13
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    That is a non-sourced .png from a clearly biased Youtuber. You're going to believe that over OurWorldInData's source, United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)? I think that establishes you're being misled on this aspect. Now, what other aspects of "carnivore" diet are you being misled on? Extra ironic that you claim carnivore research is so well-cited, while your first and only example isn't and is contradicted by known facts.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Doesn't the preponderance of evidence show that saturated fats aren't horrible but still- when people replaced them with unsaturated fats their heart disease risk dropped?

mfer 4y ago

What is cardiovascular disease? If we dig into that we find things like atherosclerosis and other types of diseases. Something like atherosclerosis happens, in large part due to LDL cholesterol [1]. There are many studies and papers on it. Scientists know a fair amount about what's going on here. Saturated Fat is a leading cause of high LDL cholesterol [2]. Dietary cholesterol plays a role in elevated cholesterol but to a lesser extent. A way to think about it is that animals (including humans) produce the LDL cholesterol they need. Cows, pigs, and other animals do too. When you eat them you eat extra LDL cholesterol that ends up in your system. I just grabbed a couple quick links on the topic. There are many podcasts with cardiologists on this, books by dietitians, and papers by researchers. On a personal note, I had high cholesterol and cut out dietary cholesterol and saturated fats (to the level recommended by the american heart association [3]). In a few months my LDL cholesterol dropped about 70 points. I know it's anecdotal but it worked for me and several others I know. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33966809/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33966809/ [2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-cholesterol/symptoms-causes/syc-20350800 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-ch... [3] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/fats/saturated-fats https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...

dnissley 4y ago
Aren't there certain cultures with high saturated fat intake but very low occurrence of heart disease? E.g. Inuits
- mfer 4y ago
  The data on their life expectancy shows it was far lower than average. What caused this? Was it heart disease? Infant mortality? Something else? Did they live long enough on average to get heart disease? The inuits eat more of a western diet now so getting data on their traditional diet must be difficult. In any case, we don't have enough data to justify them as a data point supporting high saturated fat diets.
  - dnissley 4y ago

leobabauta 4y ago

I think jumping to conclusions based on this paper is not a good idea: * The authors are not experts in this field. They seem to be experts in business management [0], other science fields [1], and the culinary arts [2] but not cardiovascular disease or anything related to it. * Experts in this field have done extensive reviews, and there is a strong link between saturated fat & CVD, especially if you take into account replacing SFA with PUFA. * All the world's health bodies agree — from Wikipedia: "Recommendations to reduce, limit or replace dietary intake of trans fats and saturated fats, in favor of unsaturated fats, are made by the World Health Organization, American Heart Association, Health Canada, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the UK National Health Service, the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, the Australian Department of Health and Aging, the Singapore Ministry of Health, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the New Zealand Ministry of Health, and Hong Kong's Department of Health." [3] * In my observation, many people strongly dispute the link between SFA & CVD usually subscribe to fringe health beliefs like all-meat diets, etc. Note: I do think limiting sugar/HFCS is a good idea as well. [0] Reimara Valk: https://www.aud.edu/aud-school/school-of-business-administration/faculty-and-staff/reimara-valk/ https://www.aud.edu/aud-school/school-of-business-administra... [1] James Hamill: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Hammill%20James%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Hammill%20Jam... [2] Jonas Grip: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/jonas-karl-grip-89875a12 https://ch.linkedin.com/in/jonas-karl-grip-89875a12 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat

p_j_w 4y ago
>I think jumping to conclusions based on this paper is not a good idea Something that I think most people on HN need to realize is that we are not experts on biology or medical science, so we shouldn't be reading these papers and coming up with conclusions on how to live our lives. Until the organizations that you list in your 3rd bullet point start changing their recommendations, we'd all be well served to follow their advice.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  The tech community is saturated with hubris and inflated egos.

noyeastguy 4y ago

Sure. But what is known about atherosclerosis is that plaques are not _on_ the arterial wall, but _inside_ the arterial wall. For plagues to form, fats have to be pulled into the arterial wall. How does this happen? Inflammation as designed opens up the arterial wall as a way to allow immune cells passage. Atherosclerosis happens when you have a bunch of fat in your arteries and you open them up to go inside. That's why cheeseburgers and pizza are the perfect heart disease vectors (Western diet). The bread parts cause inflammation via innate immunity (saccharomyces receptors) and the saturated fat parts (cheese and meat) flow in. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18163971/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18163971/

oifjsidjf 4y ago
"Fats" don't flow in, lipoproteins do at high blood pressure parts. It has nothing to do with saturated fats being pushed in. It's more likely that foods high in saturated fats cause inflammation of the blood vessels. But there is no difference between saturated and unsaturated fats since they are all transported in lipoproteins once they are in the blood. The issue is inflamation, not the actual lipoprotein cargo (fat, cholesterol,..) that gets pushed in. The real question is what causes the blood vessels to get damaged.
- mfer 4y ago
  saturated fats are associated with increasing LDL cholesterol. Here's another paper on it... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9101427/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9101427/ From the paper... "Thus, an important mechanism by which reductions in dietary saturated fatty acids decrease LDL-cholesterol in humans..." unsaturated (e.g., polyunsaturated) fats do not have the same association. There are now many studies and papers linking saturated fat to increased LDL cholesterol. This is why groups, like the American Heart Association, recommend low intake of saturated fats (20 grams per day or less).
  - Amezarak 4y ago
    It’s not at all clear that LDL is actually bad. Some studies show that LDL is inversely correlated with all cause mortality. That is, the lower your LDL, the sooner you die. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8586008/#:~:text=Multiple%20studies%20have%20shown%20that%20low%20LDL-C%20level,men%2C%20the%20death%20result%20from%20any%20cause%20increased https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8586008/#:~:tex.... There are also fascinating studies showing a strong link between aggression and violence and low LDL in all animals with vertebrae.

rjdagost 4y ago

With this kind of uncertainty, is it any wonder that many people don't trust medical science when we are told to behave in a certain way, or when we are told to take a certain medical treatment? How many years have we been told that saturated fat is the nutritional devil? This is a great example of why censorship of "misinformation" is not justified- who is to say what constitutes misinformation?

oifjsidjf 4y ago

There was an interesting study on rabbits done (can't find it now): First they gave one batch of rabits only saturated fat -> the developed atherosclerosis. Then they gave the other batch unsaturated fats -> no atherosclerosis. Now you might think, "ok, saturated fat bad." But wait! Then they removed ALL fat from the 3rd batch of rabbits and you'd expected no atherosclerosis: but NO! Even at no fat the rabits developed atherosclerosis.