5 ms·

I believe this kind of study will shed more light on how much more we have to learn about nutrition and how our body processes and metabolizes nutrients. I thi

I believe this kind of study will shed more light on how much more we have to learn about nutrition and how our body processes and metabolizes nutrients. I think a lot of nutrition has been, for lack of a better term, very basic and somewhat stoicimetric - fat consumed equals fat stored, cholesterol consumed equals cholesterol stored, and also treating manufactured sugars (e.g., High Fructose Corn Syrup) as equal to natural sugars such as what's found in fruits and honey. This and many other studies have shown that this parity between input/output is not what happens nor is it an adequate reflection of how our body works. Treating the body as a simple machine in this manner is very naïve and has lead, in my opinion, to a huge amount of misapplied health advice or just outright wrong policies. Of course, the factors driving this have profited handsomely from this misdirection, but that's another angle suitable for it's own thread.

cromka 4y ago
Not so recently the similarly shocking findings about the Mediterranean cuisine rich in animal fat also contradicted the common beliefs regarding the saturated fats. If I may be allowed to speculate, I think it could simply have a lot to do with the very basic idea of consuming processed vs natural foods. So refined sugar = bad, refined fats = bad. Our bodies have evolved to optimize digestion and make most of those natural ingredients, but not the artificial, industrial products we had been exposed for mere 150-200 years. EDIT: for more background, what was stunning is that some cuisines in Mediterranean, like Spanish or North Italian, can be quite heavy on meat, yet that did not negatively correlate with the lifespan, compared to more lightweight variates in the region. I can’t recall the paperwork, but that was the general gist.
- soco 4y ago
  I guess "refined" should be probably understood as "many ingredients, seemingly important but unknown to actual medicine, filtered out"...
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Can you share more? The balance of evidence against saturated fats is quite clear, and there are usually good responses to find around single studies that purport to show countervailing evidence. The biggest example of this is that it’s hard to find a cohort that contains substantially different levels of saturated fat intake (very low vs very high). So the quintiles inside the same cohort don’t necessarily have significant outcome differences, and that’s peddled as saturated fat not being bad for you.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Saturated fat is definitely not as bad as things like partially hydrogenated fats, and likely not as bad as some other highly-processed fats. Does anyone else remember "heart healthy" margarine from the 90s that was certainly worse for you cardiovascular system than lard? Anyway, studies regarding saturated fat are contradictory and inconclusive: From 2022: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/saturated-fat https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/saturated-fat From 2014: https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/features/truth-about-saturated-fats/ https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/features/truth-... Statements that seem to be true: - You should avoid trans fats - Replacing fats with carbs + sugar is a bad idea. - Going on a low fat diet, or a low saturated fat diet usually results in eating more carbs and sugar.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    Every guidance I've read for almost a decade has said saturated fat, including from animals, was falsely vilified and when consumed as part of a whole food is perfectly healthy up to half of your caloric intake. And that polyunsaturated fats are extraordinarily unhealthy even when not modified into transfats. The only holdouts I've seen reference American heart association which does still give the guidance you suggest. I do see triglycerides alternately blaimed on fats or carbs. My best bloodwork came when I spentonths having 1.5lbs of grassfed beef ever day with leaves and roots. My worst was when my triglycerides spiked on a carb heavy diet after soylent swapped brown rice protein for more carbs towards the end of the Kickstarter.
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    > "The balance of evidence against saturated fats is quite clear," Copying from a comment I made 3 months ago[2]; Dr Paul Mason on "Saturated Fat is not Dangerous"[1] talks about the introduction of the "lower saturated fat" guidelines in Australia and how it was not based on any evidence or medical literature review. He mentions three meta-analyses on saturated fats: "Insufficient evidence of association is present for intake of ... saturated or polyunsaturated fatty acids; total fat ... meat, eggs and milk" - Mente A, et al. A systematic review of the evidence supporting a causal link between dietary factors and coronary heart disease. Arch Intern Med. 2009 April 13. "... no significant evidence for conclusing that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD" - Siri-Tarino PW, et al. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Mar. "There were no clear effects of dietary fat changes on total mortality or cardiovascular mortality..." - Hooper L, et al. Reduced or modified dietary fat for preventing cardiovascular disease. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2011 Jul 6. And he says "the balance of evidence available at the time of developing our nutritional guidelines says that saturated fat in the diet is not associated with any deleterious health outcomes, that is, it's safe". Newer research published after 2013, same results, he cites three more reviews and meta-analyses, two from the British Medical Journal. Then he mentions the biggest most expensive study done on reducing dietary fat, $700,000,000 dollars, 50,000 people, 8 years, and the only statistically significant result from the study was that women with a history of heart disease who were randomly selected into the lower fat group, increased their risk of problems such as heart attacks by 26%. That is, saturated fat (animal fat tends to be) hasn't been proven to do anything bad, and reduced fat (vegetarianism tends to be , but not necessarily) hasn't been proven to do anything beneficial. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUY_SDhxf4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUY_SDhxf4k [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966148
- Buttons840 4y ago
  > Mediterranean cuisine rich in animal fat Are you saying that a Mediterranean diet is rich in animal fat? Because that doesn't match the common definition of the word. "These proportions are sometimes represented in the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid. In a diet with roughly this composition, the fat content accounts for 25% to 35% of the total intake of calories, while the amount of saturated fat is, at most, 8% of the calorie content."[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#Dietary_components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#Dietary_com...
- cnntth 4y ago
  I haven't kept up with the debate over the 'Mediterranean' diet, has there been a consensus of the benefits of the diet? IIRC, a big flaw in the proponents of the trend was that a lot of those benefits -- cardiovascular, weight, etc -- could also be attributed to the lower stress and more active lifestyles in those cultures compared to Americans.
aardvarkr 4y ago
For context, the natural sugars found in fruits are called FRUCTOSE. High fructose corn syrup comes from corn that naturally produces fructose. I’m not saying HFCS is healthy but merely pointing out that just because “natural sugars such as what’s found in fruits” sounds healthy doesn’t mean it’s chemically different from the thing being vilified.
- hollerith 4y ago
  >High fructose corn syrup comes from corn that naturally produces fructose Not true as explain in the first paragraph of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
- spion 4y ago
  That's the thing though. They may be 'found' in one place or another, but it seems that the surrounding chemicals matter quite a bit more than we thought.
  - eptcyka 4y ago
    What surrounding chemicals? The mitigating factors in fruit is that the fructose is interspersed with plant matter that isn't pure sugar and occasionally the non-fructose plant matter contains other nutrients. The plant matter allows for slower absorption of fructose, thus blood glucose levels rise slower and the peak might be lower. However, there's nothing inately bad or good about the "surrounding" chemicals - if you eat too much fruit you'll have similar health consequences as if you were to consume similar amounts to high fructose corn syrup. Swap out fruit for fruit juice, the outcomes will be more similar still.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Fruit also contains glucose. Studies of HFCS suggest that the problems all come from lack of signaling. Your body doesn't "notice" the calories you obtained from the fructose, which causes all sorts of downstream issues. To see the effect for yourself: Go to a fast food restaurant, and get the largest sized cup that would normally have HFCS soda in it. Fill the cup with sugar based soda, and drink the entire thing at a normal rate. You'll likely feel full / nauseous before you get to the bottom of it. This doesn't happen (as soon) with HFCS soda.
pferdone 4y ago
I dont know anyone who thought input == output. Diets like keto clearly show the opposite.
- leidenfrost 4y ago
  Keto is a very special case where the body depletes its glucose storages so it switches to fat by force. It does work, but you have to stay out of any kind of carbohydrate for the rest of your life (or for whatever amount do you plan to stay in that state). In non ketogenic states, input does somewhat equals output. Nutrition experts still try to create a caloric deficit when they create nutrition plans. If there was some sort of magic nutrient that made you lose weight by eating mostly the same food, I'm sure most nutrition experts would have known already.
dxbydt 4y ago
> lot of nutrition has been, for lack of a better term, very basic and somewhat stoicimetric - fat consumed equals fat stored, cholesterol consumed equals cholesterol stored, and also treating manufactured sugars (e.g., High Fructose Corn Syrup) as equal to natural sugars Its much worse. Active misdirection by using the same term to refer to entirely different products/processes. A is not equal to B just because A and B happen to contain the same ingredient C in majority quantity. (Chimps share 99.6% of our genes etc). Labeling glucose, sucrose & fructose with the common label sugar. Sucrose itself has 100s of varieties - https://www.whatsugar.com/post/unrefined-vs-raw-vs-refined-cane-sugar https://www.whatsugar.com/post/unrefined-vs-raw-vs-refined-c... .In most tropical countries, sugarcane is consumed raw in copious quantities. I grew up in a village eating sugarcane from fields. We were poor, but we always had a few stalk of sugarcane. You just chew on it & grind it down. Nobody got diabetes or anything from that. You move to the city & then the refined white sugar comes in bottles & you see the ill-effects all around you. But you can't point out how these things don't happen in the village, because that would be unscientific, all sugar is sugar etc. So an industrial product like hfcs, something that doesn't exist in nature in any form & has to be manufactured in the factory, is also sugar, because the majority constituent has the same chemical composition as orange juice, so no drinking orange juice for breakfast because that's just sugar, which is the same sugar in coke & pepsi & maple syrup & since we're way too poor to afford actual Canadian 100% grade A maple syrup from the maple tree, we must substitute it with cheap hfcs syrup, which is also called maple syrup & sold as maple syrup ( there's a small asterisk in unreadable h6 font at the label footer that says its not the true maple syrup but who is reading that ? ). The price difference these days - true maple syrup is $20 a bottle while hfcs is $2 !!! 8 ounce of Manuka is $20. So what do we do ? Well, we fill up a drum with sweet white sugar water & place it in the open. The poor honeybee is too dumb to know the difference, its going to drink our sugar water instead of nectar, so the beekeepers actually recommend this! https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/ https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/ So now we can sell this cheaper honey for a fifth of the price yay capitalism ftw. Labeling lard, bacon, olive oils & avocados & ghee, coconut oil, butter, vegetable oil under the common "fat", compounded by the fact that we call people who are obese "fat", thus confusing dietary fat with lipose, to the extent people think if they eat eggs they become fat because the "fat" of the yolk is somehow equal to the lipose tissue of the fat person. Like every yolk you eat, the "fat" from yolk goes straight to the lipose tissues because we refer to these two very different things by the same label ! People actually point at fat people and say "it must be the butter, must be the bacon and eggs"...when its mostly the refined sugar in the cakes & cookies & dessert. Once again, look at the cost - 16oz of ghee is $10, but you can buy a few gallons of processed industrial canola oil for $10, so that's the right thing to do, because oil is oil & it is all fat anyway & hfcs is sugar & so is honey & javascript is java & python is R & everything is the same, my man, it is all turing complete, just use the cheaper one, otherwise you are fucking gatekeeping you fucking elitist what's that i can't hear you over the sound of my freedom rah rah rah.
isamuel 4y ago
Thank you. I was typing out a comment like this in frustrated response to a different remark elsewhere in the thread (“calories in, calories out!”) but stopped. I’m glad I did because you put what I was going to say much better than I would have. Also I learned the word “stoicimetric,” so thanks for that.

cromka 4y ago

Not so recently the similarly shocking findings about the Mediterranean cuisine rich in animal fat also contradicted the common beliefs regarding the saturated fats. If I may be allowed to speculate, I think it could simply have a lot to do with the very basic idea of consuming processed vs natural foods. So refined sugar = bad, refined fats = bad. Our bodies have evolved to optimize digestion and make most of those natural ingredients, but not the artificial, industrial products we had been exposed for mere 150-200 years. EDIT: for more background, what was stunning is that some cuisines in Mediterranean, like Spanish or North Italian, can be quite heavy on meat, yet that did not negatively correlate with the lifespan, compared to more lightweight variates in the region. I can’t recall the paperwork, but that was the general gist.

soco 4y ago
I guess "refined" should be probably understood as "many ingredients, seemingly important but unknown to actual medicine, filtered out"...
hombre_fatal 4y ago
Can you share more? The balance of evidence against saturated fats is quite clear, and there are usually good responses to find around single studies that purport to show countervailing evidence. The biggest example of this is that it’s hard to find a cohort that contains substantially different levels of saturated fat intake (very low vs very high). So the quintiles inside the same cohort don’t necessarily have significant outcome differences, and that’s peddled as saturated fat not being bad for you.
- hedora 4y ago
  Saturated fat is definitely not as bad as things like partially hydrogenated fats, and likely not as bad as some other highly-processed fats. Does anyone else remember "heart healthy" margarine from the 90s that was certainly worse for you cardiovascular system than lard? Anyway, studies regarding saturated fat are contradictory and inconclusive: From 2022: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/saturated-fat https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/saturated-fat From 2014: https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/features/truth-about-saturated-fats/ https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/features/truth-... Statements that seem to be true: - You should avoid trans fats - Replacing fats with carbs + sugar is a bad idea. - Going on a low fat diet, or a low saturated fat diet usually results in eating more carbs and sugar.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Every guidance I've read for almost a decade has said saturated fat, including from animals, was falsely vilified and when consumed as part of a whole food is perfectly healthy up to half of your caloric intake. And that polyunsaturated fats are extraordinarily unhealthy even when not modified into transfats. The only holdouts I've seen reference American heart association which does still give the guidance you suggest. I do see triglycerides alternately blaimed on fats or carbs. My best bloodwork came when I spentonths having 1.5lbs of grassfed beef ever day with leaves and roots. My worst was when my triglycerides spiked on a carb heavy diet after soylent swapped brown rice protein for more carbs towards the end of the Kickstarter.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  > "The balance of evidence against saturated fats is quite clear," Copying from a comment I made 3 months ago[2]; Dr Paul Mason on "Saturated Fat is not Dangerous"[1] talks about the introduction of the "lower saturated fat" guidelines in Australia and how it was not based on any evidence or medical literature review. He mentions three meta-analyses on saturated fats: "Insufficient evidence of association is present for intake of ... saturated or polyunsaturated fatty acids; total fat ... meat, eggs and milk" - Mente A, et al. A systematic review of the evidence supporting a causal link between dietary factors and coronary heart disease. Arch Intern Med. 2009 April 13. "... no significant evidence for conclusing that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD" - Siri-Tarino PW, et al. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Mar. "There were no clear effects of dietary fat changes on total mortality or cardiovascular mortality..." - Hooper L, et al. Reduced or modified dietary fat for preventing cardiovascular disease. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2011 Jul 6. And he says "the balance of evidence available at the time of developing our nutritional guidelines says that saturated fat in the diet is not associated with any deleterious health outcomes, that is, it's safe". Newer research published after 2013, same results, he cites three more reviews and meta-analyses, two from the British Medical Journal. Then he mentions the biggest most expensive study done on reducing dietary fat, $700,000,000 dollars, 50,000 people, 8 years, and the only statistically significant result from the study was that women with a history of heart disease who were randomly selected into the lower fat group, increased their risk of problems such as heart attacks by 26%. That is, saturated fat (animal fat tends to be) hasn't been proven to do anything bad, and reduced fat (vegetarianism tends to be , but not necessarily) hasn't been proven to do anything beneficial. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUY_SDhxf4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUY_SDhxf4k [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966148
Buttons840 4y ago
> Mediterranean cuisine rich in animal fat Are you saying that a Mediterranean diet is rich in animal fat? Because that doesn't match the common definition of the word. "These proportions are sometimes represented in the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid. In a diet with roughly this composition, the fat content accounts for 25% to 35% of the total intake of calories, while the amount of saturated fat is, at most, 8% of the calorie content."[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#Dietary_components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#Dietary_com...
cnntth 4y ago
I haven't kept up with the debate over the 'Mediterranean' diet, has there been a consensus of the benefits of the diet? IIRC, a big flaw in the proponents of the trend was that a lot of those benefits -- cardiovascular, weight, etc -- could also be attributed to the lower stress and more active lifestyles in those cultures compared to Americans.

aardvarkr 4y ago

For context, the natural sugars found in fruits are called FRUCTOSE. High fructose corn syrup comes from corn that naturally produces fructose. I’m not saying HFCS is healthy but merely pointing out that just because “natural sugars such as what’s found in fruits” sounds healthy doesn’t mean it’s chemically different from the thing being vilified.

hollerith 4y ago
>High fructose corn syrup comes from corn that naturally produces fructose Not true as explain in the first paragraph of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
spion 4y ago
That's the thing though. They may be 'found' in one place or another, but it seems that the surrounding chemicals matter quite a bit more than we thought.
- eptcyka 4y ago
  What surrounding chemicals? The mitigating factors in fruit is that the fructose is interspersed with plant matter that isn't pure sugar and occasionally the non-fructose plant matter contains other nutrients. The plant matter allows for slower absorption of fructose, thus blood glucose levels rise slower and the peak might be lower. However, there's nothing inately bad or good about the "surrounding" chemicals - if you eat too much fruit you'll have similar health consequences as if you were to consume similar amounts to high fructose corn syrup. Swap out fruit for fruit juice, the outcomes will be more similar still.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Fruit also contains glucose. Studies of HFCS suggest that the problems all come from lack of signaling. Your body doesn't "notice" the calories you obtained from the fructose, which causes all sorts of downstream issues. To see the effect for yourself: Go to a fast food restaurant, and get the largest sized cup that would normally have HFCS soda in it. Fill the cup with sugar based soda, and drink the entire thing at a normal rate. You'll likely feel full / nauseous before you get to the bottom of it. This doesn't happen (as soon) with HFCS soda.

pferdone 4y ago

I dont know anyone who thought input == output. Diets like keto clearly show the opposite.

leidenfrost 4y ago
Keto is a very special case where the body depletes its glucose storages so it switches to fat by force. It does work, but you have to stay out of any kind of carbohydrate for the rest of your life (or for whatever amount do you plan to stay in that state). In non ketogenic states, input does somewhat equals output. Nutrition experts still try to create a caloric deficit when they create nutrition plans. If there was some sort of magic nutrient that made you lose weight by eating mostly the same food, I'm sure most nutrition experts would have known already.

dxbydt 4y ago

> lot of nutrition has been, for lack of a better term, very basic and somewhat stoicimetric - fat consumed equals fat stored, cholesterol consumed equals cholesterol stored, and also treating manufactured sugars (e.g., High Fructose Corn Syrup) as equal to natural sugars Its much worse. Active misdirection by using the same term to refer to entirely different products/processes. A is not equal to B just because A and B happen to contain the same ingredient C in majority quantity. (Chimps share 99.6% of our genes etc). Labeling glucose, sucrose & fructose with the common label sugar. Sucrose itself has 100s of varieties - https://www.whatsugar.com/post/unrefined-vs-raw-vs-refined-cane-sugar https://www.whatsugar.com/post/unrefined-vs-raw-vs-refined-c... .In most tropical countries, sugarcane is consumed raw in copious quantities. I grew up in a village eating sugarcane from fields. We were poor, but we always had a few stalk of sugarcane. You just chew on it & grind it down. Nobody got diabetes or anything from that. You move to the city & then the refined white sugar comes in bottles & you see the ill-effects all around you. But you can't point out how these things don't happen in the village, because that would be unscientific, all sugar is sugar etc. So an industrial product like hfcs, something that doesn't exist in nature in any form & has to be manufactured in the factory, is also sugar, because the majority constituent has the same chemical composition as orange juice, so no drinking orange juice for breakfast because that's just sugar, which is the same sugar in coke & pepsi & maple syrup & since we're way too poor to afford actual Canadian 100% grade A maple syrup from the maple tree, we must substitute it with cheap hfcs syrup, which is also called maple syrup & sold as maple syrup ( there's a small asterisk in unreadable h6 font at the label footer that says its not the true maple syrup but who is reading that ? ). The price difference these days - true maple syrup is $20 a bottle while hfcs is $2 !!! 8 ounce of Manuka is $20. So what do we do ? Well, we fill up a drum with sweet white sugar water & place it in the open. The poor honeybee is too dumb to know the difference, its going to drink our sugar water instead of nectar, so the beekeepers actually recommend this! https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/ https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/ So now we can sell this cheaper honey for a fifth of the price yay capitalism ftw. Labeling lard, bacon, olive oils & avocados & ghee, coconut oil, butter, vegetable oil under the common "fat", compounded by the fact that we call people who are obese "fat", thus confusing dietary fat with lipose, to the extent people think if they eat eggs they become fat because the "fat" of the yolk is somehow equal to the lipose tissue of the fat person. Like every yolk you eat, the "fat" from yolk goes straight to the lipose tissues because we refer to these two very different things by the same label ! People actually point at fat people and say "it must be the butter, must be the bacon and eggs"...when its mostly the refined sugar in the cakes & cookies & dessert. Once again, look at the cost - 16oz of ghee is $10, but you can buy a few gallons of processed industrial canola oil for $10, so that's the right thing to do, because oil is oil & it is all fat anyway & hfcs is sugar & so is honey & javascript is java & python is R & everything is the same, my man, it is all turing complete, just use the cheaper one, otherwise you are fucking gatekeeping you fucking elitist what's that i can't hear you over the sound of my freedom rah rah rah.

isamuel 4y ago

Thank you. I was typing out a comment like this in frustrated response to a different remark elsewhere in the thread (“calories in, calories out!”) but stopped. I’m glad I did because you put what I was going to say much better than I would have. Also I learned the word “stoicimetric,” so thanks for that.