12 ms·

How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

143 points by fhoxh 14y ago

Direct link to video here: https://vimeo.com/45485034

dools 14y ago
Can someone summarise the vid? It won't play on Android ...
- lwat 14y ago
  Link seems to be dead
  - fhoxh 14y ago
    Link seems fine to me: https://vimeo.com/45485034 https://vimeo.com/45485034
activepeanut 14y ago
I've always wondered if the saturated fat in coconuts is bad for you..
- waivej 14y ago
  Me too. Though the author has a picture of coconuts on his "what I eat" page.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  You are looking at things from a "nutrionism" point of view http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.... The answer is simple: Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.
  - omgsean 14y ago
    I don't really like that simplification. Potatoes and wheat are both plants and people eat far too much of both.
    - pyre 14y ago
      I assume "not too much" covers that.
    - lukeman 14y ago
      Exactly. Some plants are simply poison, too. And many people have allergies that can make even a small amount of some plants deadly. Nothing gets me ranting like the old "everything in moderation" line.
    - latch 14y ago
      citation needed? When you say wheat, do you mean processed and refined flour? And by potatoes, do you mean chips and fries? Potatoes are loaded with vitamins and minerals. Some of the starch isn't easily digestible and acts similarly to fiber (in addition to the fiber found in the skin). The fact that they are little bombs of nutrition aside (along with sweet potatoes, yummm!), they will also keep fresh for months.
      - lwat 14y ago
        Any wheat and any potatoes according to people like Gary Taubes. Sweet potatoes are probably better than regular spuds. Wheat and potatoes are mostly just carbohydrates which, as explained in the video we're discussing, should be reduced. There's no such thing as an 'essential carbohydrate' and all other vitamins and minerals in potatoes and wheat can also be found in more than sufficient quantities in 'good' foods like meat and leafy veggies.
        latch 14y ago
        This is where I find Dr. Ludwig's work interesting. My understanding is that you can't just look at nutrients individually. For example, a carbohydrate eaten in a highly processed form is digested, substantially different, at a chemical level, than carbohydrates eaten with fiber. I don't doubt that carbohydrate consumption has gone up and with it, suspiciously, so too has obesity. But I can't help but think we should be looking at the package containing these newly consumed carbohydrates. A mars bars contains 40g of carbohydrate...are people grouping that with 40g of carbohydrates yielded by potatoes and wheat?
- SwellJoe 14y ago
  Most likely good for you, along the lines of olive oil and avocado. Assuming a good balance of foods.
  - lukeman 14y ago
    And certainly better for you than rapeseed (canola) and soy oils.
  - Shorel 14y ago
    They have very different smoke points. In short: coconut oil (also palm oil) will be useful after you use it to fry, while olive oil will stop being olive oil after just some heating. In fact, do not fry anything with olive oil. Olive oil should be added to food in your plate only.
- Shorel 14y ago
  All the people in /r/keto and /r/Paleo will say that you can't possibly eat something better. (Those are subrreddits.)
waivej 14y ago
Summary: bad science led to low fat diet craze. Reduce carbohydrates instead.
- lwat 14y ago
  Taubes was right
  - elviejo 14y ago
    Atkins was right too.
  - rmobin 14y ago
    Low-carb diets work for plenty of people (including me), but this is a must-read refutation of Taubes' carbohydrate hypothesis: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-hypothesis-of-obesity.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...
    - fhoxh 14y ago
      Guyenet is a joke. Peter over at HyperLipid recently ripped him to utter shreds: http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/confused.html http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/confused.html http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/insulin-un-dead-and-coffin-nails.html http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/insulin-un-de... Not to mention, Taubes countered Guyenet with a 6-part series refuting Guyenet's widely mocked food-reward/palatability hypothesis: http://garytaubes.com/2011/09/catching-up-on-lost-time-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-carbohydrates-kettles-pots-other-odds-ends-part-i/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/09/catching-up-on-lost-time-ances... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iia/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iib/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iic/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iid/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iie-as-in-“end-and-egh-already/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the...
waivej 14y ago
Try this for the video: http://vimeo.com/45485034 http://vimeo.com/45485034
bhauer 14y ago
Thumbs up for Frederic Bastiat quote. Thumbs down for presumably hosting with WordPress.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  You presume correctly: http://eatingacademy.com/wp-login.php http://eatingacademy.com/wp-login.php Though all it'd take to fix is 3 clicks to install a caching plugin, usually.
robbiep 14y ago
Our body doesn't posess the enzymes to dehydrate saturated fats, therefore we can't process them as efficiently, Additionally saturated fats lead to cell membrane instability and 'crystallisation' due to the straight-line chemical arrangement of the carbon atoms. Cis - (A type of) unsaturated fats by contrast, have kinks in the chains which induces fluidity into cell membranes. Interestingly Cholesterol is used to maintain membrane stability/'fine-tune' membrane fluidity when there are lots of Cis fats. I haven't listened to the whole talk yet and take it the poster's angle is that there is a lot more to diet, nutrition and preventable diseases like Ischaemic heart disease than just 'saturated fats and cholesterol'. Yes. No doubt. But they are still terrible for you in high doeses, Epidemiological studies have shown this beyond a doubt and the basic science is sound.
ramses 14y ago
Twelve years ago I had read too many peer-reviewed papers to know that low-cholesterol diets were a bad idea, and useless from the point of view of having a good blood-cholesterol profile. Useless because, for example, population study after population study showed that low-cholesterol diets did not improve blood-cholesterol. Furthermore, it was common to find populations with high-cholesterol diets that had an excellent blood-cholesterol profile, and, conversely, populations with low-cholesterol diets and a bad blood-cholesterol profile. A bad idea because, among other things, low-cholesterol diets will immediately lower your blood Testosterone. Recall that cholesterol is the most basic steroid; from it, all other steroids, including anabolic androgenic steroids such as Testosterone, are metabolized. A diet with a good amount of cholesterol is a necessary condition to achieve good levels of Testosterone. Why would a hacker care about his Testosterone levels?? Some examples: Males with high Testosterone perform better in arithmetic and mathematics than males with low testosterone. Males with high Testosterone levels have better short-term-memory. Males with high Testosterone have good mood; whereas low Testosterone causes depression, mood-swings, and angry reactions to minor things. So, for at least 12 years, I have made it a point to have two jumbo eggs for breakfast. And that's not the only source of cholesterol and saturated fat in my diet. I do, however, make sure that I do not ingest too much saturated fat ... and there are too many more details to my diet to discuss here.
- paupino_masano 14y ago
  It has also been found that diets high in cholesterol and/or saturated fat also lowers testosterone [1,2,3]. I think the best course of action is to reduce rather than eliminate. i.e. "control" your intake of cholesterol and saturated fats. Blindly increasing your intake of either (above acceptable levels) goes against many scientific studies. [1] http://www.drmirkin.com/men/1008.html http://www.drmirkin.com/men/1008.html [2] http://www.ergo-log.com/toomuchcholesterol.html http://www.ergo-log.com/toomuchcholesterol.html [3] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/study-of-the-day-diets-high-in-saturated-fats-may-spoil-semen/254425/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/study-of-t...
  - sandGorgon 14y ago
sabat 14y ago
Science?
- semenko 14y ago
  Watching Hacker News try to interpret scientific data is, well, "like Quora without the Questions."
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
fhoxh 14y ago
Google's cache for this article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-did-we-come-to-believe-saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad-for-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...
user49598 14y ago
I believe it coincided with converting to a nearly sedentary culture. Nothing is as bad for you as being sedentary and since many/most people refuse to exercise, and you can't buy exercise pills (let alone get people to take them), you have to get people to want to cut down on the stuff their body isn't using. Cholesterol isn't bad, saturated fat isn't bad, but if you're sitting around all day festering so are they. Nutrition is far from an exact science and humans from around the world react to foods differently in subtle ways giving any Nutritional conclusions limited relevance. IMHO, The 2 most important things you can do are exercise and pay attention to your body. Also, a lot of these "mis-conceptions" come from media and laymen thinking that phrases like "a link between saturated fat and heart disease" imply causation. Remembered one more thing: A lot of shit food is loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol (and salt and sugar). Frozen dinners, snack cakes and fast food are some great examples. These products, which significantly contribute to the fattening of the world, help give their main flavor sources a bad name.
- ladzoppelin 14y ago
  Wow that's a great way of explaining the underlying issue. The way that everyone reacts differently to the same foods is also the reason that thousands of different diet books continue to make money. Its a mess and the internet has only added to the confusion.
- rubashov 14y ago
  > Cholesterol isn't bad, saturated fat isn't bad The issue gets super complicated once you add chronic emotional stress. A huge problem with all these dietary disease models is they ignore cortisol and stress levels, which may ultimately turn out to be the single-most important variable. In short, the original findings to do with fat intake -> cholesterol -> atherosclerosis weren't outright invalid. It's just that in healthy, unstressed people the final link to atherosclerosis doesn't actually happen, even in old age. But the situation in the industrialized world is massive numbers of people living in chronic stress, so who knows. Turns out chronically elevated cortisol levels produces the arterial damage that make "bad" cholesterol a problem at all.
latch 14y ago
While it's really interesting to debate whether you should eat potatoes or beef, the real battle for the western world is that we stop eating processed foods. Wheat vs eggs seems like a silly debate when people are living off of Coke, Oreos and Capt'N Crunch. Whenever I hear these arguments, I feel like these scientists aren't living in the same world as me. "Eggs are ok, declare scientists" reads the headline while the man sips from 32 oz soda. In addition to that, having no education in biology, chemistry or any field remotely associated with health and fitness, I do have two eyes. In light of all the contradicting information and conspiracy theories, I'll trust what I've observed. And, what I've observed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that people who favor fruits and vegetables, grains and legumes over beef, pork and fatty foods are healthier.
- unreal37 14y ago
  You should read the book "Wheat Belly". That will bust that myth about grains and fruits for you.
  - markerdmann 14y ago
    This blog post presents some interesting criticisms of the book "Wheat Belly": http://noglutennoproblem.blogspot.com/2012/03/wheat-belly-busted.html http://noglutennoproblem.blogspot.com/2012/03/wheat-belly-bu... It sounds like the book often misrepresents the research that it cites.
    - bitsoda 14y ago
      It seems that the only real error made by Wheat Belly's author was bending the study by claiming its subjects were all obese with celiac disease. Apart from this, the comments contains many anecdotal responses from people who have dropped not only gluten, but all grain from their diet and had positive results. Moreover, take into account the blog's author who has published three books circulating around gluten-free foods -- something that Wheat Belly advises the reader to jettison altogether.
  - latch 14y ago
schultkl 14y ago
I defer to Walter C. Willet, M.D., who writes in "Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy" (co-developed with the Harvard School of Public Health): "There's no question that two types of fat -- saturated fat, the kind that's abundant in whole milk or red meat, and trans fats, which are found in many margarines and vegetable shortenings -- contribute to the artery-clogging process that leads to heart disease, stroke, and other problems...monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats found in olive oil and other vegetable oils, nuts, whole grains, other plant products, and fish -- are good for your heart.... Our bottom line is this: It is perfectly fine to get more than 30 percent of your daily calories from fats as long as most of those fats are unsaturated." "The term saturated means that the carbon atoms in a chain hold as many hydrogen atoms as they can...saturated fats come in gradations of bad...butter and other dairy products most strongly increase LDL (bad) cholesterol. Those in beef fat aren't quite as powerful at boosting LDL and those in chocolate and cocoa butter have an even smaller impact." HDL and LDL are lipoproteins: "...fats must somehow get from your digestive system to your cells...like oil and water, fats and blood don't mix. If your intestines or liver simply dumped digested fats into your blood, they would congeal into unusable globs. Instead fat is packaged into protein-covered particles that mix easily with blood and flow with it. These tiny particles, called lipoproteins (lipid plus protein), contain some cholesterol to help stabilize the particles. "Lipoproteins are generally classified by the balance of fat and protein they contain. Those with a little fat and a lot of protein are heavier and more dense than the lighter, fluffier, and less dense particles that are more fat than protein. The proteins also act like address labels that help the body route fat-filled particles to specific destinations. "LDL is often referred to as the bad cholesterol...they can end up inside cells that line blood vessels. Once there, LDL is attacked by highly reactive free radicals and transformed into oxidized LDL. Oxidized LDL can damage the artery lining and kick off a cascade of reactions that clog the artery and set the scene for artery-blocking blood clots. "In contrast, HDL particles sponge up excess cholesterol from the lining of blood vessels and elsewhere and carry it to the liver for disposal." He goes on to list several studies: Ancil Keys' 1956 international survey called the Seven Countries Study which found a strong link between saturated fat and heart disease; the Framingham Heart Study, which identified high levels of cholesterol as linked to impending heart disease; the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (both very large cohort studies); the Lyon Diet Heart Study; and others. "In the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of carefully controlled feeding studies among small groups of volunteers showed conclusively that when saturated fat replaced carbohydrate in the diet, total cholesterol levels in the blood rose...." The book also talks about the challenges of practical, large-scale studies of nutrition "in the wild": it's not easy to track and correlate people's eating habits over decades, for any number of reasons.
gkcn 14y ago
403 - Forbidden
- fldrog 14y ago
  the same here
- tista3 14y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAI5zmCTTDUJ:eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-did-we-come-to-believe-saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad-for-us+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=sk&client=firefox-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAI5zmC...
ioquatix 14y ago
Why is this on Hacker News?
- ioquatix 14y ago
  Is this not a valid question? Since when did food and health have anything to do with hacking? This belongs in /r/health
- xlevus 14y ago
  Because it's interesting and satisfies (at least my) curiosity.
  - ioquatix 14y ago
    Sure, it may be so, but what does this have to do with hacker news?
    - thomas11 14y ago
      "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) You could at least read the site's guidelines before complaining.
- conradfr 14y ago
  Somehow I find the diet talks on HN really interesting (but to be fair I don't usually read about that kind of things).
- ufo 14y ago
  My same question. Reading this thread makes me feel like I am watching a PHP conference host a panel on language design.
  - ioquatix 14y ago
bitsoda 14y ago
How about we all just eat real food? Stay in the perimeter of the super market -- with the exception of some canned fish -- and you should be okay. You can't go wrong with fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood, tubers, nuts, and seeds. As for wheat...come on, don't kid yourself. A refined white powder that is highly processed is not real food. Drink water, exercise a few times a week, and get some sun. If nothing else, living this way will make you healthier than most Americans.
- Blara 14y ago
  I do believe you can get fat even if you eat only "real food", the trick is to eat in moderation. If you eat more calories than you use up you will gain weight. It really is that easy. You could loose weight eating pastries only, just as long as you don't eat too much. It wouldn't be healthy though...
  - seabee 14y ago
    Case in point: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.profes...
  - adrianN 14y ago
    It's really hard to eat too many calories if they come in the form of vegetables. Caloric density is important. So are additives like MSG that mess up your sense of satiation.
adv0r 14y ago
Here in Scandinavia is quite popular a diet based on butter and fat. They were abusing it so much that they had a crisis : the butter shortage. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204553904577102332973418996.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020455390457710... funny, isn't it?
shakesbeard 14y ago
At my former company we had free access to beverages (sodas, water, energy drinks, ... even beer). I gained a lot of weight while working there. After I quit I stopped drinking sodas altogether, while mainly keeping my diet (vegetarian, one "big" meal per day + snacking) and level of physical activity. I lost about 18kg (40 pounds) in about 2 months. Went from 103kg to 85kg. I'm 1.84m so that's an ok weight I guess. So that worked for me ... drinking water.
zader 14y ago
Site appears to be down. The Google cache is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAI5zmCTTDUJ:eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-did-we-come-to-believe-saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad-for-us+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAI5zmC... But the meat of his presentation appears to be this video, available on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/45485034 http://vimeo.com/45485034
tokenadult 14y ago
Is the link submitted here throwing 403 errors for other HN users? I notice that many comments here on HN could just as well be responding to the bare title alone, whether or not the participant has read the fine article. Until I can read the article (I can't so far after repeated attempts), I'll give some history of how the cholesterol hypothesis was developed. Ancel Keys, a member of the Terman longitudinal study of high-IQ children and inventor of the K ration for United States soldiers during World War II, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7213-2004Nov23.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7213-2004Nov2... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/obituaries/23keys.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/obituaries/23keys.html?_r=... was active at the University of Minnesota in some key years of his career. http://mbbnet.umn.edu/firsts/blackburn_h.html http://mbbnet.umn.edu/firsts/blackburn_h.html He did studies of human nutrition, including starvation, in an intellectual milieu that included some of the first studies (by other researchers) on surgery to treat heart disease. (It was the surgical research that prompted my mother, a nurse, to move to Minnesota after completing nursing training in another state.) Keys hoped to find a dietary explanation for the prevalence of heart disease in industrialized countries, and he thought his regression methods of statistical analysis pointed to dietary fat and cholesterol as the main risks factors for heart disease. He lived to the age of 100, so it's hard to say that he was completely crazy in his ideas, but the idea that cholesterol intake from the diet alone is the whole story in heart disease rates is now generally discredited, and it is especially controversial to say that a diet of the kind he recommended is as good for all-cause mortality reduction as it appears to be for heart disease reduction. Like all other members of the Terman longitudinal study, Keys was never awarded the Nobel Prize. Two young people who were rejected for the Terman study (William Shockley and Luis Alvarez) because their IQ scores were too low later went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics (in separate years).
- fhoxh 14y ago
  As per his Twitter feed[1]: "We're being kicked off HostGator for crashing their server due to volume. Working to get a dedicated server. Sorry for inconvenience!" In the meantime, Google's cache of this article is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-did-we-come-to-believe-saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad-for-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#... And the direct link to his talk [video] is here: http://vimeo.com/45485034 http://vimeo.com/45485034 [1] https://twitter.com/EatLikePete/statuses/225822001154117632 https://twitter.com/EatLikePete/statuses/225822001154117632
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mbrown77 14y ago
Check out Fat Head. A Documentary response to Super Size Me that discusses how what we "know" about fat and cholesterol was the result of a politician lining his pockets by pushing the agenda of one of his friends in the business world http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fat_Head/70115017?trkid=2361637 http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fat_Head/70115017?trkid=23...

143 points by fhoxh 14y ago

Direct link to video here: https://vimeo.com/45485034

dools 14y ago

Can someone summarise the vid? It won't play on Android ...

lwat 14y ago
Link seems to be dead
- fhoxh 14y ago
  Link seems fine to me: https://vimeo.com/45485034 https://vimeo.com/45485034

activepeanut 14y ago

I've always wondered if the saturated fat in coconuts is bad for you..

waivej 14y ago
Me too. Though the author has a picture of coconuts on his "what I eat" page.
rogerbinns 14y ago
You are looking at things from a "nutrionism" point of view http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.... The answer is simple: Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.
- omgsean 14y ago
  I don't really like that simplification. Potatoes and wheat are both plants and people eat far too much of both.
  - pyre 14y ago
    I assume "not too much" covers that.
  - lukeman 14y ago
    Exactly. Some plants are simply poison, too. And many people have allergies that can make even a small amount of some plants deadly. Nothing gets me ranting like the old "everything in moderation" line.
  - latch 14y ago
    citation needed? When you say wheat, do you mean processed and refined flour? And by potatoes, do you mean chips and fries? Potatoes are loaded with vitamins and minerals. Some of the starch isn't easily digestible and acts similarly to fiber (in addition to the fiber found in the skin). The fact that they are little bombs of nutrition aside (along with sweet potatoes, yummm!), they will also keep fresh for months.
    - lwat 14y ago
      Any wheat and any potatoes according to people like Gary Taubes. Sweet potatoes are probably better than regular spuds. Wheat and potatoes are mostly just carbohydrates which, as explained in the video we're discussing, should be reduced. There's no such thing as an 'essential carbohydrate' and all other vitamins and minerals in potatoes and wheat can also be found in more than sufficient quantities in 'good' foods like meat and leafy veggies.
      - latch 14y ago
        This is where I find Dr. Ludwig's work interesting. My understanding is that you can't just look at nutrients individually. For example, a carbohydrate eaten in a highly processed form is digested, substantially different, at a chemical level, than carbohydrates eaten with fiber. I don't doubt that carbohydrate consumption has gone up and with it, suspiciously, so too has obesity. But I can't help but think we should be looking at the package containing these newly consumed carbohydrates. A mars bars contains 40g of carbohydrate...are people grouping that with 40g of carbohydrates yielded by potatoes and wheat?
SwellJoe 14y ago
Most likely good for you, along the lines of olive oil and avocado. Assuming a good balance of foods.
- lukeman 14y ago
  And certainly better for you than rapeseed (canola) and soy oils.
- Shorel 14y ago
  They have very different smoke points. In short: coconut oil (also palm oil) will be useful after you use it to fry, while olive oil will stop being olive oil after just some heating. In fact, do not fry anything with olive oil. Olive oil should be added to food in your plate only.
Shorel 14y ago
All the people in /r/keto and /r/Paleo will say that you can't possibly eat something better. (Those are subrreddits.)

waivej 14y ago

Summary: bad science led to low fat diet craze. Reduce carbohydrates instead.

lwat 14y ago
Taubes was right
- elviejo 14y ago
  Atkins was right too.
- rmobin 14y ago
  Low-carb diets work for plenty of people (including me), but this is a must-read refutation of Taubes' carbohydrate hypothesis: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-hypothesis-of-obesity.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...
  - fhoxh 14y ago
    Guyenet is a joke. Peter over at HyperLipid recently ripped him to utter shreds: http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/confused.html http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/confused.html http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/insulin-un-dead-and-coffin-nails.html http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/insulin-un-de... Not to mention, Taubes countered Guyenet with a 6-part series refuting Guyenet's widely mocked food-reward/palatability hypothesis: http://garytaubes.com/2011/09/catching-up-on-lost-time-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-carbohydrates-kettles-pots-other-odds-ends-part-i/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/09/catching-up-on-lost-time-ances... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iia/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iib/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iic/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iid/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the... http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates…-part-iie-as-in-“end-and-egh-already/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-–-the...

waivej 14y ago

Try this for the video: http://vimeo.com/45485034 http://vimeo.com/45485034

bhauer 14y ago

Thumbs up for Frederic Bastiat quote. Thumbs down for presumably hosting with WordPress.

dangrossman 14y ago
You presume correctly: http://eatingacademy.com/wp-login.php http://eatingacademy.com/wp-login.php Though all it'd take to fix is 3 clicks to install a caching plugin, usually.

robbiep 14y ago

Our body doesn't posess the enzymes to dehydrate saturated fats, therefore we can't process them as efficiently, Additionally saturated fats lead to cell membrane instability and 'crystallisation' due to the straight-line chemical arrangement of the carbon atoms. Cis - (A type of) unsaturated fats by contrast, have kinks in the chains which induces fluidity into cell membranes. Interestingly Cholesterol is used to maintain membrane stability/'fine-tune' membrane fluidity when there are lots of Cis fats. I haven't listened to the whole talk yet and take it the poster's angle is that there is a lot more to diet, nutrition and preventable diseases like Ischaemic heart disease than just 'saturated fats and cholesterol'. Yes. No doubt. But they are still terrible for you in high doeses, Epidemiological studies have shown this beyond a doubt and the basic science is sound.

ramses 14y ago

Twelve years ago I had read too many peer-reviewed papers to know that low-cholesterol diets were a bad idea, and useless from the point of view of having a good blood-cholesterol profile. Useless because, for example, population study after population study showed that low-cholesterol diets did not improve blood-cholesterol. Furthermore, it was common to find populations with high-cholesterol diets that had an excellent blood-cholesterol profile, and, conversely, populations with low-cholesterol diets and a bad blood-cholesterol profile. A bad idea because, among other things, low-cholesterol diets will immediately lower your blood Testosterone. Recall that cholesterol is the most basic steroid; from it, all other steroids, including anabolic androgenic steroids such as Testosterone, are metabolized. A diet with a good amount of cholesterol is a necessary condition to achieve good levels of Testosterone. Why would a hacker care about his Testosterone levels?? Some examples: Males with high Testosterone perform better in arithmetic and mathematics than males with low testosterone. Males with high Testosterone levels have better short-term-memory. Males with high Testosterone have good mood; whereas low Testosterone causes depression, mood-swings, and angry reactions to minor things. So, for at least 12 years, I have made it a point to have two jumbo eggs for breakfast. And that's not the only source of cholesterol and saturated fat in my diet. I do, however, make sure that I do not ingest too much saturated fat ... and there are too many more details to my diet to discuss here.

paupino_masano 14y ago
It has also been found that diets high in cholesterol and/or saturated fat also lowers testosterone [1,2,3]. I think the best course of action is to reduce rather than eliminate. i.e. "control" your intake of cholesterol and saturated fats. Blindly increasing your intake of either (above acceptable levels) goes against many scientific studies. [1] http://www.drmirkin.com/men/1008.html http://www.drmirkin.com/men/1008.html [2] http://www.ergo-log.com/toomuchcholesterol.html http://www.ergo-log.com/toomuchcholesterol.html [3] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/study-of-the-day-diets-high-in-saturated-fats-may-spoil-semen/254425/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/study-of-t...
- sandGorgon 14y ago

sabat 14y ago

Science?

semenko 14y ago
Watching Hacker News try to interpret scientific data is, well, "like Quora without the Questions."

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

fhoxh 14y ago

Google's cache for this article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-did-we-come-to-believe-saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad-for-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...

user49598 14y ago

I believe it coincided with converting to a nearly sedentary culture. Nothing is as bad for you as being sedentary and since many/most people refuse to exercise, and you can't buy exercise pills (let alone get people to take them), you have to get people to want to cut down on the stuff their body isn't using. Cholesterol isn't bad, saturated fat isn't bad, but if you're sitting around all day festering so are they. Nutrition is far from an exact science and humans from around the world react to foods differently in subtle ways giving any Nutritional conclusions limited relevance. IMHO, The 2 most important things you can do are exercise and pay attention to your body. Also, a lot of these "mis-conceptions" come from media and laymen thinking that phrases like "a link between saturated fat and heart disease" imply causation. Remembered one more thing: A lot of shit food is loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol (and salt and sugar). Frozen dinners, snack cakes and fast food are some great examples. These products, which significantly contribute to the fattening of the world, help give their main flavor sources a bad name.

ladzoppelin 14y ago
Wow that's a great way of explaining the underlying issue. The way that everyone reacts differently to the same foods is also the reason that thousands of different diet books continue to make money. Its a mess and the internet has only added to the confusion.
rubashov 14y ago
> Cholesterol isn't bad, saturated fat isn't bad The issue gets super complicated once you add chronic emotional stress. A huge problem with all these dietary disease models is they ignore cortisol and stress levels, which may ultimately turn out to be the single-most important variable. In short, the original findings to do with fat intake -> cholesterol -> atherosclerosis weren't outright invalid. It's just that in healthy, unstressed people the final link to atherosclerosis doesn't actually happen, even in old age. But the situation in the industrialized world is massive numbers of people living in chronic stress, so who knows. Turns out chronically elevated cortisol levels produces the arterial damage that make "bad" cholesterol a problem at all.

latch 14y ago

While it's really interesting to debate whether you should eat potatoes or beef, the real battle for the western world is that we stop eating processed foods. Wheat vs eggs seems like a silly debate when people are living off of Coke, Oreos and Capt'N Crunch. Whenever I hear these arguments, I feel like these scientists aren't living in the same world as me. "Eggs are ok, declare scientists" reads the headline while the man sips from 32 oz soda. In addition to that, having no education in biology, chemistry or any field remotely associated with health and fitness, I do have two eyes. In light of all the contradicting information and conspiracy theories, I'll trust what I've observed. And, what I've observed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that people who favor fruits and vegetables, grains and legumes over beef, pork and fatty foods are healthier.

unreal37 14y ago
You should read the book "Wheat Belly". That will bust that myth about grains and fruits for you.
- markerdmann 14y ago
  This blog post presents some interesting criticisms of the book "Wheat Belly": http://noglutennoproblem.blogspot.com/2012/03/wheat-belly-busted.html http://noglutennoproblem.blogspot.com/2012/03/wheat-belly-bu... It sounds like the book often misrepresents the research that it cites.
  - bitsoda 14y ago
    It seems that the only real error made by Wheat Belly's author was bending the study by claiming its subjects were all obese with celiac disease. Apart from this, the comments contains many anecdotal responses from people who have dropped not only gluten, but all grain from their diet and had positive results. Moreover, take into account the blog's author who has published three books circulating around gluten-free foods -- something that Wheat Belly advises the reader to jettison altogether.
- latch 14y ago

schultkl 14y ago

I defer to Walter C. Willet, M.D., who writes in "Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy" (co-developed with the Harvard School of Public Health): "There's no question that two types of fat -- saturated fat, the kind that's abundant in whole milk or red meat, and trans fats, which are found in many margarines and vegetable shortenings -- contribute to the artery-clogging process that leads to heart disease, stroke, and other problems...monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats found in olive oil and other vegetable oils, nuts, whole grains, other plant products, and fish -- are good for your heart.... Our bottom line is this: It is perfectly fine to get more than 30 percent of your daily calories from fats as long as most of those fats are unsaturated." "The term saturated means that the carbon atoms in a chain hold as many hydrogen atoms as they can...saturated fats come in gradations of bad...butter and other dairy products most strongly increase LDL (bad) cholesterol. Those in beef fat aren't quite as powerful at boosting LDL and those in chocolate and cocoa butter have an even smaller impact." HDL and LDL are lipoproteins: "...fats must somehow get from your digestive system to your cells...like oil and water, fats and blood don't mix. If your intestines or liver simply dumped digested fats into your blood, they would congeal into unusable globs. Instead fat is packaged into protein-covered particles that mix easily with blood and flow with it. These tiny particles, called lipoproteins (lipid plus protein), contain some cholesterol to help stabilize the particles. "Lipoproteins are generally classified by the balance of fat and protein they contain. Those with a little fat and a lot of protein are heavier and more dense than the lighter, fluffier, and less dense particles that are more fat than protein. The proteins also act like address labels that help the body route fat-filled particles to specific destinations. "LDL is often referred to as the bad cholesterol...they can end up inside cells that line blood vessels. Once there, LDL is attacked by highly reactive free radicals and transformed into oxidized LDL. Oxidized LDL can damage the artery lining and kick off a cascade of reactions that clog the artery and set the scene for artery-blocking blood clots. "In contrast, HDL particles sponge up excess cholesterol from the lining of blood vessels and elsewhere and carry it to the liver for disposal." He goes on to list several studies: Ancil Keys' 1956 international survey called the Seven Countries Study which found a strong link between saturated fat and heart disease; the Framingham Heart Study, which identified high levels of cholesterol as linked to impending heart disease; the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (both very large cohort studies); the Lyon Diet Heart Study; and others. "In the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of carefully controlled feeding studies among small groups of volunteers showed conclusively that when saturated fat replaced carbohydrate in the diet, total cholesterol levels in the blood rose...." The book also talks about the challenges of practical, large-scale studies of nutrition "in the wild": it's not easy to track and correlate people's eating habits over decades, for any number of reasons.

gkcn 14y ago

403 - Forbidden

fldrog 14y ago
the same here
tista3 14y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAI5zmCTTDUJ:eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-did-we-come-to-believe-saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad-for-us+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=sk&client=firefox-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAI5zmC...

ioquatix 14y ago

Why is this on Hacker News?

ioquatix 14y ago
Is this not a valid question? Since when did food and health have anything to do with hacking? This belongs in /r/health
xlevus 14y ago
Because it's interesting and satisfies (at least my) curiosity.
- ioquatix 14y ago
  Sure, it may be so, but what does this have to do with hacker news?
  - thomas11 14y ago
    "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) You could at least read the site's guidelines before complaining.
conradfr 14y ago
Somehow I find the diet talks on HN really interesting (but to be fair I don't usually read about that kind of things).
ufo 14y ago
My same question. Reading this thread makes me feel like I am watching a PHP conference host a panel on language design.
- ioquatix 14y ago

bitsoda 14y ago

How about we all just eat real food? Stay in the perimeter of the super market -- with the exception of some canned fish -- and you should be okay. You can't go wrong with fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood, tubers, nuts, and seeds. As for wheat...come on, don't kid yourself. A refined white powder that is highly processed is not real food. Drink water, exercise a few times a week, and get some sun. If nothing else, living this way will make you healthier than most Americans.

Blara 14y ago
I do believe you can get fat even if you eat only "real food", the trick is to eat in moderation. If you eat more calories than you use up you will gain weight. It really is that easy. You could loose weight eating pastries only, just as long as you don't eat too much. It wouldn't be healthy though...
- seabee 14y ago
  Case in point: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.profes...
- adrianN 14y ago
  It's really hard to eat too many calories if they come in the form of vegetables. Caloric density is important. So are additives like MSG that mess up your sense of satiation.

adv0r 14y ago

Here in Scandinavia is quite popular a diet based on butter and fat. They were abusing it so much that they had a crisis : the butter shortage. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204553904577102332973418996.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020455390457710... funny, isn't it?

shakesbeard 14y ago

At my former company we had free access to beverages (sodas, water, energy drinks, ... even beer). I gained a lot of weight while working there. After I quit I stopped drinking sodas altogether, while mainly keeping my diet (vegetarian, one "big" meal per day + snacking) and level of physical activity. I lost about 18kg (40 pounds) in about 2 months. Went from 103kg to 85kg. I'm 1.84m so that's an ok weight I guess. So that worked for me ... drinking water.

zader 14y ago

Site appears to be down. The Google cache is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAI5zmCTTDUJ:eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-did-we-come-to-believe-saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad-for-us+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAI5zmC... But the meat of his presentation appears to be this video, available on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/45485034 http://vimeo.com/45485034

tokenadult 14y ago

Is the link submitted here throwing 403 errors for other HN users? I notice that many comments here on HN could just as well be responding to the bare title alone, whether or not the participant has read the fine article. Until I can read the article (I can't so far after repeated attempts), I'll give some history of how the cholesterol hypothesis was developed. Ancel Keys, a member of the Terman longitudinal study of high-IQ children and inventor of the K ration for United States soldiers during World War II, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7213-2004Nov23.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7213-2004Nov2... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/obituaries/23keys.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/obituaries/23keys.html?_r=... was active at the University of Minnesota in some key years of his career. http://mbbnet.umn.edu/firsts/blackburn_h.html http://mbbnet.umn.edu/firsts/blackburn_h.html He did studies of human nutrition, including starvation, in an intellectual milieu that included some of the first studies (by other researchers) on surgery to treat heart disease. (It was the surgical research that prompted my mother, a nurse, to move to Minnesota after completing nursing training in another state.) Keys hoped to find a dietary explanation for the prevalence of heart disease in industrialized countries, and he thought his regression methods of statistical analysis pointed to dietary fat and cholesterol as the main risks factors for heart disease. He lived to the age of 100, so it's hard to say that he was completely crazy in his ideas, but the idea that cholesterol intake from the diet alone is the whole story in heart disease rates is now generally discredited, and it is especially controversial to say that a diet of the kind he recommended is as good for all-cause mortality reduction as it appears to be for heart disease reduction. Like all other members of the Terman longitudinal study, Keys was never awarded the Nobel Prize. Two young people who were rejected for the Terman study (William Shockley and Luis Alvarez) because their IQ scores were too low later went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics (in separate years).

fhoxh 14y ago
As per his Twitter feed[1]: "We're being kicked off HostGator for crashing their server due to volume. Working to get a dedicated server. Sorry for inconvenience!" In the meantime, Google's cache of this article is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-did-we-come-to-believe-saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad-for-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#... And the direct link to his talk [video] is here: http://vimeo.com/45485034 http://vimeo.com/45485034 [1] https://twitter.com/EatLikePete/statuses/225822001154117632 https://twitter.com/EatLikePete/statuses/225822001154117632

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mbrown77 14y ago

Check out Fat Head. A Documentary response to Super Size Me that discusses how what we "know" about fat and cholesterol was the result of a politician lining his pockets by pushing the agenda of one of his friends in the business world http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fat_Head/70115017?trkid=2361637 http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fat_Head/70115017?trkid=23...