7 ms·

You’re exactly right: This one incident did not shape the entire body of scientific research. There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a

by Aurornis 10mo ago

You’re exactly right: This one incident did not shape the entire body of scientific research. There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though. In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you. There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.

llm_nerd 10mo ago
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter. > excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal. Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
- Retric 10mo ago
  The 80’s anti fat diet was mostly clogged arteries before we had all these anti cholesterol drugs and research showing how little impact dietary cholesterol has. US obesity simply wasn’t as common (15% in 1985 vs 40% today) and at the time most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place even earlier. Further many people that recently became obese didn’t have enough time for the health impact to hit and the increase of 2% between 1965 and 1985 just didn’t seem that important. Thus calories alone were less vilified. Put another way when 15% of the population is obese a large fraction of them recently became obese (last 10 years), where at 40% the obese population tends to be both heavier and have been obese for much longer. Heath impacts of obesity depend both on levels of obesity and how long people were obese.
  - llm_nerd 10mo ago
    The government and medical groups were advocating lower fat diets for CVD reasons, but among the mainstream it took hold overwhelmingly because it was seen as a mechanism for weight reduction or management. A gram of fat has twice the calories of a gram of protein or carbs, and this was widely repeated (yes, I was alive then). Similarly, if being fat was bad (and yes, it was viewed as very bad), then fat as a component of food must similarly be bad. Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch". "Thus calories alone were less vilified." I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality. In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.
    - 10mo ago
Teever 10mo ago
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions. This clip summarizes the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo
- cassepipe 10mo ago
  First time ever I get : "The uploader has not made this video available in your country"
pseidemann 10mo ago
Such "science" should be illegal.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  What, specifically? Industry funded research? Results that disagree with the current consensus? Nutrition science entirely?
- entropicdrifter 10mo ago
  If propaganda was illegal, who would decide what was propaganda and what was simply argumentation made from positions of relative ignorance?
  - pydry 10mo ago
    The courts could easily decide whether a message has been paid for or not.
    - NetMageSCW 10mo ago
      All messages are paid for by someone.
- stanford_labrat 10mo ago
  the greatest travesty of modern science is that fraud is not illegal. in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
  - ceejayoz 10mo ago
    It's not legal, but intentional misconduct can be tough to prove. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/professor-charged-operating-multimillion-dollar-grant-fraud-scheme https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/professor-charged-op... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben > in every other industry that i can imagine Our own industry (tech) is rife with unpunished fraud.
deadbabe 10mo ago
But there is also the fallacy where some people want you to believe basically everything will cause CVD and there is no single thing you could do to change it, so therefore just keep doing whatever you’re doing.
- cogman10 10mo ago
  I've never seen this fallacy. What I've seen is that the best and most well documented way to prevent CVD is the DASH diet paired with exercise and potentially statins. If you are an unhealthy weight you are both eating too much and/or not exercising enough. High calorie foods can be fatty, sugary, or both.
- ademup 10mo ago
  I call this the "Everything in Moderation" fallacy. From what I've heard people who say it, they emphasize the everything part of it. In other words almost everything is bad for you so just eat a little bit of everything and you won't get too much of the bad stuff. It's maddening.
  - darth_avocado 10mo ago
    I don’t think “Everything in Moderation” means you won’t get too much of the bad stuff. The philosophy alludes to the fact that in the modern world, trying to have the ideal diet is exhausting and near impossible. Lack of choice, money, time, education, self control etc. all contribute to you intentionally or unintentionally eating stuff that’s going to do irreparable harm to you. You could be eating salads and somehow poisoning yourself with pesticides and high sugar/fat/sodium salad dressings. Which is why this philosophy focuses on, do everything in moderation and you’ll maybe avoid CVD and other diseases for longer. It is meant for people who cannot meet the idealistic standards of what you are supposed to do.
    - overgard 10mo ago
      Is it really that exhausting though? I've been on a zero-carb diet for two months (other than thanksgiving or christmas), and it really hasn't been hard at all. If I eat at a restaurant there's some things I can't avoid (seed oils), but otherwise it's not too hard to look at a menu and see things I can eat. The only hard part is to be optimally healthy I need to cook for myself, but that's always been true. In a lot of ways, it's actually been easier. Because my blood sugar isn't crashing every few hours, I can easily skip a meal and feel perfectly fine. Fasting is very easy for me now, which it wasn't at all on an unhealthy diet.
cogman10 10mo ago
The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions. It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000. The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth. This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers. That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans. Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
- junofan 10mo ago
  I disagree. Demand is the big problem, not supply. The general public possesses domain-independent expertise on social pressures, institutional and financial incentives, and other non-epistemological factors that in some cases can support a rational rejection of scientific consensus. Inadequate gatekeeping—premature or belated consensus or revision—is a failure of a given field of inquiry, not a failure of the general public. More here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05423-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05423-7
overgard 10mo ago
I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions) Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
- fasterik 10mo ago
  That has nothing to do with whether excesses of those nutrients cause cardiovascular disease, though. The general consensus is that the healthiest diet is one with 5-10% of total calories from saturated fat. For most people, it's necessary to restrict saturated fat to land in that range. We also need to distinguish between sugar and carbohydrates. Again, the general consensus is that intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates should be minimized, while 50-75% of total calories should come from sources of complex carbohydrates like vegetables, beans, and whole grains.
  - wan23 10mo ago
    Funny you should say that after today's FDA announcement. (Not taking any side here just interested in how we determine what is a consensus these days)
    - fasterik 10mo ago
      It's hard, because when an issue becomes politicized everyone has their own preferred "consensus". I would say it should come from the scientific community, not government agencies. Sometimes government agencies agree with the scientific consensus, but not always. My go-to source for nutrition information is Understanding Nutrition by Whitney and Rolfes.
      - mr_toad 10mo ago
        > everyone has their own preferred "consensus" For some people choice of diet really does seem core to their identity. It’s literally all the OP ever posts about.
manmal 10mo ago
[flagged]
jklinger410 10mo ago
> There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game. Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people. Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
- kudeyar 10mo ago
  indeed, it's such a commonsense matter that i wonder who's the intended audience and whether there's really any issue. rather like MSM eating its own tail, it's happening way over there and our lives continue irreguardless.
buu700 10mo ago
You're right that extrapolating from one flaw to claim wholesale debunking is a common logical fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Logic-Chopping https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Logic-C.... Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients. In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
- bruce511 10mo ago
  I think the benefits of "low fat" may have been dulled by how literally people took that message, and what companies replaced the fat with. Most available "low fat" products compensated by adding sugar. Lots of sugar. That way it still tastes nice, but its healthy right? Just like fruit juice with "no added sugar" (concentration via evaporation doesn't count) is a healthy alternative to soda right? In truth your body is perfectly happy converting sugar to weight, with the bonus that it messes up the insulin cycle. At a fundamental level consuming more calories than you burn makes you gain weight. Reducing refined sugar is the simplest way to reduce calories (and solves other health issues.) Reducing carbohydrates is next (since carbs are just sugar, but take a bit longer to digest). The more unprocessed the carb the better. Reducing fat (for some, by a lot) is next (although reduce not eliminate. ) Both sides want to blame the other. But the current pendulum is very much on the "too much sugar/ carbs" side of things.
  - buu700 10mo ago
    Agreed, this is a big part of the problem. The average person doesn't have anything resembling a coherent mental model of nutrition, and vague conflicting nutritional advice only adds to the confusion. The average person doesn't even know what a carb is, much less understand the biochemistry of how their body processes one. Does "reduce fat consumption" mean a proportional reduction (i.e. increase carb/protein consumption) or an absolute reduction (i.e. decrease overall caloric intake)? In either case, what macros and level of caloric intake relative to TDEE are the assumed starting point? Who knows, but the net effect has been multiple generations hooked on absurd concentrations of sugar and UPFs.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

llm_nerd 10mo ago

> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter. > excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal. Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".

Retric 10mo ago
The 80’s anti fat diet was mostly clogged arteries before we had all these anti cholesterol drugs and research showing how little impact dietary cholesterol has. US obesity simply wasn’t as common (15% in 1985 vs 40% today) and at the time most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place even earlier. Further many people that recently became obese didn’t have enough time for the health impact to hit and the increase of 2% between 1965 and 1985 just didn’t seem that important. Thus calories alone were less vilified. Put another way when 15% of the population is obese a large fraction of them recently became obese (last 10 years), where at 40% the obese population tends to be both heavier and have been obese for much longer. Heath impacts of obesity depend both on levels of obesity and how long people were obese.
- llm_nerd 10mo ago
  The government and medical groups were advocating lower fat diets for CVD reasons, but among the mainstream it took hold overwhelmingly because it was seen as a mechanism for weight reduction or management. A gram of fat has twice the calories of a gram of protein or carbs, and this was widely repeated (yes, I was alive then). Similarly, if being fat was bad (and yes, it was viewed as very bad), then fat as a component of food must similarly be bad. Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch". "Thus calories alone were less vilified." I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality. In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.
  - 10mo ago

Teever 10mo ago

> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions. This clip summarizes the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo

cassepipe 10mo ago
First time ever I get : "The uploader has not made this video available in your country"

pseidemann 10mo ago

Such "science" should be illegal.

ceejayoz 10mo ago
What, specifically? Industry funded research? Results that disagree with the current consensus? Nutrition science entirely?
entropicdrifter 10mo ago
If propaganda was illegal, who would decide what was propaganda and what was simply argumentation made from positions of relative ignorance?
- pydry 10mo ago
  The courts could easily decide whether a message has been paid for or not.
  - NetMageSCW 10mo ago
    All messages are paid for by someone.
stanford_labrat 10mo ago
the greatest travesty of modern science is that fraud is not illegal. in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  It's not legal, but intentional misconduct can be tough to prove. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/professor-charged-operating-multimillion-dollar-grant-fraud-scheme https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/professor-charged-op... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben > in every other industry that i can imagine Our own industry (tech) is rife with unpunished fraud.

deadbabe 10mo ago

But there is also the fallacy where some people want you to believe basically everything will cause CVD and there is no single thing you could do to change it, so therefore just keep doing whatever you’re doing.

cogman10 10mo ago
I've never seen this fallacy. What I've seen is that the best and most well documented way to prevent CVD is the DASH diet paired with exercise and potentially statins. If you are an unhealthy weight you are both eating too much and/or not exercising enough. High calorie foods can be fatty, sugary, or both.
ademup 10mo ago
I call this the "Everything in Moderation" fallacy. From what I've heard people who say it, they emphasize the everything part of it. In other words almost everything is bad for you so just eat a little bit of everything and you won't get too much of the bad stuff. It's maddening.
- darth_avocado 10mo ago
  I don’t think “Everything in Moderation” means you won’t get too much of the bad stuff. The philosophy alludes to the fact that in the modern world, trying to have the ideal diet is exhausting and near impossible. Lack of choice, money, time, education, self control etc. all contribute to you intentionally or unintentionally eating stuff that’s going to do irreparable harm to you. You could be eating salads and somehow poisoning yourself with pesticides and high sugar/fat/sodium salad dressings. Which is why this philosophy focuses on, do everything in moderation and you’ll maybe avoid CVD and other diseases for longer. It is meant for people who cannot meet the idealistic standards of what you are supposed to do.
  - overgard 10mo ago
    Is it really that exhausting though? I've been on a zero-carb diet for two months (other than thanksgiving or christmas), and it really hasn't been hard at all. If I eat at a restaurant there's some things I can't avoid (seed oils), but otherwise it's not too hard to look at a menu and see things I can eat. The only hard part is to be optimally healthy I need to cook for myself, but that's always been true. In a lot of ways, it's actually been easier. Because my blood sugar isn't crashing every few hours, I can easily skip a meal and feel perfectly fine. Fasting is very easy for me now, which it wasn't at all on an unhealthy diet.

cogman10 10mo ago

The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions. It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000. The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth. This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers. That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans. Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.

junofan 10mo ago
I disagree. Demand is the big problem, not supply. The general public possesses domain-independent expertise on social pressures, institutional and financial incentives, and other non-epistemological factors that in some cases can support a rational rejection of scientific consensus. Inadequate gatekeeping—premature or belated consensus or revision—is a failure of a given field of inquiry, not a failure of the general public. More here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05423-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05423-7

overgard 10mo ago

I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions) Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.

fasterik 10mo ago
That has nothing to do with whether excesses of those nutrients cause cardiovascular disease, though. The general consensus is that the healthiest diet is one with 5-10% of total calories from saturated fat. For most people, it's necessary to restrict saturated fat to land in that range. We also need to distinguish between sugar and carbohydrates. Again, the general consensus is that intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates should be minimized, while 50-75% of total calories should come from sources of complex carbohydrates like vegetables, beans, and whole grains.
- wan23 10mo ago
  Funny you should say that after today's FDA announcement. (Not taking any side here just interested in how we determine what is a consensus these days)
  - fasterik 10mo ago
    It's hard, because when an issue becomes politicized everyone has their own preferred "consensus". I would say it should come from the scientific community, not government agencies. Sometimes government agencies agree with the scientific consensus, but not always. My go-to source for nutrition information is Understanding Nutrition by Whitney and Rolfes.
    - mr_toad 10mo ago
      > everyone has their own preferred "consensus" For some people choice of diet really does seem core to their identity. It’s literally all the OP ever posts about.

manmal 10mo ago

[flagged]

jklinger410 10mo ago

> There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game. Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people. Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.

kudeyar 10mo ago
indeed, it's such a commonsense matter that i wonder who's the intended audience and whether there's really any issue. rather like MSM eating its own tail, it's happening way over there and our lives continue irreguardless.

buu700 10mo ago

You're right that extrapolating from one flaw to claim wholesale debunking is a common logical fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Logic-Chopping https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Logic-C.... Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients. In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.

bruce511 10mo ago
I think the benefits of "low fat" may have been dulled by how literally people took that message, and what companies replaced the fat with. Most available "low fat" products compensated by adding sugar. Lots of sugar. That way it still tastes nice, but its healthy right? Just like fruit juice with "no added sugar" (concentration via evaporation doesn't count) is a healthy alternative to soda right? In truth your body is perfectly happy converting sugar to weight, with the bonus that it messes up the insulin cycle. At a fundamental level consuming more calories than you burn makes you gain weight. Reducing refined sugar is the simplest way to reduce calories (and solves other health issues.) Reducing carbohydrates is next (since carbs are just sugar, but take a bit longer to digest). The more unprocessed the carb the better. Reducing fat (for some, by a lot) is next (although reduce not eliminate. ) Both sides want to blame the other. But the current pendulum is very much on the "too much sugar/ carbs" side of things.
- buu700 10mo ago
  Agreed, this is a big part of the problem. The average person doesn't have anything resembling a coherent mental model of nutrition, and vague conflicting nutritional advice only adds to the confusion. The average person doesn't even know what a carb is, much less understand the biochemistry of how their body processes one. Does "reduce fat consumption" mean a proportional reduction (i.e. increase carb/protein consumption) or an absolute reduction (i.e. decrease overall caloric intake)? In either case, what macros and level of caloric intake relative to TDEE are the assumed starting point? Who knows, but the net effect has been multiple generations hooked on absurd concentrations of sugar and UPFs.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]