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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, there is no research stating that lowering dietary cholesterol leads to lowered blood levels and the reversal of fatty liver disease.

There is research stating that fatty liver disease exists due to long term over-production of cholesterol in the liver, caused by low dietary cholesterol, and increasing dietary cholesterol can lead to the reversal of fatty liver disease; and such research isn't really cutting edge, much of it is around a decade old now.

The FDA has reversed course on this, and is no longer hammering its anti-cholesterol drum.

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> much of it is around a decade old now

Has your doctor done any research/training about cholesterol in the last 10 years?

I'm being snarky. But I think it's important to consider the lifecycle of doctor careers. If you go to a liver or cholesterol specialist, then I'm sure they will be up to date with even findings from the last year. But I wouldn't expect a GP to be up to date on what every field within medicine has decided in the last decade after years and years of back-and-forth.

It's almost like asking a computer scientist to know both the difference between Angular and React, and how to rewrite COBOL mainframe code into Lisp. The actual job of a computer scientist is writing proofs in Coq and understanding the difference between lexical and context-free grammars.

> The actual job of a computer scientist is writing proofs in Coq

I was with you, but then this analogy went too far.

You have a misinformed view of what a "computer scientist" is; I have never written a Coq proof, but I think my publication record buys me the label "computer scientist".

(I recognize you were probably usually your specific examples as examples of a kind, but it's that kind which I think is misinformed. You probably think a "computer scientist" must necessarily be a theoretician, which is not the case.)

I think you would be saved by rephrasing to indicate a particular computer scientist. People are getting overly pedantic.

It's okay. That's how engineers and computer scientists work. The idea of "generalization" and "hyperbole" and "caricature" is often lost on us.

This is primarily why my technical blogging has slowed down significantly. Writing for an audience that cares more about details than The Point (tm) is often annoying.

Actually, to nitpick on the details, it's both. We care about the details AND the point. The details sometimes take you to The Point.

For example, I on your original post, I was trying to figure out if you meant "Computer Scientists are theoreticians" through the details. If you're not going to outright say something straight to the point, the details better be clear so that one can understand the implication.

That's the thing, there were no details, it was a caricature.

I've never heard of a person rewriting COBOL into Lisp in 2015. But I do personally know people who write Coq proofs and care about differences between strengths of various grammars.

Maybe that's the problem - that part came too close to reality and triggered people's spidey senses.

But most anti-cholesterol diets lower animal fat intake, not dietary cholesterol intake. Is this supposed not to work?

I had high cholesterol for years, I didn't take it very seriously because I'm otherwise healthy and I was eating healthy, but when I decided to take care of it I got it from around 210mg/dL to something like 140mg/dL just by changing all my meat/cheese to low fat alternatives as my doctor said. I am a big eater though, so maybe it doesn't make as much a difference for people that don't eat so much.

There were two suspected causes of high blood cholesterol-

1) dietary saturated fat (e.g. beef)

2) dietary cholesterol (e.g. chicken eggs)

Classical anti-(blood)cholesterol diets recommend avoiding both.

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