Hacker News Reader

Comment by mchmch | Hacker News Reader

This one minute video will save your life. FAT is the cause of type 2 diabetes. Fat in cells stops your body from processing sugar correctly. You need to reduce dietary fat to very low levels and your body will be able to process carbs correctly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S51D07bvlPY

View on HN

http://www.ncahf.org/articles/o-r/pcrm.html

The guy on that video is well known by Quackwatch. He is a vegan evangelist, and also teaches that proteins are not required in the diet.

It's motivated nonsense.

there is a contingent of vegan proselytizers on hn that always post this stuff when low-carb or keto diets are discussed.

> He is a vegan evangelist, and also teaches that proteins are not required in the diet.

If anything is nonsense, it's your statement. Can you explain where he suggests such a thing?

Speaking of "motivated nonsense". The millions of dollars the meat/dairy industry spends on political campaigns and the revolving door at the NIH might concern you :)

http://qz.com/523255/the-us-meat-industrys-wildly-successful...

Eating a diet based heavily on animal products is almost as stupid as smoking cigarettes. If we didn't have so many wonder drugs keeping people who make bad choices alive, it would be obvious by now. Luckily, drug companies and meat peddlers don't have to worry because the propaganda is working... as evidenced by all of the ignorant comments here.

The spending of any large industry on political influence concerns me.

But the link doesn't say much. Very similar arguments are used to discredit climate science ('big climate science') vaccinations ('big pharma') and things that do need discrediting ('big tobacco'). An argument like that has little signal, but it does allow people who are already convinced to post-hoc rationalise their position.

Why omit the millions of dollars spent by the corn lobby or various seeds-related lobbyists (of which Monsanto is the most well-known donor)? Or very California-specific nuts lobby, and until recently bottled water lobbying? Excluding the food groups associated with major lobbying spending might not lead to an optimal diet.

Dangerous nonsense. Do you fatten up a goose by feeding it butter, or by feeding it grain? Since America fell in love with a low-fat diet, have Americans become lighter, or heavier?

Americans never fell in love with a low fat diet. Our diet is extremely high in fat and individuals that are obese consume much a much higher amount than average. By very low fat, I am saying reduce saturated fat to near 0 and limit intake of unsaturated fat to 30g or less a day.

http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/average-fat-intake-sad-11370...

Well, whatever the fat intake, it won't be enough to mitigate the refined wheat, and sugars.

What about instead of fat, wheat and sugars, we eat whole plant foods, which are the most physiologically appropriate things to put into our bodies?

Pure vegan diets work for some, yet lead to feelings of constant hunger, weakness, lack of energy, sleepiness or headaches in others. As a result, people who try them frequently revert back to their old ways with vengeance when they need that extra boost of energy, and yo-yo dieting usually leads to worst outcomes than no dieting at all.

If a pure vegan diet worked for you and your gut bacteria, that's great. It's a challenge for a lot of others.

That doesn't even make sense at all. Fat stored in cells != Dietary fat. You can gain tons of weight by just eating carbs.

Dietary fat -> Bloodstream -> Cells

That still doesn't make any sense. When you consume fat, carbs, or protein, those cells do not directly become part of your body. They're broken down and are either used as energy or reassembled into different types of cells based on the body's needs.

And to add onto that, it's insulin the protein that sends the signal for your body to store fat.

...and guess who's the bigger culprit for inducing insulin production. Hint: It's not fat.

I commend your effort, but don't even try bringing up Veganism on Hacker News. I've tried to do the same and low-carb dogma ideologues lost their minds to the point logical and evidence-based dialogue became impossible. My own theory is, there is too much emotional attachment to eating meat, dairy and eggs in Americans to consider Veganism seriously. They will perform incredible mental gymnastics to justify their violent ideology promoted and ingrained by USDA and Animal Ag.

Regarding the NY Times article itself - it is the usual incoherent nonsense, citing how "USDA began recommending a high-carb, low-fat diet" as if to imply Americans then started eating whole plant foods, instead of added sugars and refined carbohydrate. Ignored also are the many studies pointing out low-carb diets are not satiating and promote weight gain and death (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), which is obvious to anyone who has had an unbiased look into Atkins "nightmare" diets [11]. Who wrote the article? None other than a "director" at an organization paid for by Laura and John D. Arnold, which have substantial ties[6] to animal agriculture industry (Another poster in this thread linked to a website trying to discredit Dr. Greger which the Arnold Foundation also paid for.)

The low-carb ideologues will vehemently deny the current scientific consensus that we should derive a majority of our calories from carbohydrate (7, 8), citing flawed, biased or outright retracted research, akin to deniers of anthropogenic climate change, which is not ironic given animal agriculture also happens to be the leading cause of climate change (9). The long - and the short of it - is that humans are natural plant eaters; whole plant foods are most appropriate to our physiology (10). I, for one, am sick of the carbophobic low-carb propaganda.

. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7498104 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20820038 3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25246449 4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19828712 5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20820038 6. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/the-money-behind-the-f... 7. http://www.fao.org/docrep/w8079e/w8079e00.htm 8. http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?Rec... 9. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5wfMNNr3ak 11. http://www.atkinsexposed.org/

Since you dropped a load of references I thought I might as well critique the ones in the first batch to satisfy my curiosity (the other citations would be less surprising to me, though I didn't check them).

1. This doesn't analyze low-carb vs. high-carb diets, it's just a study of satiety indices. The lowest satiety index foods were all high in carbs, as one would expect (croissants, cake and donuts were the bottom three) as were the highest satiety index foods (boiled potatoes). There were only 4 items on a list of 38 items that would be considered acceptable low-carb foods if you were trying to hit the keto subreddit's 20g low-carb diet (cheese, eggs, steak and fish). Everything else had a high amount of carbs, with the next highest protein foods being yoghurt, baked beans and lentils, which all contain significant amounts of carbs.

2. This study compares a low-carb animal diet to a low-carb vegetable diet, and therefore does not address the topic you described.

3. See the prior point.

4. This study compared saturated fat to monounsaturated fat, and thus does not address the question of low-carb vs. high carb diets in particular.

5. This link is a duplicate of 2, so see point 2.

How do you explain France (high-fat diet, average amount of plant consumption, lowest rates of heart disease) and Mexico (diet heavily reliant on rice, beans and other plants, yet the world leader in obesity)?

How do I explain a completely made-up, non-scientific, anecdotal conjecture you've just thought up? What you're saying is ridiculous.

Both of these things are not just google'able, they're wikipedia'able.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Mexico

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_paradox

Reply on news.ycombinator.com