Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcavezza | Hacker News Reader

<<< The new view on cholesterol in food does not reverse warnings about high levels of “bad” cholesterol in the blood, which have been linked to heart disease. Moreover, some experts warned that people with particular health problems, such as diabetes, should continue to avoid cholesterol-rich diets.

<<<The greater danger in this regard, these experts believe, lies not in products such as eggs, shrimp or lobster, which are high in cholesterol, but in too many servings of foods heavy with saturated fats, such as fatty meats, whole milk, and butter.

Here is my paraphrased takeaway:

Cholesterol you see in your blood results is still bad. Whole milk, butter, and fatty meats is still bad. Foods like eggs, shrimp, and lobster might be good.

I don't think this changes any of my mental models. The foods that I always thought of as "probably not great" are still classified as such, according to this article.

View on HN

> Whole milk, butter, and fatty meats is still bad

You're sure of that?

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/12/275376259/the...

My main takeaway:

> "Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome," John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and statistics at Stanford and one of the harshest critics of nutritional science, has written.

Even in that article, they say it's just associated with reduced obesity, and saturated fats in dairy are still associated with heart disease.

This is inaccurate.

Pubmed studies show that butter is not related to heart disease https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/behindtheheadlines...

I'm just relating what's in the article. Thanks for sharing that, though.

For instance, here's a handy guide to what causes or cures cancer http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/a-z/b

This is an illuminating comment on the state of research, and it needs more awareness.

Dietary cholesterol is now suspected to be essentially irrelevant to health. We know this because, among other things, some people eat diets with 10-100x as much cholesterol as some other people, and they don't immediately develop heart disease.

Blood cholesterol, on the other hand, seems to be essentially a thing the body does while storing excess quantities of fat. The obese will usually have high blood cholesterol, the non-obese will usually not have high blood cholesterol... whether they're on a zero-fat zero-cholesterol diet or not.

So basically, they're two different things: Long-term, blood cholesterol is mostly created endogenously independent of diet, and dietary cholesterol does not convert to blood cholesterol.

Still really incomplete. Medium-chain-triglycerides, for example, are still listed as saturated fats but don't carry the same negative weight that long-chain fatty acids do.[1]

"Probably not great" food has vacillated greatly over the decades, eggs being the cliche example. Dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol are often not directly connected.[2] The relationship between (any) saturated fats and blood cholesterol is not clearcut.

[1] http://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(03)00070...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22037012

Of course then there is Linus Pauling who says that cholesterol has noting to do with heart disease, which he called chronic scurvy, insufficient L-ascorbic acid and lysine is the real underlying cause.

I'm throwing my lot in with Linus, he was as smart or smarter than probably anyone in history, and he wasn't making money from his discovery.

Not sure if you are joking, but Pauling was pretty wrong when talking about vitamin C. His ideas were repeatedly rejected by actual research studies and yet he kept pursuing vitamin C. I assign him very little credibility in this arena.

Also he was making money from the sale of his books.

> Foods like eggs, shrimp, and lobster might be good.

You mean "might not be bad". There's a whole lot of gray area between "bad" and "good".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com