Replacing butter with vegetable oils does not cut heart disease risk (2016)

If the sample size was large enough and you could factor our everything else, then yes. I don't think anything like this was done, though.

What exactly is your point, then?

In Netherlands it is common to have rather cold temperatures in houses even if people can afford to pay for warmth. And cold requires body to spend much more energy that is coming directly from burning body fat unless one shivering from cold.

In fact if one wants to loose like 10 kilos quickly, just climb to Everest. Most of that weight will be spent on body heating, not muscular work.

That also explains why butter does not harm people in Tibet. It is not stored as body fat and goes directly into body heat.

You are right that being active is also very important for cardiovascular health. However, you cannot underestimate the importance of diet as it too is a daily reoccurent factor for health.

Are tibetans generally heart-healthy, though? I took that for granted but did not actually fact check the original poster. I think he just wanted to give an example for a rural, healthy eating society. I do not know if that was true in the past or is now, though.

To argue that, you'd have to demonstrate that the fats in animals raised on what you call healthy food differ chemically from the fats you'd find in animals fed otherwise.

Related example: The glucose from sugar beets is chemically identical to and indistinguishable from the glucose from sugar cane or corn. Animal fat tends to be a more complex mix, but while no expert I suspect there's only so many different lipid compounds produced and stored in animal cells. After all, the energy currency in any animal's bloodstream is mainly glucose - the source information is lost.

There are excellent _ethical_ reasons not to mistreat animals as is today often the case. I'm not sure that there are chemical reasons related to nutrition.

I think the point was that most of the health-conscious general public has the mindset that fat is the enemy and that things like cholesterol should be avoided at (almost) all costs.

The reality is that you can have a diet that is relatively high in fat and still lose weight, just as you can have a diet that is low in fat and still put on weight. As for cholesterol, it isn’t a toxin that should be eradicated from your diet - it’s something that just needs to be eaten in moderation (perhaps with butter on toast for breakfast, rather than fried chicken for lunch).

> The diet works for weight loss, that is undisputed

All I could find was this (although it doesn't seem like they were checking ketone levels) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311279409_Visceral_...

Do you have a study that shows ketogenic diets are indeed better for weight loss than other diets?

> The problems are in the longer term with elevated cholesterol...

From your link:

> These differences were not significant at 24 months.

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> and increasing insulin resistance.

I'm going to need to insist on sources on this.

I thought that LDL-P had been determined to be a more reliable indicator of heart disease risk? Also hasn't heard of insulin resistance as an effect of ketogenic diets... What's the mechanism for that, do you know?

Most of the weight loss would be water weight from glycogen stores being depleted, not fat being burned.

Citations?

>"It react by using only 85%, storing that extra 5% in case things get worse later on. So the body expects that later on, supply could drop to 70% or much less. Then those stored 5% are really useful."

This doesn't sound right.

As someone who's tried every diet and training regiment under the sun, and never (before or after) being outside of "normal" BMI and of varying levels of athletic (maxing out at 10 push-ups through 30 dead-hang pullups):

On your first point, yes. Most diets work, as long as they fit with your persona and schedule. Anything you feel comfortable with and can stick to. Just by "doing" a diet, you end up being a lot more conscious of what you put in yourself.

When someone asks me for advice, it's mostly the same:

* Write down everything you eat for two weeks, weigh yourself before and after. The initial point was to measure your actual TDEE, but people invaribaly end up eating less and losing weight during those two weeks because they don't want to write down "half a package of Ritz crackers" in their log.

* Take an honest before pic. When you think you've stopped progressing after a few weeks after the initial burst, being able to compare backwards is invaluable as a motivator.

> When you eat less, the body adapts by working more energy efficient. So you eat 10% less, meaning the body can use only 90% of the normal energy supply. It react by using only 85%, storing that extra 5% in case things get worse later on. So the body expects that later on, supply could drop to 70% or much less. Then those stored 5% are really useful.

This is however not anything I'm comfortable believing before I read it from reputable sources. From a strict weight standpoint, I've rarely seen anything that doesn't align to your TDEE mainly differing by your weight and muscle/body ratio, unless chemically induced.

There was a recent study on alcohol in this scenario, but even that mostly indicated the effects on hunger, not on energy expenditure: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/behindtheheadlines...

While I'd say that the keto diet works, it's not very practical, when accounting for eating in restaurants, socially (other people cooking for you, you cooking for others), etc.

What is your goal? Just losing weight? Being healthier? Body recomposition?

What is your life today? Could you cut out something you indulge in now? Alcohol, snacks, sugar in your drinks? Would you be content in cutting those out?

Do you work out? Could you see yourself doing that a few times a week? What would you enjoy doing? Hard 7 minute work-outs daily? Fun climbing/swimming/rowing/hiking? Lifting in gyms?

TLDR; Whatever diet/routine works is whatever you can stick with. I hate running/endurance training, so HIIT and calisthenics is what I've had most fun with. Would love climbing if I didn't hate heights :)

It was like magic. No expensive drugs. No side effects.

I'm surprised and disappointed that none of the doctors I saw recommended it and I only found it by googling my symptoms.

I had a gastroenterologist suggest that I take miralax every day for the rest of my life but he never suggested vitamin or mineral supplements.

The sad thing is that the FDA first had to be convinced to allow trans fats to be listed. Later it required them to be labeled.

Partially hydrogenated oils are shelf-stable, so they're used in a lot of individually-wrapped junk food items. That kind of stuff should be left out of just about any diet.

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The phenomenon is called 'lipid peroxidation'. The search term 'drying oil' is also helpful.

But would a feed lot likely do that? I doubt it.

And speaking of feed lots ... eeyew.

> For which you don't kill the animal.

Milk cows are continually raped for the duration of their lives: http://www.humanemyth.org/happycows.htm

> For which you don't kill the animal.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I thought dairy necessitated pregnancy, and as such went hand in hand with veal production. Is this incorrect? Input from someone with experience in the domain would be helpful.

(I've googled it but the sources primarily seem to be extremely biased).

IME most people, if they look into it, find ethical problems in industrial dairy/beef production. Maybe most don't care or muster discipline enough to change their consumption, but that is different from thinking it's all fine.

A 500 g packet of butter has a footprint of 4.7 kg of CO2 equivalent. If a car does 200 grams of CO2e / km, distance by car on the store trip would have to be over 23 km to match the butter.

I don't wish to argue (I'm a butter eating cyclist after all!) but this seems to be selective, since cows are more known for producing methane than co2 ?

Normally I am all for asking for sources, but this isn't really in dispute nor hard to find. Just one of a thousand sources:

"50% of the fat content in butter is saturated fat and 4% is trans fat."

https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/healthy-eating/food-and-n...

"Published data suggest that all fatty acids with a double bond in the trans configuration raise the ratio of plasma LDL to HDL cholesterol."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2830458/

The Google Instant answer for the question [does butter contain trans fat?] says 100 g butter contains 3.3 g of trans fat.

http://imgur.com/a/i7qw0

Trans fats sometimes occur naturally in food. They're created by bacteria in an animal's stomach.

Trans fats were nothing to do with weight loss. Trans fats were used because they're cheap and have long shelf life.

Yes they do contain trans fats - just not the same kind - and recent research shows that they are probably just as damaging as the artificial creations. See my comment to the other poster.

Some important differences, as I understand it:

- polyunsaturated fats are the category that includes omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids. Even further, omega 3's can be ALA (from plants) or DHA (e.g. salmon) variety. Omega 3's and in particular DHA have been shown to have anti-inflammatory and other health properties. Which is to say even within polyunsaturated fats there is a wide variety of alleged health effects, but when talking about cooking oils and processed foods we're almost certainly talking about other types than the type known to have health benefits.

- polyunsaturated fats can be hydrogenated which makes them solid at room temperature. So replacing butter with margarine typically means these types of fats. It was discovered relatively recently that trans fats (which are often the by-products of this) are almost certainly bad for you.

- polyunsaturated fats are the least stable, meaning they're more likely to break down into things that are probably not good for you (e.g. if deep frying with them).

- highly-processed foods tend to be high in polyunsaturated fats, and omega 6's in particular. This is the same category regular vegetable oil (e.g. soybean oil) falls in.

- olive oil is high in monounsaturated fat, is generally thought to be pretty healthy, and it doesn't have these same kinds of "gotchas" that polyunsaturated fats can. Historically the main reasons we think olive oil is healthy are that populations with less heart disease (e.g. Mediterranean populations) eat a lot of it, I don't know how much more recent research there is actually proving causation here.

- saturated fat is the other type, which can occur in plants like coconuts (healthy) or in butter, fatty meats like bacon and steak, etc. The history here is pretty fascinating, but through lots of misplaced assumptions of correlation/causation these are traditionally viewed as unhealthy (thus why people are doing these studies like replacing butter with other fats). AFAIU this debate is still ongoing, there is some evidence these really do raise your cholesterol but also some evidence that the particular kinds of cholesterol they raise aren't necessarily bad, in otherwise healthy people. I'm a bit unclear of this aspect.

I've concluded for me personally, this stuff is still so unknown that your best bet is just to keep your total calories under control and not worry about types of fat, with the exception of not eating any trans fats and prioritizing fatty fish if you can.

Apologize in advance for not listing sources (busy) but my comment can perhaps still be a source of some information for you. The last I'd read up on it, one aspect of Olive (and perhaps, others) oil has to do with additional compounds which act as more specific anti-inflammatory substances. Again, sorry for no source, but my brain says that the recommended daily intake of Olive oil (per "official" mediterranean diet) is similar to ~1/10th a dose of aspirin. There is some speculation that the additional benefits of Olive oil consumption may be related not to just to the fat type but also to the additional anti-inflammatory compounds.

Whether this type of benefit could be replicated (/ is safe) by taking low dose aspirin directly is probably a subject of some investigation. I hope this is helpful despite a my non-cited fuzzy memory.