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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

Eating kills you. Heart disease kills 614,348 people per year & cancer kills 591,699 per year [i]. Heart disease has been linked to saturated fat for years. Cancer is your own cells that have mutated. Each new cell is just ticket to the cancer lotto. Obesity = more cells. Cancer & Heart disease kill over a million per year. But we spend most of our media time on shootings and snake bites, in reality it's that bag of Cool Ranch Doritos (which are a curse on humanity).

[i] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php

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> Obesity = more cells

That's not true. Not only do fat cells just grow bigger (a skinny person has just as many as a fat person), you'd expect the increase in cancers to be mostly liposarcomas ("fat cell cancer"), which stay very rare.

Other organs might be distended or enlarged, but they don't contain more cells.

The reason obesity leads to cancer is not very well understood, but it's probably a complicated process involving abnormal hormone levels usual in obese people, and the constant low-grade inflammation their body is usually suffering from

I don't believe this is how it works.

https://news.yale.edu/2015/03/02/new-fat-cells-created-quick...

I'm no longer deeply involved in this area so my information might be dated, though years ago it was pretty well understood based on the evidence that fat cells were created _and_ grew bigger as person got heavier, however, fat cells (once created) were never eliminated from the body, meaning they would shrink though they would be around forever once created.

It was also understood (if I recall correctly) that the faster someone gained fat, the easier it was for fat cells to be created. Meaning rapid weight gain was more likely to create new fat cells. (not sure if I'm remembering that one right)

It was surmised from these that this is why rebound weight gain (aside from rebound lifestyle factors) was quite easy for many, particularly the incredibly obese. It was also why it was strongly recommended to take fat gain incredibly seriously as the creation of fat cells was deemed potentially lifelong damaging.

> That's not true

Do you have a source for that? I find that claim interesting because I'd be surprised if obesity != more cells.

Update: I found this link about a study that found as you gain weight, you grow new fat cells (2010). I can't find the paper though.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2010/10/05/gorging-study-shows...

Update 2: I believe this is the paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=20921416%5Buid%5D

Update 3: Another paper that found growth of new fat cells on weight gain (2015): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4380653/

From this article found in this thread: https://news.yale.edu/2015/03/02/new-fat-cells-created-quick...

How can that be true? Don't fat people at least have more skin cells than skinny people? Also, I can't imagine that enormously obese people just have larger fat cells than skinny people. I have read that it is harder to get rid of fat cells once they shrink, but not that we don't get more of them.

A common misunderstanding is that organs are made up entirely of "cells" but, they are not. There are other materials involved, such as collagen. We call these names like "connective tissues" and they take up a lot of the space.

That doesn't mean they aren't involved, proteins can go wrong, but, that is usually associated with other types of diseases besides cancer.

That still leaves me confused. A skinny adult who becomes obese has the same number of skin cells? That sounds hard to believe.

I would like to point out also, that many people who would be described as "skinny" would almost never become obese. Neither would they be able to put on much muscle mass. It is a huge misconception that our bodies are just blank templates that can become fatter or more muscular. Different bodies have affinities for different shapes.

Someone who is very ectomorphic and "scrawny", will often have severe difficulty gaining a substantial amount of weight.

I disagree, (would be open to sourcing from this) but there are photos of people I know from 15-20 years ago where you would look at them and think they’re scrawny, and now they are visibly obese.

Sorry, but this just sounds wrong. Even if the only evidence I can point to is life experience.

Stretch marks are the areas where fibroblasts just lay down a thin patch of fibers because there's insufficient ability to grow skin to keep up with the required surface area.

Oh sure they increase, but, not at a plainly obvious rate, it depends on the tissue and the like. But the majority of that mass is not cells.

Yes, the number of skin cells will increase. They will also need more blood vessel cells, immune cells, etc.

What about muscle? Does that follow the same thing as fat cells, they just stretch/grow, not increase in count? I always just assumed more cells were created as you got bigger.

Human muscle cells experience hypertrophy (growth) but not hyperplasia (increase in number). (Post-puberty, anyway)

The low grade inflam and hormones are definitely causal. Another that biologists don't really from is the simple increased temp these people live at due to fat being insulation: Simple thermodynamics starts to creep in over 50 years.

Speaking of hormones, being overweight or obese may also increase the risk of breast cancer. The development of breast cancer involves estrogen, and fat cells produce estrogen.

Excess fat tissue also isn't vascularized to the same degree normal quantities of tissue are, resulting in an inflammatory cascade via Hypoxia- Induced Factor.

I have a rather large amount of loose skin that begs to differ with your "Obesity != more cells" assertion.

The link between saturated fats and disease is dubious at best. Here’s[1] a meta-analysis with 350,000 subjects that failed to show a link between saturated fat, coronary heart disease, stroke and cardiovascular disease. Many meta-analyses[2] fail to show a correlation, and many remain unpublished.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2824152/

[2] http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3978

I think the people who want the world to be vegetarian for non-health related reasons (e.g animal rights advocates, environmentalists) push the largely discredited "saturated fat is bad, carbs are good" dogma because saturated fat is mainly present in meats and not in vegetables with some rare exceptions such as avocados and tropical plant oils. Also, carbohydrates are not present in meats, but plentiful in vegetables.

and many remain unpublished.

Citation?

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

The scientific consensus is that saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, having been endorsed by many medical, scientific, heart-health, governmental and intergovernmental, and professional authorities, such as the World Health Organization,[1] the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Medicine,[2] the American Dietetic Association,[3] the Dietitians of Canada,[3] the British Dietetic Association,[4] American Heart Association,[5] the British Heart Foundation,[6] the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada,[7] the World Heart Federation,[8] the British...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat_and_cardiovasc...

Actually a lot of these xx Is bad for you are dubious or just well marketed fads eg lo salt as my specialised NHS dietician (for chronic kidney failure) commented they don't tell you what C$%^ the put in to replace salt

a bag of cool ranch doritos has 1 gram of saturated fat. saturated fat is not linked with heart disease

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

Total fat and saturated and unsaturated fats were not significantly associated with risk of myocardial infarction or cardiovascular disease mortality.

Rather the opposite, in fact, which is kind of hilarious to me.

> Intake of total fat and each type of fat was associated with lower risk of total mortality...

It is hilarious, although I left it the lower risk of all type mortality since OP was specifically talking about saturated fat being linked to heart disease. But yes people should probably eat less pasta and more steak

Yeah. Lets all go on a Keto diet and sustain 400 million americans on steak. Do you people ever stop and think about the consequences of your diet?

Keto is a high fat diet not a high protien diet. Replace "keto" with "Atkin's" and I have no issue with your comment, in fact i would agree.

I think it’s the number of people which is the problem. Also, there are not 400m Americans. Yet.

Funny, if you flip to any recent thread about climate change, you're likely to come across someone advocating less steak and more pasta. Why? Producing meat is incredibly resource-intensive; cows are the biggest offenders. They literally shit greenhouse gas.

Which is not to say I don't enjoy a nice juicy cheezburger. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

1 gram per serving.

Most of their packages contain multiple servings. Even the smaller packages that you usually see on the shelf are 3 servings, at least in the US.

A steak has roughly 21g of sat fat per serving, though. So you'd have to eat 7 bags of Doritos to eat the equivalent of a steak.

My point is not that Doritos aren't bad for you but that saturated fat isn't the reason they're bad

Yes. But they aren't good for you either. They're digestive spam. And as a result the body will continue to seek the nutrition it needs. Feed it more unnecessary calories and it will keep looking.

Eventually, "you are what you eat" catches up to you.

No disagreement here. As I said, it's not that they aren't bad, it's that saturated fat isn't the reason they're bad. I'm with you that doritos should be nixed from any person's regular diet

I'm more fearful of sugar and simple carbs than sat fats.

So.. how much is a serving? Wherever I eat steaks that seems to vary wildly. In any case the variation is too big to warrant giving such a precise number (21 grams) for the amount of fat.

The fun size bags have one serving, but even so I doubt that doritos, en masse, are to blame for obesity. It's the accompanying sedentary lifestyle that is the real culprit.

If we want a food source to blame, look at high sugar content foods like soda or the slew of 'Little Debbie' type snacks (I'm preferential to Nutter Butters) that can be consumed in one or two sittings if you aren't calorie conscious.

But, just to reiterate what's important, if we all just got a solid hour of exercise each day the rate of cancer and heart disease would drop appreciably.

> if we all just got a solid hour of exercise each day the rate of cancer and heart disease would drop appreciably.

But people really want a magic bullet, "X is bad, Y is good". People generally do not like to exercise so they'll keep looking for something else.

Conversely, junk food companies love to shift the blame to the consumers not getting enough exercise.

I don’t disagree that the sedantary lifestyle is the primary cause. However the processed food industry is a dangerous trap; Doritos and their ilk are almost as dangerous as those other sugary snacks, they are just a different kind of addictive, using fats, salt and MSG instead of sugar

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/01/dining/nacho-g...

Add to that #3 on the list, the 250,000 Americans that die each year from medical errors.

>But we spend most of our media time on shootings and snake bites, in reality it's that bag of Cool Ranch Doritos (which are a curse on humanity).

We really going to worry about a bag of chips when so many people still smoke?

Smoking has been falling constantly and it is now 1/3 the level it was 40 years ago. Not only is it falling, but the rate at which it is declining is increasing. OTOH Americans apparently cannot, under any circumstances, stop shoveling Oreos and Twinkies into their mouths. There are far more obese Americans than there are Americans who consume tobacco products and the obesity rate is going up. Any resources spent on reducing obesity will deliver greater returns than that spent on reducing smoking, even given the greater risk that smoking represents at the individual level.

More cells + a compromised system* = Problems.

The problem is people aren't interested in health. Oreos are a God given right, evidently. And it's easier to blame the healthcare system than to face the truth. That is, you are what you consume.

*The report is just cancer, but diabetes will be just as happy to kill too.

This might be completely inaccurate, but I've always thought of the body as a machine, and it has moving parts. And as with any machine, the more its parts move and get used over time, the sooner the machine will wear out. And if you eat more, regardless of whether it's healthy or not, just the quantity itself, you are going to make the parts inside you move more to process the digestion. Eating less puts less stress on your system over time, as long as you are of course not under p-eating by an alarming amount.

But that would mean a direct relationship between physical exercise and death, which I believe is not the case.

I don't follow. The body spends much more time digesting food than is normally spent exercising.

I've read that constant digesting gets in the way of the body doing nightly internal cleanup processes that detox your system, as energy is diverted to process food instead. That might be another source of problems.

The more exercise you do the more you have to eat to maintain your body. If you are following a healthy diet you will need to increase even more your total amount of food due the fact that generally healthy food has less calories. Also, there is nothing more stressful for the body than exercise.

> there is nothing more stressful for the body than exercise

I think you are postulating. There was an article here a week or two ago that showed how bodies frequently in motion tend to live longer and be healthiest. There are different types of effects on the body from activities, and I'd be willing to bet that a body that's constantly in a state of digestion is stressed more than one in natural motion. However, I say this with a disclaimer that I'm guessing based on recent articles posted here. But if you really think otherwise, you should just provide a source.

Also, unless you are training for the Olympics, you do not need to linearly scale your food intake in proportion to your exercise. The average diet for many people does not need to change much after introducing exercise because the average diet already is usually too many calories.

> Also, unless you are training for the Olympics, you do not need to linearly scale your food intake in proportion to your exercise.

Lets assume that you are. Would that mean you will die earlier? Does that mean that the more exercise you do the earlier you die?

If everything else is kept the same (never true), that would be correct. Like everything else in this area of research (which depends upon NHST), you will find conflicting studies if you search. Here are some layperson sources (I didn't bother looking deeper):

http://observer.com/2017/04/study-finds-running-extends-life...

http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20140401/too-much...

You mean you can have too much of a good thing. Say it ain't so nonbel.

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