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Comment by rocannon | Hacker News Reader

Here's a 2010 Scientific American article, "Carbs against Cardio: More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart": https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbs-against-car...

Note the emphasis on refined carbohydrates. I would think that if you ate an unhealthy vegan diet which emphasized lots of junk food like high fructose corn syrup loaded sodas, etc, you'd be pretty unhealthy. Personally, I suspect that a vegan diet can be very healthy for you, but it could also be quite bad for you, depending on how you do it.

Regarding cholesterol: Humans make cholesterol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol

Also: http://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-eating/nutrition/art...

> Many people think that all the cholesterol in their blood (and elsewhere in the body) comes from the cholesterol they eat, which is called dietary or preformed cholesterol. In fact, most of it is made by our livers.

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Just a quick note on Ronald M. Krauss, which is mentioned in this article. He has been working for the National Cattleman's Beef Association and the National Dairy Council since 1990, so his "research" is heavily biased towards his sponsors. https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2014nl/mar/140300.pdf

This information can be also found on his own page here: http://www.chori.org/Principal_Investigators/Krauss_Ronald/k... in the Other Activities (since 1990) section

Okay, I suppose it is possible that Krauss does "research" as opposed to research. This is what the article says about it: "The [meta-]analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease."

So do you dispute this result? I was in fact under the impression that recent studies say saturated fat is not really bad, especially if it is not paired with highly processed carbs. Trans fats, OTOH, are extremely bad. Trans fats occur in small quantities in meat, FWIW.

Note that the Scientific American article cites several different studies and scientists, e.g. "Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health" (is Stampfer also in the pocket of the beef industry?):

> A 1997 study [Stampfer] co-authored in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated 65,000 women and found that the quintile of women who ate the most easily digestible and readily absorbed carbohydrates—that is, those with the highest glycemic index—were 47 percent more likely to acquire type 2 diabetes than those in the quintile with the lowest average glycemic-index score. (The amount of fat the women ate did not affect diabetes risk.)

I suppose you could accuse McDougall of bias; after all he does run a business around his diet. I wouldn't go that far, though.

https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/161/7/672/70862 "The Nurses' Health Study was initiated in 1976 when 121,700 female registered nurses aged 30–55 years completed a mailed questionnaire about their lifestyle"

The same for the other paper done with the male population - mailed questionnaire.

The problem with both - these are population studies, you don't have a control group for correlation and people can report whatever they want.

And here is Dr Meir Stampfer leaning towards a more plant based diet https://youtu.be/LUYwMsFuQ1o

Here's a summary of one of Stampfer's papers: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/higher-cons...

> The health effects of specific types of fats depended on what people were replacing them with, the researchers found... people who replaced saturated fats with unsaturated fats—especially polyunsaturated fats—had significantly lower risk of death overall ... People who replaced saturated fats with carbohydrates had only slightly lower mortality risk. In addition, replacing total fat with carbohydrates was associated with modestly higher [my emphasis] mortality. This was not surprising, the authors said, because carbohydrates in the American diet tend to be primarily refined starch and sugar, which have a similar influence on mortality risk as saturated fats.

This analysis is also based on the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Apparently, Stampfer finds the Nurses’ Health Study credible enough to support his conclusions.

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