Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
So if you want low carbs, don't eat too much meat.
Plant based diets, such as the Mediterranean diet have been shown lead to reduced all cause mortality in randomized control trials [1]. Getting your diet right really isn't that hard, just eat fresh plant based food.
[1]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1800389?query=fe...
Even if this ends up with higher mortality (which I highly doubt this claim, there is a lot of research and results it is in conflict with) - I'd rather live feeling like this than the alternative.
I also question the meat claims because there is also a lot of evidence to the contrary. It seems like there may be a confounding variable in there that is skewing the results.
They weren't. It looks like the lowest in the study was ~20%, which is about the upper bound on what could be considered "low carb".
So you’re not wrong, but cheese, fish, meat are all the tip of the pyramid, not the base. Of course as wealth has spreas people eat more fish and meat and cheese than they used to, and they suffer for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Teicholz
I quote from it:
>>"Nina Teicholz is a journalist who became an advocate opposed to the idea that saturated fat is unhealthy and should be minimized in the American diet."
So, to begin with, she's a journalist who wrote a book about fat. In fact, she advocated that people should load up their diets on fat, particularly saturated fat:
>>Teicholz advised readers to "eat butter; drink milk whole, and feed it to the whole family. Stock up on creamy cheeses, offal, and sausage, and yes, bacon"
This advice runs counter to the advice of public health organisations and the opinionts of scientists:
>> Teicholz' claims were harshly criticized by the DGAC, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and others, including a petition signed by 180 scientists, and they called for BMJ to retract the article or issue corrections
My underlining.
I wouldn't trust that lady to tell me what to eat, or to criticise a scientific study's methodology. A journalist with a book has very clear incentives to "shake things up" by going against the scientific consensus. But, it's the opinion of experts that have studied the matter at length, who know the relevant bibliography well and understand its subtleties that one should trust more than outsiders who "rock the boat" for their own reasons.
Finally- it's really dangerous to listen to someone who tells you that, that thing you love to eat (or smoke, or drink, etc) that you always knew was not very good for you is actually very healthy. You have a big, fat incentive to blieve them unconditionally.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/low-fat-d...
And in general, the American population has been following this diet, and we are fatter than ever before, suffering from Type 2 Diabetes. And the "science" behind our current health policy is driven by organizations like the American Soybean Asociation who are more concerned with making money and less on science. And when you start talking about money, the science research will follow the money, because the scientists need to eat.
Please take a look at this videos,
https://youtu.be/Q2UnOryQiIY https://youtu.be/7Lww5WH7INI
I would read her book before you pass judgment.
This can't be right. Olive oil is a vegetable oil and it's been known since antiquity. Its preparation requires an olive mill and a donkey to turn the millstone. Not "extensive industrial processes!
I am talking about those other vegetable oils, like grapeseed oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, cottonseed oil. Do you remember Crisco short, this was a new product produced from cottonseed oil which had been hydrogenated though intensive industrial processes and sold as a cheaper alternative to the normal saturated fats used as the time.
I hope you actually look at the links and videos I put up in my previous comment. Your ad hominem attacks against Nina Teicholz, like "I wouldn't trust that lady to tell me what to eat" and "she's a journalist" don't go unnoticed.
I also want to point out her BMJ article was not retracted. The petition signed by 180 scientists was found to be without merit. I do find it telling you bring up the petition, yet you fail to say that article was not retracted.
That sounds threatening. Could you please clarify- who is it that noticed and what happens now that they noticed?
I am going to give you another video, you really should watch it.
The easiest way to do this is to batch prepare things heavy in monounsaturated fats: avocados/guacamole, olives, almond butter, walnuts, etc. Then prepare things with polyunsaturated fats the day of, like wild salmon.
Basically if you don’t eat enough good fats you’ll eat bad fats, and if you don’t eat enough bad fats you’ll eat sugar or carbs. So you want to make it easy for yourself to eat good fats, and then round out the rest of your diet with other stuff.
Things like Israeli/Persian/Arabic salad also store pretty well in the fridge for four days, so that’s another easy way to prepare veggies in advance.
Basically, some say that having single bond chains leads to less viscous molecules => less deposits. But some say that is double bonds which leads to less deposits.
...because I've read a few medical books
(randomly picked) and ended with contradictory
reasonings and conclusion.
Its really mind numbing that we have so much confusion in such an important space as nutrition.
Just look at the credentials of the expert that Ms.Teicholz [1] blames for this mess:
Alice H. Lichtenstein is a senior scientist and director
of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at the HNRCA,
as well as a Stanley N. Gershoff Professor of Nutrition
Science and Policy at the Friedman School.
Lichtenstein also serves as the executive editor of the
Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter.
Education
Hon. Ph.D., 2005, Faculty of Medicine, University of Kuopio (Finland)
D.Sc., 1979, Nutritional Biochemistry, Harvard University
M.S., 1975, Nutritional Biochemistry, Harvard University
M.S., 1973, Nutrition, State College, Pennsylvania State University
B.S., 1971, Nutrition, Cornell University
[1]
Nina Teicholz - 'The Real Food Politics'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lww5WH7INI&t=12m26s
[2]
I guess it's a bit like music, unless you have genius talent out of the box, you will only be able to parse things clearly after 5-10 years of swimming in the pool. Unless we have something to connect the dots for us, for instance something that can cross correlated data from biological pathways, chemistry, physics, maths, so you know what is solid or not.
Also nutrition is too tied to economics and politics, that doesn't help.
Here is another article that specifically addresses this study,
http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2018/08/low-moderate-or-high-carb...
Zoe Harcombe takes a hard look at this study, and there are so many problems with this study, I am amazed that it was published, but wait, I would take a look at this,
https://twitter.com/WGyogaSC/status/1031258976560852992
This was a "paid to publish" study.
Basically if you don’t eat enough good fats you’ll
eat bad fats, and if you don’t eat enough bad fats
you’ll eat sugar or carbs. So you want to make it easy
for yourself to eat good fats, and then round out the
rest of your diet with other stuff.
Any large study or trial?
Have you observed this first-person, anecdotally atleast in someone, over a sizable period of time?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081007123647.h...
- This study will get tons of press, with misleading headlines all over the place. Like this one we already saw: "Low carb diets shorten your life unless you are mostly vegetarian."
- Nobody actually knows which diets are best for longevity, as it's an impossible question to answer without a trillion dollar randomized trial. Supercentenarians eat a wide variety of diets, calorie/methionine restriction helps in some animal studies, etc. A collection of observational evidence (like in the Lancet paper) is helpful for noticing overall patterns, but can't say much about actual diets. One high-carb diet could be high in candy and cake, and another high in fruit and tubers. The Lancet study wasn't able to address diet quality.
- The Lancet paper is not one study, but two: a long-term observational study in the US, plus a meta-analysis of international cohorts.
- The "easy" conclusions (low carb bad, high carb bad, high meat bad) are not so easy. The broadest way to cut dietary data is by macronutrient, so the result interpretations aren't always useful. Those with high and low carb intake are more likely to be on a diet, for example, and dieters can be more likely to have health conditions they're trying to address.
- When you meta-analyze heterogeneous data sets, problems arise. There's no good way around this, since the different data sets are from different research groups, and individual-level meta-analysis is thus rarely possible.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/Examinecom/posts/2146299502057199?_...
But all of the super centenarians ate very little meat, with the exception of some fish in a few populations.
And we don't know for certain whuch diets will help you live the longest, but the knowledge and evidence we do have very heavily favors a diet that is primarily plant based, low in protein, and has very little chicken/pork/beef.
Hong Kong has one of the highest life expectancies (Surpasses even Japan) in the world yet their cuisine is mostly based on meat, not plant-based
Furthermore not a single country from this list is a plant-based or low in protein, all of them eat alot of meat, dairy, seafood etc
If you look at the Wikipedia article for blue zones(areas with especially high levels of centenarians). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
They mention that one of the things that unites these areas is a mostly plant based diet.
Also, if you look at table 1, you can see the "low carb" group was the highest smoking, most diabetic, more male, highest hypertensive, and least exercising group. Is it really a surprise that these people have higher mortality?
Retrospective self reported questionaire.
Pah.
Around about the weakest evidence you can get as to what their actual diet was.
I would rate this study as "Junk Science".
>'The findings "will disappoint those who, from professional experience, will continue to defend their low carb cult, but contributes to the overwhelming body of evidence that supports a balanced approach to caloric intake recommended globally by public health bodies," Collins added.' https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/17/health/low-carb-high-carbohyd...
Given the obvious problems with this study (their definition of "low carb" is wrong), this is just an astounding display of hubris.
And 37% is not low-carb. If anything what this shows is that if you have moderate carbs, you won't be doing so well. But if you have moderate carbs + more plant-based food, you'll be healthier.
So all this study showed has nothing to do with carbs, but everything to do with eating more veggies = you'll be healthier.
I bet that if had they replaced not just part of the meat/animal fat with veggies, but also another 20% of those "low carbs", they would've gotten even healthier people (and on an actual low-carb diet, too!).
And really 100 g/day is a lot. Most people on "low carb" diets are going to be eating half or a quarter of that.
So, this is just more ridiculous nutrition research funded by the US government, produced by academia.
They made up their own definition of "low carb", then people who read the results get confused and try to apply the conclusions to actual "low carb" diets.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Die-Discover-Scientifically/d...
He mentions only those that are frequently cited so as to address their results.
We really need multiple long-running (50+ years) randomized study that controls for all influence factors to really answer the questions. Something that is unlikely to be accomplished in our current political lifetime and unlikely to be completed within our lifetime.
This would be a waste of money. Its not going to tell you anything about the effect of diet in any real people, only "average" people.
The truth is, it is extremely hard to accept that something that directly hits your fabled pleasure centers -like fat, sugar, salt, nicotine, alcohol etc- is so bad for you it's decreasing the time you have to enjoy it. There is an extreme form of denial that seizes the human mind when someone tells you "this thing you really like, it's very bad for you".
Our pleasures are immense sources of bias. Take what your heart desires with, um, a huge pinch of salt and don't listen to the people who tell you salt, fat, sugar, smoking, drinking etc are good for you when this contradicts years of research and hundreds of trials, especialy when the evidence for keeping your dietary habits unchanged is based on a couple of studies with poor practices and few participants.
If a moderate reduction of carbohydrates in your diet is bad for you, almost entirely eliminating them does not look very promising.
Why?
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise, so there are some additional assumptions you are making somewhere.
Why not?
As I originally asked: why?
You think the low carb diet people would be mistaken if they dont pay attention to this study that contains no data for low carb diet people at all.
Now, this is passing judgement and I apologise, but I don't think you replied to the strongest interpretation of what I wrote.
• Polyunsaturated fats, the supposedly "good" fats in the classical model, actually go rancid really easily and cause damage.
• Saturated fats are associated with high cholesterol, which is a marker of some misunderstood kind of arterial and vascular inflammation. Not everyone gets an increase in cholesterol from consuming saturated fats, and we don't know why. It may be determined by the intestinal flora. But these "bad" fats are actually very stable, and do not appear to cause damage via oxidation as they don't go rancid easily.
• Monounsaturated fats have the best qualities of both.
tl;dr (imho): Have some of everything in moderation and with the due awareness of what you're having vs. your particular body.
Consume limited PUFA and be very aware of the potential rancidness vs. the effectiveness of antioxidants present in the source. Whole foods with antioxidants e.g. fruits tend to mitigate the oxidation of any PUFA that they contain. Consume limited saturated fat as per your propensity for LDL. You can't go wrong with monounsaturated fats, which are relatively stable and tend to come in high-antioxidant sources, and also do not cause LDL to rise. But overall, eat a moderate amount of fat.
Don't go too low carb as it causes a stress state (cortisol + damage-inducing free fatty acids). Get your carbs from buffered, whole food sources (e.g. fruits, whole wheat bread), but don't go high carb because it's damaging.
Have as much fiber (incl. resistant starches / FOS / FODMAP / "soluble fiber") as you can stomach. If they make you feel especially sick, you probably have gut fermentation (SIBO or similar). Some people like myself cannot tolerate anything fermentable.
Be aware of your idiosyncrasies, e.g. I can't tolerate histamines, so I must avoid high histamine or histamine-releasing foods like avocado, as well as anything fermentable or fermented.
Moderate exercise is superior to intense exercise. Exercise that is too intense is damaging and is linked with poorer health.
This study is based on a 66 question FFQ (food frequency questionnaire) spanning a six year period. Do you remember what you ate last month? A year ago? Six years ago? Maybe a more modern version of these types of studies can be done if the subjects are required to take pics of everything they ate instead of reporting from memory on a questionnaire.
“LMS receives grant funding from the California Walnut Commission”
Oh?
“SC reports grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and personal fees from Novartis and Zogenix”
Novartis and Zofenix are in the business of making statin drugs.
I do want a proper study on a keto diet, on one hand it's an unnatural biochemical process for the majority of non-starving humanity, on the other hand there seems to be no downside to ketosis under than the Flu in the short term.
we estimated that a 50-year-old participant with intake of less than 30% of energy from carbohydrate would have a projected life expectancy of 29·1 years, compared with 33·1 years for a participant who consumed 50–55% of energy from carbohydrate (difference 4·0 years [95% CI 2·6, 5·3]). Similarly, we estimated that a 50-year-old participant with high carbohydrate intake (>65% of energy from carbohydrate) would have a projected life expectancy of 32·0 years, compared with 33·1 years
You're all over this thread like a bad rash.
So, the "low Carb group" (Q1):
had higher % of smokers,
had higher % of diabetics,
exercised less,
had higher % of men.
In this study, the higher smoking, higher diabetic, lowest exercising, and higher male cohort were more likely to die. To ascribe causality on the diet, one that is not even a low carb diet is absolute bullshit.