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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

I am looking for a scientific write-up that shows the correlation of dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol as it pertains to coconut oil. This write-up should be a human study that shows a controlled test of a number of subjects consuming coconut oil vs not, and the direct correlation of dietary and blood cholesterol.

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Please ignore my irony, but good luck funding that. Almost no well known food item would/has ever go through something like that as it would set you back several (tens) millions. The best you can hope for is a study where people report eating different substances in their daily lives and afterwards you draw conclusions from several biomedical read-outs. But that wont be cheap either, you would just be testing multiple things at once.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5745680/

That is exactly what I was looking for! Thankyou.

But wait... isn't HDL supposed to be the good form of cholesterol?

As if it wasn't already hard to know what to believe... sigh

Good catch, thank you. In retrospective, I should have written 'to prove that there is no effect' since for that you would need a much bigger (and more diverse) cohort over a longer time frame. If you have a strong effect, this is obviously not necessary.

The claim made in the article is regarding saturated fats, not cholesterol, as dietary cholesterol is not obtained from plant sources like coconut oil. Plants do produce phytosterols, which compete with cholesterol for absorption & may lower serum cholesterol.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15166807 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2793103/

That is my understanding as well (regarding cholesterol) and that our knowledge of saturated fats as it pertains to health may not be as accurate as we once thought.

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