Effects of High Fat Diet may Last for Generations | Hacker News Reader

Effects of High Fat Diet may Last for Generations

technologynetworks.com

14 pointsbrahmwg16 comments

1. Humans aren’t mice and this kind of reporting is extremely irresponsible, because this is how policy gets made.

2. HFD (high fat diet) is a synonym for diets with a high fat content that are still high in carbohydrates. If the diet used in the experiment is also low in carbs, this is explicitly mentioned.

Indeed, from my reading, they fed those mice with Kliba-Nafag 2127, a diet used in experiments that has sucrose and vegetable oils in it. They even report testing their preference for water with sucrose in it ... so what the heck is the study measuring anyway?

The clear confounding factors in all studies of “HFD” are sugar and vegetable oils. It is mind blowing how this gets reported as valid science.

How can this even pass the review process? Are the standards nowadays so low?

1. This is an article on "technologynetworks.com", if that's where you expect to get valid science reporting...

The original paper is titled: "Transgenerational transmission of hedonic behaviors and metabolic phenotypes induced by maternal overnutrition"

"Overnutrition", not high fat, which brings us to #2:

When they say High Fat Diet in these papers, they don't mean Keto or Atkins or anything like that. They mean: "fat mice", "overfed mice" etc.

> The results from our mouse study certainly cannot be transferred one-to-one to humans, but studying the effects of maternal overnutrition is almost impossible to do in people..

I don't want to be that guy, but shouldn't this article be named "For Mice, High Fat Diet May Affect* Offspring"?

I'd improve that a bit by changing it to, "For Mice, High Fat Diet May Affect Offspring."

High fat diets and obesity are not correlated.

I‘m by no means against a high fat diet, but you CAN overeat on fat. The type of fat also matters - eating mainly omega-6 fats and low omega-3 will lead to inflammation and thus disease and potentially obesity. Easy to see from literature.

UPDATE:

Eg this article from 2009: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/circulationaha.1...

Please cite, I am not aware of anything conclusive.

So what? Mice dont normally eat fatty foods anyway.

People on keto do (high fat moderate protein low carb diet). There’s even a pregnanacy keto subreddit.

I've spent a lot of time reading about keto etc

An important detail in many of these studies (I'm not sure if it applies here, it's not clear on the paper) is that mice High Fat Diet isn't high fat as in keto.

Keto is: high fat, almost zero carbs, many vegetables (normal to low calories and low insulin peaks)

HFD in mice studies is: we put more fat in the normal mice food to give them more calories so they get fat (very high calories with insulin cycles)

Exactly, it’s hard to generalize mouse dietary studies to humans because they’re not anything close to an apex predator, humans are. Our biology is evolved to preferentially run on fatty meat from large game animals (that are now mostly extinct thanks to our prowess).

I'm sorry, but this is just so wrong. I'm not saying humans can't eat meat, but if you compare the digestive track and other physiological factors of humans to animals that actually evolved to eat meat like lions the difference is startling. On the spectrum of cow to lion we are very far from the lion end so to say humans "evolved to preferentially run on fatty meat from large game animals" is just plain wrong.

Here is a somewhat entertaining video with some specifics and sources. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmXynDLkbXY

There is also a ton of anthropological data on how our diets actually did evolve and although there are exceptions the gist is that we mainly relied on gathered plants with occasional meat.

  On the spectrum of cow to lion we are very far from the lion

Do you seriously not understand that cows are ruminants?

I actually do. My point was that on a spectrum of "apex predator totally tailored for eating meat" and total herbivore able to digest cellulose we are far from both ends.

The gp specifically stated we have "evolved to preferentially run on fatty meat from large game animals" and that is just plain wrong.

How many stomachs do humans have? How much energy do we obtain from fiber?

Actual title: Effects of High Fat Diet may Last for Generations

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