Beef Fat Prevents Alcoholic Liver Disease in the Rat | Hacker News Reader

Beef Fat Prevents Alcoholic Liver Disease in the Rat

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

26 pointsfortran7710 comments

Anecdotally, Irish sausages are the world's best hangover cure (pig fat). Spent a year in Galway in college. The first time I tried an Irish sausage, it made my stomach turn. Tried them again with a hangover and it was like angels were singing.

Media baiting paper title.

What they believe they found was that lineolic acid caused liver disease:

"The degree of histopathological abnormality correlated with the linoleic acid content of fat in the diet (tallow 0.7%, lard 2.5%, corn oil 56.6%). We postulate that linoleic acid facilitates development of ALD and provides an explanation for our previous epidemiological observations."

I.e. they believe that beef fat has no protective function, it's just neutral. I only read abstract, so maybe paper has something different to say.

I thought it was interesting because in my circles we like to have all-night study sessions where we eat a lot of oily fish (herring, sprats, etc), deep fried chicken skins fried in chicken fat, fatty chopped chicken liver pate, etc. followed by ample amounts of vodka. Not beef fat, but nobody I know has liver disease. :-)

I’m pretty sure this is happening due to the omega fat ratio. Corn oil is just omega-6, which is bad for you alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratio_of_fatty_acids_in_differ...

Beef fat might be neutral in terms of ALD, as it doesn’t contain any polyunsaturated fat.

That explains Argentina.

Seriously though, this study was published in 1989, so doesn't seem to be all that newsworthy?

A more recent summary: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4808795/

The headline is ridiculous. If anything, beef fat doesn't prevent ALD, corn oil promotes ALD.

There's mounting evidence that supposedly "bad fats" (saturated) aren't really that bad, whereas supposedly "good fats" (polyunsaturated fats as in vegetable oils) are actually bad, at least in the amounts that we consume them.

https://paleoleap.com/many-dangers-of-excess-pufa-consumptio...

(I know this source is biased, feel free to prove me wrong)

So they validated that the Ron Swanson diet is healthy(-ish).

Love it.

In a rat, but too much red meat is also linked with cancer.

Increased red meat consumption is associated with a moderately elevated risk of cancer, but what counts as "red meat" varies. Processed meat with tons of additives and preservatives isn't the same as beef.

In any event, the headline of the study should be that polyunsaturated fat promotes fatty liver disease, because both lard and tallow (both mostly satured) did not promote it significantly, but lard has a bit more polyunsaturated fat than tallow, whereas corn oil is almost completely polyunsaturated.

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