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Comment by onebot | Hacker News Reader

>> These studies are quick to point to conclusions. Remember that time where every "scientific" study pointed at fat as the big culprit behind heart problems? When it was sugar all along?

I mean there is just insurmountable evidence that fat is correlated to heart disease. What is so ironic is that some journalists with no medical backgrounds write a book about "The Big Fat Lie" and now it is sugar that is the cause with not much scientific research to back it up. Sugar is bad and inflammatory for sure, but mountains and mountains of research on fat and heart disease are somehow all wrong now?

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What is wrong was the immediate jump from "Fat in organs is the fat we eat from food". It seemed a natural and simple explanation at the time.

Now it appears it's not that clear. It's the excess of sugar in everything that overloads your bodies temporary stores of glycogen in the muscles and liver, which is then stored as fat, since your body can easily transform sugars into fats.

To see how that looks you can track the obesity numbers in US, the more "0%!" fat products are propped up with suger over the years, the larger the obesity crowd.

I don't think the final word is out yet, but the _cause_ of fat in your body, is not necessarily the fat that you eat.

Did people really believe that dietary fat was stored by the body without any kind of biological processing?

If you examine it from a thermodynamic perspective (I know that is simplistic for human biology), weight for weight fat has double the energy density of sugar, 38 MJ/kg vs 17 MJ/kg according to [0]. For reference, gasoline and diesel fuel are around 45 - 48 MJ/kg.

Also, according to [1], dietary fats are broken down to generate acetyl-CoA which is the precursor for lipogenesis (fat storage), therefore eating fat does not necessarily make you fat but consuming a lot of it and not metabolising it to do work will make it easier for you body to store fat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid#Energy_storage

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid#Degradation

Fat stored in the body is the cause of heart disease, not fat consumption. Sugar is how you tell your body to store fat.

Sugar doesn't give you cholesterol. So how is cholesterol correlated to heart disease?

Fat storage, is for sure related to becoming overweight and the cause of many ailments.

Sugar does not contain cholesterol, but consuming an inappropriate amount of it will most certainly have a negative impact on your blood lipid profile.

Do you have a reference by chance? Would love to dig in a bit. I know that high sugar consumption raises triglycerides. But haven't seen anything yet on cholesterol.

A good start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid#Biosynthesis

One missing piece of this puzzle is that your body is perfectly able to make its own cholesterol even if you never eat any.

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